Capitalism, Morality, and the Dark Psychology of Social Networks — with Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business, joins the pod again for a conversation on how social media disrupts our democracy and the mental health of young people. We also learn about Jonathan’s forthcoming book, “Three Stories about Capitalism: The moral psychology of economic life.” Follow Jonathan on Twitter, @JonHaidt. . Algebra of Happiness: Cry more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 1:27Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 87th episode of the Prof G Pod. Today, we speak with another one of our favorite Blue Flame thinkers, Jonathan Haidt, who is a colleague, I would say a friend. We like each other, I like him. Jonathan is a colleague of mine at NYU Stern and my go-to social psychologist for trying to make sense of the world we live in. I actually believe that Jonathan, right now, is probably one of the three or four most influential scholars in the world, whether it's social issues or parenting. Today, we discuss the dark psychology of social media specifically as it relates to our democracy and Jonathan's latest research on the mental health crisis among young people. We also learn more about Jonathan's forthcoming book, Three Stories About Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life. Oh, God, I'm gonna love that shit. That might be a book I actually read.

• 2:10Scott Galloway?

  Jonathan, where does this podcast find you?

• 2:13Jonathan Haidt?

  This podcast finds me in my office at NYU Stern. Me and three other people in a very large building.

• 2:18Scott Galloway?

  We're back.

• 2:19Jonathan Haidt?

  Yeah, three of us are.

• 2:21Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, there you go. All four of you. So in your latest book, The Coddling, or your last book, The Coddling of the American Mind, you sort of broke new ground and really, I think articulated what a lot of people were feeling, and that was that social media was playing a pretty big role in this emerging mental health crisis among teens. What, since the last time we talked, what new research or additional thinking have you done on the link between social media and teen depression?

• 2:45Jonathan Haidt?

  So there have been a couple of big developments since the book came out in 2018. One really interesting and good one is that we were challenged by teams of researchers that said, oh, there's no evidence of this. And that really forced us to dig into it. And Jean Twenge and I on one side, Orbin and Shabinsky on the other side. And what really has come out of that is fine tuning it. It's not that, oh, screens are so bad for kids. It turns out it is just social media, not video games and watching TV. And it is mostly for girls. And when you analyze all kids and all screens, you get kind of garbage. But if you zoom in, you pretty reliably find a link between social media and depression, especially for girls.

• 3:28Jonathan Haidt?

  And that's from correlational studies and experimental studies.

• 3:31Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it does appear, and this is post-marketing, but just as a dad, there's a different level of, it seems like, neurological rewiring when my kid is on a video game or social media or something that has some sort of feedback or weird incentives versus watching TV. It just seems like it's a, it's sort of, I don't know, THC versus ketamine. It's just a different level of drug. Is it the feedback or is it the judgment? What is, what is the delta between kind of less or more benign screens and these really, and stuff that's more damaging?

• 4:04Jonathan Haidt?

  Yeah, that's the right question to be asking. And I would say it's two very, very different things. So the first, the one you're talking about is why are some things really engaging and addictive and crack-like and things like that? And there, just be a behaviorist and think about the speed with which you get reinforcement for small behaviors. And so video games are incredibly rewarding.

• 4:24Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Jonathan Haidt?

  They deliver little hits of dopamine as quickly as possible. But addiction isn't really the problem. I mean, when kids are on for eight or 10 hours a day, yes, it pushes out all other activities like, you know, going outside or doing anything, you know, other than through your fingertips. But the bigger, the bigger problem isn't the addiction, it's the change in social networks. So we are mammals and we're really social mammals. And all mammals play a lot. And kittens and puppies and baby chimpanzees, these are really social species, or at least with humans. And so kids are practicing the things they're going to do as adults. And it used to be, until around 2010, it used to be that kids actually played with each other.

• 5:08Jonathan Haidt?

  And then, once we all got online and kids got smartphones into their hands, they were on, they were playing with, through their phones all the time. Now, at first, we thought, wow, okay, they're really social. And I thought, wow, all this like, you know, tweeting little micro details of your life, this could be very good for them. This could be like a lot of sociality. But it turns out, it's really like empty calories sociality. It turns out that the more connected a generation is, the more lonely it is. And this is the paper that Twinkie and I have coming out today, is that actually, school loneliness has been going up sharply since 2012. It was flat from 2000 to 2012, and then it starts going up all over the world. No one can explain that other than via pointing to social media.

• 5:52Scott Galloway?

  And what is, what is the downside of that? I mean, you, I remember one of the stats that you presented me that just blew me away is that in the last, I think it was 10 years, the number of kids or teens who see their friends every day has been, has been cut in half. What's the downside to that?

• 6:06Jonathan Haidt?

