The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Today's guest is Nellie Bowles, a co-founder of the immensely popular Substack publication The Free Press, where she writes TGIF, a weekly news roundup that has earned a fanatical following. She's also the author of the new book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, a deeply reported account of how America responded to COVID lockdowns and racial unrest in 2020 and 2021 and her tumultuous tenure at The New York Times.

This interview was recorded at a live event in New York City.

00:00—The Morning After The Revolution

2:30— First sparks of the revolution

5:30— the working class victims of The Reckoning

9:37— BLM's property empire

11:16— Bowles' New York Times dispatch from CHAZ

13:40— Black and Asian White Supremacists

15:55— White women's tears & DEI trainings

20:25— Dismantle capitalism, but not too urgently!

24:10— The Progressive Stack 26:01- Academic "Pretendians"

29:20— The Bon Appétit Cancellation Turducken

34:37— The Creation of Non-man

37:52— Woman: a submissive vessel?

42:40— The Current Thing Speedway

44:06— San Francisco: Progressive Libertarian Nihilism?

48:33— Nellie Bowles' politics

50:25— Positive social change

54:17— Q&A

Today's Sponsor:

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post Nellie Bowles: How the Lockdowns Drove Us Crazy appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Kat Murti, the new executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), the country's oldest and most influential student group challenging the war on drugs. Before taking the helm at SSDP, Kat was a longtime staffer at the libertarian Cato Institute, a founder of Feminists for Liberty, and an SSDP chapter head at the University of California, Berkeley, where she attended undergrad. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Murti about the role that young people in particular can play in ending prohibition, why marijuana has yet to be legalized at the federal level, and whether Donald Trump and Republicans or Joe Biden and Democrats are actually worse when it comes to drug policy reform.

This interview was taped live at an event cosponsored by The Psychedelic Assembly in midtown Manhattan.

00:00:00—Introduction

00:02:03—What is Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP)?

00:05:59—The Drug War is far from over

00:08:45—Don't let politicians get away with empty legalization promises

00:10:45—What's the best legalization model?

00:16:26—How do we activate the youth vote?

00:19:10—Harm reduction vs. prohibition

00:22:51—Drug education and safety

00:26:33—ALL of us are on drugs

00:27:17—The Rat Park Experiment

00:29:30—How to make safe injection sites Work

00:34:48—SSDP & psychedelics

00:40:50—Shifting attitudes toward drug legalization

00:46:45—Kat Murti's career in drug policy

00:49:19—How to pursue drug policy wins despite polarization

00:51:19—Audience Q&A

Previous appearance: "Kat Murti: 'The State Has Been One of the Largest Perpetrators of Gender Inequality and Violence.'"

Today's sponsors:

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post Kat Murti: How To End the Drug War for Good appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Noam Dworman, the owner of New York's Comedy Cellar, the most influential—and controversial—comedy club on the planet. Dave Chapelle, Louis C.K., Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Andrew Schulz, and many others not only broke out from this club, but they also regularly return to try out new material. Trained as a lawyer, Dworman is a staunch defender of the First Amendment and, in an era of groveling apologies and censorship on the down low, he remains outspoken on the value and importance of free expression to a flourishing society. His podcast Live From the Table has guests ranging from Israel critic Norman Finkelstein to atheist Sam Harris to former Reasoners Radley Balko and Michael Moynihan—and never has a dull moment. Nick Gillespie talks with Dworman about free speech, the history of comedy in Greenwich Village, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia.

00:00- Noam Dworman Highlights

Today's sponsors:

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Noam Dworman: Free Speech for All, From Finkelstein to Chapelle appeared first on Reason.com.

Stephen Wolfram is, strictly speaking, a high school and college dropout: He left both Eton and Oxford early, citing boredom. At 20, he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech and then joined the faculty in 1979. But he eventually moved away from academia, focusing instead on building a series of popular, powerful, and often eponymous research tools: Mathematica, WolframAlpha, and Wolfram Language.

He self-published a 1,200-page work called A New Kind of Science arguing that nature runs on ultrasimple computational rules. The book enjoyed surprising popular acclaim.

Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward interviewed Wolfram as part of the June 2024 AI special issue of Reason. He offered a candid assessment of what he hopes and fears from artificial intelligence, discussed the complicated relationship between humans and their technology, and elaborated on the ways that artificial intelligence can already overcome existing regulatory burdens.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Stephen Wolfram Is Ready To Be Surprised by AI appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is comedy writer Rob Long, who served as a writer for and producer of the great sitcom Cheers for years, writes the weekly Martini Shot commentary, and cohosts the GLoP Culture podcast with Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz. He is a columnist for Commentary and a cofounder of Ricochet, the online community and podcast platform. At a live event in New York City, Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Long about whether Hollywood is out of ideas, what it's like being a libertarian-leaning conservative in a very progressive industry, and the role that psychedelics have played in his creative process.

Chapters:

0:00- Blockchain, Machine Learning, and Jesus

3:22- What's Scarier; God Or Guns?

8:59- Road To Damascus, Hollywood

13:45- Jesus: A Weird But Groovy Dude

17:30- A Hollywood Solution To Hell

22:50- A Psychedelic Life Lesson

29:48- Comedy As Aggression

32:09- MDMA: A Non-Specific Amplifier

34:25- O Hollywood Mega-Hit, Where Art Thou? 43:35- The Comedies That Made Rob Long

45:39- Q&A

Previous appearances:

Today's sponsor:

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post Rob Long: God is Good, Drugs Are Better appeared first on Reason.com.

You've probably seen footage and images of the January 6 riot at the Capitol captured by today's guest, videographer Ford Fischer. A decade ago, Fischer cofounded New2Share, a radical experiment in decentralized video journalism. He and his colleagues gather long-form footage from all sorts of breaking news events, including protests organized by radicals across the political spectrum. They upload it to YouTube and elsewhere, and then let viewers draw their own conclusions. His coverage has been licensed worldwide and appears regularly on networks ranging from CNN to Fox News to NBC. Fischer's YouTube and Facebook channels routinely get demonetized and in other sorts of trouble because of the controversial nature of his work. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with him about why he started News2Share, what he hopes to accomplish by offering something truly unique in an age of 24/7 news coverage, and how his training as a Reason intern informs his worldview.

Today's sponsors:

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser
• Video Editor: Danielle Thompson

The post Ford Fischer: Why You Should Surveil the State appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Jonathan Haidt, whose new book is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The New York University psychologist and Heterodox Academy cofounder argues that what he calls a play-based childhood has been replaced with a phone-based one over the past 50 years, leading to skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among younger Americans. He says parents, schools, and society must keep young kids away from smartphones and social media if we want them to thrive.

Haidt is coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018) and he's also cofounder of Let Grow, a nonprofit that lobbies for policies, laws, and pedagogy that will increase children's resiliency and independence. "The Fragile Generation," the 2017 Reason article he coauthored with Lenore Skenazy, is among the most-read stories on this website. Reason's Nick Gillespie asks Haidt about what is driving Gen Z and younger kids to distraction and whether it's possible–or wise–to childproof the internet. This interview was taped in front of a live audience in New York City as part of the Reason Speakeasy series. For more information on live events, go here.

Today's sponsors:

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: Our guest tonight is Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor whose new book is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Jonathan Haidt, thanks for talking to Reason.

Jonathan Haidt: My pleasure, Nick.

Gillespie: This book is currently at the top of The New York Times bestseller list. Is that correct? Okay, what's the elevator pitch for the book?

Haidt: Actually, before I do that, I want to just make a very brief opening statement, which is when I walked in or we were all milling around before and Matt Welch said, "Welcome to the lion's den," because there's an interesting thing going on with this issue, which is that there's not really a left-right divide. Left and right are actually pretty much together. The main debate is actually between left and right and libertarians. And here's the great thing about libertarians, when they disagree with you, if they hate what you're doing, you know what they do? They make arguments, and they give evidence, and they have fun doing it. There's humor and there's excitement, things like this. As Matt acknowledged, it was a joke like, "You guys are very nice lions." You're not all libertarians, but you're all nice lions.

Then the other thing I just wanted to say is when my wife Jan and I, when we moved to New York in 2011, we were welcomed by Gerry Ohrstrom, and you and Matt and many others. So the extended Reason network in New York City has been really the most exciting intellectual community. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for all of that.

Now, elevator pitch for the book. Something really, really changed for Americans born in 1996 and later. They were very different from those who were born just a few years before. And we first saw this with The Coddling [of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure]. Greg [Lukianoff] was the first to spot it. The students coming in 2014 were just very different from those who'd come in even as late as 2012. We didn't know it then, but it was the Gen Z, millennial divide. Their mental health is much, much worse. And it turns out that's happening in all the English-speaking countries and in Northern Europe as well. It's very widespread.

So we have this giant global mystery: Why did mental health collapse in so many countries at the same time in the same way, hitting girls harder than boys? In The Coddling, Greg and I addressed a major cause which [is] coddling, like overprotection. That's what we focused on. We didn't know that. We speculated, "Well, maybe social media could be something. The timing is right, but we don't know." We wrote that in 2017. Since then, a lot new has come in, a lot of new evidence. People have seen it with their own eyes. Something is just going wrong when kids are raised on a screen rather than playing.

So the book is about how the play-based childhood got replaced by the screen-based childhood. And that disrupts almost everything about human development. The book explores much more than you can do in an article, it explores 15 different causal pathways and many interactions. So that's what the book is about. Then it goes into solutions, which are some norms that I think will change this.

Gillespie: In the book, you talk about how there are two main contributing factors to the current mental illness problems with Gen Z. First, before we get into that, can you just quickly sketch, what are the problems that we're seeing now that are so different?

Haidt: The ones for which we have the most evidence are the mental health studies, because that's tracked very carefully. America and Britain have very good longitudinal surveys. My lead researcher and research partner, Zach Rausch is here somewhere. Zach, where are you? Stand up. Okay, back there. I hope everyone here will follow AfterBabel.com. That's our Substack. Zach is the editor, and we put all our work up there.

What you see over and over and over again are hockey sticks. Mental health was pretty stable. Millennials were actually a little healthier than Gen Z, than Gen X before them. And then all of a sudden, right around 2012, plus or minus a year or two, the numbers go way, way up for anxiety, depression, self-harm; well, suicide starts a bit earlier, but that also goes way up. And it's not just us. It's the same in many countries. That's the obvious thing. That's where the debate has been. Almost all the scientific argument is, is social media causing mental illness?

Gillespie: There does not seem to be a debate about whether or not these indicators have changed. I mean, there's some, but-

Haidt: Well, no, actually, there is. There is. And we'll hear from Aaron [Brown], my colleague at NYU. There are some people who think maybe there's not even any real rise, it's just changes in diagnostic criteria. So that's a separate argument, is there a mental health crisis? But I think most people now and almost all health authorities internationally are saying something's going wrong for young people.

Gillespie: There are two major contributing factors, and it's kind of like different types of insulin, of a fast-acting in a slow-acting one. One is the disappearance of what you call a play-based childhood. This really started decades ago. Can you talk about what was a play-based childhood, and what happened to it?

Haidt: The play-based childhood is Mother Nature's plan for mammals. When mammals evolve, they quickly develop larger brains, especially the social mammals like dogs and cats and primates.

Gillespie: Dolphins.

Haidt: Dolphins. Yeah, that's right. They play, that's right. If you're an intensely social species, you have a big brain for the sociality. And how do you wire it up? Because the genes don't tell the neurons where to grow. They just start the ball rolling. You wire it up in play. That's the most important thing. And that was the case from about 200 million B.C. till about 1980-something. All kids went out and played. It didn't matter if it was raining. 

Gillespie: It was Beavis and Butthead, right, that ended play-based childhood or something.

Haidt: They did. Yeah, I guess that was kind of the fall of a civilization. But play is just absolutely essential for human development. The most nutritious play is a group, mixed-age, outdoors. We evolved outdoors. We're attracted to outdoor things. We want to run. That's the healthiest kind of play, with no adult supervision. And here, I'm drawing on Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book Free Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Grow, and helped me to write this book. She had a huge contribution to the sections at the end on what parents can do. Lenore, if you can stand up. This is Lenore Skenazy and she also writes at Reason.

Play-based childhood is what we evolved to do to wire up our brains. We develop our social skills, empathy, ability to read faces, turn-taking, all the skills of democratic engagement, all the skills that Alexis de Tocqueville praised about Americans that, "Oh, if there's a problem, they get together and they figured out a way to solve it, whereas in France, we wait for the king to do it." All those skills kids were developing until the 1980s. Then we started freaking out about child abduction. We stopped trusting each other with our kids. We also had fewer kids. So for a variety of reasons, the play-based childhood faded out.

Gillespie: Is it partly because women started entering the workforce on equal terms as men? So what do you do with kids, right? Because we're both the same age. We're 60. We grew up in a period … I mean, both of my parents worked. In the neighborhood you grew up, if you were in the baby boom or Gen X, to some degree, there were always parents in the neighborhood, mothers in the neighborhood. That kind of disappeared. That was part of you put the kids in institutional settings.

Haidt: That's correct. That's a big part of it. There was what was called Eyes on the Street. Jane Jacobs wrote about the sidewalk ballet. Kids were out playing. They were playing even if the weather was bad. Even if there was a crime wave, whatever, the kids were out playing, and in part, because there were adults around that you could trust. But as women begin to work and for related and unrelated reasons, family size begins to shrink, there just aren't a lot of kids. Around Gen X, they were known as the latchkey kids, because part of the solution to mothers working was, "Well, sweetheart, here's the key. You come home alone, let yourself in after school," when you're seven or eight, which you can do. Kids can do. So there was a brief period, but then we kind of said like, "No, let's stop doing that. Let's make sure there's always an adult supervising. And if that means I have to put them in adult supervised activities every day, then so be it." But in the process, kids lost.

Gillespie: Part of it is we professionalized childhood, right? It's boomer parents who wanted their kids to have ballet lessons, music lessons, and be good at sports. We became richer, fewer kids.

Can you talk a little bit about how the end of play gave rise to what you wrote about with Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind?

Haidt: As I was founding Heterodox Academy … And John Tomasi is here somewhere, the president of Heterodox Academy. John, can you stand up? Where are you? All right.

Gillespie: This is like a Dean Martin celebrity roast. I mean, it's just like everybody's here tonight.

Haidt: It's like the intellectual royalty of New York City.

Gillespie: That's right.

Haidt: It's good. Moral dependency is this really great term that I learned from two sociologists who wrote the first major paper on microaggressions. Manning and Campbell were their last names. They pointed out that all this stuff of microaggressions, it was coming up not in the places where you'd expect there to be the most prejudice or the most reason for it, but in the places that were the most equal, in the places that were most egalitarian, in places where there aren't big distinctions, but there is also an authority that you can call in if you need help.

They point out how in a culture of honor, a man cannot stand a microaggression. A man cannot stand a stain upon his honor. He must take vengeance himself. He can't call the police, he has to do it himself. So there's a culture of honor. Then that changed to a culture of dignity, where sticks and stones will break my bones. We let the law take care of it. What they observed was on elite college campuses among young people…and this is the beginning of Gen Z. They wrote this around, I forget when, 2015, 2014, something like that. On college campuses was emerging a culture which is kind of like an honor culture, in that if any little thing is said, it must be dealt with by the authorities.

Young people became expert at, "How do I make my case to the authority? I'm not going to argue with you. I'm going to convince him to punish you." This is what really ruined things in universities, because we have to be able to challenge each other. We have to be able to study all sorts of things. We need open inquiry. But if someone is offended and they can call in a drone strike on you, it really kind of chills speech.

Gillespie: I don't know how much this is mythic or not, but some of us, at least boys, although I think this was true of girls too, you would get into a fight, come home and complain to your parents. And they would say, "Go out and figure it out. We're not stepping in." That is over. Now it's you come back to your parents, they call the other parent…

Haidt: Yeah, that's right, or they report them or whatever. Yeah, that's right. That's moral dependency, where you don't handle disputes yourself. Everyone needs to learn to handle disputes themselves and know when to escalate. There are times, but it shouldn't be every day.

Gillespie: So that gives way, the play-based childhood has given way to the phone-based childhood. Talk about that.

Haidt: The play-based childhood is declining from the '80s all the way down to 2010. Kids are spending less time alone, less time outside. It's gradual. But mental health isn't actually declining. As I said, the millennials, actually, they're a little healthier than Gen X.

Gillespie: But that's because Gen X is just a garbage generation, right?

Haidt: No, no. No, that is terrible. It's because of leaded gas. They have brain damage from leaded gas. I'm actually mostly serious about that.

Gillespie: Yeah, it's true.

Haidt: Oh yes, so that's the puzzle, is that this is very important, but it seems to sort of weaken them, but it doesn't make them anxious and depressed. The millennials, they still [have] this amazing spirit. My wife has lots of millennial friends. And you talk to them like, "Yeah, so I decided to go surfing in this place. And then I sold my car and I went here." Like, "Wow, you really have a spirit of that exploration." That seems to be almost entirely missing in Gen Z. They're just a much more anxious generation.

Gillespie: What's the age range in Gen Z?

Haidt: I say 1996 and later. Gene Twankey said '95 originally. Pew now says '97. Whatever. So I say '96 is about the birth year it begins. So what happens, so it's important to understand the chronology. So in 2010, there's no sign of a problem. The mental health stats, they're bouncing along. There's no trend up. [In] 2010, very few young people have an iPhone. The iPhone comes out in 2007. Very few young people have one. It's expensive. Less than 20 percent. Most don't have high-speed internet. No one has a front-facing camera. No one has Instagram. So that's the situation for teens in 2010. They use their flip phones to text each other to meet up, like, "I'll meet you at the mall, or let's go someplace after school." Mental health is fine.

Five years later, everything is different about their daily life, because now 75 percent or 80 percent have a smartphone. These smartphones got front-facing cameras in 2010. Instagram was founded in 2010, but only becomes a real thing in 2012 when Facebook buys it. They've got high-speed data, unlimited texting. But it becomes possible to be online all the time. Half of Gen Z now says … How much of your day do you spend online? 45 percent in a Pew survey a couple of years ago said, "Pretty much all the time." Even if they're in school, they're actually tracking what's going on in their virtual world. They just hold the phone at their desk. Even if they're talking to you at the dinner table, they're actually thinking about it, and they're checking whenever they can. They have the phone out.

It's a complete transformation of consciousness, behavior. Imagine, take childhood in 2010, let's take away a lot of outdoor time, a lot of sleep. Read fewer books. No hobbies, no time for hobbies. You don't see friends very much. You basically go home. If you're a boy, you have to go home in order to play with your friends, because you have to go to have your controller and your headset. You can't go over to a friend's house to play video games anymore, because now everything's multiplayer. For all these reasons, these technological changes, they came in very, very fast. That's why I say 2010 to 2015 is the great rewiring of childhood.

