Jonathan Haidt
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
No, that's right. We evolved for small group interactions with a lot of gossip. So when kids are talking in small groups and someone says something stupid and others make fun of them, people laugh and then you move on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But when you put kids on a stage where potentially millions of people could be laughing at them and they could be the internet topic of the day and it might last for the whole week, a lot of those kids are considering suicide because when you are being shamed and it seems like you're out, A lot of kids will think of killing themselves because that's a way to relieve the pain.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So however, and the thing is, look, almost all of us as adults, we see this stuff. If you post stuff on social media and then you read the comments and then you can be upset by the comments. Imagine if you were 12 or 13.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's right. And so I just, you know, I really want to emphasize puberty as, puberty is one of the key ideas in my book. So in The Anxious Generation, I really focused on, well, the subtitle is How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. So while it's childhood that got rewired, from 2010 to 2015, it is unrecognizable.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
The change that happened in those five years is beyond what anyone could have ever imagined. And The millennials are fine because they were already done with puberty by 2010, largely. And so they had flip phones. When they were going through puberty, let's say ages 11 to 12, it begins typically a little earlier for girls, to 15, 16 is sort of the peak.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
It goes on until your early 20s, but it's especially early puberty, the early teens, the mid-teens, that is the period where your brain is literally rewiring. It is literally from back to front, changing over from the child form to the adult form, which is much more competent, but much less flexible.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We don't respond to brain damage as flexibly as we did when we were children, because everything's locked in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And so the difference between the millennials and Gen Z is that the millennials went through puberty on flip phones, and they actually, and they used those phones to meet up with each other, and they saw each other, and they got together in person, they made eye contact, they laughed together, they had a recognizably human childhood. By 2015, that's not happening anymore.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I mean, things have changed. And so if Gen Z, suppose you're born in 1990, let's say born in 2000. So you're seven when the iPhone comes out, but that's not so important because the iPhone doesn't change things for the first few years. You're nine when social media goes super viral, when you get the retweet button, the share button, the like button. The gamification. Yes, exactly. That's right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Social media changes radically beginning in 2009. And the status. The status aspect. Well, that's right. Because then it's not about me connecting with your page. It's now about the newsfeed and likes and what goes viral.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, absolutely. Let me just finish up the narration of Gen Z and we'll go right to that. So Gen Z had the bad luck that they went through all of puberty. So if you're born in 2000, you are, let's say you're a girl, 2011, 2012 is when everyone is changing in their flip phones for smartphones. 2010, you get the first front facing camera on the iPhone, and then Samsung copies that right away.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So 2010, you get the front facing camera. 2009, we got super viral social media. 2012, Facebook buys Instagram, and that's when it really becomes popular. In this period is when everyone's getting high speed internet. In 2010, most people didn't have it. So the point is the millennials in 2010 on their flip phones could not spend all day on their flip phones. What are you gonna do?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Texting like that difficult texting on the number pad all day long? Nobody did that. But by 2015, Gen Z, you can be on your phone all day long. And half of them say, literally half of American teenagers say that they are online almost constantly. So if they seem to be talking to you, they're thinking about what's going on on their phone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
If they're on the bus next to other kids, they're on their phone. If they're in class and the teacher's talking, they're on their phone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I'm going to take that line and try to remember to credit you for it. Watching the funniest thing. Okay. Watching the funniest thing. That's great. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Tell me more, what do you mean? If you solve those two things, so desire, yes, but it's all about cutting off desire.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
If you can just do two terms, I'd say evolutionary biology meets the problems of modernity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Absolutely, absolutely.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, that's right. There's a great thinker who I know has talked about in Silicon Valley, Rene Girard, Frenchman who taught at Stanford. I read some of the chapters of one of his books and I read some summaries of his work and I think it's brilliant. And the key thing is this, we kind of naively assume that young people copy what they see other people doing. But that's not true.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
If my kid sees me doing something, they're not going to copy me. I mean, when they're two, they do, but not older. If they see some other kid doing something, they're not necessarily going to copy that just because the kid is doing it. Girard's point is what we copy is what they want. So if someone, we don't know what to want. I mean, yes, for hot, we want cool, but...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But if we can add in evolutionary psychology meets anthropology and cultural psychology with a little smattering of sociology in the head of a guy who is just really bothered when he sees systems and institutions screwing up, messing up, and he thinks to himself, wait, if we just did this, it would work better.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Beyond that, we don't know what we want. And so we're incredibly attuned to what everyone else in our reference group is wanting. And that's always been the case. And of course, advertisers in the 19th century began to pick up on that. How do you make it seem like everybody wants this product?