  So the downside is that we're getting a generation that was not given what they need as normal social mammals to become competent adult social mammals. And what we're getting instead, and I'm sure you've seen this, is when you talk to people in the business world about their young employees, you know, when Greg Lukianoff and I wrote our book in 2017, 2018, we didn't hear a lot of this coming from business. This was a problem on college campuses, a lot of writing about how students seem fragile and easily offended by a word here and there. And then suddenly, since 2018, when Gen Z began graduating and joining the corporate world, when I talk with people eating anything, especially if it's a progressive nonprofit

• 6:48Jonathan Haidt?

  or an industry that hires from elite universities, talk to them about their employees were born after about 1995, and you get the same stories over and over again. The fragility, the ease of offense. So the cost, I think, is a generation that is less prepared for the workplace, less prepared for democracy, less prepared for marriage and parenthood.

• 7:09Scott Galloway?

  So social media, and you've shown this, attacks young women's or girls' self-esteem. That we've put these, and again, I constantly parrot your lines, and this is one of your great lines, that boys bully physically and verbally, and girls bully relationally, and we've put these kind of nuclear weapons in our hands with social-enabled smartphones. I look at online trading, specifically Robin Hood, and I think, are we doing the same thing to young men that Instagram has done to young women? Have you done any research on Robin Hood or trading?

• 7:42Jonathan Haidt?

  No, I haven't, but I did just talk with a really smart young guy, a Nigerian immigrant came here, did well in college here, and he's spent the first, the last couple of months, basically, on Robin Hood. Now, he did actually make a huge amount of money, lost most of it, but still is up $30,000 or $40,000, so I don't quite have a verdict, but the addictive power is enormous. And so, once again, if we focus on the addictive power, yes, boys are easily addicted to video games and now Robin Hood, but if we look at whether it harms their social relationships or their development... I think that's the bigger question. And I know you've given out a lot of great advice to young people about how to build wealth and the habits you need to be economically successful.

• 8:26Jonathan Haidt?

  And my guess is that since Robin Hood and all the, you know, the meme stock bubble, all of this, we're, we're hypercharging the connections that are probably not good. I mean, all these books written on the psychology of investments and how to minimize the effect of emotions. Well, my God, what happens if you suddenly put everybody on Reddit and you get contagious emotions surging through a generation of mostly young men? Yeah, they're going to make a lot of bad decisions and they're going to get warped ideas about investment.

• 8:57Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

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• 11:12Scott Galloway?

  So let's move to your new book, or the book you're working on, Three Stories About Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life. Could you expand on the three stories, if you will?

• 11:22Jonathan Haidt?

  Sure. So when I moved to Stern in 2011, I met you a few years later here.

• 11:28Scott Galloway?

  God, it's been that long? You've been at Stern 10 years?

• 11:30Jonathan Haidt?

  It's been 10 years. Yes, I've been here for 10 years. So when I moved here, it was July of 2011. And I came, I just moved here temporarily to promote my book, The Righteous Mind, which came out in 2012. And soon after I got here, Occupy Wall Street broke out. And so what I was hearing was down, and I went down and visited, it's just a mile south of us here. I went down and visited and talked to people, and you heard a story about capitalism that basically, Matt Taibbi had a great line about Goldman Sachs just before Occupy Wall Street. He said, "Goldman Sachs is a giant vampire squid with its tentacles wrapped around the head of humanity, stuffing its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

• 12:14Jonathan Haidt?

  And that's a really evocative story, but guess what? You actually see the image of an octopus was used to describe JP Morgan, you know, 120 years ago. Yeah. So this image of capitalism as a bloodsucker, a parasite, you know, just, you know, listen to any Scott Galloway rant on the Bill Maher Show and you'll hear this, you know, this kind of idea about bloodsucking exploitative capitalists. So that's one story. It's been around for hundreds of years. But then there's a different story. You know, it begins with Adam Smith and the fact that actually, you know, self-interest can lead people to produce for the public good. And you get what's called the deuce commerce thesis in the 18th century France and England. They began noticing, you know what?

• 12:57Jonathan Haidt?

  When people have to trade with others, or when countries have to trade with others, they don't try to sharpen their weapons and kill the other people. They try to actually appeal to them. And so there's a long story that capitalism actually promotes all kinds of virtues. The economist Deirdre McCloskey has a number of books on the bourgeois virtues. So there's these two really different stories. One is that capitalism is the worst thing that's ever happened and it makes people poor and it sucks the blood out of the low wage employees so that a small class of overlords can lord it over the rest of us. And the other is that, you know what? Everybody was poor and miserable until the 19th century and especially the 20th. And guess what? All the good, you know, every indicator is going in the positive direction because

• 13:40Jonathan Haidt?

  of capitalism and China's coming out of poverty because it joined up with markets. So two really different stories. And that fascinated me as a social psychologist studying morality, because I was already writing about how left and right construct different fabulous worlds, different moral matrices that have increasing little overlap. And I began to see at Stern, studying business, that actually the same thing's happening in our economic life. So that's what the book is about, how to understand these stories, what they do to us, why we can't get good public policy, why we fight never-reach solutions over basic questions like, does the minimum wage have good effects on the bottom third of the country? Those sorts of things.