Just to finish up from a point before that I forgot to put the second half on, the mental health stats is what we're fighting about. But there's like 20 other outcomes. This is what I hear from employers. I always ask, I work in a business school, I talk to a lot of business people, "How's it going with your young employees?" I never hear, "Oh, great. They're so creative, they're amazing." It's always, "They're so anxious, and they need encouragement about everything. And they often won't do things because they say they have an anxiety reason. They've been accommodated so much." There's just problems making the transition. None of this is their fault. We never let them have independence.

Gillespie: Where do we see that in terms of depression? How many kids are disabled by depression in 2010, 2015, 2020?

Haidt: In general, based on the self-report studies, the numbers go up, it depends on which study you're looking at, generally between 50 and 150 percent. These are not small increases. Whenever you zoom in on… So girls, the percentage increase is usually larger, though not always. Young girls, 10 to 14, that is always the largest and it's often gigantic. The increase there in, I forget the exact numbers for depression and anxiety, but there you often get numbers 150 to 200 percent. Self-harm is up I think 190 percent. That's hospital visits for self-harm.

Gillespie: Do we know the absolute numbers, though? Because this is, if it's from zero to one, that's a massive increase. But it's not like, okay, this is the new normal that kids are killing themselves. Kids are disabled by depression.

Haidt: Yeah. Obviously, it's not the new normal that kids are killing themselves. But it is the new normal that if you're a girl in an English-speaking country, you're a little less than half, I mean one in three, let's say, has anxiety or depression at a relative level of severity. This is on the order of 50 to 100 percent more than what it was in 2010. These are big increases. Because we see the same degree of increase in self-harm and suicide, some critics have said, "Oh, this is just changes in self-report criteria, or diagnostic criteria by psychiatrists. It's not a real thing. The kids are okay." But because, again, we see the same thing. If you look at the number of kids who were taken for psychiatric emergency visits in Australia or New Zealand, we see the same patterns and around the same magnitude. I don't think this is just Gen Z is comfortable reporting.

Gillespie: One of the things you point out in The Anxious Generation is that Gen Z was the first generation to go through puberty with smartphones. Why does that matter?

Haidt: Puberty is an incredibly important time neurologically, for identity. The human brain grows very quickly. It reaches almost full size by the age of six. Then the rest of development is not about getting bigger. It's about actually pulling stuff out, and leaving just what matters. Then you myelinate those. You put a fatty sheath along them to make the circuits better. This is happening during childhood, but it really speeds up at puberty. Puberty is not just a body growth spurt. It also is the signal, "Okay. Now we convert over from the caterpillar to the butterfly. Now we convert over from the child form of the brain to the adult form of the brain." That process is guided by experience. It's not guided by genes. The genes don't tell the neurons where to grow. It's guided by incoming experience.

In most cultures, traditionally, as soon as they have their first signs of puberty, that's when the adults say, "Okay. Now we will separate you from your childhood life, and you will have a guide, and it won't be your parents." It's never the parents. It's always, "Other adults of your sex will help you and guide you into how you become an adult in our culture." What we've done instead is we've said, "You know what? We're too busy for that. Forget that. Here. Here you go. Here's an iPhone. Now you can basically do this all during puberty, and that will guide your neural development. And you'll be basically socialized and inculturated by random weirdos on the internet, who are selected by an algorithm."

This I think has lasting effects, possibly permanent, although it can be undone to some extent. But that's why early puberty is so, so important. This, I believe, is why the millennials are okay in their mental health, because they didn't get their first smartphone or Instagram account until they were at least 15 or 16. They were well into high school or college. 

It's doing a number on all of us. We all feel fragmented and frazzled. I get very anxious if I'm on social media. But our brains, we made it through puberty, so our brains aren't being changed as much.

Gillespie: Is there a decline in participation of say after-school sports or things like that? That would also show that Gen Z or younger kids are withdrawn from social life. There's a lot of studies that show younger people reporting fewer close friends and things like that. But are kids doing fewer sports? Are they doing fewer music lessons? Are they doing things like that?

Haidt: Yeah. Adult-organized activities, I don't know that those are dropping. I don't see any reason why adults are suddenly going to say, "Oh, rather than having piano and math and all these other after-school activities, we're going to reduce that because you need more time on TikTok." As far as I know, they have roughly the same number of activities. It's just that now that they're spending a couple hours a day on TikTok, and a couple hours on other platforms, it all adds up to the average is about nine hours a day that they're spending on their devices.

That's not including school or homework. Most of the time is now doing this. What that means is that they just don't have much time. They have less time for homework. They're not getting more homework, but they're more pressured because they don't have time for it anymore. They don't have time to see friends. They don't go to religious services. They don't read books. Imagine giving up nine hours a day every day. There's not a lot of time left. Everything else is getting squeezed out.

Gillespie: Is there a reason to believe that we won't adjust to this, or that we're not already adjusting to a new technology?

I'm looking at 16 to 19-year-old labor force participation rates. In 2002, it was 47 percent. It dropped to 34 percent in 2012. It was back up to 37 percent in 2022. Suggesting that teenagers are actually going back into the workforce a little bit. There are other indicators like that, where according to Pew Research, between 2022 and 2023, the amount that 13 to 17-year-olds said they used YouTube declined, TikTok declined, and Instagram declined. Why wouldn't we kind of adjust after this shock of a new powerful technology that we really dig?

Haidt: I think adults are trying to learn how to live with this. We're trying to adapt to it. From what I hear, we're not doing a very good job. It's hard. We rely on these things for work. We get hooked on them for pleasure. I have very little interest in limiting what adults can do, but children are a very, very different story. I don't think that in 100 years, children will have adapted to nine hours of TikTok a day so that it no longer harms their brains.

Gillespie: You don't think that, they won't be on nine hours of TikTok or social media?

Haidt: No. I think the way we adapt to it is precisely by saying, "You know what? This is really messing up our kids. How about we say, 'No smartphone till 14. No social media till 16. Phone-free schools and more independence and free play'?" That's what my book is about. So yeah, I think we will adapt. I think we're going to roll back the phone-based childhood, because it's just incredibly toxic for developing kids and their brains.

Gillespie: Let's run through some of the critiques of the book, and I'll give you a chance to respond. Then when we start the question and answer period, actually, Jon mentioned that Aaron Brown is here. He's a statistician and an academic. He's also written and done videos for Reason, including a critique of Jon. So we're going to do a mini debate about Aaron's critique of Jon, which has to do with some of the social science work that Jon relies on. 

Eric Levitz at Vox wrote a piece critiquing your book. He points out that a university psychologist, Christopher Ferguson, notes that the recent increase in suicide rates in America is not simply for younger people. It's across age ranges, and actually higher age ranges have higher rates. That suggests that whatever is driving up suicide rates, which is a hard number, it's a harder number than diagnoses of mental illness, it's something different than cell phones. Right?

Haidt: Well, hold on a sec. Suicide has many causes. I don't know the percentage of people who kill themselves who are depressed, but one thing, and Zach has just been digging into this data recently. Because the other critique that I'm sure you'll get to, Candace Odgers, suggests that the global financial crisis is the cause. 

Gillespie: That actually is why I want to kill other people. No.

Haidt: Jean Twenge and Zach and I have all looked into this. What we find is, when the economy tanks, there is one group that really is more likely to kill themselves. It's adult men. When men suddenly go bankrupt, they're supporting their family, they do sometimes turn to suicide. Here in New York, all the South Asian men who bought taxi licenses, as those medallions dropped to very low value, a lot of them killed themselves. They couldn't make a living. There's not a hint, a shred, anything suggesting that economic factors affect teenagers. The suicide rate is not affected by this. Depression rates are not affected by this.

Gillespie: Are you suggesting then that the suicide rate for older people might be going up for one reason, and then for younger people for different reasons?

Haidt: That's right. Suicide, Chris is right that suicide is the hardest metric. The stats are very accurate from many countries. Yes, it's a good thing to look at, but it is not a direct readout of depression and anxiety. There are many causes. Émile Durkheim wrote an incredible book on suicide, and all the different factors of social integration that go into suicide. What we've done at After Babel, Zach has developed an interesting way of graphing out the suicide rate of each generation, at each age. Then he stacks them, so you can see how suicidal was Gen X compared to other generations when they were all 18 years old, or whatever.

What he finds is that Gen X was the most suicidal generation, for the boys, overwhelmingly. Gen X boys had the highest suicide rates ever. But when we look at girls, it's not Gen X, it's Gen Z. Gen Z girls in all five Anglo countries, he's done those, it's the exact same pattern. It's the highest ever. It all goes up in the early 2010s. There is a signal here. This is not random noise. Suicide, there are many reasons for adults committing suicide. I don't think adults are committing suicide because they have TikTok and Instagram.

But I think teenage girls often are, because when they get a mob against them, when you are canceled. In the ancient world, either we're going to kill you. If you commit crimes, we're going to kill you or banish you. You're socially dead either way. For teenagers, social death is a living hell, whereas death is over quickly. I think that part of the big increase in preteen girls suicide is because a small number of them get massively shamed in ways that could not have happened before 2010.

Gillespie: How many preteen girls commit suicide, though?

Haidt: It's not a large number.

Gillespie: Is that indicative of a larger problem, or is that just an outlying statistic?

Haidt: Well, no. Chris Ferguson and others are right to say, "If we really want to save lives, we'd be looking especially at older people. The suicide rate is much higher in older people, and it's lowest in the preteen boys and girls, especially the girls." But what Zach and I are trying to figure out is a detective story. What happened? Why did this change so quickly in so many countries at the same time? We don't see that for the adult data. You don't see that suddenly middle-aged men are killing themselves more at a certain point, other than the global financial crisis. If you're trying to solve a mystery, then you're interested more in percentage change than in absolute levels.

Gillespie: Can you talk about why this stuff hits girls, particularly young girls, harder than any other subset of the population?

Haidt: Sure. I'll come back to the boys in a moment. Because it's not that the boys are okay, the boys have a different set of problems. But the evidence connecting social media to girls is much more consistent and much stronger. The correlations are larger, the experimental effects are larger. There is a special relationship between social media and girls. As we say in the book, the reason seems to be, when boys get together, if you just let them get together with no adult supervision, they're likely to organize themselves into groups to compete. It's just something that boys really enjoy doing more than girls.

When everyone goes on devices and the internet is everywhere, boys are going to go to multiplayer video games. They're amazing. They're fun. Girls are much more interested in talking about relationships. Who is on the outs with whom? Who's dating who? Girls are just much more, they have a more developmental map of the social space. Boys are a little more clueless, and literally on the spectrum, according to Simon Baron-Cohen. That is the male-female difference, that boys are shifted over towards autism a little bit. So because girls are just more interested in social relationships, and also their aggression is different.

Boys' aggression is ultimately backed up by the threat of physical domination, and punching or pain. Girls aren't like that. Girls' aggression is equal in magnitude, but it's aimed at relationships and reputation. It's called relational aggression. Video games, if anything, prevent boys from getting in fights. Because you can't have a fight in a video game. There's nothing to argue over. The platform does all the, settles all the, everything. But girls' relational aggression is amplified. The worst year of bullying is seventh grade. I'm really focused on middle school.

Gillespie: Middle schools, there's a popular series, Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life. Right?

Haidt: But if you think about all the things that were terrible about middle school, and then you give everybody Instagram, and you get things like…we have an example in the book of a story. They organized an Instagram group, everyone but Mary. Like, "We're all going to get to talk about her." I mean, how painful is that when you're a 12-year-old girl? For so many reasons, social media really targets girls' insecurities and social needs. It doesn't satisfy them. As soon as girls go on social media, it's not like they're now super connected and happy. They get much lonelier.

Gillespie: In some parts of the book and in some interviews I've seen you do, you kind of wave away the benefits of social media. Okay, Mary is ostracized within a certain setting. But a lot of people talk about how social media, and before that, just the rise of the internet allowed people who were already isolated to connect to other people. How does that kind of balance factor into this?

Haidt: Yeah, but the key is what you just said, and before the internet. I think there are a couple of mistakes that people make when they talk about the benefits of social media. Obviously for adults, we use it for many purposes. Businesses need it. It's a functional tool. I'm not saying that. But let's focus on middle school. Let's focus on seventh, eighth graders. They're 11, 12, 13 years old. Let's focus on them. It said, "Oh, you know. It helps them find people, and especially if they're from a marginalized community or LGBTQ." Well, you know, the internet did that before.

Marginalized community or LGBTQ. Well, the internet did that before Instagram. You don't need a newsfeed, an algorithm amplification, which pushes everyone to go for, you don't need that. If you have the whole internet and blogs and videos, you have all this stuff, you're not isolated anymore. That's the first thing is don't confuse social media with the internet. I'm not talking about keeping kids off of the internet.

Gillespie: What counts as social media and what doesn't?

Haidt: So it's prototypically defined. That is the prototype would be Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. It's where users have accounts, they post stuff on their accounts, they connect to other people's accounts, and it's all about user-generated content. Those are the prototypes. Now, technically YouTube is social media because you can have an account you can post, but for the most part, YouTube is used as the world's video library. YouTube, if we're going to do a cost-benefit analysis, YouTube is incredibly valuable. A lot of bad stuff happens, a lot of radicalization.

Gillespie: It's also by far the most popular. I mean, pretty much across all age groups too.

Haidt: Yeah, I don't remember whether it's, I think it is even more than TikTok now. I think so. 

Gillespie: Why is TikTok really, really bad?

Haidt: I didn't write about this much in the book, but I'm coming to see short-form video as really, really horrible, especially for young people, for children. The reason is this, actually, I'll do an experiment with you right now. How many of you, I don't know if this will work on radio or whatever, we'll see. How many of you in this audience raise your hand if you watch Netflix at least once a week? Raise your hand high. Okay, about half. Okay, now just those who raised their hand, how many of you wish that Netflix was never invented? The world would be better if Netflix wasn't here. Raise your hand if you, okay, one or two. So Netflix is stories. Stories are human. Humans love stories. We've always told stories. We've always lived in stories. We've always raised our kids in stories. And when you and I were young, we were immersed in stories that were really, really stupid like I Dream of Jeannie and Gilligan's Island, but they were stories. So the stories are better now on Netflix and things like that.

All right, next question. How many of you spend at least an hour or two a week on TikTok? Raise your hand high. Okay, not enough to do the demonstration. I'll have to tell you, it's only about five hands. Of the five of you, how many think the world would be better if TikTok was never invented? Raise your hands. All of you. Okay. Even more than the five who raised their hand before. 

Gillespie: Wow. That's powerful. Wow.

Haidt: I do this with my students at NYU and the results are the same on Instagram, but on TikTok, almost everybody raises their hand that they use it. How many of you wish it was never invented? Almost everyone raises their hand.

Gillespie: Why do they do that?

Haidt: Because it's a collective action trap. I say why, and some of the students are spending five hours a day on TikTok, five hours a day just on TikTok and on their other platforms, and part of that is addiction. It's the most addictive form. Netflix isn't rewarding you like B.F Skinner with a little treat every hour when you press the repeat button. In fact, you don't even have to press it. They have autoplay, which is bad. Whereas TikTok, it's stimulus response, stimulus response. So TikTok has a power of behaviorist conditioning more than any other platform. And it's not stories, it's little bits of garbage. It's people doing degrading things. It's people getting hit by cars. It's all kinds of horrible things.

Gillespie: That does not really comport with the content analysis.

Haidt: It depends. Look at teenage boys. Obviously it's lovely for many people because of course it gets to know you, but for a lot of teenage boys, what they're being fed, what they're choosing ends up being really horrible stuff. I think when we look at the social benefit brought by a platform, economists have this thing they do where they say willingness to pay. How much would you pay to avoid oranges being eliminated from the world? I don't want a world without oranges. I'll put in a thousand dollars to save oranges, okay? And when they ask them about social media and people say, "Oh, you'd have to pay me a certain amount of money to get off of Instagram," the economists say, "Oh, see, multiply this out by 3 billion people. That's a lot of value created." But actually it's a trap because people are on it because everyone else is. And the young people say, "I would be off TikTok if everyone else was. But since everyone's on it and they're talking about, I have to know what are the TikTok trends."

Gillespie: Abigail Shrier, who has a book out that's also somewhere on The New York Times bestseller list called Bad Therapy: Why Kids Aren't Growing Up. She argues that social media—she's not a big fan of it—but she says that the bigger problem is the context in which it emerges, which is a therapeutic culture that has infused every aspect of childhood in particular. She has written that all of the bad trends showed up before social media kicked in. We have social media, which is bad. Then we have all these other things like a constant valorization of being emotionally traumatized teaching you that you need to check in with an adult or a mental health expert before you take any risks whatsoever. Is she right or is she wrong to devalue the contribution of social media to the lassitude and mental problems of Gen Z?

Haidt: She's right. I haven't read the book yet, but I've heard interviews and I get the basic story. Her basic story is right, that therapy, well therapy for adults, overall is positive. Therapy for teenagers and children is not nearly as positive, has many more risks, many more backfire effects. She's right about that. She's right that we're doing too much therapy, we're valorizing.

Her basic argument is right, but for her to say, so it's not social media, it's bad therapy, I would say, now, wait a second. Since the seventies we've been becoming a therapeutic culture, the triumph of the therapeutic. This is a very long-running trend. Everything gets psychologized. So if you wanted to say that some long-running decline was because of our long-running increase in psychologization, I would say, okay, that's a sensible argument. But I would ask her, I hope, I will imagine I'll get a chance. Okay, why does suddenly everything go haywire in 2013? Is that because suddenly everyone was getting therapy? Or is that because suddenly the girls were on Instagram sharing emotions, they were on TikTok and well, not TikTok, they're in YouTube groups for various mental illnesses with no psychiatrists anywhere near just young people competing for likes by being more and more extreme. I would say her argument of bad therapy isn't contradicting my story about social media. It actually is an illustration of it.

Gillespie: We'll get into this a little bit later, but what do you do with studies that show, and there's a 2022 Stanford medicine or study done by some people at Stanford Medicine Medical School that was led by Xiaoran Sun that found a study of 250 tweens over about a five-year period that found that the presence or lack of presence of phones or high-speed internet just was not a predictor of whether or not these people did well. Is that just too small a study or is it-

Haidt: Yeah, I mean, 250 people is not, I mean, I don't know that study. So I mean, if we're looking at correlational studies, there's a lot of them. And even my critics, even some of the skeptics that I am debating with. So Amy Orben for one at Cambridge, she did a review of what's the size of the correlation between social media and mental health problems. And she concluded that the correlation is in the domain of 0.1 to 0.15. It's not 0.03, which is the size of eating potatoes in our arcane debate. So even she finds that it is not zero, it is more substantial, and that's for all kids. It's actually larger for girls. And even she finds that the evidence of harm is greatest for 11 to 13-year-old girls. That's where the correlation is even bigger.