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So advertising has always been about appealing, about trying to hack, trying to really activate this Rene Girard mechanism that we're copying each other's wants. And that's where I think influencer culture represents the, what, not reductive, like take it to its extreme conclusion.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Where I speak to young people, they come to ask me for advice on how to be successful, and some of them have not even thought about what they can do that would be of worth to anyone. All they're focused on is how to get more followers. So, you know, everybody wants likes and followers. So I want likes and followers. Well, you know, in the world before this, you had to do something to get prestige.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's right. And that's a trap. That's a trap that leads to unhappiness. That's right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And so I get deeply involved in what's going wrong with our democracy, and that's the righteous mind. What's going wrong with our universities? That's the coddling the American mind and my project at Heterodox Academy. And now what's going wrong with family life and children and people born after 1995? So I would just put a few more terms in there, but yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Okay, so let me just set this up by sort of jumping ahead to the notion of collective action problems and the four norms that I suggest in the book to break out of collective action problems. So the clearest collective action problem is any kid who doesn't get a phone is left out. And so the kid says, mom, I'm the only one without a phone. I'm in fifth grade. Everyone else has a phone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They're making fun of me. And this hurts us as parents. So we say, okay, I'll give you, I have an old phone here. We'll reactivate it for you. And so you can end up in a situation where everyone has a bad outcome, which is you get to the point where now, in third and fourth grade, kids are all getting phones, and you sort of get there because everyone else is doing it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And Gen Z feels trapped on social media. I talk to my students, why are you spending so much time on TikTok and Instagram and five other platforms every day? You have no time to do anything of any use to anyone. And they say, well, I have to because I need to know what people are talking about. I don't want to be left out. So this whole thing is a set of collective action traps.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's how we got so deep into this. And so the solution is collective action. So in my book, I kind of assume that we might never get any real help from the federal government. There is a chance that COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, will pass. That is the one thing that really could pass. But I really wrote the book assuming there's not gonna be a legislative solution to this.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We have to do this ourselves by changing norms. And so in the book I propose, I mean, I have like 50 suggestions, 50 ideas for parents and teachers and schools. But I realized, wait, four of these are just really foundational things that we can do together and they're really powerful. So in order, they are no smartphone before high school. We have to just clear this all out in middle school.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Middle schoolers should not be having the internet in their pocket. Give them a flip phone, give them a phone watch, give them something else, but not a smartphone. No social media till 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate for minors. It's full of extreme sex, violence, men from all over the world reaching out to you because they want sex.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I mean, it's insane that we have children talking with men all over the world. So no social media till 16. The third norm is phone-free schools. Lock up the phones in a yonder pouch or in a phone locker in the morning, they get it back at the end of the day. And the fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world because Until the 1990s, kids had a childhood.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They were outside a lot. They had adventures. They learned to be self-governing, self-supervising. We took that away from them beginning in the 90s, totally gone by 2015. So our kids never get any fun or adventure. So all they have is their screens.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So if we do those four things, we break out of these collective action problems, we restore childhood, we delay the full social media immersion until age 16 when they're halfway or more than halfway through puberty. That's my basic proposal. So those are the four.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Oh my goodness. Yes. Yeah. That's what's so exciting about this is that, so I propose these four norms, I have this analysis of what happened at Gen Z. I paint Gen Z as a generation that's been damaged, that's gonna be less than they would have been. They're less ambitious, they're less successful, they're less happy, they're less competent.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And I've given a version of this talk in middle schools, in high schools, in universities, and I always ask at the end of it, what do you think? Did I get your generation wrong? And I usually try, if I remember, I usually say, okay, question time. If you think I got something wrong, please raise your hand now, you know, or please be the first up to the microphone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And maybe one time someone said, I think you got this wrong. The other, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of times, they say, yep, that's basically right. Now, maybe some of them are too shy to speak up, but my point is, young kids like, you know, nine, 10, they desperately want phone, TikTok, everything.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But by the time they're in late high school or certainly college, the overwhelming view I find among Gen Z is, wow, did this mess us up? Not that I'm gonna quit because I don't wanna be alone, But man, did this mess us up. And that's why when you ask them, do you wish social media was never invented? Most of them say, yes, I wish it was never invented. So Gen Z, Gen Z is incredibly supportive.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