• 14:18Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it feels as if capitalism, if you will, and I don't know if it's just because I'm an angry, depressed person, but it definitely feels like capitalism, and I would argue this isn't capitalism, but it's failing, that income inequality, a celebration or an idolatry of billionaires versus people who devote their lives to public service. Do you sense that something is wrong here? And have you looked at what, from a societal standpoint or a sociological standpoint, what has brought us to this point?

• 14:48Jonathan Haidt?

  Yes. So that's what the third story is about. So if the first story is capitalism is exploitation, and the metaphor is a giant squid, and the second story is capitalism is liberation, and the metaphor is Prometheus giving fire to mortals from the gods, a gift that transformed our lives, made us more powerful. The third story is capitalism is an operating system in a world full of hackers. So, you know, you are, I think we're, I don't know, I think you're around the same age as me, I'm 57.

• 15:24Scott Galloway?

  I'm younger than you, I'm just gonna say that. I'm younger than you, Jonathan, thank God.

• 15:29Jonathan Haidt?

  But I'm sure you remember DOS, right?

• 15:31Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Jonathan Haidt?

  That crappy operating system with the blinking cursor?

• 15:34Scott Galloway?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:35Jonathan Haidt?

  But it allowed you to do things you couldn't do if you didn't have a computer or an operating system. And then we got Windows, and you know, Windows 3.1, which was a little better. So you get an operating system, and it expands what people can do. But if you never upgrade the operating system, you know, people are really inventive, and they find ways to hack it. They find ways to drain away value rather than joining with others to create value. And so you have to keep upgrading the operating system. And that's one of the most important roles of government, is to create the conditions in which free markets can operate for the public benefit. Because if you don't, you know, it's like if you have a garden and you don't weed it, you know that in a year, it's gonna be totally overrun with weeds. It's like there's a natural law of entropy in our institutions, just as there is in our gardens. So we need an upgrade to the operating system.

• 16:20Jonathan Haidt?

  Now, a lot of it is just tweaks, but when you get a big change in social relationships or technology, sometimes you need a Major change in the operating system. And I would argue that the Internet is exactly such a change. So the economist Robert Frank, a really brilliant economist, one of the leaders in bringing psychology into economics back in the 1980s. He wrote a book called Winner Take All, I think it was called. He said, you know, modern technology has allowed Michael Jackson and people at that level to make, you know, a hundred million dollars from an album. And whereas the other 99.9% of musicians are making nothing.

• 17:00Jonathan Haidt?

  And he said, as technology allows one person to dominate the globe, you know, this causes massive inequality that is not really merited and that we need to change. We need to think about our tax system and everything else because one person, we now live in a winner take all economy. And then we get the Internet just a couple of years later. And of course, it's, you know, its promise wasn't fully realized in the first years, but now it is. And so the fact that, you know, it's wonderful to hook everyone up together in the world. It's wonderful in many ways, terrible in others, which I hope we'll get to. But the technology and the nature of trade and exchange and invention is so different now than it was, say, in the 70s, that we need a really major upgrade in the operating

• 17:45Jonathan Haidt?

  system. And that's what the book will be about. There are all these new movements, you know, there's, well, obviously stakeholder, just a move to a more stakeholder approach. There's patient capitalism, conscious capitalism, human centered capitalism. So I think a lot of these theories are on the right track. And I'm going to try to review them all and figure out, given our psychology, what actually makes sense to create a system that feels fair to people and that really maximizes both dynamism and decency.

• 18:15Scott Galloway?

  But isn't there, in terms of capitalism,

• 18:19Scott Galloway?

  Isn't it, well, let me put forward, I don't think we need a radical change. I just think we need to go back to this notion that capitalism doesn't work unless it sits on a bed of empathy and a certain amount of comity. That we used to charge billionaires 40% to 60% tax rates such that we could fund NASA and put engineers and pilots in the space. Now we have an individual who's paid a tax rate of 1% on his wealth. And we have decided that to a certain extent, I don't want to say poor people deserve to be poor, but it definitely seems as if we've decided that the winners should accrete more and more spoils. It's not, you know, it's become winner take most, winner take all. And I feel as if we don't need anything new, we just need to return to our proud legacy

• 19:03Scott Galloway?

  of a certain level of income distribution, progressive tax structure, antitrust. Do you see it as we need actually an upgrade or something new? Or is it a return to the past?

• 19:15Jonathan Haidt?