Gillespie: Should we be more focused on them rather than all kids?

Haidt: Oh, you mean just on middle school girls?

Gillespie: Yeah. If they're the largest kind of victims of this technology or the shift, because are the things that will help them necessarily the things that will help other people.

Haidt: So, imagine a complicated space with 12 different things, part of the technological environment. And over here you've got 15 different bad outcomes and one of them is watching, spending a lot of time on social media and then depression, anxiety. That link is definitely strongest for the girls. And so if that was all it was, it was just everyone's fine except that more girls are depressed and it seems to be social media, maybe we can let the boys on social media, but the girls, let's keep the, not that we would do that regulatory, but if that's all it was, I would say, well, maybe, maybe. But that's not all it is.

So the boys aren't watching, checking social media and getting depressed and having eating disorders. That's not them. But they are getting drawn into these insane challenges where they risk their lives and some of them die and they commit vandalism and they get sextorted and they buy drugs with fentanyl. So there's so many different harms. So I would not say, oh, let's just keep the 11 to 13-year-old girls off of social media, let them on when they're 14, 15.

Gillespie: I don't mean to be a dick about it, but I guess I'm going to be, are you catastrophizing to use a word that you use in cuddling? How many kids actually die from TikTok challenges, from milk crate challenge? I mean, these are vanishingly small numbers that are similar to the number of kids who go missing because they're kidnapped or something.

Haidt: Yeah, I don't know the number and I don't think it's tens of thousands. But it's also, look, if it was 10 or 20 a year, I would say that's life. But imagine, I don't quite remember what the Furby was, but there was a toy craze called the Furby, okay? Now, so imagine if the Furby-

Gillespie: You've triggered me, actually but thank you.

Haidt: So imagine if the Furby caused every year it caused a few hundred boys to die doing stupid things and it caused a few hundred girls to commit suicide. Now, as a percentage of the public, that's like 0.00. I mean, come on, that's not a big deal. But that thing would be gone in an instant.

The growth of these companies, these are the most important companies in the world by many metrics. They're certainly the most important companies in our children's lives. They largely govern our children's lives. They may have more influence over our children than we do. They are completely unregulated. Congress, not only did Congress say, "How about you don't have to age gate, how about you don't have to check ages, you're not responsible unless you know that they're under 13, you're not." So Congress passed a law saying you don't have to age gate. COPPA. It says as long as people say they're 13, that's enough. And then Congress says, "Oh, and also you can't be sued. How about you can't be sued?" Now imagine if the maker of the Furby was killing just a few hundred a year, only a few hundred kids a year and they can't be sued. That's where we are.

Gillespie: I'd buy Furby stock because that's how you make money, right? By killing your customers. 

Haidt: They're not customers. They're not the customers.

Gillespie: But it's a good pivot into policy prescriptions. And to go back to what you were saying before about the adjustment period, I think your book is certainly part of the adjustment. It's calling attention to the impacts of this technology. What are your main policy proposals? And this is, if not in the room, going out on a reasoned channel. It's largely a libertarian audience and you're very thoughtful about wanting to stress. What are the different types of policies that you're calling for here?

Haidt: Yeah, thank you for that. So I'm a social psychologist and at the center of the analysis in the book is that social media has social effects that are unlike anything else, unlike cigarettes or heroin or gambling or anything else. With cigarettes at the peak of smoking, only a third of high school kids were smoking, two-thirds were not smoking. But if we look at eighth graders, ninth graders, it's the great majority are on. They have to be because everyone else is so it's a trap.

And so what I'm after at the end of the book is how do we liberate ourselves from the trap? And the first move is if you're the only parent of a sixth grader who says, "You're not getting a smartphone, I don't care that you're the only one. I don't care that you'll be cut off. You're not getting a smartphone."

Gillespie:You are going to stick with the Furby.

Haidt: You get a Furby. Yes.

Gillespie: It's like you're just taking the Furby to college.

Haidt: That's right. So you're now costing your kid a lot and you're going to have a lot of struggle. So if you're the only one, it's very costly. And most parents look and decide, you know what? This is the way things are. I'm just going to give my kid a phone. And that's how you get caught in a collective action trap.

So what I did in the book was I wanted to find norms that were realistic that we could actually do and coalesce around. And I wrote the book, assuming that we will never get any help from our legislators. Congress created the problem in the nineties with two bills, and I'm assuming that we will never get help from Congress. Now I actually think we-

Gillespie: And by that you mean because the minimum age federally where a website can't collect data without parental consent of a minor, it's set at 13. Okay.

Haidt: 13. Unless you say you're 13, in which case you can be two. Yeah. So I wrote the book, assuming that we're not going to get any help from legislation. Now in Britain, they are. Britain, they have a functioning legislature. We don't, but they have a functioning legislature, which has mandated phone free schools. Now that's obviously state level here in the US. So let's assume-

Gillespie: Phone free, taking phones out of schools is one of the proposals.

Haidt: That's right so let's go through them. So the first one is no smartphone before high school. Just give a flip phone or a phone watch. This is a parent, this is a thing that people can do if they coordinate with other parents at their kid's school. As long as you and the families of your kid's friends do it, it is actually not just painless. It actually is fun if you also give those kids fun things to do together, and this is where Let Grow comes in. Go to letgrow.org. You find all kinds of ideas.

Gillespie: Your work in the territory. What does that mean though? What would you do if you say, okay, we're creating a, and I realize I'm running into trouble here, but like a kid version of a polycule and we're saying, no smartphone, okay? We're just using flip phones. What are some of the other things that the kids would do to fill the time?

Haidt: Okay, so first, okay, so let me just jump temporarily to the third rule, the third norm, which is phone-free schools. Now, some schools are going phone-free. I've learned that religious schools, that those that are Orthodox Jewish or various Christian denominations, they think about the whole community. And Orthodox Jewish schools say not only can you not have a smartphone in school, you can't come to this school if you have a smartphone. Parents have to agree, I don't know if this is all schools, but some Orthodox. Parents have to agree that they will not give their kid a smartphone. There's what's called a kosher phone that has very few functions. So religious communities have already organized to do not just phone-free schools, but to delay smartphones till 18.

Okay, so let's look at secular schools. What's happening now, which is so exciting, is now, and in part from reading my book and other things that we've done a lot, and I had a big article in the Atlantic a year ago on phone-free schools. So a lot of schools are going phone-free, which means you lock up the phone in the morning, you need the phone to get to school perhaps, but you put in a phone locker or a yonder pouch, you get it out at the end of the day. So schools are doing that, but they're not just doing it, they're now actually communicating with the parents. Not public schools, but some private schools are doing this. Not public schools, but some private schools are doing this, they communicate with their parents to explain their concern. So I just gave a talk at JP Morgan. There were 15 heads of schools in New York City. They all see the problem. They hate the phones generally. They're now beginning to communicate to the parents, "Look, we all have to do this together." So once you have everyone agreeing, not just phone-free schools, but let's at least keep it out of middle school, no smartphones in middle school. Oh, and if we're taking away so much screen time, we have to actually give them the independence, the freedom, the responsibility to do things in the real world. So now it's not just deprivation, it's, kids, how about you have a fun childhood the way all of us did?

Gillespie: So this is kind of blending free-range… In the book you talk about we over-regulated the real world and under-regulated the virtual world. You're kind of flipping that script.

Haidt: Well, that's right. I'm flipping the script, but they're really two halves of the same coin. Because if you send your kids out to play and they have a smartphone and they're eight, nine, 10 years old, they're going to sit and be on the phone. Maybe they'll be doing it together, but often they're just sitting next to each other on separate things. So you can't really give the independence if they're just going to be hooked on the phone all the time.

Gillespie: I don't know anybody who would be particularly upset by that, of saying parents obviously have a large amount of dominion over their children, and you decide what the technology is and you're giving them a kind of scheme where you can get more people to get along with that. And with schools in America, at the national level and at the state level, there are certain requirements, but generally speaking, it's a pretty dispersed and decentralized system.

Haidt: State level decision making, yeah. And with some states, we are getting laws like Florida and Utah that are mandating schools go phone free. A bunch of states are doing that. In other states, they're leaving it up to the districts. So in all of this, my views are not in a conflict with libertarians on these.

Gillespie: Yeah, we'll get to that in a second. One of the things that's fascinating though is that at the state level, when places like Florida have said, "Okay, we're going to ban certain types of social media practices," that does get in the way of a libertarian idea. It's like, my kids and I should be able to raise them the way that I want. One of the big proposals that you have is age gating, is changing the minimum age, raising it under which kids can't have access to social media. Talk about that, and is that just, okay, this is a difference with libertarian ideas?

Haidt: So this is the one place where I think I do have conflict with libertarians, and I want to talk about it because I'm best friends with Greg Lukianoff. I have a lot of libertarian sympathies.

Gillespie: You're the co-author with Greg of The Coddling of the American Mind, who on his Substack wrote a critique or his first amendment concerns with some of your policy proposals. 

And he's saying that government bans are one size fits all, he writes. That means those kids who benefit from social media, and there are plenty of them, would be out of luck. Parents know their kids better than anyone. Let them, not the government, make the decisions about what media they consume. How do you respond to that?

Haidt: Let's talk about age gating. First I would ask you or him or anyone else, so let's start with pornography, strip clubs and casinos. Let's talk about things that either involve sex or addiction. Let's also bring in alcohol, nicotine. Let's focus on sex or addiction. In the real world, we've largely said, "You know what? Adults want to do these things. They're really harmful for kids who are not ready to make these decisions and their brains are developing." So in the real world, we've worked out all kinds of ways where adults can do what they want, and sometimes there's a little inconvenience. When I was in high school, we could buy cigarettes from vending machines. But then they realize, "You know what? We have to stop that." And now people who want to smoke, they have to actually pull out their driver's license and show it, and then they get their cigarettes. That's an inconvenience, I understand that. But in the real world, we've found ways to do that. We're only 10 or 25 years in, however you want to count it, into the internet age. I really consider the early 2010s is when the current internet age really began. So this is all very new for us. And so far we've done nothing. There's no protections of any kind.

Gillespie: Parents either know or they don't know what their kids are doing, right? Because there are controls on all of the social media platforms, on all of the devices. Parents either say they can't use them or they don't use them, which is similar to in the '90s when cable TV was being attacked and we created TVs with chips and ways of banning certain channels and parents didn't use them.

Haidt: Okay. That's right. So even when it was simple on one device, parents often didn't use them. And then there would also be differences of education and marriage. There are going to be all kinds of couples that are going to be trying to do it. So I would put it to you like this: I certainly want parents to have control, but here's the thing, most parents feel they don't have control. Most parents don't want their kids on these things early, but they feel like they can't stop it. So if you value parental control and consent, you should be very upset with the way things are now, and you should ask for a change that would allow you to have the kind of policies that you want. Because right now, very few parents are able to do that. So think about it this way: suppose a hundred years ago when they began to regulate passing laws on alcohol and drugs and all sorts of things, suppose they said for alcohol, "Okay, the age is 18, but we can't expect bars and casinos to enforce that. It's up to the parents. Parents, if you don't want your kids being in bars and casinos and strip clubs and other things, you keep them out." Well, that would mean you have to lock your kid up, you cannot let your kid out, otherwise you can't stop them. The digital world is like that.

Gillespie: But it's also, if I want to go to a bar, because the age-gating laws means that everybody has to enter confidential information on a website in order to… Well, how else do you do it? And it's not if I want to go to a bar, I don't have to share my credentials that then get put into a database which is going to be hacked, et cetera.

Haidt: Okay. Thank you for that. Yeah. So I think many people think, first of all, there's a misconception that Haidt wants the government to control everything and wants the government to tell you how to raise your kids. Again, I wrote the book assuming that nothing is going to happen on the government level, that we can do this all ourselves with collective action. The one place where it'd be really, really helpful would be if Congress would raise the age from 13 to 16 and require the platforms to actually share in the policing of it. Now, people assume then that I'm saying you have to show your driver's license, your government ID in order to open an account. Because we're not talking about logging onto your accounts, only to open an account, that's all. What I'm suggesting is that Congress undo the mistake it made when it said companies don't have to check age, the age is 13 at which you can give away your data and sign a contract with a company, but the companies don't have to check anything. I want Congress to fix that and not say, as a couple of state bills do, that they have to require a driver's license. I don't want that. I want them to say, and the platform shall offer a menu or a range of options for doing age verification. There are many, many things already there. So Clear, the company Clear, many of us have Clear to go to airports, you can use that to buy a beer at a stadium. You don't even have to show an ID. I don't know whether in that case it's biometrics. But Clear is one way, if you have a Clear account, and my kids have Clear accounts, so Clear already is doing it.

Gillespie: What's the liability that you would hold companies responsible for if parents sue Instagram and say, "My daughter killed herself and she shouldn't have been able to have an account"?

Haidt: Well, under current practice, I think that the parents should be able to sue. And the companies have done everything they can, especially Meta, they've done everything they can to get the youngest kids they can. They want to do Instagram for kids. They talked about how do we get five and six-year-olds involved. So Meta, I think, should be held responsible for what it has done to kids. Now, what I'm suggesting is, especially for the underage, what I'm suggesting is, what if Congress were to actually undo the mistake, make it 16, require age verification, but not a hundred percent. We don't expect like, "Oh, this kid got on, therefore you can sue Meta." But if Meta is doing a reasonably good job of putting in an obstacle, making it harder, then they wouldn't be sued for that.

Gillespie: What do you do to the parent who lets their kid on at 13 rather than 16? Do the kids get taken away? What's their liability? Because if your kid was having sex below the age of consent, child protective services would come in and be like, "What the fuck's going on here?"

Haidt: No, no, no. What I'm really focused on here is not banning an experience, it's what are the laws around signing a contract at which you can give away your family's information and data without your parents knowing or consenting? What did you think that should be? Do you think that any seven or eight-year-old should be able to just sign a contract with a company and tell them all about what you have in your house without you knowing? How can this be the reality that we live in? So I'm not focused on banning an experience. I'm saying, at what age do we treat children as adults? And what Senator Markey did when he was in the house and he introduced COPPA, he said 16. "We've got teenagers dealing with all these new tech companies in the '90s, 16 should be the age." But various libraries, they pushed it down to 13, they gutted enforcement, so now it's essentially nothing. That was a mistake. Let me ask you, what age do you think your kids should have been able to make contracts with companies without you knowing?

Gillespie: I have a Gen Z child as well as a millennial, and they got social media, or they got unfettered access to the internet at… my younger son was probably 10 or 11. And we monitored it though as much as we could.

Haidt: But unless you keep them away from browsers, if he's at someone else's house and they have a browser, he can open accounts on everything.

Gillespie: Totally. Yeah.

Haidt: But I'm asking you personally, at what age?

Gillespie: No, and the way that we dealt with it was, it was not seven or eight, but you talk about it and you check things and you check in with other parents. I'm not disputing, I think you're absolutely right. And this is one of the real insights of Abigail Shrier's book, which is that, and we forget this, kids are different than adults and they should be treated differently.

Haidt: Thank you, yes.

Gillespie: And things that are fine for adults to do are not good for kids to do and all of that. But once you start getting into the nitty-gritty of saying, "How do you police this and how do you regulate it?", it comes back to this question more of social norms and of individual familial or parental enforcement mechanisms more than I think overarching legal ones.

Haidt: But that's not the way we dealt with drinking and gambling.

Gillespie: No, no. But what I'm saying is, that's also up to businesses to do what they want, but if you are with your kids in Ohio, if you're with your family, if you're with your parent or guardian, you can drink at the age of 15 in a restaurant. So there's a sliding scale and things like that. And to give discretion away from families to a government, that is a big deal. And I'm not saying one is right and wrong, but it is a real difference.

Haidt: Okay. I appreciate that as a libertarian you're willing to say that kids are different from adults. And while we both have very libertarian ideas for adults, but we recognize that kids are different. I assume you think it's legitimate… Actually, do you think it's legitimate for states to say there's a minimum age to gamble in a casino?

Gillespie: Yeah, I guess so.

Haidt: Or do you think that should be entirely up to the parents?

Gillespie: No, I think it's mostly up to the parents, but yeah, I don't lose a lot of sleep over that. I don't lose sleep over age of consent laws and things like that, although there are always exceptions.

Haidt: Okay, good. So the two exceptions that we've already talked about are sex and addiction, so we agree with it. And things that involve sex or addiction, there might be a role for a government to set a minimum age. I want to add a third category, which is those that by your very action as an individual put pressure on everyone else. That's what we're dealing with. Social media is unlike anything else we've ever dealt with.

Gillespie: I'm not convinced of that, or to say that having access to Instagram at 14 would lead to a collective action problem or a particular outcome for a kid that I would say, "No, nobody can consider that."

Haidt: Okay. Now why did you say 14?

Gillespie: Just saying it's below 16 because that's what you want to make it now.

Haidt: So let's talk about the Florida bill, because I think that's actually a very good one. So my second norm is no social media before 16. I think that should just be the norm. It should be supported by age verification. So that's what I'm proposing. Now, the Florida bill that DeSantis just signed a couple of weeks ago says, originally it was that it was that in Florida you can't open an account. It's not banning experience. It's saying you can't have this commercial relationship with the company until you're 16. And then there was pushback. And so they added on, now if you're 14 or 15 and you have your parents' consent, then you can do it.

Gillespie: So it's like a Romeo and Juliet law for age of consent, actually.

Haidt: Yeah. Okay, that's fine. So actually I'm okay with that. And the reason why I'm okay with it is because that would force the companies to do something they could easily have done long ago, but they really don't want to do, which is establish a way to get parental consent. Right now, you really can't stop your kid from doing things unless you lock them away and they can't get to the internet. But if they could develop ways by which, if you have an Instagram account or you're willing to do something and you can verify that you are the parent, then you can give permission to your fourteen-year-old, not your thirteen-year-old, because we have to get it out of middle school. It's a collective action problem. We have to get middle schools free of social media entirely.

Gillespie: Let me put it this way, and we might agree on this, we need to get rid of middle school. And I don't say that lightly, or junior high, because it used to be seven, eight, nine, now it's six, seven, eight. Middle school is a terrible institution. 

Haidt: So what do you propose we do about that.

Gillespie: Maybe it's one through eight or you put them in a medically induced coma for a couple years.

Haidt: That's basically what TikTok is.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Regulating Smartphones? Jonathan Haidt vs. Libertarians appeared first on Reason.com.

Abigail Shrier is author of the best-selling new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. She argues that the mental health of Gen Z—people born between 1997 and 2012—is a mess because an infantilizing therapeutic culture pervades every aspect of their lives.