If you go to the website for the book, anxiousgeneration.com, we have all kinds of activities for parents and teachers and Gen Z. We have writing on my sub stack after babble.com by Gen Z. That's why this is so different from any previous tech panic is that the kids themselves see the problem.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, it's definitely a continuation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So it began when Greg Lukianoff, who is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, noticed that all of a sudden around 2013, 2014, it was actually the students who were demanding protections from speech, from books, from speakers, shut this down, ban this, stop this person from speaking. And he came to me and said, something's wrong.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Something's really different about students today. It wasn't like this in 2012. something's changed and they are more fragile. They want more protection from words, books, speakers. They think speech is violence. And at the time we thought that these were millennials, because that was the name for the young generation, millennials.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And so we wrote an article on this in Atlantic, like laying out what we think is happening. Something is teaching these students to think in these distorted ways that are like cognitive distortions. And then in 2015, so the article comes out August, 2015, in October, 2015, or November, 2015, everything blows up beginning at Yale, the Halloween costume protests, all sorts of things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Universities undergo a kind of a cultural revolution, really some very similar, a lot of similarities to the Chinese cultural revolution of pulling down everything high, pulling down everything old, a kind of a revolutionary young people's movement, shaming professors, spitting on professors, all that sort of stuff. Now, so what's the continuity today?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
One of the worst things that the leaders did back then, the university presidents, is they did nothing. Students would shout down speakers. No one was ever, ever punished for shouting down speakers, even when they used intimidation. Claremont McKenna did punish some students in 2018, but hundreds and hundreds of shout downs, no one ever punished.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
The message was, oh, as long as you're protesting for social justice, you can break the rules. You can use intimidation. You can shout people down. You can bang on glass and make people afraid for their lives. You can do those things because it's for a good cause. And besides, we're actually kind of afraid of you too. So that was the precedent that was set.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And that, I believe, was the beginning of one of the greatest brand destructions in American history. Higher ed used to have one of the greatest brands in the world. Elite higher ed was the envy of the world. Now it's a laughingstock. Harvard is a punchline in jokes around the world, certainly in America.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And so it was because there was fear, there was lack of leadership and we permitted intimidation rather than persuasion. Universities must be about persuasion. You can never win an argument by saying, if you don't agree with me, I'm gonna hurt you, I'm gonna destroy you socially. We can't allow that, but we did. And so now along come the protests.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So of course the October 7th, the massacre was horrific. The Israeli response has produced horrific suffering and death. Yes, it's normal and expectable that there would be debates on a college campus. And nobody that I know of is saying people shouldn't be protesting in favor of the Palestinians.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But the question is really about the encampments and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of the university, to pressure the university to make a statement pro-Palestine or anti-Israel or to divest from Israel. So this is the use of intimidation and disruption, which... They allowed for nine years before.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They said since 2015, as long as you're protesting for social justice, you can do whatever the hell you want. We're not gonna punish you for anything. So now this sort of the intersectional social justice protests that are pro-Palestine and often anti-Israel and often shading anti-Semitism, the presidents don't know what to say.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And that was the spectacle we observed on December 5th in that house hearing room of the three presidents who could not explain why it was against their policies for people to call for death to the Jews. Like, they couldn't, they had been so tied in a knot with their hypocrisy, they couldn't even explain it. So yeah, there's a very direct continuity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's right, exactly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
No, good. No, that's right. And that's another point of continuity from the coddling. So the central idea of the coddling was that there are three great untruths, ideas that are so bad that if any young person believes all three, they're almost certain to be depressed, anxious, not amount to much in life. And those three are what doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So avoid stressful experiences, avoid speakers who are going to say things that you hate. Don't expose yourself. Always trust your feelings. Your feelings are right. If you feel offended by something, someone has offended you and someone has to do something about it. Someone has to punish that person.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And the third, to your point about duality, is life is a battle between good people and evil people. And this is the distortion that's caused the most human misery. I mean, this is a normal thing people do. This is part of being a tribal species. We're very, very good at coming together to say our side has been hurt or cheated or defiled by their side. They're the evil ones. They're perfectly bad.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We're perfectly good. So it's that third distortion is really the most pernicious from a societal level. Now, what you just said before about the haves and the have-nots, that's what the left used to be about from the time of Marx or the French Revolution even until the 1950s or 60s, it was about the haves versus the have-nots.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And the left was the one that stood up for the have-nots and the left stood up for the poor and the people. But we go through a period in the 60s and 70s of the conversion away from a sort of a Marxist idea based on economics to something, is it a little bit Marx? Is it Michel Foucault? There's different intellectual heritages here where now it's all about power.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
It's not haves or have nots, it's power. And power is such that Whatever you look at in society, you will see that some people have power and privilege and they use that to oppress the opposite. And this is what intersectionality is about.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