  Well, it just depends on how extensive you want to consider changes to be a new operating system. You know, it's not as radical as from DOS to Windows, but it's also going to, I think it's going to be more radical than, you know, what is it Catalina to, you know, whatever we have now on Mac, where things feel pretty much the same, it's just you get a different color scheme and some new features. But, but let's, okay, let's work on this together because you, you've been thinking about this a long time and, and I, you know, I love your rants about capitalism because you start from, and this is sort of the motto of my area here at Stern, pro-business, high standards. So, you know, we all agree, business is generally a good thing. We don't want it, we're not anti-business, we're not anti-capitalism, we're pro-capitalism.

• 20:00Jonathan Haidt?

  But we recognize that you get all this exploitation and, and, you know, the, just the things you were just talking about. So let me ask you, what do you mean by sits on a bed of empathy? That sounds great, but when I think about it, it kind of falls apart. So what do you mean?

• 20:14Scott Galloway?

  Sure, well, it probably does, but I feel like we've become, it's a Long de Bataille notion that we have embraced this full notion of a meritocracy where winners deserve more and more. But the ugly side of that is that if your kid is on food stamps, it's your fault. And that if we don't do a better job of investing in our infrastructure, which I think is an investment in the middle class, if we don't do a better job of ensuring that kids all get a reasonable start, whether it's food or access to school or mom. Doesn't have to live out of a car, that capitalism and the prosperity it produces is not, you know, kind of isn't worth, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And then more recently, even this bailout, where we seem to be focused on saving companies,

• 20:58Scott Galloway?

  not people, that we've become much more empathetic towards corporations, we've personified them, but we've become much more harsh and Darwinistic on individuals. And I think that's a change from where we used to be.

• 21:10Jonathan Haidt?

  Got it. Okay. So I would say that thinking about meritocracy, that's in the news quite a lot these days. And it may be one of these concepts where we've taken it so far, you know, it was originally proposed by an English sociologist as a bad term, a term for a bad kind of society. So now there's a lot of questioning of meritocracy, but I think that turns out to be even worse than what we had. We're seeing this a lot now with the idea of equity, the idea that anytime you see a difference of outcome, we have to do something to fix the difference of outcome. And by equity, we don't mean individual, we mean by group.

• 21:49Jonathan Haidt?

  So I think if you drop meritocracy in this country, it gets replaced by ideas that are really toxic and are going to turn people against each other. What I think we need is to keep meritocracy, but to produce systemically more churn. And what churn means is that if you just say, hey, you know, free society, do what you want, let the ships fall where they may, the people on top find all kinds of ways of keeping themselves at the top, and especially their children. And here I'd point to Richard Reeves' book, Dream Hoarders. So we need churn to try to, you know, pull down some of the barriers that people put, you know, for example, legacy admissions to universities.

• 22:31Jonathan Haidt?

  So we need to remove some of the safety that people at the top have for themselves and their children. And we need to give some more opportunity to those at the bottom through no fault of their own. One parent is a drug addict and others in jail, or wherever they grow up, there are not good schools, whatever it is, it becomes really unfair when you look at children. Whose lives are dictated so much by who they were born to and where they're born. So I would say meritocracy with more churn and more safety for those at the bottom. And I think, you know, you and Kara have been talking about about this, the, you know, with the rising wages and the, you know, the COVID subsidies, people actually have choices and it's a good thing.

• 23:15Jonathan Haidt?

  So I'm with you on that meritocracy, but with more churn at the top and the bottom. Now for empathy, if you're saying we need to cultivate more empathy for each other. Well, good luck with that. I don't think that, so empathy, I think is way, way overrated. Paul Bloom has a book against empathy. It sounds really good. It's an applause line on the left, especially George Lakoff says that all progressive policies are based on empathy. Well, guess what? Policies based on empathy don't actually have a very good track record of working. I would look at empathy not as the cause of better outcomes, but as the result of better outcomes. And here I learn a lot from talking to people in Scandinavia. There are some really wonderful economists and historians in Scandinavia who've pointed

• 24:00Jonathan Haidt?

  out that the key to their, these great societies that have dynamism and decency is that they have a long history of feeling they have a social contract. That is, we're all, we're all similar, we're all Swedes, we all have these norms of hard work, Protestant work ethic, everybody works, you'd be ashamed to just rely on welfare. But given that we're all party to the social contract, if you fall down, we'll pick you up. If you're giving it a try and you're injured or, or your, you know, or your parents are killed while you're young, of course we'll pick you up. So if you have a sense of community, of social contract, of we're all in this together, of you're not going to cheat me, I'm not going to cheat you.

• 24:44Jonathan Haidt?