Shrier stresses that she's not against psychological counseling and help per se, but she believes too many unqualified and misguided people are causing far more problems than they solve.

Her previous book was the controversial Irreversible Damage, which looked at the rapid rise of girls identifying as transgender. We talk about the roots of today's therapeutic culture, the extent of the problems it causes, and how parents, teachers, and young people themselves might find a better way forward.

Previous appearance:

Abigail Shrier: Trans Activists, Cancel Culture, and the Future of Free Expression, July 7, 2021

Today's sponsor:

This interview has been condensed edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: The new book is Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. Can you give us the elevator pitch for Bad Therapy?

Abigail Shrier: So I always start a book with a question, and my question was, why are the kids who've gotten the most mental health resources, had the most therapy, the most diagnoses, the most psych meds, the most wellness tips, the most coping tips, etc. They should be the picture of mental health. Instead, they're the picture of despair. And I wanted to know why. 

And I also wanted to know why they have no interest in growing up. Why weren't they looking to move out of their parents' house? A larger percentage of them are living at home more than ever before, even with our low unemployment. Why are they putting off getting a driver's license or claiming that driving is scary? Boys over 17 are saying this. So, those were my two questions, and I found that they were related.

Gillespie: A couple of the big points that you make, which I think are really good and interesting and important, is that all medical interventions or any kind of interaction with a doctor of any stripe, they have the potential for negatives. Explain how that kind of intersects with the topic here.

Shrier: So there's this concept called iatrogenesis, which is a Greek word meaning when the healer introduces harms. What I want people to know is that any intervention, no matter how good, if it is efficacious, if it has the power to help, also necessarily has the power to harm. If it can do anything at all, then of course it can harm. So Tylenol, which is wonderful, can damage your liver if you take too much of it. X-rays. But what people might not know is that therapy, which also has the power to help, can harm as well.

Gillespie: For the context of the book, you're talking about Gen Z, but also kids who are in school now and are dealing with a much more therapeutic culture generally than you or I grew up with. Kids are different from adults. How does that factor into your book?

Shrier: A number of ways. When an adult goes to therapy, an adult first of all makes the decision, I want to work on this or I need the support. I know myself and I need this. You have their buy-in, the therapist has their buy-in, and they show up ready to work. Number two, they've lived enough life that if the therapist is a little off track, or maybe the therapist got the wrong impression, an adult can say, "You know what? I really think I gave you the wrong impression of my mom." Or "Look, my parents were difficult in that regard, but I wouldn't call them toxic. And I don't think breaking off with them is the right move." 

It's very hard for a teenager or a child to say those things, especially if they're angry with mom. They don't know what constitutes emotional abuse, especially if an adult is leading them to think that they were emotionally abused, or that they had experienced trauma. And with a child, you don't have their buy-in. So a therapist is naturally going to want to pander to a child to get them on board. Now, if a child has a severe problem that they're coming to a therapist with, that sort of focuses the mind. You've got a kid who's anorexic or who has severe [obsessive compulsive disorder], you know what they're going to be talking about. But if you drop off a kid who's got some anxiety for general psychodynamic psychotherapy, the therapist could lead in any direction. And I think that's what we're seeing.

Gillespie: How many kids are on psychoactive drugs and in active therapy?

Shrier: We only stopped talking about ADHD not because it was being diagnosed any less—there are more diagnoses—but because so many young kids are on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) today, the antidepressant. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just cleared Lexapro, which is a very strong antidepressant, for 7-year-olds. In fact, we've been going in one direction, putting kids on more and more and more psychotropic drugs, anti-anxiety medications, and various forms of speed for ADHD. 

So in 2016, one in six kids between the ages of 2 and 8, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), already had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis. Those kids weren't on social media. They didn't have smartphones, certainly not in 2016. They don't have them today. So we know that this diagnosis has been exploding. And also mental health treatment has gone in one direction. So, nearly 40 percent of the rising generation has been to see a therapist already. And I'm not the only one to have noticed this—a team of researchers did a year ago and called this the treatment prevalence paradox. 

What they were noticing is that with treatment of illness, the more treatment there is, the more the point prevalence rate of a disorder should go down. We saw this with breast cancer treatment and other things. The incidence of death from breast cancer went down with more pervasive treatment. Here, there's been vast expansion of treatment and the rates of depression and anxiety have only gone up.

Gillespie: Supporters of that trend would say, "Well, that's because it's an epidemic. It's a pandemic of anxiety, of depression, of isolation, of whatever." But you're effectively saying that it's probably more caused by the intervention itself. Let's also talk about how the therapy culture has gone into schools. Because it used to be, certainly 30-40 years ago, teachers were not trained in therapy. They were not expected to be counselors. Most schools probably didn't even have school counselors or psychologists or anything like that on staff. But now, everywhere you look, that is considered part and parcel of K-12 teacher education, right?

Shrier: And that's why we're seeing so much increase in anxiety, depression, and the known harms of therapy, because we are treating a vast population, and mostly they are well. And here's the thing with iatrogenesis or when a healer introduces harm: If you have a problem, if you have a serious cut and you need stitches, it's worth the trip to the emergency room. But if you have a minor scratch, then you only stand to face risk, right? Because you don't stand to benefit, really. 

So all the exposure to MRSA and other bacteria at the E.R., now you're just facing risk. And that's what we're doing with this generation. We're taking healthy kids who are a little bummed out, a little anxious, and we're loading them with intervention, as you say, much of it through school, through social-emotional learning and all the therapeutic techniques now going on in school. And so all these kids face is risk. 

Gillespie: Why don't teachers push back on this ask of them, to be teaching history, or reading, or math, or whatever, and to also be scanning the classroom for problematic behavior? 

They seem to have embraced this role as being therapists or being on the lookout for stuff, which I think you both stress and document very well. Whatever else you think about therapy and counseling, these teachers just aren't equipped to do that. So it's really wrong to ask them or to expect them to be any good at it. But why aren't they saying, "If you want kids to be put in therapy, come and do it yourself."

Shrier: So teachers broke down into a number of categories. Some of them absolutely objected. They're desperate to get through their lessons. That's why they got involved, and many of them told me they can't deal with even the behavioral outbursts. The kids have become so dysregulated. They're being asked to do things that aren't their job. They want to get out of teaching. 

Then there are the teachers who don't really want to teach, or they find it really challenging, and it's much easier to play "Let's talk about your trauma" or to play a sort of amateur therapist. And of course, the third answer I have is that a lot of this is coming from school counselors who march in. And what I want people to know is that when a school counseling staff expands in your high school, it operates a lot like the [diversity, equity, and inclusion] staff of a university. It starts to take over everything. All of a sudden, the mental health staff is overseeing the entire curriculum. And that's what we're seeing.

Gillespie: One of the people that you talked to in the book is Elizabeth Loftus, who is an incredibly well-known psychologist who helped to pop the recovered memory bubble a couple of decades ago. And one of the things that she stressed was that psychologists oftentimes can introduce memories that people then take on as their own. 

Last night, I watched a documentary about Joan Baez, the folk singer in the '60s. She, late in life, became convinced that she may have been assaulted by her father and that her sister probably was. And she had multiple personality disorder. 

So let's talk about iatrogenesis. And how does the work that Elizabeth Loftus does help explain the worst case scenario of a therapist-created issue?

Shrier: Well, Elizabeth Loftus, who is widely considered one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, really showed that our memory is like a mosaic. You can introduce things into it and it's always being updated, a little like a Wikipedia page. And other people can edit it and you can edit it. And here's the thing: It's especially true of children. 

So what she did was she helped expose the recovered memory epidemic of the '90s, in which kids were being led through questioning to remember things that didn't happen to them. Traumas, assaults, sexual molestation that never happened. The problem is, what's going on today in schools is effectively group therapy—they don't call it that—social-emotional learning where the kids sit around sharing their pain and sharing their trauma. You're very likely in that process to introduce incorrect memories or exaggerate kids' memories of a past pain.

Gillespie: There's also a valorization of having pain or of having trauma or of not feeling well. Can you talk about that? How did that happen? 

Shrier: Maybe that's the goal of therapy. It's a question and I'll tell you why. The profession makes no effort to track improvements or harms. That's a real problem. And when I say the profession makes no effort, it's not that no therapists do that. There are some very good cognitive behavioral therapists who absolutely do this, and that's wonderful. 

But in general, most psychotherapists do not track any harms they make, no effort to see, "Gosh, have your relationships gotten worse since we started? Has your anxiety gotten worse? Has your depression gotten worse?" And that's a huge problem because those are the known side effects of therapy. We know that when they've studied burn victims, breast cancer survivors, first responders to catastrophe, in many cases, the ones who went to therapy ended up with worse symptoms than those who didn't go to therapy at all.

Gillespie: What is The Body Keeps the Score and why do you spend as much time as you do in the book talking about it?

Shrier: You're talking about a book that sold over 3 million copies. This has entered the bloodstream, and it's convinced a generation that they experienced childhood trauma. Actually, he kicked off an effort to go into schools and teach teachers that they needed to be trauma-informed about their education, because every child may have been traumatized and, in fact, likely had been traumatized. 

And the problem with this is, of course, that kids and people are highly suggestible. And they came to believe it. And we've basically induced what I think is something like an emotional hypochondriasis. We've created a generation of emotional hypochondriacs who are so focused on their emotional pain, so convinced of their trauma that it's debilitating them. And that's not to say that their pain isn't real. But as I learned when I talk to experts in hypochondriasis, the hyper-focus on real pain magnifies it. And I think that's what they're doing.

Gillespie: So in a simplified way, what you're arguing, at least on this point, is that trauma has been kind of defined downward. Everyday aspects of adolescence or growing up have been redefined as traumatic.

Shrier: Absolutely. Exactly right. There was just a new study out in the last couple of months by this wonderful researcher, a psychological researcher I love, named Kathy Witham. She did a prospective study. So these are the only rigorous studies really. They actually start with the kids. And they check who has actually experienced documented abuse. Then they follow them 15 years later and see what they're like as adults. And the researchers are blinded. They don't know which group is the control group. 

And what she found was the contextualization of what happened to these kids had more to do with adult psychopathology than what actually happened. Meaning, if an adult thought that what happened to him as a kid constituted trauma, he was more likely to suffer as an adult than a child who actually had suffered but didn't think of it as trauma. And here's the thing: Many of the adults who believed they had been traumatized as kids and so were suffering as adults, when they went back and looked, there was no record of actual trauma.

Gillespie: In a way, those of us who are parents, when your kid is a toddler and they hurt themselves, sometimes they look to you for the cue of like, are you hurt or not? And depending on how you react, they react. If you show them that you think they're hurt, they start to cry. If not, they kind of shrug it off.

Shrier: That's true of all of us is the remarkable thing. It turns out, if we come to believe we were traumatized as children and that the body keeps the score—that somehow, mysteriously, we have these memories stored outside our central nervous system, which has been disproven—we're a lot more likely to manifest symptoms than if we just think, "Yeah, I went through a hard time," and are able to surround ourselves with family, with friends, if we exercise, if we are active in the world, if we contribute to others. We tend to do really well in life with those things. In fact, the story of humanity is one of profound resilience in the face of what we think of as trauma.

Gillespie: You talk about Viktor Frankl in the book. Can you explain who Viktor Frankl is and why he's important to Bad Therapy?

Shrier: Sure. Well, he was a survivor of Auschwitz. He wrote a wonderful book called Man's Search for Meaning. And he was a psychiatrist himself. And one of the things that he says in his book that I quote in mine is that, actually, there are a number of things that he felt got him through Auschwitz; one of the things was humor, which is an amazing defense. And unfortunately, it has become so politically incorrect that we are often not allowed to avail ourselves of it. But actually, it's really good for getting through hard times. 

The other thing he said was that if you want the parts of an arch to form together, you don't relieve it of weight, you put more weight on it. And what he was saying is, making demands of children, which doesn't mean being cruel but giving them chores, giving them responsibilities, making them responsible for each other, having them in the world doing things, that's better for their mental health than telling them they've probably been traumatized and might not actually recover. That's the worst thing you get.

Gillespie: Another person that you cite in the book is Christopher Lasch, who is best known for two works that came out in the late '70s and early '80s, The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self. You quote him in the book about the rise of therapeutic culture, how it's kind of gone everywhere. 

In The Minimal Self, Viktor Frankl is one of his villains because he felt that Frankl and a number of other people expanded the experience of the concentration camp, which is a very unique historical experience, and also one that is unbelievably intense beyond virtually anything anybody today could be doing. And Lasch argued that that was where trauma talk started seeping out in the '50s. People started equating their everyday life in a relatively comfortable suburb with a concentration camp. The most famous case of that is Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique,  saying that being a housewife was like being in a comfortable concentration camp. 

It's a vast army of educators and people in the mental health industry that have fanned out into the schools. But what do you think about that argument that the beginning of the redefinition of trauma to everyday life might actually start with the misapplication of the experience of the death camps in World War II? 

Shrier: I agree with it completely. In America, we saw a vast expansion in the treatment of the well. All of a sudden, mental health experts were not just treating the sick. They decided to treat the well. And, so that meant mental health for everybody, first of all. And second of all, we see that people often extrapolate from people who experienced the most severe trauma. Bessel van der Kolk himself talks about combat vets and PTSD and then uses that to extrapolate to kids in elementary school who grew up in the most gentle circumstances. 

That's exactly what's gone wrong. Trauma experts often use metaphor. And so it's very hard to evaluate their claims because they slip between what seems to be a serious scientific claim into metaphor. So you can never tell. Are you saying that you literally passed down your trauma through your genetic code? Or are you just saying that you told your kids really upsetting stories and it upset them? And very often they sort of make a lot of headway by not being clear about that. 

Gillespie: When a kid has a real problem, not an everyday-life problem, they can benefit from counseling or therapy or some kind of intervention. How do we draw that distinction in a meaningful way?

Shrier: That's a great question. And I think parents know their kids best. But I think in general, a good sort of shorthand is, is this something that I could handle when I was their age? If something really didn't qualify as trauma when you were a kid, it probably isn't traumatic. It's probably something they can handle. Now, if you've tried to stabilize your kid, if you've taken the tech out of their environment or whatever else seemed to be contributing to their problem—and you can't stabilize a child who is anorexic or has obsessive-compulsive disorder and any other number of things where it's really interfering with their daily life—and their suffering, by all means, get them help. I certainly wouldn't say, don't get them help. Get them help, get even medication if they need it. But we need to change our default settings, and the default should be no intervention. The default should be: Let's see if we can give him a healthier life.

Gillespie: You talked at length about your grandmother, who was born in 1927. She actually contracted polio and spent a year in an iron lung and then ended up flourishing. Is there a problem where we valorize the unbelievable stress that people were under in an earlier age?

Shrier: Well, a few things. First of all, I think we need to get clear on what the goal is. So the goal isn't someone who doesn't go through any pain. We all have our different personalities. We all have different levels of patience with each other or forbearance. Some people are more irritable or whatever else it is, but here's the thing. Can they function? Because my grandmother formed a family. My grandmother had a stable marriage. My grandmother had certain things. My grandmother could be depended upon by her neighbors. My grandmother was a good citizen. 

These are things we're seeing the rising generation opt out of. They don't even want to leave their parents' house, and they don't want to get married, they don't want to have children. They don't want people depending on them. And so whatever else you say—you might say, "Oh, you're looking past the rose-colored glasses." I think that's a fair criticism. But the question is, were these people undertaking adult responsibilities? Because that's ultimately what we want. We want to raise kids who can say, "You can depend on me" to other people. That's what we want. 

Gillespie: Is part of this that we're misdiagnosing because of the fact that childhood is lasting longer and longer, which is annoying if you're a parent because it's like, "Hey, you're 21. Maybe you ought to think about getting your own place."  But, are we misdiagnosing the curse of wealth that we can afford to start our work lives and our adult lives later as a crisis?

Shrier: Absolutely. There's no question that wealth has played a role. When I started writing the book, I thought, gosh, these kids have gone through no World War, no Great Depression. They have everything they could want. Why are they suffering? And one of the answers is, having responsibility is really good for you. Having a job, having to show up on time, having people you see in person regularly, having neighborhood friends and cousins around, that's all really good for you. And the responsibility is really good for you too. And what I wanted parents to know was not only that that stuff was good for you, but to stop feeling guilty if they wanted to give it to their kids, that kind of responsibility.

Gillespie: It is amazing how an afterschool job, which used to be something of a rite of passage for everybody from the wealthiest to the poorest—sometimes out of privilege, sometimes out of necessity—has really disappeared at every level of income. Do we just need to put our kids back in factories or something like that?

Shrier: We need to put them back into something. People ask me, well, instead of doing social-emotional learning in schools, what would be better for the kids? They could paint the gym. They could literally do anything. They could clean the yard with rakes. They could engage in any activity. They could dance. Anything would be better than sitting around and talking about their problems. And that's the truth. Like, we all need to feel productive. We do. And part of that is having responsibility where someone cares if you show up.

Gillespie: So part of it is giving them more responsibility, but part of the solution might also be giving them more free time where they're expected to hang out with their peers and kind of figure out how to do things.

Shrier: That's right. Tech-free free time is great. Sitting around on their phones is a lot less great. And we know that there's no question, as Jonathan Haidt always talks about, that social media has played a really bad role in our mental health. The problem is, this is a problem we've known about for eight years, how bad it's been. And we've done nothing to take it out. The schools allow kids to be on their phones and on social media all day long. And why have we done [nothing to change this]? Partly because parents have gotten no support from the mental health establishment. These schools, they were happy to go in and give therapy and social-emotional techniques and mindfulness, but they were less happy to take away the kids' cellphones even during the school day.

Gillespie: Can you talk a little bit about why the therapeutic culture in your argument is more important than the social media one?

Shrier: Sure. Because if you give kids a healthy life, then no one harmful thing is going to be that damaging. So, for instance, social media is bad. There's no question, and it's harmful. My last book was about a horrible trend spread through social media. But here's the thing. It's like that old commercial when we were growing up with the Frosted Flakes. They would put a bowl of sugar cereal until there was orange juice on the side and toast on one side and eggs on another, and they would say it's part of a nutritious breakfast. And what they were saying is, well, Frosted Flakes isn't great, but look at all these other things you could be eating too. 

Gillespie: It's not so bad if you eat a balanced diet.

Shrier: Right, and that's the problem. We have social media, which is bad, and then we have all these other things, like a constant valorization of being emotionally traumatized, like regular therapy teaching you that you need to check in with an adult or a mental health expert before you take any risks whatsoever. Like your mental health diagnosis that you now believe limits you in some profound way, and you can't just get over on your own like you can with, say, shyness or sadness. Now, I have depression. Well, that suggests you need an expert. So all these things have contributed to incapacitating these young people.