  If you have that sense, then you get really good capitalism. But the difficulty is that as you lose a sense of solidarity and social contract, as you have rising diversity, for one thing, and this is a really important paper by Robert Putnam, the more you have diversity, the less you have social capital. So there are certain conditions emphasizing differences, emphasizing that society is a battle between whites and AEPi and BIPOC. Emphasizing the conflict within society and domination and unfairness and everything's rigged, that really cuts empathy. In fact, there's even a research paper published a year or two ago that the more you teach people

• 25:28Jonathan Haidt?

  about about white privilege, the less sympathetic they get to poor whites. That's the big change. They don't get more sympathetic to black people. They start they start being more callous towards poor whites. So I would say, don't focus on empathy as the thing we need to cultivate. Focus on a good system and that will then breed empathy.

• 25:48Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, what is the connective tissue that results in that social contract? Let's kind of double click on this, if you will, this this sort of resentment that can build amongst our brothers and sisters and talk about, and this is a comment posed as a question, but I do want you to I do want you to comment on my comment, that looking constantly through the lens of identity makes things worse.

• 26:15Jonathan Haidt?

  Oh, my God, yes.

• 26:16Scott Galloway?

  That that when I see younger people, when I see the media and I see them approaching every issue through not what you're saying, but who's saying it.

• 26:25Jonathan Haidt?

  Yep.

• 26:25Scott Galloway?

  And coming with a certain set of assumptions around, well, Scott is a white heterosexual male born in the 60s. You just have a different view in your viewpoint. It strikes me that everything we've managed to achieve of really any importance starts from a place of we're all in this together, as opposed to a place of, well, let's look at who's saying it and let's think of each other as different as a starting point. It feels entirely counterproductive to where we're all trying to where we're all trying to head. Your thoughts?

• 26:55Jonathan Haidt?

  Absolutely. So let's let's let's do a little thought experiment here. I'm going to describe a fictional planet inhabited by tribal creatures. They always live in tribes. They they at the drop of a hat, they will fight each other. They'll they'll sneak into the other's encampment at night and try to kill as many of them as possible. And this goes on for tens of thousands of years. And then one day, some of them in a certain area figure out ways of living together. They don't do that. And a lot of this has to do, it turns out, with trade. And you get a part of it where people trade. And as one writer of the era says, go to the go to the stock exchange,

• 27:38Jonathan Haidt?

  where you will see Jew and Muhammadin and Christian trading with each other. And they only use the word infidel for those who go bankrupt. That's what Voltaire said about the London Stock Exchange. So you get this marvelous liberal order, this liberal democracy, a liberal society. And as John Stuart Mill put it, these societies enable experiments in living. They grant incredible freedom. And with that freedom comes incredible innovation. You don't get equality, but you get incredible innovation. You get rights, you get women's rights, gay rights, civil rights. So imagine this on this planet, okay, obviously, it's not a fictional planet. Obviously, it's Earth. But on our planet, where for tens of thousands of years,

• 28:21Jonathan Haidt?

  you know, we evolved to be tribal creatures with enormous amounts of intergroup violence and intergroup violence, we develop liberal societies. And as they develop, people stop identifying primarily as their tribes. And this is one of the most marvelous things about America. You know, it didn't welcome my grandparents from Poland and Russia, but it didn't put any obstacles in their way, really. It didn't welcome my wife's parents from Korea, but it didn't put any obstacles in their way. And no one cares that, okay, my mother wanted me to marry someone Jewish. But other than that, you know, there's not hostility to Asians or Jews.

• 28:56Scott Galloway?

  I'm sure you're a real disappointment to your parents, Chad.

• 28:59Jonathan Haidt?

  I was for a little while.

• 29:01Scott Galloway?

  You're every parent's dream. Anyways, go ahead.

• 29:03Jonathan Haidt?

  Anyway, so what I'm saying is overcoming identity is one of the secrets of modernity, of success, of a decent society, of a society in which people don't really care where your grandparents are from. And all of this makes gives us incredible progress until the early 21st century. And, you know, the late 20th century was a time of extraordinary progress. Just since you and I were born in the 60s. Again, gay rights, civil rights, animal rights, environmental concern. I mean, this is the biggest increase. If you're progressive, you should look back at the last. Sixty years and say, my God, we're almost there. We've made it ninety percent of the way. What a transformation. But instead, what happened after 2012, I believe, is the social media connections, the hyperconnection of everyone,

• 29:47Jonathan Haidt?

  allowed terrible ideas to spread very, very quickly. And it filled up everyone's receptors that young people in particular haven't actually heard anything from before about 2010. They don't know anything about the 20th century. They don't know that they're recreating a lot of the discourse of Maoism and of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution. So we're getting this resurgence of tribalism, which is not grounded in any reality and is incredibly damaging, especially to those who identify as members of the tribes. It's not a coincidence that the people whose mental health is most harmed by all this is young white women. There's data on mental health. If you break it down by politics,

• 30:31Jonathan Haidt?

  liberals have higher rates of depression anxiety than conservatives. This is from a Pew study, and this was publicized by Zach Goldberg, a graduate student at Georgia State University. And when he put the graphs up, I said, Zach, can you dig into it by age? Because I've been studying Gen Z. And sure enough, these effects are much bigger for Gen Z than they are for older generations. Then I said, Zach, can you cut it by sex? And he did, and sure enough, the huge spike is young white women. I should point out what Zach found is that politics is correlated with depression only for white people, not for blacks and Hispanics. And so it's young white women who are liberal.

• 31:14Jonathan Haidt?

  The majority of them say that they've been told that they have mental health disorder, the majority, whereas for every other group, it's under thirty percent. So my point to answer your question is that whether you look at the...

• 31:25Scott Galloway?

  Is that a cause or an outcome? I mean, what?

• 31:28Jonathan Haidt?

  Well, I don't think it's the case that a conservative who gets depressed suddenly becomes a liberal. Right. But I do think it's the case, and I've heard this from a lot of young women. That's the thought. If you're a young, if you're a young, white, liberal woman. Yeah. You have to be constantly outraged. You have to join in. As one woman told me in Australia, she said, you know, all my friends are saying they're depressed, and I feel like I have to say so too. And guess what? If you identify as something, you know, assume or virtue if you have it not, for use almost can change the stamp of nature, as Shakespeare said. If you're around depressed people all day long, you catch depression. This was Nicholas Christakis's studies showed of the Framingham Heart Study. Emotions are contagious, especially among women. Men don't talk about their emotions as much.

• 32:13Jonathan Haidt?

  Women talk about emotions a lot. So, young women who are talking about how depressed they are, how terrible things are, oh my god, you know, everything is structural injustice, the world's gonna end, global warming, sexism, you know, on almost every measure other than global warming, things are getting better and better. So, over and over again, policies based, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these policies, when activists want to, quote, "save the world" with their activism, you know, if you line up all the things that activists push for or ask for, I would bet that the majority of them backfire or have no effect. Because social systems are really, really complicated. And when you get experts in a room, people who've studied a problem for their entire careers, and you get them in a room for a year, and you say, can you come up with a good housing policy?

• 32:58Jonathan Haidt?

  Can you come up with a good low-income support policy? I think they have a better than 50% track record of success, but I don't think it's 60%. So, it's really, really hard to improve complex social systems if you study them for your whole life. What happens if you're 17, you haven't studied them, but you just embrace, you know, "defund the police! What a great idea! It's based on empathy." I don't like to see these videos of, of police killing, killing African-Americans. Nobody does. So, out of empathy, we're going to defund the police. And I would posit that if you, if you line up all of the, all of the programs that are pushed by activists who are not experts in the systems they're trying to change, they mostly make the world worse.

• 33:42Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, on the left, defund the police and on the right, defund the police. They're just, they're more effective. They defunded the IRS.

• 33:48Jonathan Haidt?

  Exactly. That's right. That's right. The right is very concerned about about street crime, but not very concerned at all about white collar crime. That's right. So you look, I'm more critical in our talk today, I've been more critical of the left because that's, I'm mostly focused on what's happening on campus and elite institutions. But let me be very, very clear that the right is, the Republican Party has lost its mind. It stands for nothing other than culture war. And the dynamics on the right involve actually more, certainly more threats of violence than I think actual violence. So I'm not, I'm an equal opportunity anti-illiberal. I'm opposed to illiberalism on the left and on the right.

• 34:26Jonathan Haidt?

  Coming up after the break. You can't really have a deliberative democracy if you don't have people who feel that they are tied together, belong together, have a shared past and a shared future. Stay with us.

• 34:43Scott Galloway?

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• 36:21Scott Galloway?

  What in your view, based on looking at other cultures, what do you think are some of the best programs, or ideas, or shifts in thinking? In what world does universities play in that?

• 36:31Jonathan Haidt?

  So, again, it's so hard to come up with social policies that work. So what I would say is the first criterion is you have to have a system for gathering data and testing variations. You can't just go on your assumptions. There are problems called wicked problems, which doesn't mean big. It means there are problems that reach into your mind and engage your morals and politics so that you know the right answer before you collect the data. But then you have to figure out things that will actually work. You have to try experiments, and you have to have a careful analysis of the system. It is not my area, but from what I've heard, one of the biggest problems is the police unions.

• 37:13Jonathan Haidt?

  We know a lot about how to train police to be better at shooting decisions and things like that, but the police unions block a lot of the reforms that would actually improve accountability and improve behavior. So I think there are no easy solutions, and I think the brokers here should be university researchers. The academic world, in a sense, we get this gigantic tax subsidy. Our endowments and our operations and donations to us are tax deductible because we're supposed to be performing this major public service.

• 37:54Jonathan Haidt?