Gillespie: One of the things you discuss is the current parenting generation. Talk a bit about why parents surrender authority as parents to experts.

Shrier: I think that part of it is that our parents divorced in such high numbers. We had the high watermark of divorce in America when I was young, and people were put in therapy, or they felt like they needed therapy, because they went through something hard, like their parents splitting up. And as they entered adulthood, they entered therapy. They went into therapy and they thought it was beneficial. And they thought, my parents weren't there for me in various ways. I remember the pain I went through and also my therapist really encouraged me to see my parents' failings. 

They weren't emotionally sensitive enough. And my generation and millennials went into parenting thinking we were going to be the most emotionally sensitive generation of parents. We were going to watch our kids like hawks. We were going to be there for them, and we were going to constantly ask them how they were feeling. And we thought that being gentle with our kids would produce them as gentle as possible. And we never asserted our authority. We avoided all punishment. And frankly, we've presided over something like a disaster.

Gillespie: Just to play devil's advocate, I think about that a lot. My parents were members of the Greatest Generation. And in a way, they were emotionally unavailable, partly because they were dealing with their own shit. They were the children of immigrants, and they grew up in not only stern families, but also in stern subcultures. And that clearly was not good. 

I didn't want to be like them as parents. I don't want to be my kid's friend. How do we find a happy medium, where it isn't like going home to a German family in the 1930s that people rightly thought was the incubator of fascism or something like that, with a stern father and a stern mother? How do you balance not being distant but also not being smothering with positive regard?

Shrier: I think this is such an important question because a lot of people feel like, "My parents were cold. I didn't like that. I didn't get all the hugs I wanted and the love I needed." So there's a difference between, some of this is what kids need and other is just good stuff to have. 

Being loving with your kids, as affectionate as you want to be, is great. No one says you have to be cold. And in fact, there's great research on this. In study after study—this is such a replicated study, it's a very sturdy study—authoritative, meaning the parents are in charge, but loving, raise the happiest, least anxious, least depressed, and honestly, most successful kids. And the kids end up having the best relationship with their parents. What you can't do when you're loving and affectionate with your kids is divest yourself of authority. That's what you can't do, if you want them to raise them well and then have them be adults themselves.

Gillespie: When did we, as a culture, start surrendering our authority to experts? I think America was a relatively poor country before World War II. There was a huge boom after, and a lot of people entered the middle class who really came from places of little authority. There was a cult of experts growing in the mid-20th century. Parents either read Benjamin Spock in droves and were supposedly being permissive about their kids, although his book is just filled with passive aggression. Or Bruno Bettelheim, who's another concentration camp survivor who also turned out to be, in many ways, a fraud. There was a real dichotomy between hard and soft parenting. But there was an overwhelming urge for people who were newly in the middle class, I think, to say, we really don't know what we're doing, and our parents can't help us because they grew up in Italy, and Ireland, and Poland, or under bizarre circumstances. 

Are we actually getting out of the cult of experts? 

Shrier: Well, I don't think they knew that therapists were a part of that. I don't think they knew that the mental health establishment was part of that. I think they thought, "I want to be as emotionally attuned. I want to get this right. I'm better educated than my parents. So I'm going to go to the most educated therapist I can find to help me with the exact technique I need for a child." And what they didn't ask themselves, what we didn't ask ourselves is, what are we actually looking to produce? So we thought, "Oh, I'm going to raise the most sensitive, emotionally in-tune, happy child." Well, turns out that's actually not how you do it. We obsessed over our children's happiness and spent no time at all thinking about how to make them strong. And it turns out, raising strong kids is a much better way to raise happy kids.

Gillespie: Let's talk a little bit about the treatment of your book. It's funny, it has not been reviewed as widely as I would have thought. This is not because it is a bad book or a lacking book. It's curious to me. And that is also reflected in the treatment. I looked this morning and of all books sold on Amazon, you were at No. 8. But on The New York Times bestseller list, you are nowhere to be seen. Can you talk a little bit about the treatment of the book in the legacy media? And how is that working for you?

Shrier: I think all of us who are the truth-tellers out there and went against various narratives, that's the treatment we get. So, of course, right away, The New York Times decided it wouldn't review my book and other legacy media, because that's how they treat you when you were questioning the transgender narrative or the gender ideology narrative with teenage girls early on. 

Now, of course, they write whole articles about it, as if it's obvious. Everything that I said in the book four years ago is now so obvious, The New York Times can casually write about it. But at the time, they tried to paint me as some sort of bigot or something. I write for readers, I don't write for reviewers, and I don't write for legacy media, which is what it is. 

Gillespie: Obviously, sales are brisk. You were telling me before we started recording that Amazon actually ran out of the book. Is it going through another print?

Shrier: We just got another shipment. So they should be ready to go. But, it was the No. 1 book on Amazon of all books in the world and quickly sold out. And that's because there actually is a desire to talk about what the harm therapy and over-focus on feelings might be doing. Any criticism of the ruling class tends not to go over well.

Gillespie: It seems like in a strange way, and I would argue a wonderful way, your work and certainly your first book, Irreversible Damage—which was the subject of various attempts to kind of limit its circulation through discussion or to take it off certain websites and things like that—finds its audience. So that must be heartening.

Shrier: It's absolutely heartening. Look, I have no complaints. I've been very happy that I've been able to reach so many readers. But, I think we should all be getting a little tired of being told what we're allowed to read. And unfortunately, there are always these campaigns to limit certain authors because they're so afraid that if your message gets out, people might think for themselves and agree with you. And, it's just a really ugly strain that we're seeing. Obviously, it's often enforced through the various tech fora. But I certainly hope that there's a good amount of pushback to it.

Gillespie: Nothing brings out social anxieties more than talking about children. They're a blank screen that we project all of our anxieties, all of our aspirations on. And I think the book should be read by everybody who has any interest in that. What are the next steps now?

Shrier: So this is the thing I'm most optimistic about. We can absolutely turn this around, and here's why. You don't need any money. You don't need expert help. You can do it yourself as a parent. Kids need authority. They need to know they're going to be just fine. We need to remember to tell them that minor injuries are fine. They can shake it off. It's fine and play on. We need to assume that most kids will be resilient. Most combat veterans are resilient in the face of trauma. Certainly most children are, and we need to tell them that their ancestors were resilient. 

We need to tell them about what their grandparents and great-grandparents went through. We need to reassure them that they can get through hard times too. There are so many things we can do for our kids, like giving them some amount of independence, teaching them a skill, giving them time when we're not monitoring and hovering. All these things are really good for them, surrounding them with a family who loves them. And it doesn't cost any money to do it. That's the thing.

Gillespie: On a systemic level, are there particular interventions that you would make or that you think should be done because there are, what, 15,000 school districts in the country, etc.? Are there particular interventions that can have a broader reach than being the change that you want to see in the world?

Shrier: Absolutely. You can start by shrinking all the mental health staff at schools and bringing back order to schools. Right now, all disciplinary problems are treated as a mental health problem. And the kids get talk therapy and no discipline. That makes us put kids who are good kids really in danger of violence from other kids who really should be expelled. And we're seeing that. We're seeing kids brutalized in school. Since [former President Barack] Obama issued his "Dear Colleague" letter, they're not allowed to expel a disproportionate number of minority students. So instead of doing that, they do these therapeutic interventions. They don't work. We're seeing chaos in schools. We need to bring back order and shrink the mental health staff so that they can only treat the kids who actually need it, not everyone.

Gillespie: For the Gen Z kids who are in their 20s, who were raised under this dispensation of bad therapy, what's your advice to them? 

Shrier: They're on way too many medications that they don't need, way too many therapeutic interventions. And they all believe they have a mental health diagnosis. I just want to say, some kids are a little different. They're a little weird, awkward, quirky; it doesn't mean you have a mental health problem. 

I would caution people, as serious as I think it is to put a child or an adolescent on SSRIs or a serious antidepressant, you'll also need medical oversight coming off of those things. So definitely don't try to quit cold turkey. These medications have very powerful withdrawal symptoms. And you really need to very carefully taper if you're going to try living without the snowsuit you may not need.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Abigail Shrier: Stop Obsessing Over Our Children's Happiness appeared first on Reason.com.

Joe Lonsdale is a co-founder of the data analytics firm Palantir; OpenGov, which provides cloud software services for governments; and the University of Austin, which seeks to reform higher education. He's the managing partner of 8VC, a tech and life sciences venture capital fund, and is chairman of the board of the Cicero Institute, a nonprofit working to "restore liberty, accountability, and innovation in American governance."

Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Lonsdale why he relocated to Texas from California, how to curb government overreach while providing essential services, his goals for his podcast American Optimist, and his 2020 article, "Libertarianism is Dysfunctional, but Liberty is Great."

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This interview has been condensed edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: Your venture capital firm is called 8VC. What is that referring to?

Joe Lonsdale: Originally, we had a firm called Formation 8 with some Korean partners, and they took formation, I took eight. Eight's a lucky number in Asia. It's a lucky number actually in Judaism. It kind of represents beyond the seven days. So you can see infinity is tied to eight. It's a lucky number. You have to have lucky numbers. 

Gillespie: And does it tie into the history of Silicon Valley at all?

Lonsdale: It does as well. We talk about waves of innovation in Silicon Valley. And the second big wave of innovation was the semiconductor wave. That's why it's called Silicon Valley, because of the silicon wafer. One of the three Nobel Prize winners who invented the transistor, [William] Shockley, he brought eight of the most impressive people he could find to Silicon Valley. And it turned out he was a great scientist but a terrible boss. And he kept giving them lie detector tests. And finally, they left and said enough of this, we're doing our own [thing]. And they got someone else to back them called [Sherman] Fairchild. So they built Fairchild Semiconductor. And those eight people at Fairchild Semiconductor, it was [Gordon] Moore of Moore's Law, it was Eugene Kleiner of Kleiner Perkins. It was the guys who built a lot of Silicon Valley. So it really pays homage to the history of the tech sector.

Gillespie: And then Shockley, just to cap that story, ended his career by promoting scientific racism.

Lonsdale: It's not ideal, I suppose. So yeah, at least fortunately, we're on the side of the eight people who didn't work for him anyway.

Gillespie: When did you move to Texas?

Lonsdale: 2020. 

Gillespie: Good time to move. Good time to buy, I suppose. But you left California. You were raised in California. You went to school in California. You've thrived in California. You co-founded Palantir in California. Why did you move to Texas? And what does that say about governance strategies?

Lonsdale: There are a lot of things California has going for it, and we still have to go there sometimes for things we do. But California got to be really broke—and I wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal at the time [about this]—it had about a thousand people working for six companies in Austin because you couldn't really scale companies in San Francisco anymore. It became really expensive. Basically, you'd hire someone in there, you pay them $300,000, and their spouse would really resent it because their standard of living for that much money was still not very high in Silicon Valley. Your staff would have to drive over an hour to come back and forth, even if they were paid well. So really not a good place for middle-class living standards.

Gillespie: Or even upper class. If you're making $300,000, you're in the top 2 percent or 5 percent.

Lonsdale: Not a good place for upper-middle-class standard, either, I should say. There are all sorts of issues in California. It's hard to build things. If you get sued, you're probably guilty until proven innocent, so the really bad court system and just all these reasons why we didn't really want to raise our family there culturally either. I'm pretty moderate socially, but there are really crazy things going on there, and you'd best rather raise your kids somewhere sane. 

A lot of my friends actually left America. They got really negative. It's really sad. Some of them went because they made a lot of money and went to Switzerland, or Singapore, or elsewhere. And I really believe in America. I believe in our constitutional republic. I believe in the values that created this country. And so for me, choosing to go to Texas is like, let's stay here, let's fight for our country. Let's do it from somewhere sane.

Gillespie: What was most attractive about Texas? The four most populous states in the country are California, New York, Texas, and Florida. California and New York are losing people to Texas and Florida. What was it about Texas that you liked more than Florida?

Lonsdale: Yeah, we do love Florida. We love Gov. [Ron] DeSantis and the rule of law there and the great policy they do. If I was just a hedge fund investor, Palm Beach would be a great place to live. I have a lot of mentors there. Miami's a good place for that. 

Culturally, Texas is a better place to build things. There's a history of building technology companies here in Austin, Texas. There are a lot more engineers. There are a lot of great engineering schools here, a lot of great companies. If you look at who's moved here to Austin, I have a lot of my fellow entrepreneurial friends. Elon Musk is spending time in Texas, not in Florida, for the same reasons as me I think.

Gillespie: In Texas, you said it's easy to build here. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Because that is something Texas is known for. It's got a lot of wide open space. Lonsdale: Yeah, there are less stupid rules. There are less bureaucrats. Even in this house, when we were trying to do some work in the back, we called the city and they said "You're in the extrajudicial territory, call the county." And we called the county, and he said, "Are y'all dumping sewage?" And we said, "No, sir. We're trying to build this extension." They said, "What did you call me for? Do what you'd like." 

This is amazing, this place. It just lets you do what you want. Also, the governor and the people here, when you call them up with a problem as a business, they say, "How can I help you get this done? How can I help you build?" In California, famously when Elon Musk complained to them online, they said, "Fuck you," right? So, it's a very different culture of working with you to help enable you as a builder and stay out of your way vs. getting in your way.

Gillespie: Let's talk a little bit about some of your billionaire friends who left the country rather than staying here. Everybody has a right of exit, but are they doomers in a way? You are part of the effective accelerationist movement. You are very much a white-pilled optimist about the future. What's wrong with going to Singapore?

Lonsdale: Listen, I'm a realist. They're right that there's a lot we have to fix about America. My father raised me to be courageous. And your job as a leader is that you confront things that are broken and that's what you're supposed to do. That's part of me. It's part of my masculine urge, that I have to fix things. I have to stand up for what's right. And so to me, it's just not who I am, to run away. 

And I could see the argument in different contexts in history where it did make sense to run away. Like I had Jewish relatives, some of whom fortunately left Poland on time. That was correct. I don't think there are places to run away to right now [where we] could get away from the types of battles that we need to fight in the world, that we need to win in the world. It's not obvious to me that liberty, freedom, markets, innovation for health care win out if America goes the wrong way. So, we have to have that fight here because if we lose, we'll probably lose everywhere else.

Gillespie: Are you always looking toward the future?

Lonsdale: I like to think I'm an entrepreneur who sees the world for how it is. I see what's possible. I see the gaps. I see where we are now, where we could be. I think that we can see what'll happen if we don't do something, what will happen if we do something. And I've built a lot of companies because I realized this thing's broken, but here is what's possible. And I see a lot of those gaps around policy and government as well. And I'm optimistic that with the right builders, we could do it. I'm not optimistic these things will just happen. But I'm optimistic that if a bunch of us get together and we fight for it, then we can win.

Gillespie: So let's talk about artificial intelligence, and how that plays out, because this seems to be the new bugaboo right now. Everybody is freaking out about it. What are the concerns over AI right now? And why are you on the positive side of things, rather than the "we got to slow down and regulate everything to death" side?

Lonsdale: There are a couple of different buckets I put the concerns into. One of the more extreme concerns, which was expressed well by people like Tim Urban and people like Elon Musk, kind of shows this exponential takeoff of AI. Throughout American history, we've had a lot of times where there are these messianic complexes where people are convinced that the Messiah is going to come and the world is going to end. And it just seems to occur every couple of generations. And this is a kind of secular version of a messianic complex that they're arguing for.

Gillespie: But you don't know if it's Jesus or the Antichrist, right?

Lonsdale: You could argue either one, very interestingly, or analogs of either one in some interesting ways. And so people are saying, yes, this thing takes off, it starts to improve itself, and it's very impressive how well this is working. And so how are we going to have to bear a new form of God effectively that's a thousand times smarter than people and just basically runs the world? And in 10 to 30 years, [that's] pretty unlikely, but there are smart people who believe that's the case and that's a worthy conversation.

Gillespie: But you're a smart person, and you're not betting on that. You're betting on something else.

Lonsdale: If it actually turns out that it is possible to create that with this technology, I don't think we're going to stop it long-term anyway. And I don't know if there's much I could do about it. So we can have that debate. It seems pretty unlikely to me. It seems like it'll take a lot longer than people think.

Gillespie: What are the things that AI will do for people that they're not understanding?

Lonsdale: So there are two buckets. There's a messianic bucket, and that's one argument. It's a very separate argument we can discuss or not, which is this very crazy end-of-time sort of debate. And then there's the everything-else argument where they're afraid of disinformation and destroying jobs. We shouldn't conflate the two arguments, right? They're two separate arguments, like, if you're going to have a God who destroys a job, that's like a stupid thing to debate. It's going to be different anyway. 

So let's go to this bucket over here, what's actually going to happen. And as far as I could tell, this is going to be one of the best things ever for humanity. Productivity is the underlying factor for how well our civilization is doing, how well the economy is doing. And productivity can go way up over the next decade. It could basically free us from drudgery. It can make things really inexpensive for poor people and for everyone else.

Gillespie: Can you give a specific example of how you think—granted, all predictions are wrong—that AI will make life easier or better for people?

Lonsdale: So let's start with what it's already doing. So there are some that came out in the last month from companies like Klarna, which is a big payments company, and people have to call and deal with them. And they have 70 percent of the calls being handled by the AI now. And the people are happier with those calls and can call back less to bother them afterward. [It's] saving [Klarna] a lot of money on those. And there are lots of versions of this. 

Michael Dell—who's also a major presence here in Austin—was saying the other day when he was here that he thinks he's going to have 20 percent higher productivity for his company of 100,000 people. And so basically, there are all sorts of applications of that. Michael is a very serious guy. He doesn't just make wild claims. He actually sees how in the next two years he's going to have certain salespeople being helped, certain marketing documents, certain customer support processes. 

I'll give you one other one: health care billing. Sounds like a boring area. Why are we talking about it? Over $200 billion a year is spent on health care billing in the United States. It's people in office parks going back and forth with insurance companies, and there's like tens of thousands of rules, each for thousands of companies—a mess. Millions of people try to do this. And so it turns out, we already have companies that are making that a few times more productive, which is going to pull another $100 billion of waste out of the economy. So this productivity hitting in all these areas seems very likely over the next few years.

Gillespie: Let's talk about Palantir. You are one of the co-founders. And it was 2003, is that right? 

Lonsdale: I was 20-21 years old, and we started it back then.

Gillespie: How did you start it at that age?

Lonsdale: I just finished at Stanford. I was helping Peter [Thiel]. Peter Thiel was an investor with Facebook at the time, and we had a hedge fund we were running together. I was an intern at PayPal—and the Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all of our money. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk merged two companies to become Paypal. And so we had to figure out how to stop the bad guys. 