  Not just as educators, but as the arbiters of truth, the localized area of expertise. Jonathan Rouch has this wonderful new book called The Constitution of Knowledge, where he says that part of the genius of a liberal society is that we developed a way of finding truth, where for tens of thousands of years, it was all superstition. And the three pillars of this constitution of knowledge are the universities and the research community in general, journalism, and the courts. And he says the courts are still holding up, but journalism and the universities have become ideological and are not doing as good a job as they used to at finding the truth.

• 38:37Jonathan Haidt?

  The 21st century is a century in which social science problems are at least as large as any technological or physical problem. We need reliable universities, and they are not up to the task right now, I believe.

• 38:49Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, my sense is that, I love the idea that, at least in principle, as academics, we're supposed to be pursuing the truth regardless of who it affects. And what I, my fear is that we pursue the truth as long as the outcome surrenders to a certain narrative that tends to be, for lack of a better term, the woke narrative.

• 39:10Jonathan Haidt?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Scott Galloway?

  That research, you know, it's like I swat the motor and another colleague of ours says, "I can tell you the outcome of any research study if you tell me who's paying for it." And what I see now is just, I think there's just so much fear to put out research that doesn't sign up to the narrative. And it's, it just feels like we're not doing our job. I mean, we're not, when 2% of Harvard's faculty identify as conservatives, it's like, well, how can we have progress without some sort of level of, you know, evidence-based conflict and debate? That universities have become...

• 39:47Scott Galloway?

  I mean, we used to be part of the solution and it feels like we've become part of the problem. Am I just glass half empty?

• 39:53Jonathan Haidt?

  Yeah. Well, first, universities are vast institutions with many, many departments, most of which are untouched by this. I think what De Moderan said about, tell me who's paying for it, that might be true in economics, but that's not really true in psychology or in most other areas. It's not about money. It's not about who's paying. But it is true in the social sciences, other than economics and in the humanities, that almost everybody is on the left. And so any finding that challenges, doesn't fit with a left narrative about white supremacy culture, et cetera, is much harder to publish. And if you publish anything, for example, on trans or trans kids or kids who de-identify, you're, you know, the Brown

• 40:37Jonathan Haidt?

  withdrew, I mean, if you publish anything on it, you're in grave danger. Your article might be pulled, your university will cave under pressure. So there are certain areas, especially around trans and race, that are really radioactive. And so I would say this doesn't touch most of the product that comes out of universities, but in certain areas it does. For example, diversity research. I mean, we really need ways to improve inclusion and equality or quality of opportunity, good treatment in companies. And decade after decade, we have really no progress to show for it in terms of what would work. Is there any kind of diversity training that makes things better? Not anything that's ever scaled.

• 41:22Jonathan Haidt?

  So I would just be a little more specific. So basically, what you're saying there is right, but limited. It's not true for most of what comes out of universities, but it is true for a lot of what comes out of, on anything related to complex social issues.

• 41:39Jonathan Haidt?

  The solution is not that individuals need to have more integrity. Of course, that's nice, but it's very hard to change people. The solution is systems that lead to truth from flawed individuals. And that, again, is part of the genius of a liberal society, is that liberal societies developed institutions that pit conflicting ideas against each other in a context in which we can tell which one is closer to the truth. And that's where universities have begun to fail, because, as you said, if everyone at Harvard is on the left, if there's literally only 2% Republicans, in any conversation in the academic world, there probably is nobody on the right. And so there's nobody to check our favored conclusions.

• 42:24Jonathan Haidt?

  There's nobody to challenge us.

• 42:25Scott Galloway?

  In terms of the potential solution, is there an opportunity to create more connective tissue through national service? And that is, we don't, when I think about great legislation, civil rights legislation in the 60s and 70s, it was largely affected by people who saw themselves as Americans first and then red or blue. And that's because they'd served not only just in a uniform, but they'd served shoulder to shoulder in the agency of something bigger than themselves or their politics. And it feels as if we don't have that. Have you found any research across nations that have some sort of mandatory subscription or public service demonstrating some of the behaviors we want and being able to move forward in a more thoughtful, productive manner?

• 43:09Jonathan Haidt?

  Yes. So there is empirical research showing that if your country was at war while you were a teenager, and then 20 years later, you're playing an economics game, you know, like a social dilemma game, where you can either keep all the money or you can put some in a common pot, which is the pro-social thing. Joe Henrich and others found that if your country was at war when you were young, you're more cooperative decades later. And you and I grew up in the shadow of World War II. You know, Hitler was only dead for, I think, 18 years when I was born. And everybody, all the adults, remembered him and remembered World War II and remembered that we, you know, we saved the world. We fought the Japanese. So there's no question

• 43:53Jonathan Haidt?

  that a foreign attack and a war against a vicious adversary unites people like nothing else in all of human experience. Yeah. So 9/11 was the closest in our modern lives to that, and that did work for a few months. I think it was then exploited by George W. Bush, who sent us off on a wrongful war. But a foreign attack is incredibly powerful. National service would be helpful, but I think it's tiny compared to World War II or even to 9/11. So I'm in favor of it, but don't expect that we can recreate the post-war American world with national service alone. But it is the right way to think about things. We have to think about the forces that draws together, that is, the centripetal forces in our society and the centrifugal forces

• 44:35Jonathan Haidt?

  which pull us apart. And I would argue that social media, not the internet per se, but social media as it changed in between 2009, 2012, social media turns into an outrage platform, which really drives us apart. It's an enormous centrifugal force. The Russians saw that, and in 2014, they activated all their networks, and, boy, are they effective. The Russians really, you know, basically, you know, we opened up our skulls and said, "Insert wedge here. Make me hate my fellow Americans," and they did it. So that's a huge centrifugal force, and I would argue that the new emphasis on identity, which we were just discussing, is another huge centrifugal force. You can't really have a deliberative democracy if you don't have people who feel that they are tied together, belong together,

• 45:20Jonathan Haidt?

  have a shared past and a shared future, and if they are exposed constantly to outrage, some of which is even true, about the other side.

• 45:28Scott Galloway?

  Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University Stern School of Business, whose research focuses on morality. Professor Haidt is also the New York Times bestselling author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. He joins us from his office at NYU. Jonathan, I look, I genuinely More so than usual. Look forward to seeing you in the flesh on campus.

• 45:57Jonathan Haidt?

  I hope you'll come back to New York and bring your brand of irreverence, humor and insight.

• 46:04Scott Galloway?

  Go on, Jonathan, go on. That's how you get on the pod repeatedly. All right, brother. Stay safe.

• 46:09Jonathan Haidt?

  You too. You too, Scott.

• 46:19Scott Galloway?

  Altery of Happiness. I was on a show yesterday. I was on PBS. This is me bragging. I'm really excited about this. I love PBS. I grew up with PBS. And this guy, Stephen Goldblum, is this fantastic producer who tracked me down and I did Brief But Spectacular, which is a segment they do on PBS NewsHour. And I was just so excited to do it and they invited me back to do a second one. And I did this show called Tell Me More with Kelly Corrigan, where they speak to quote unquote, interesting people and ask them a bunch of, it's like therapy.

• 46:55Scott Galloway?

  But I really enjoyed it and I was excited to do it. And she asked an interesting question. She asked, when was the last time you cried? And the answer was yesterday, watching Loki. My son came up behind me, my youngest son, and just kind of naturally, he was sitting next to me and he started kind of rubbing my head. And affection from your boys, it's unsolicited. I've said before, it's just such a wonderful thing. And I kind of miss it from my 13 year old. He is naturally sort of pulling back from me, which I get. He doesn't like me messing up his hair as much as he used to. He doesn't kiss me at night when he goes to bed anymore. And that's fine. I get it. That's what he's supposed to be doing. But I just really love it when my 10 year old is still very, you know, still very affectionate. And it brought tears to my eyes. And that's not, that's not the headline news here.

• 47:40Scott Galloway?

  From the age of 30 to 44, I forgot how to cry. I didn't know how. I didn't cry when my mother died. I didn't cry when I got divorced. I just literally for 14, 15 years didn't cry. And now I cry pretty much every day, or at least I get emotional and weepy and teary. And I find it is really wonderful. It feels cathartic. It feels good. It's usually tears over things I'm really nostalgic or happy about, but also I think about stuff that upsets me and I, I start crying. And a piece of advice I would give to young men, as I was trained that my masculinity and how attractive I was to other men and other woman was a function of my masculinity. And then part of that masculinity was not

• 48:25Scott Galloway?

  demonstrating emotion and specifically never demonstrating weakness through crying. This was certainly saying crying is sort of saying, in a weird way, I'm weak or I give up. And men don't want to display that kind of emotion. And a piece of advice I would give to men is to absolutely embrace the sloppy part of you. And it's okay to cry. It's, it feels really good. And I think it puts you in touch with your emotions around things that are important to you. Cause you register when your son is randomly and in an unprompted way showing you affection, that that is really important to you. I think crying doesn't make you weak, doesn't demonstrate weakness. And some, I think crying makes you a better man and makes you appreciate, appreciate how many wonderful things there

• 49:10Scott Galloway?

  are that might, you might lose, how many incredible things there are that might get less incredible, which is reason to be upset. But also just the wonder of the world that just sort of moves you. And crying for me has become almost like a practice of appreciating things. Anyways, I'm just, just, I'm getting teary just thinking about it. Cry more. Trust me on this one. Our producers are Caroline Shager and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our assistant producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prov G Show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll catch you next week on Monday and Thursday.

• 50:20Speaker 05

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