And it turned out that with all the talent that had been brought together in Silicon Valley around that first tech bubble in 2000, we were able to figure out things like how to investigate bad guys that were way ahead of what the government was doing. This was a shocking realization, that all these young engineers were actually way ahead. In the computer science world, you hear stories about the National Security Agency in the 1970s doing things that no one even understood until 15 years later.

Well, the congressional hearings built them. But honestly they would do things and people would look at it and then academics can't explain it. And then I could have just learned why with much more advanced theories much further on. So they were way ahead of us in the government from the mid-20th century. But that was no longer the case in 2000. 

And so we started helping the FBI and Secret Service to arrest the bad guys at PayPal, and my roommate and I got really interested in this. Wow, there's all this investigative stuff we're doing, and 9/11 happened and the government was spending billions of dollars on, frankly, backward things, that we're not nearly as advanced. We said, wow, this is really dangerous. We have bad guys attacking our country. We have people violating civil liberties, not using the data right. Let's build something that could take the best and brightest in this area and extend it to help all of our allies stop the bad guys.

Gillespie: What was the genius inside of Palantir?

Lonsdale: If you want to go to the highest level, we were ranked No. 1 in Silicon Valley for the talent. So there are a lot of very hard engineering problems all combined, you have to do just all these things. David Hume was a big inspiration for us of how reason works, how the mind works, like what are the ways in which the human mind can grapple with data that's too big to be kept inside one human mind. 

You had tens of billions of dollars being spent gathering all types of data in thousands of databases. How do you as an analyst look at this and connect the dots? And so you had to basically figure out how you start with one set of objects and properties and link them in various ways to other things and say, show me everything connected to this by this type of data. Show me everyone where this person's flown with. Show me everything that's connected to this where they have similar names, maybe the same person. Show me everything they've paid for, and then show everyone they've paid and watch the cash flows. Just helping people get their minds into massive data and then monitoring it in a way that's intuitive to them, so that when some random signal intelligence six months later showed a payment between two suspicious guys, all of a sudden they can connect the dots and we can find where the bad guys are. So it's really hard to say who's allowed to see what data. 

Gillespie: From a libertarian perspective, the engineering and technological feats are fantastic. The idea of following data flows where you can find bad behavior and target that, rather than doing large sweeping nets of all sorts of people, that's great. And obviously, the successes that Palantir talks about the most is unveiling China's GhostNet program, as well as probably helping to locate Osama bin Laden. 

Lonsdale: Palantir is behind thousands of terrorists being targeted and eliminated.

Gillespie: Then what are the concerns? How do you work with a government that is known for violating civil liberties on a fairly regular basis? How do you build a system so that you're not merely the handmaiden to a surveillance state?

Lonsdale: The whole core of Palantir was basically a civil liberties engine from the start. What data are you allowed to see and in what context? And how do we bring that together in light and show you only what you're allowed to see that lets you get your job done. The problem is, a lot of these guys, maybe they think they're Jack Bauer in the show 24, someone who's in charge of catching the bad guys, and they're going to break the rules. And we don't want you to be able to break the rules if you're not supposed to break them, but we want you to get the bad guys anyway. That's the whole point of this. 

So it's actually a really hard data problem. Like what are you legally allowed to see? And what's the policy? And we don't set the policy. But we make it so it's very transparent. So if Palantir's installed a certain part of the FBI or the CIA or anywhere else, the people running that can go back and look, here are the rules, here's what was done, here's where the rules were changed, here's who changed them. 

You have basically full audit logs, full audit trails, and you're doing things within their system. And you do need to make things so you can change the rules because there is policy change that happens. But it needs to be transparent, needs to be clear who did what. So someone can't just get in and do something inappropriate.

Gillespie: Here's a strange question. What is your reaction to people like Julian Assange and WikiLeaks or Edward Snowden?

Lonsdale: There's good and bad there. So as a libertarian, as someone who thinks the government wastes tons of money on tons of incompetent things, you want whistleblowers to call out the government, you want to call out waste, you want to call out bad actors. 

Palantir, along with some really talented people, helps stop a lot of major attacks. We literally helped eliminate thousands of terrorists that were planning attacks on us that we wouldn't have otherwise found or stopped, including those famous ones as you alluded to that we don't talk about in public because we don't want crazy people coming for us. But in general, we were close to people who helped uncover tons of these different rings of people who are clearly planning violent attacks in America. Some cases stopped them only with very little time to spare. And it's very frustrating to me that because you have so much competence in stopping these things, people now assume you don't need anything at all in the intelligence community. 

So I agree, there are abusive elements of the intelligence community. I agree that a lot of times, when something's confidential, they're using that to get away with nonsense. But I disagree with the idea that there are not bad guys that we have to fight. And so for me, it's like, let's make the government competent, but let's make the system so it watches the watchers.

Gillespie: How does Palantir help keep the government accountable?

Lonsdale: Actually, to Joe Biden's credit, at the time as vice president, I think he was involved in helping bring Palantir in a long time ago and making sure that we were tracking where all this money was going, because there is just generally a lot of fraud around these issues. And so the more you track any kind of government spending well, the more you understand it in a confident level, the more you're going to find all sorts of bad actors. Unfortunately, this was not always applied to my knowledge to COVID spending. It wasn't always applied as much as I would have liked it to be.

Gillespie: How does that system work?

Lonsdale: If you go back to the complicated fraud problem at PayPal, you're basically mining through the information and you're connecting different analyses and you're finding, first of all, cases that are of known fraud, which are not that hard to find. And you're modeling those to search for things that are similar, and you're piecing through it and you're flagging a bunch of suspicious things. A person does not have time to go through millions of these things. But if you flag things that are very suspicious to them and then show all the data in an intuitive way to them, they say, "Wait, this is obviously something that's wrong."

I remember back at PayPal, there'd be payments, there'd be a bunch of emails that were clearly all set up by the same person, like "baseball2000" or "Yahoofootball2000" or whatever it was, and all the money's going to those accounts and going out of the banks right away, and it's clear it's a coordinated network or something. The computer didn't know for sure. But once you show it to a person, it becomes obvious. So you work together on these things.

Gillespie: Can you ballpark what percentage of stimulus payments were either wrong or shouldn't have been made?

Lonsdale: I don't have that information myself. Palantir is a nonpartisan company. I don't even run it anymore. I'm close to a lot of people behind it. I remember at the time, even President [Barack] Obama agreed, for example, there's lots of fraud in Medicaid. We should probably go after it. He visited us. He was going to do it. His office ended up stopping us from doing it. They didn't want that. Their office doesn't want us to, because they don't want the narrative out there admitting how bad it is, which is frustrating, because we can actually fix most of it. 

Gillespie: Is there any way to change that political calculus?

Lonsdale: You need a really strong, really competent president who's willing to do it. Policy-wise, the Trump administration was willing to, but there's a certain level of confidence that wasn't always there on the follow through. And people have pushed back, and they drop it.

Gillespie: I mean, every president's like this. I'm not going to touch your Medicare. And that might mean I'm not going to touch your Medicare even if you're getting it under the wrong circumstances.

Lonsdale: It's not even for people. I think most of the fraud goes to a lot of very sketchy doctors and health systems. Those places are very powerful special interests. And it just creates a huge headache to go after them. And you need a president who wants to focus on the issue. And listen, there are lots of things to focus on. I'm not telling you this is the most important thing. It does bother me as an American that we waste $100 billion or whatever it is on this nonsense.

Gillespie: Are you going to vote for Donald Trump or Biden?

Lonsdale: I spend most of my time in the states because that's where I can make a huge difference. I have teams in 20 states for Cicero. I respect people very much who would never vote for Trump. I respect people who think Trump's policies are much better than Biden's. And so it's not something that I tend to weigh into.

Gillespie: Do you respect people who definitely will vote for Biden?

Lonsdale: I generally think there's a lot of failed policies. I generally think that there are some people in this administration I admire, but overall, I do not admire this administration. I understand why some people morally still prefer Biden to Trump. That's not my point of view right now.

Gillespie: Is something fundamentally broken, where we are looking at a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump?

Lonsdale: They do seem probably slightly too old to be the people we should be electing. I understand why people are really angry at the way Donald Trump's been treated. Jeb Bush and I wrote a piece on him in The Wall Street Journal talking about how both Elon Musk and Donald Trump had the court weaponized against them. And I see people who agree with a lot of the policies Trump did and are feeling he's treated really badly. So I know why that makes them want to fight for him. I don't think the country is broken or anything like that. I respect different views on these things.

Gillespie: It is interesting though, that Trump has run twice and has gotten less than 47 percent of the popular vote each time. And it seems like it's going to be very close now. Lonsdale: Yeah, I definitely don't think he's the Antichrist. And I definitely think there are some things I really admire that he's done and some things that I dislike as well.

Gillespie: Whatever else you can say about Trump or Biden, they plainly are the end of something. They're not the beginning of something new. Are we just going to be in a holding pattern for at least four years?

Lonsdale: I don't know if that's actually entirely true. There is a lot of new stuff coming, especially on the right. Right now we have a lot of new ideas and a lot of people around the policy organizations on the right who would be running things.

Gillespie: I hope you're right. Because the narrative, which may not be right, is that nobody wants to go into the Trump administration because it's going to be a train wreck. 

Lonsdale: I think people generally want to serve the president of the United States of America, even if they don't necessarily personally always admire him.

Gillespie: Let's talk about the Cicero Institute. What's its mission statement?

Lonsdale: So, the Cicero Institute is a nonpartisan policy think tank. We have a C3, which is the education side, and the C4, which is we're working at the state level to basically increase accountability and align incentives. 

Gillespie: It's named after Cicero. Explain why.

Lonsdale: Cicero was a Roman statesman. I really admire that a lot of the wisdom we have, the kind that reignited the Renaissance, came from writings of his that were saved. And he really stood for duty and wisdom, and for how a country is supposed to work, how a country is supposed to have its citizens who are merchants or natural aristocrats getting involved and making things competent and logical.

Gillespie: What is the Cicero Institute's approach to homelessness, and how is it different and more effective than what you encountered in California?

Lonsdale: We're looking for areas where there are giant gaps in the world between how things should work and how they work today thanks to bad policy. And the homelessness stuff is a really good example of that. The way things are done now in California are just totally insane. You have a billion dollars being given out, not based on data or metrics, but based on political favors to very powerful, very corrupt nonprofit groups whose incentives are completely misaligned. So these cities and these nonprofit groups get more money for doing the wrong things.

Gillespie: I know you're a big critic of the Housing First policy, that the first thing you do to address homelessness is somehow either build more housing or give more housing to people. Why is that wrong?

Lonsdale: Seventy-five percent of these people in cities are on drugs, and 75 percent are mentally ill. It overlaps. And if you give someone who's on drugs and mentally ill a house…. I think in San Francisco, they have more people who died in these homes than who moved on to being self-sufficient. This is a total mess. And then, by the way, who gets the homes? A lot of people who are working in the nonprofit groups get the homes, and people who are close to them, of course, and we try to make it so we had to give the homes to the people who are the most vulnerable, which sounds good on paper. It's that idea of equity. There's a vulnerability index they created, which is used by most homeless groups now in most cities. Most of the cities around the country are using the progressive groups. And the index says you get more points toward a home if you're on drugs. You get more points toward a home if you've committed a crime. It's more points for violent crime. You get more points if you're not in a drug recovery program because you need it more. You get more points where kids are truant and have been taken away from you. 

If you're on the very far left and you see everything through a lens of victimhood, you say, "Oh, these things happen to you. You should get more points." If you understand the world like a person who understands logic and reason, you realize, well, these [policies] are creating incentives, right? And so our nonprofit will follow and try to help people working with the homeless industrial complex. 

Even here in Austin, homeless people walk into this thing that's been set up by these progressive groups, and they say to them, "You sir deserve a home. Here's how you can get a tent." And he replies, "I don't really need a tent. I'm sleeping on someone's couch." She says, "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that, because you're more likely to get a home if you're in the tent. And here's how you set it up." And then he comes back two months later and she says, "Oh, you're not quite there for a home yet. The Republicans haven't given us enough funding." And he says, "I hear I would have maybe qualified for home money if I was on drugs." And she says, "Well, that might have given you enough points, but we don't like to think of it that way." 

This is literally the conversation. A lot of people don't realize our country is more insane on these things. They assume it's something more logical than this. It's not.

Gillespie: Does the Cicero Institute have model legislation for how to deal with homelessness?

Lonsdale: It does. We have eight different points. The big ones are you want to redirect money away from Housing First toward mental health treatment and drug treatment. You want to redirect things toward temporary shelter, not toward just giving away homes. It's much more efficient and scalable. You want to realign the incentives, so cities ban street sleeping and put people into the shelters. And they don't get more money for bringing more homeless people in. You want to basically realign things where the dollars given out to the nonprofit groups are given out based on metrics and goals. So you have accountability, you audit them, you say, here's your goals, and you get the money not based on being politically connected but based on what you're hitting. 

One of the big ones we really like is what is basically called diversion courts. And so you want a court that could actually force treatment for people. So if someone in San Francisco, forgive me, has pooped on the street for like a fifth time in a row, rather than say, "Oh, we can't do anything about it, just go out there and do it a sixth time," which is disgusting and bad for everyone, you say, "I'm sorry, we're not going to put you in prison because we're not jerks, but we're going to put you here in forced treatment," which is kind of like the obvious solution.

Gillespie: Which is also kind of like prison, right? 

Lonsdale: It is. So, technically, they do deserve to go to prison for having broken the law, but that's really mean. Let's send them somewhere else instead of forced treatment, because you can't just let people keep pooping on our streets. It's like having an adult in the room. It's like these are children in charge, so you can't just let a person keep doing that.

Gillespie: Reason is a house with many mansions. So we have lots of differences of opinion. Within that, I agree, if you're constantly defecating on the street, there should be enforcements for that. But, in general, with a lot of policies like this, how do you make sure that you are not just creating another power structure that can be used arbitrarily by the state or by whoever's in power to punish people that for whatever reason you don't like?

Lonsdale: This is where a lot of our government is broken. We have to have separation of powers. You have to have checks and balances. [Distinguishing between the] Legislative, judicial, and executive branches is one of the key things we get wrong with our administrative state. But you do need rules about this. Then you do need a court system that enforces those rules. And you need a way to appeal to another thing outside of that court system if it's doing something wrong.

Gillespie: So let's jump from homeless people and possibly forced diversion to something else. I've heard Cicero is involved in creating nonprofit prisons. This is not a private prison and it's not a state-run prison, but it would get money based on getting its inmates not to come back to prison, not to be recidivists. How does that illuminate what the Cicero Institute is about?

Lonsdale: So again, we're all about incentives and accountability and really things that create effective functional cultures to get the best results. And right now, our prisons in America do not have effective functional cultures. They are mostly very negative cultures. They mostly have extremely poor results relative to what's possible. When you want to look for incompetence in the world, you look for volatility results. It turns out there are some programs in some prisons for the same sets of people that have like half or a third of the recidivism rate. And so how do we do that? 

A not-very-smart politician who wants to do the right thing will look at that program and say, "We're going to just pay money for that program. We're going to try to copy it." That's one level, but the higher level is how do we create a system which is as close as possible to the way the market works, where the things that are working get more funding and get rewarded and the things that are not working go away. Because the problem is, one system might work somewhere. It's not going to work everywhere else. So you want to make things echo as close as possible to a market. And they say this actually gets down to one of the core misconceptions about prisons, that we have these for-profit prisons, and that's what's ruining everything. It's 10 percent of the prisons. These for-profits are not very good in general, but it's not because they're for-profit. It's because their profit incentive is the wrong incentive. Imagine if we gave a bunch of best entrepreneurs the right incentive and said you can only make money in prisons by getting your recidivism rate down, by making sure people who come out, they come out employed, by making sure when they come out there are ways of measuring their success in the community. That's what we should be doing. There are 37 prisons in California. Imagine if we measured all of this really well. And every couple of years, we replace the bottom three or four and give rewards to the top three or four. Make it so they're all part of this mission. 

Gillespie: You relegate them. It's like British football. 

Lonsdale: So how do you do this? First of all, there's a policy we're trying to pass. There are a bunch of great policies, and unfortunately in Arizona recently, the private prisons—not the good private prisons—stepped in and they've killed some of them. But we're going to get it next year. We're going to keep fighting. But there are other places where we have passed policy for incentives for probation and parole. It's worked extremely well. 

Here's another thing we want to do: We want to take a for-profit prison. We want to buy it into a nonprofit. So imagine putting it in a nonprofit. We're going to run it inside of that nonprofit as if the policy was already there, as if our only goal was that people coming out have higher employment, as if we don't want people to come back, and I want to do that in order to show what's possible. Because again, it's back to that volatility concept. You could show that something could be much better than it is. You can inspire people to say, wait a second, how do we get more of this? Because this is possible and no one's doing it.

Gillespie: Do you think too many things are crimes?

Lonsdale: I'm not for locking up nonviolent drug offenders in general. I have people in my life who I've worked with, who spent a lot of time in jail for things that I think they shouldn't have done. I think our regulatory state is way too big, and it's way too easy to get someone in trouble for a lot of nonsense. We have 9 million words of regulation per state on average. It's a mess. So yeah, there are definitely way too many crimes. 

That said, you do need to put the bad guys in jail. And if you don't, you get really high crime rates. And there are people who need to be punished, who need to be deterred from doing what they're doing. There's a whole thing on the left about prison abolition, which is insane. And I think that's going to hurt our society. I think there's a thing on the right, which is probably too mean, where it's just like you lock up everyone and copy [El Salvador President Nayib] Bukele, which is probably not what we should do in the U.S., even though maybe it made sense in Central America. But I think that both the left and the right, we all can agree that we should run these prisons competently.

Gillespie: I was hoping you were going to say that the right and the left can agree that they really should be libertarian.

Lonsdale: I think that's the libertarian concept from the sense that you're taking the things that work about liberty, work about a free society, and you're applying it to create competence in something that we all can win on.

Gillespie: You are one of the co-creators of the University of Austin. What drew you to that project? You're a Stanford graduate. You have written you don't want to send your kids to an Ivy League or, I guess, Stanford. What is the market gap that you're hoping the University of Austin will fill?

Lonsdale: Well, I hope in 15 or 20 years, the Ivy League or Stanford might be better. If you haven't been in these universities the last 10 years, you've really missed the rapid decline of them on a number of vectors. You basically had these radical, far-left ideologues conquer these places. There are more administrators than kids at Yale. There are almost as many at Harvard. And they are to the left of the professors. The professors in a lot of these departments are basically really focused on these very, very extreme ideologies. 

And you can't become a professor or even a Ph.D. student anymore if you don't go along with that stuff most of the time in these places, and it's really a rot that's kind of core to what's going on in our civilization right now, which Elon Musk calls the woke mind virus. I think [Richard] Dawkins came up with that. It really is this mind virus that is spreading from there and breaking a lot of things. I think a lot of stuff in our society, when it doesn't have to fight for its living or doesn't have to be accountable, ends up just being taken over by this virus.

Gillespie: One of the arguments used to be that you could be a leftist until graduation. But now it's gotten to a point where it's broken; the universities and the people coming out of them don't quite snap back. They're stuck there.

Lonsdale: Yeah. A lot of them go into these thousands of government-funded nonprofits all over the country and just spread ridiculous, broken ideology. They've conquered a lot of the marketing departments and human resources departments. And they're spreading ideas that are frankly anti-competence ideas. And they're very broken. You see all these blue cities all around the country, the vulnerability index we talked about for homelessness, it makes no logical sense. But they've learned in college, you don't argue against things like this. It's a virtue-signaling thing. You have to go along with it. You have to nod. You have to applaud. You have to snap or whatever the hell they do these days. And you're not allowed to say this is clearly wrong. It's bad incentives. By the way, you learn that if you're a white man, you shut up and you nod and go along. The whole thing's ridiculous.

Gillespie: What's the alternative then?

Lonsdale: The alternative is not to have an insane [Critical Race Theory] Marxist running schools. Just have one of them run by moderate, sane people. It's not a conservative thing. It's not a libertarian thing. You probably still have more moderate Democrats than anything else, because it's academia. That's generally been how academia works. You have people on both sides, right? And you have a school that focuses on the pursuit of truth. You have a school that focuses on actually educating the kids and teaching you how to speak up, teaching intellectual courage, teaching them how to have debates. Basically, the idea of intellectual humility, where you might not already have the answer. I think the whole idea of the woke mind virus is that you already have the answer and your job is to shame and ignore people who don't go along with your preconceived set of solutions. 

Instead, let's actually learn and let's violate what we thought was true and learn from both sides. It's a culture of healthy intellectual discourse, which is missing unfortunately on these campuses. We've had these seminars where kids come from Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and Yale and these places, and they're blown away being at the seminar for a week with great professors and debating ideas and seeing debates, for example, on the whole trans issue, like get a famous trans-economist and a famous feminist to debate the trans issue. Imagine that, and do so with intellectual humility and respect. And they actually ended up hugging each other afterward, despite the kind of fierce argument for a couple of hours.

People have never even seen these debates modeled in a healthy way to them their whole lives. Our society's not in a great place with the way universities work.

Gillespie: Let's talk a little bit about getting it to a better place. You have a very active Substack and a podcast that is called American Optimist. What's the controlling idea there?

Lonsdale: I've been lucky to be able to found a handful of multibillion-dollar companies. And I'm friends with a lot of people who have done the same, and I'm involved with a lot of that. I've been exposed to a lot of things that make me more optimistic because I understand what a lot of smart people are doing to change things in health care and to save lives with new breakthroughs there. And there are just lots of cool stuff going on in the world. And I want to show people, here's what's going on, here's what the common people are doing. Here's why we can be optimistic.

Gillespie: Why do you think the country really has been in a funk at least for 10 years or so? What do you think is driving that?

Lonsdale: What are the challenges? There's definitely civic breakdown. There's definitely this weird thing going on. And it's probably because of social media and because of living our lives more online, where we're like these more disembodied people who don't have some of the same, traditional, healthy ways of relating to each other, relating to our communities. The algorithms make us far more polarized. Donald Trump's ascendancy was also tied to a lot of people in the working class facing competition from around the world and overall lifted up everyone around the world but that did make things tougher for quite a while. And so you have a lot of different areas of struggle. I'm actually quite optimistic. There are good solutions to these things, and I think it's our job to work on those solutions. But that doesn't mean these aren't real, serious challenges for our society.

Gillespie: You're young and you're already doing this. This is the type of stuff that usually people in your situation, they wait 10 or 20 years, cash out, and then start telling the world how to run itself. And that has a long and generally awful lineage. People like Henry Ford did that to very strange ends. But what drives you to be doing this now while you're still growing your business empire?

Lonsdale: There are a couple of things. One is there's just a lot around us that's really broken in our society. And I worry that if you know the history of these things, when you take something that's really broken, if you don't fix it, that's when populists come in and pass crazy things. So if you don't fix health care, then health care gets socialized. If you don't fix a badly broken regulatory state, that's when they come in and just completely change all the rules and take it over and break everything. So in general, I'm worried if we just don't do anything for 10 or 20 years, things could be broken. 

America is an exceptional country, and it's very rare to get a constitution with a check on powers that enshrines liberty the way that ours did. And there are lots of things to fix now. The regulatory state has obviously grown in such a way that it's no longer really constrained by the same principles of the Constitution. So we have to go and put that back in the box and fix it. So there are big things to fix. But yeah, if we just start over from scratch, if you look at human history, like 999 times out of a thousand, we get a really bad answer. So, we don't want to burn it down. That's much worse. We have something really, really precious that we have to keep fighting for and improving. And the other thing is, I do think actually that as an entrepreneur, from what I've seen, I think your mind can work really well in your 30s, 40s, and 50s in a way where you can still learn new things in a dynamic way.

When you start to get into your later 60s and 70s and 80s, I think there's something that ossifies where it's a lot harder to create new concepts for yourself and create new expertise for yourself. I think you still can be the best in the world at what you've been doing your whole life. But to do something new, I wanted to make sure I was really learning these things in a time when I could be one of the best in the world at them.

Gillespie: Do you worry that this is also true of nations and societies, where they go through a period when they get old and senescent?

Lonsdale: That's why it's our job to come in and boldly fix them. So there are all these invisible hands of the market that get rid of old companies. And we don't have stupid companies built 100 years ago around. Imagine if your local town restaurant failed 60 years ago and it was still there. That's what the government is right now. So we basically have to go in and put these same mechanisms in, to get rid of dumb regulations, get rid of dumb parts of government. And we haven't done that very well. But the reason I'm excited about what the Cicero Institute could do is we can go into the states, we can do it in the states boldly. And then we could take those same frameworks and use them in D.C. And that's what I'm trying to do.

Gillespie: Growing up, what were the sources of the person you became intellectually and politically?

Lonsdale: So, obviously, when I was very young, Ayn Rand was an important influence in the duty of the businessman to get involved in the fight for these things. My father actually read some of these books as well. He and I don't always agree on politics, but he was into that. My younger brother was into Austrian economics. So Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard had a very strong influence on me. I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but there's deep wisdom in a lot of the structures and frameworks he came up with that were really fascinating. And when I was at Stanford, Milton Friedman was there actually. He had been in Chicago before that, and he and I regularly got lunch and his wife Rose joined us.

Gillespie: Did he pay for it? Did you get a free lunch from Milton Friedman? 

Lonsdale: I think the Hoover [Institution] did have free lunch. I was paying tuition though, so it could have been something like that. And those were really big influences on me. If I'm honest, maybe like Isaac Asimov's Hari Seldon—I don't know if you ever read the old Foundation series, but Hari Seldon's job was to kind of figure out what was going to happen over the next thousand years and to improve society. I thought that was a really great goal. I was born with a lot of talents, and I'm lucky to be good at lots of this stuff. And so I'm like, what's a really hard intellectual thing that is really important? Well, how can we have a positive impact on the future of our civilization? And so that to me was very formative as well.

Gillespie: I'm more of a Heinleinian, if we think about it in those terms. Asimov was more of an engineer. But you stopped calling yourself a libertarian. Explain why.

Lonsdale: Yeah, I wrote that piece that liberty is great, but libertarianism is dysfunctional. And in my experience with libertarians, especially from the generation above mine, it was like you sit on the couch and you yell at the TV and tell the government to stop doing things, and you maybe put some money to try to stop the government from doing things, and then the government ends up eventually doing it anyway. It ends up being even more dysfunctional and it keeps growing and you're kind of angry. And all that's not nearly as useful as getting involved in trying to put liberty-based frameworks into the government. 

So, do I think the government should be doing most of these things? No. Should the government be really small? I agree. But there are all these insights that come from liberty and they come from how our society works. Another one: vocational education in America. Do I think the government should have a bunch of vocational programs and training programs? Probably not. I'm pretty pro-liberty, but are they going to get rid of them? No, they're not. So given they're not getting rid of them all, how about we go and we say, how do we apply liberty to these things? How do you apply to them other than deleting them? We're going to go in there and say, listen, we're only going to fund you—there are 27 technical high vocational programs in Texas—based on the salaries of the students coming out. That's a market signal that you can't game. We funded based on graduation rates. They're just going to graduate people. They're going to be funded based on the salaries coming out. Guess what happened when we did that change? The salaries doubled over a period of six years. Doubled. It's completely changed the lives of 50,000 to 100,000 people. 

So you're taking these liberty and free society frameworks and you're putting them into things and you're fixing them and making the government competent. And frankly, that's where the leverage points are these days. If you understand liberty, let's fight and use those frameworks to actually fix things.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Why Palantir Cofounder Joe Lonsdale Left California for Texas appeared first on Reason.com.

Psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker is one of the leading defenders of academic freedom and liberal values of limited government, secularism, tolerance, and free enterprise.

A year ago, he helped found the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, "a faculty organization to advocate for the free and civil exchange of ideas inside and outside the classroom." In the wake of the reaction by the campus left to the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, he published "A Five-Point Plan To Save Harvard from Itself" in The Boston Globe. His ultra-influential home institution, he wrote, "is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context." Reason's Nick Gillespie and Pinker discuss if higher education is doomed, why so many people on the right and left are skeptical about moral and material progress, and how his "stereoscopic" photography fits into his larger worldview.

Previous appearances:

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Nick Gillespie: Last December, you published an op-ed titled "A Five-Point Plan to Save Harvard from Itself" in The Boston Globe. You wrote that Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense, but calling for another Holocaust depends on context, and that deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. But you also note that outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn't want to hear hate speech. Can you bring us up to date on the climate at Harvard?

Steven Pinker: Harvard is a big place. There is a diversity of opinion in co-founding the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. There was a rush of faculty joining us, but still a small percentage of the faculty, many of them vocal, many of them for the first time had an opportunity to just communicate with themselves across the sprawling, multiple campuses at Harvard. Many are upset at the direction that Harvard and other elite universities have taken in restricting the range of expressible opinions to a pretty narrow slice of the spectrum, to criminalizing certain opinions, to getting into needless trouble by taking stands that really should be the prerogative of its students and faculty—there isn't any reason that a university should have a foreign policy—or in general, at the level of discourse, where just calling someone a racist is considered counter-argument or a refutation. 

So we formed this council to try to push back, to try to offer emotional support to those who are under attack because it can be devastating to be the target of a cancellation campaign. A lot of the problems that universities have faced have come from the fact that deans and provosts and presidents just want to make trouble go away, and so if someone is yelling at them and making their life miserable, they'll do whatever it takes to get them to shut up. We figure if we also yell at them, then they'll actually have to think about what's the optimal thing to do, rather than just do what makes the noise go down. 

Gillespie: Do you feel like this time it's different?

Pinker: I think so. Harvard itself is in a kind of crisis by its own standards, which is to say that donations are down.

Gillespie: It doesn't really need the money, but it wants the money.

Pinker: Yes. And applications are down. It's become a national joke. I have a collection of memes and headlines and bumper stickers, like "My son didn't get into Harvard." An editorial cartoon of a corporate guy saying, "This guy has a stellar resume, straight A's, top scores, didn't go to Harvard." The reputation, which is a huge resource that Harvard has drawn on, is threatened. And when it's threatened, a lot of Harvard's comparative advantage will also be threatened. Harvard has a lot of money, but it also can to some extent coast on its reputation.

Gillespie: And it can only go down, right?

Pinker: At least if the past few months are any indication, it is.

Gillespie: You also pointed out in that The Boston Globe piece, and elsewhere, that it wasn't just that. Does the affirmative action case that Harvard lost play into the sense that Harvard has been moving in the wrong direction for a long period of time and needs to back up and get back on the highway?

Pinker: It certainly got Harvard's attention. The fact that it does have an outsized reputation means that it has a certain cushion. Not every department has to compete to be the best in the country because students will come, graduate students will come, donors will give.

Gillespie: You're saying that psychology doesn't really have to work very hard at all.

Pinker: Psychology has gone through waves. My former colleague Steve Cosslett is here, who made it the best department in the country when he was a chair and working behind the scenes, which is one of the reasons that I decamped [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] for Harvard more than 20 years ago. The actual quality of departments can go up and down. But Harvard has a certain buffer because of its reputation, which is now being threatened. 

A lot of the things that we're proposing, like meeting the Council on Academic Freedom, would actually relieve some headaches on the administration itself, even though their prime driver is to avoid bad publicity, keep the donations going. But a lot of the trouble, especially that our former President Claudine Gay found herself in, could have been avoided if Harvard did have a more robust academic freedom policy among other things.

Gillespie: Was the plagiarism a legitimate firing offense or is that kind of a side issue?

Pinker: For me, it was a side issue, and I won't go there because that was her. Her testimony did not differ from the other two university presidents. Focusing on Claudine Gay gave us a bit of a distraction, because the problems are more, as we say, systemic. But among them are the fact that universities and their divisions feel that they have to offer moral guidance, some sort of pastoral counseling to a grateful nation, what they ought to feel in response to various tragedies and outrages. That inevitably gets them into trouble because someone will think it was too early, it was too late, it was too strong. Only one side was represented. If they just could shut up and point to a policy that said, we have to shut up, we don't comment, as the University of Chicago has done for more than 50 years, it would just get them off the hook. 

Gillespie: That's the institution of neutrality. And Chicago sticks by that pretty well. 

Pinker: Pretty well. That is, if a department or a center puts up a statement, then they're under pressure to take it down. The reason that it's relevant to academic freedom is that it's just prejudicial to the people working in the university, or in particular in the departments. If your department chair is posting some opinion on police shootings, or Palestine, or Ukraine…

Gillespie: Or Donald Trump, I'm sure that happens a lot. "We love Trump, I love Trump, my department loves Trump." 

Pinker: All the time, yes. But it is prejudicial to the faculty and the students who have to worry, "Are my professional prospects at stake if I take a position that differs from the official one on my department website?" 

Gillespie: In your world of institutional neutrality, would individual faculty be free to issue? 

Pinker: Absolutely. It's just that the institution itself should be the arena. It should be the debating club. It shouldn't actually be a debater.

Gillespie: Of the five principles you mention in your article, after institutional neutrality comes nonviolence. It seems insane that you have to say that colleges should be nonviolent places. How does that fit in?

Pinker: I think we'd be actually saving the university from themselves. But the idea that a legitimate form of expression of opinion in a university campus should be forcibly ejecting a dean from his office and occupying the building, that just shouldn't be what a university is about. I think a lot of faculty have a certain nostalgia for when they did it in the '60s to protest Vietnam. It's like, isn't it cute? The younger generation is doing the same thing, but it really isn't okay for a number of reasons. It's commitment to the wrong ideals. The ideal of a university ought to be persuasion, the careful formation of arguments, not chanting slogans over bullhorns and getting in other students' faces.

Gillespie: Nonviolence includes drowning out speakers. It's one thing to protest. It's another thing to preclude somebody from speaking. 

Pinker: Exactly. There should not be a heckler's veto. Protest obviously is protected, and protest could involve holding placards. It could include shouting out "you lie" in the middle of a lecture, but it can't involve forcing speakers off the stage, drowning them out, drawing a banner across the stage so that speakers can't see them. That is restricting other speech as an ostensible form of expression.

Gillespie: Do you feel like students and faculty at Harvard or elsewhere understand this isn't simply hypothetical? That nonviolence is actually a principle that we need to hold to?

Pinker: Some of us have had to make the case that it's not okay to invade a classroom and start chanting slogans over bullhorns. But we had to make the case and that the university should be consistent in cracking down on it, again to protect itself, such as the lawsuit filed by these students against anti-Semitism who have pointed to episodes in which Jewish students have been intimidated, blocked, and in one case, were assaulted. If the university just had a policy, that "speech is fine, it's okay, we encourage it, but physical force is not," and acted consistently, then they would be off the hook for selective enforcement. 

If they started to enforce it against the often quite disruptive Palestinian student groups, then the Palestinian student groups could file a lawsuit saying, "Well, how come they're enforcing it against us and they don't enforce it against other groups?" If it was just clear, "This is the policy, this is what we recognize as speech, this is what we recognize as force," and be consistent, it would remove a headache from them.

Gillespie: Do you think the bookstore should stop selling Harvard-branded bullhorns?

Pinker: The first of the five-point plan was just consistent commitment to academic freedom. Because another reason that Claudine Gay got into such trouble is that when she was given what admittedly was a kind of a trap that she walked into—that is, if students called for genocide against Jews, would that be prohibited by Harvard's code of conduct—she made a pretty hardcore [American Civil Liberties Union]-style free speech argument, which came across as hollow or worse, because we've had a lecturer who was driven out of Harvard for saying there are two sexes. 

There was another professor whose course was canceled because he wanted to explore how counterinsurgency techniques could be used against gang warfare. We had a professor in the School of Public Health who had cosigned an amicus brief for the Obergefell Supreme Court case against a national policy allowing gay marriage. There were calls for his tenure to be revoked, for his classes to be boycotted. He had to undergo struggle sessions and restorative justice sessions and basically grovel in front of a mob. Given Harvard's history of those cases and others, to all of a sudden say, "Well genocide, it's just a matter of I disagree with what you say, but I defend it to the death your right to say it," came off as a little bit hollow and hypocritical. 

If Harvard had had a free speech policy that was reasonably enforced before that, then at least you would have had something of a leg to stand on in standing on principle. She was technically correct in the same way that there's no law in the United States that says you can't call for a Holocaust. Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. But when it's so selectively prosecuted, then it becomes ludicrous and literally becomes a national joke or a national disgrace.

Gillespie: It's worse still that Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.), who lead the hearing, was herself a Harvard graduate. Although I guess it would have been worse if she was from Yale or Princeton. 

Pinker: There are some theories that there's a little bit of revenge motivation there because of an incident in which she was herself targeted at this invitation at the Kennedy School of Government. But there is a history.

Gillespie: It's wonderful when you find out that all big events in human history are really petty jealousy. Another one of your points is viewpoint diversity. What does that consist of? 

Pinker: Academia has rightly resisted external control over content, over hiring, over promotion, which is good in protecting a university against government propaganda. On the other hand, you can get self-contained circles of people kind of conferring prestige on each other. Then you can get entrenched orthodoxies, which no one can challenge because if they do, then they are downgraded in judgments of quality, which are often so subjective.

Gillespie: The American novelist John Dos Passos was considered one of the greatest writers alive by international modernists. Then he had the misfortune of going to the Spanish Civil War and deciding that the loyalists were as bad as the Francoists. Overnight, literally, he became a terrible writer. This kind of stuff happens, right?

Pinker: If you just define viewpoint by the conventional left-right political spectrum, then things look pretty grim because according to at least a survey of The [Harvard] Crimson, 3 percent of Harvard faculty identify themselves as conservative. And out of those 3 percent, a lot of them are in their 90s, so we know where that's going. But it's not just the left-right spectrum. There can be dogmas that become entrenched within academic fields. For example, in our program of women and gender studies, I don't think you could use the words chromosome, hormone, or sexual selection; that would be not an idea that is thinkable. 

Now the question is, given that universities do operate by peer review, peer evaluation, how could you open them up to the kind of viewpoint diversity that is intellectually indispensable? It's a shame that we still have to recite the arguments from John Stuart Mill about why you should listen to arguments that you disagree with, namely, maybe they're right and you're wrong. Unless you're infallible, you really should listen to other viewpoints. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between. Maybe there's some third position you haven't thought of that would only occur to you if you hear the problems with your own position. And, even if you're right, your position is only stronger if you have to defend it against legitimate criticisms. But that case has to be made again 200 years later. 

The question is, how do you rescue programs, universities, departments, fields that become self-referential echo chambers? [Psychologist] John Haidt and [political science writer] Phil Tetlock and a number of others in an article about eight years ago called for affirmative action for conservatives. Just as an idea that, especially departments of political science—as we call it, Harvard government—maybe it's not such a terrible thing to have a couple of conservatives around. That should actually be an explicit desideratum, if not a quota. But also, there might be other mechanisms, just opening the process up. We even have at universities a mechanism that's supposed to do that. There are so-called visiting committees where departments every few years are evaluated by academics from other universities, but also donors, trustees. What they're supposed to do is advise deans on whether the department is going in the wrong direction. In practice, they don't have that much influence, and they're often quite cozy with the departments themselves. But if they were more empowered to be alert to intellectual monocultures, to dogmas that have become entrenched, if that was part of their mission, that would be another, less obtrusive way of trying to mix up the ideas.

Gillespie: I suspect there are fewer and fewer Freudians in the psychology department. That's not necessarily a problem, right? As much as independent of what we do academically, we're going to enforce a political or ideological hierarchy or monoculture that has really nothing to do with academics. Is that really the problem that we're talking about?

Pinker: As a field makes progress, certain schools of thought become of historical interest. They've kind of made their contribution. You don't have to have like one Freudian, and one [Noam] Chomsky, and one structuralist, and one functionalist, but there shouldn't be a political litmus test. In many departments there really is. Sometimes it doesn't even have to pertain to the subject matter of the field. It can just be the person's reputation politically. 

I was on a hiring committee for another department at Harvard, not psychology. There was an excellent candidate, who was by any standards, including his own, a political liberal, but he had some heterodox positions. He was opposed to affirmative action, for example. The department chair said, "We can't hire him. He's an extreme right-winger," meaning he had criticisms of affirmative action. You often think of academia as being at the Left Pole. North Pole is the spot from which all directions are south. The Left Pole is the hypothetical position from which all directions are right.

Gillespie: That's the final principle that you talked about, [diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)] disempowerment. How does that happen? Why is DEI bad? And how do you minimize it?

Pinker: I have nothing against diversity, equity, and inclusion. But as Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Diversity, equity, and inclusion imposes an intellectual monoculture. It favors certain groups over others. It has a long list of offenses that mean you can be excluded. But it is a strange bureaucracy. It's a culture that is kind of an independent stratum from the hierarchy of the universities themselves. The officers get hired or poached to move laterally from university to university. It's with their own culture, their own mores, their own best practices. It's just not clear who they report to, or who supervises them, or who allows them to implement policy. 

One of the things that the Council on Academic Freedom discovered is that—we had to dig to do the research that—a notorious practice of the last decade in many universities has been the so-called diversity statements, where job applicants have to submit not only a statement of their research project, their teaching philosophy, but also their commitment to diversity, which in practice means endorsing a certain canon of beliefs, that there is systemic racism, that its only remedy is racial preferences, that racism is pervasive, that it is the only cause of any disparity in racial proportions. If someone in their diversity statement says, I believe that the most defensible policy is colorblindness and that the reason for racial inequities in universities is because of our educational system in high school, their application would go into the circular file.

Gillespie: How did that come to be?

Pinker: This is a good question. That is a question we've asked ourselves. First of all, no one knew that it was a policy of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Fortunately, unlike some universities like the University of California, where they are taken seriously, they are vetted by DEI bureaucrats before they're even sent to departments, and the ones that don't endorse what we could call a woke ideology are just filtered out.

Gillespie: You mean applications go there first before they go to the department.

Pinker: Yes. Not at Harvard, but at many universities. No one knew that we had this requirement. No one knew who implemented it. The faculty never voted on it. The president never said this is our policy going forward. A dean of arts and sciences must have signed off on it, but no one can remember who or when. But we just live with it. Likewise, freshman orientation consists of indoctrination sessions. 

This is emblematic of a trend in universities, that this nomenklatura just got empowered and no one knows exactly how. What often happens is a dean gets into trouble because of some racial incident. They hire a bunch of staff, and that's their way of getting out of the trouble. Then they're there forever. And there is only one way that they've been changing and that's upward. One of the points in the five-point plan is not to necessarily abolish them—although the Florida university system has done that—but at least, just as the military is under civilian control, the DEI bureaucracy should be under the control of responsible deans. 

Gillespie: Would that mean they should be under the supervision or discretion of faculty? 

Pinker: Faculty or at least academic deans, like the dean of arts and sciences. The policy should be exposed to the light of day. The ones that are defensible should be kept and the ones that aren't should be abolished. But they shouldn't change the entire university structure by stealth, which is what has happened.

Gillespie: With the Harvard admissions policies that got into trouble with the Supreme Court, part of the problem was that they were lying about it. They were saying we weren't penalizing Asian students. If Harvard had been more open about it and said we want a different student body than the one that our current admissions process is giving, would you be okay with that?

Pinker: I think if it was transparent and defensible. It's odd how many policies at a university just got entrenched and no one ever kind of decided on them, defended them against criticism. But the so-called holistic admissions, which is a kind of mystical process where they won't say exactly how they do it because it's holistic, favors some mix of regional diversity. Class diversity is a good thing. Racial diversity was okay if it was for diversity, but not for rectifying injustices, but also activism, and arts, and athletics, and volunteer work, and cultural experiences, which also provided a fig leaf where in practice—as we now know from these documents—Harvard could make sure it didn't get too Asian. De facto, that's what happened. We know that in the elite schools, in the University of California system, they have gotten largely Asian because they're more meritocratic—doesn't seem to have done them tremendous harm. But Harvard did not want that to happen. So the Asian applicants, as with the Jewish applicants 75 years before, just happened to be lower in leadership and creativity, all these things that you can't measure. 

Gillespie: You mentioned that Florida has banned DEI statements and things like that. That can affect state-supported institutions or state-assisted colleges. From an academic freedom point of view, this can be troubling, right?

Pinker: That is another kind of menace. I do think that it's not unreasonable for the taxpayers to have some kind of input into what it is they're supporting. But what is the best institutional arrangement where there can be input, there could be safeguards against self-serving, insular communities without it being managed by political ideologues. It's a question of institutional design that I don't even know we have the optimal design for yet. So I don't think it's unreasonable. Here I differ with some of my faculty colleagues who almost define academic freedom as professorial privilege, professorial prerogatives. Professors should be able to do anything they want, and it's no one else's business. I don't think that's right. But you also don't want, as with the McCarthy era, politically motivated, ideological restrictions or loyalty tests to be imposed by the government. But the government does have a legitimate interest in making sure universities don't go off the rails.

Gillespie: Over the past dozen years or so you've emerged as a chronicler of moral and material progress, particularly in books such as The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which came out in 2011, and Enlightenment Now in 2018. Can you summarize your case for progress? 

Pinker: The case is that if you list what you consider dimensions of human well-being, that is, we're better off if we are alive than dead, if our babies don't die, if women don't die in childbirth, if people don't live in extreme poverty, if we're safe from violent crime, if we're not at war, if our environments are clean, if people are discriminated against on the basis of their race or sex, if children aren't beaten. If you list some reasonable things that people tend to agree are good things—it's better not to have a famine, better to be well-fed—and then you look at the best quantitative estimates over time, as you plot the trends, almost all of them get better. Not all; that would be a miracle. And they don't get better everywhere all the time. The trends are not, as we say, monotonic. The bad things don't always go down, and the good things don't always go up. There are often lurches and shocks. But in pretty much all of them, the historical trend has been, things are getting better.

Gillespie: Do you have a theory of social change? Why have things gotten better?

Pinker: I think that as knowledge increases, and as the arena of debate, discussion, power, and deliberation expands, there's just certain things that have to fall by the wayside. Barbaric practices of antiquity, like a human sacrifice—you throw a virgin into a volcano to get better weather—sooner or later you discover that's the wrong theory. That actually does not, in fact, prevent crop failures. Or that certain races are fit for slavery—that's just empirically incorrect. That women are not capable of intellectual work, but are designed just for the home. 

Gillespie: Up until the late '70s, girls were not allowed to pole vault because evolution had decreed that they didn't have the upper body strength to pole vault. It seems like evolution has caught up since then.

Pinker: Right, exactly. There's just the sheer gain of knowledge. Voltaire, the way he put it, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Because there are some things that people do want—they want to be well-fed as opposed to hungry and healthy as opposed to sick—when technology provides them with the means, not uniformly, because there is superstition, but in general, more people get vaccinated than don't—but that's not the only thing. As it's harder for small elites to wield absolute power, as you open up the discussion, then there are certain ideas that just aren't going to fly. You just can't defend apartheid without seeming ridiculous or monstrous.

When the world's nations came together in the late '40s to agree on a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the question is, is there some common denominator that all of the world's countries—in the Muslim [world], in China, and India, and the Western countries—could all agree on? Or would it kind of contract to the null set, as many people suspected? It turned out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there's a lot of stuff in there. And most of it isn't particularly controversial, like everyone should have an education. People shouldn't be imprisoned for their political beliefs. Now, if they'd started out the drafters with something like, the first thing in the Universal Declaration is that America is a shining city upon a hill, you probably wouldn't have gotten agreement on that. Or Jesus Christ as our Savior and that is the way to redemption. Again, then the Hindus would drop out, or the Chinese. So what's left? 

What's left is the conditions of human flourishing. That is, the list of things that I mentioned. It isn't controversial to say that it's better to be healthy than sick, or better for kids not to die. That realization tends to be what survives when the more parochial ideologies become untenable the circle of discourse broadens.

Gillespie: Do you think that material progress and moral progress follow the same logic? 

Pinker: I think they are related. This is something that I've been looking at cross-national and cross-temporal comparisons and putting together the data that went into Enlightenment Now, I was surprised at how many good things come from being rich, for countries. People point to Sweden and Denmark and Norway as really nice places to live. You can invoke their egalitarian ethos but these are rich countries. If you look at the plot, almost any good thing—peace, safety and environmental quality against [gross domestic product] per capita—most of the countries fall on a line, with the exception of the Gulf oil states, which are rich but kind of wretched places.

An idea is that wealth is good just because it buys good stuff, like healthcare, like environmental protection, which is a luxury that you can afford after you have electricity and running water and roads and such. Education is expensive, good policing is expensive. Being rich buys you preconditions for a good life. So why isn't Saudi Arabia such a great place? They got no shortage of money. There is an idea that should be congenial to many people in this room, which is that when you have networks of exchange and commerce and markets, and that's the way you get rich, as opposed to digging stuff out of the ground, which can be monopolized by an elite and then fought over, but if the wealth comes from distributed networks of commerce and voluntary exchange, that kind of pushes people toward cooperation. 

It's the old enlightenment idea of doux commerce, gentle commerce, that the American founders endorsed, and Emmanuel Kant and Voltaire and others, that if you're in a trading relationship that yokes your well-being to that of other people, so you don't kill your customers, you don't kill your debtors. If it becomes cheaper to buy stuff than to steal it, then that eliminates one of the incentives for conquest and plunder. So countries that are both affluent and get their affluence from networks of exchange tend to be pleasant in other ways.

Gillespie: They tend to be more liberal in a classical sense, right?

Pinker: In the classical and in the American political sense, in that they have more munificent welfare states. As countries get richer, they get more redistributive. Maybe less congenial here. I've heard it called Wagner's Law. The countries that people on the left tend to extol because of their welfare states also have a lot of economic freedom and also are very affluent.

Gillespie: That came up when [Sen.] Bernie Sanders [D–Vt.] was pointing to places like Norway and Sweden, which actually sometimes do better on economic freedom indexes than the U.S. There's a lot of bullshit on both sides of that debate. The people who deny progress, moral or material, what's in it for them? 

Pinker: It's a question I thought about a lot. Why do progressives hate progress? I have to say that in the various political factions and bands along the spectrum, it does tend to be libertarians who are most congenial to the idea of progress. That wasn't always true, that's what I found. [Thomas] Hobbes put it well. It's a long-standing phenomenon, because I'm giving you a quote that's almost 400 years old. Let's see if I can remember it verbatim: "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence for antiquity, for men contend with the living, not with the dead." That is, to criticize the present is a way of criticizing your rivals, your competitors. If there's something that you don't like about the status quo, you want to say how much everything sucks. You don't want to say how much better everything is than it used to be, because then you might be giving credit to the people that you're contending with. That's a big one. 

There are also cognitive biases that hide progress from us, such as the availability bias as coined by [psychologists] Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, which is that we tend to judge probability, risk, danger according to how easily anecdotes come to mind. We use our brain's search engine as a surrogate for probability. If there is a disaster, a terrorist attack, a police shooting, a famine in a part of the world, that's our answer to the question. Are things getting better or worse? Well, of course they're getting worse. I just read about the terrorist attack this morning, and that sticks in memory. Also, there's an emotional coloring to memory that even though we remember bad events in the past, we don't remember how bad they were at the time, so that the negative effect tends to wear off of memory, whereas the negative aspects of the present are still keenly felt. 

This is not a new phenomenon. I'd like to quote Franklin Pierce Adams that, "nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory." That is really true. Even in our lifetimes, even though there are people, especially younger people, who kind of moan about how this is an unprecedented hellscape, in the '70s, the world had only 33 democracies. Half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain. Spain and Portugal were literally fascist dictatorships, not just countries that people called fascist, but they called themselves fascist. Greece was under the control of a military junta, all of Latin America. So despite the recent recession, people forget how undemocratic the world was in the lifetime of many people. 

Just quality of life. Like if you missed a movie in the local repertory theater, if you did live in a big city that had a repertory theater, you would never see film classics. You couldn't get access to musical performances. You got lost because you didn't have Google Maps. You couldn't look something up in Wikipedia. You had to go to this thing called the Britannica. All of these ways that our lives really have gotten better are very easily taken for granted. 

Gillespie: Before we go to audience questions, you are in town partly because your photography is being shown at Brooklyn Sweet Lorraine Gallery, and your exhibition is called "2 1/2 D: The Stereoscopic Photography of Steven Pinker," which sounds like a concept album from the late '60s. Can you explain what stereoscopic photography is, and your interest in photography—and you're quite accomplished at it? Does it tie into your larger intellectual interests?

Pinker: It does. It actually goes back to my Ph.D. thesis. My Ph.D. thesis advisor is actually in the room, Stephen Kosslyn. The term "Two and a Half D" was borrowed from the artificial intelligence of 40 years ago. In particular, a researcher named David Marr proposed that that is the information that the eyes give to the brain. That is, we don't literally see the world in three dimensions because we see in perspective, both when we are physically observing a scene—you stand between two railroad tracks, you kind of see them as parallel, you know that they're parallel, but you also see them converge. You see them in perspective, and as things recede in distance, you can sense they get smaller, even though they're the same size. That's not what you'd get from an actual three-dimensional model of the world, a kind of mental sandbox. But nor is the world as flat as a pancake. 

The two-and-a-half dimensions allude to the fact that the third dimension is not like the other two. It's actually computed from a number of sources of visual information. When lines converge toward the horizon, we interpret that as depth. When certain things move in the visual field faster than others, we interpret that gradient of motion as a cue to depth. But one of the most interesting is the difference in the view that the two eyeballs give you, that each eyeball is a different vantage point on the world. The views are slightly different, and the farther away something is, the closer its images are in the two eyeballs. The closer it is, the more they diverge. It's kind of a high school trigonometry problem to triangulate from the distance between the eyes, the angle and the differences in the images to how far away something is. 

The brain does that trick unconsciously, and it gives us a very vivid sense of the third dimension. Now, the photography comes from—it's almost as old as photography itself. But in the 19th century, most photography was stereophotography, which means showing two images taken from two vantage points, separated by approximately the distance of the eyes, and figuring out a technological way of getting each image to be seen only by one eye. That can be done with prisms, that can be done with mirrors, that can be done with false color. The recent technology, which is one of the inspirations for the show, when I showed it to the gallery owner, it just blew him away, a new kind of monitor that gives you a stereoscopic image without any headgear, without any glasses, without any gimmicks. It just pops out through some optical wizardry. So I have ultra close-up photos of flowers which kind of reveal their shape and color in hyper-natural detail.

Gillespie: Are you an AI optimist or pessimist, or is that just a silly question?

Pinker: In principle, I am an AI optimist. You never know how technologies will be implemented. I'm not an AI doomer. I don't think that AI will enslave us or turn us into raw materials. The scenario sometimes called the "paperclips ellipse" is the scenario in which an artificial intelligence system is given a goal of maximizing manufacturing of some commodity, like paper clips, and uses every available resource, including our own bodies, to make more and more and more paper clips. That does not keep me up at night.

There are dangers like, impersonation, counterfeit people, spread of disinformation, erosion of the chain of verification of fact. There's the hypothetical technological unemployment, although we're still waiting for that to happen. But there's tremendous promise. It's kind of a shame that the first large-scale implementation of AI was kind of a gimmick: a first-person chat bot, which may have some advantages and may have some misuses. But there is tremendous promise for AI, if it's task-oriented, like autonomous vehicles that could cut down on the million people killed every year in car crashes, or eliminating jobs that no one particularly likes that are repetitive and dangerous.

Gillespie: So DEI enforcement? 

Pinker: That could be the first to go. Actually, seriously, one of my postdocs who was on the job market, and she had to write a DEI statement, but couldn't do it in good conscience. So she had ChatGPT write it for her. It's actually pretty good. Very convincing.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credits: Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Newscom: Rick Friedman/Polaris/Newscom

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki

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