It starts with a perfectly legitimate point that there are multiple dimensions of identity and to be a black woman is not just the sum of being black or being woman, there are unique indignities that hit black women that you don't notice unless you are tuned into this. intersectionality begins, you know, Kimberlé Crenshaw with a very good insight, which I think is absolutely right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But the way it plays out on campus, what Greg and I argued in our book, is 18 year olds coming onto campus, they're easily lured into this incredibly simplistic and exciting way of looking at the world, which is, I don't have to know anything about you. I can just look at you and I can say, oh, you're a man. Oh, you're a white man. Oh, that means that you're an oppressor.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And I can feel virtuous to the extent that I am not that. And this puts a lot of pressure, especially on white kids, to try to develop some identity as a victim, which is incredibly disempowering and just not good for their development.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And what we end up with is a movement that thinks in these binary terms, and this is what brings us to today, is, of course, Jews, I'm Jewish, we always thought that we were among history's victims, and certainly you can't understand the creation of the state of Israel without understanding what happened in the Holocaust.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But because of the way intersectionality played out, because whiteness is so quintessentially evil, like whiteness is the thing that is ruining everything. So everything that's not whiteness unites together to fight whiteness. Now, most Jews, as I understand it, most Jews in Israel are actually Sephardic. They're not from Europe, but in America, Jews are coded as white.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And therefore, if there's a conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians, then obviously one is the oppressor, one is the oppressed. Now, obviously economically, Israel is wealthy, Israel is powerful. So it's not that there's no legitimacy to that view. Obviously there's a huge power differential in Israel versus Gaza. But the mindset that says,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's right. I mean, things change at different speeds. And of course, evolution works extremely slowly, unless you are a plant biologist who has a company that is making it happen very quickly. But until very recently, our psychological evolution or the evolution of our minds happened at the level of tens of millennia. And then culture changes more slowly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Everything is about power is so narrowing, incorrect, boring, and offensive. I spent so many years trying to help the left using moral psychology so they would stop losing elections. And I finally decided they're beyond hope. The right's beyond hope too. But... You know, the left is losing Asians, it's losing black men, it's losing Hispanics in the time of Donald Trump. Why is this happening?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
A big piece of it seems to be this oppressor-victim mindset pushes policies that are so offensive to most people of every race that they're like, I've had it with the left. I don't like this. So sorry, that was a rant. That was more of a rant than an answer to your question, but I hope it was entertaining.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, I think things are changing. So at least on, you have to look institution by institution. And so at least on campus, things got insane in 2015. I mean, it was, again, it was like the cultural revolution began in 2015. It wasn't like this in 2012. And I started a group called Heterodox Academy. If there are any professors listening to this, please join Heterodox Academy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We advocate for viewpoint diversity among professors. We think that we shouldn't all think the same. We shouldn't all be on the left and progressive. And every year since 2015, things got worse and worse and worse. And especially 2020 with COVID, then especially George Floyd, a lot of progressive ideas got supercharged. Ibram Kendi became the patron saint. Everything was about anti-racism.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So that's when things really became completely bonkers. Not just on campus, but in journalism, in museums, firing all the white guides. Just crazy stuff was happening 2021, 22. Many businesses went that way, but businesses have to actually make money. And so by 2022, a lot of businesses were rolling it back. They're saying, whoa, this stuff is terrible. This is not...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
making life better for members of minorities. This is actually just turning everyone against everyone. We all hate this. So business has begun definitely moving away from all this stuff. Universities, we're not really moving away until December 5th. I think December 5th, that hearing was so humiliating for higher ed. I think a lot of us feel much freer now. We feel like, you know what?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
The intersectional, the sort of the people who will destroy your reputation if you question them. They're on the defensive now. We don't hear much from Ibn Kendi anymore. We don't hear him referred to very much anymore. So I think that at least even on campus, the pendulum is swinging. I was afraid it wasn't a pendulum. I was afraid it was more like a tower that just falls faster and faster.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But I do think, because the great majority of professors and presidents are true liberals. They're on the left, but they believe in free speech. They're not illiberal. What I think has happened on the far left and the far right, we have illiberalism. So the far left is not liberal. The far right is not conservative.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And most of us, the 70% in the middle, are actually pretty reasonable people who could live together, but we're all afraid of the extremes. But we're less afraid of the extremes now than we were a year ago.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And really, the origin of sociology is really in the huge changes in the 19th century. wrought by the industrial revolution.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
You have to look institution by institution. And so in institutions that are governed, that are dominated by the left, and that is all the knowledge creating institutions. So it's journalism, the arts, media, universities, most of the scientific establishment, other than the hard sciences. In all those areas, yes, I think the left took it too far.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
You know, we went into a point where everything like chemistry has to be about anti-racism and, you know, everything has to be about race. And that was just kind of nuts. And so I think there is a kind of a move to a more common sense view.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So I'll answer your question as a psychologist, which is one of the amazing discoveries in psychology since the 80s is that almost everything about our personality is partly heritable. And if you have an identical twin separated at birth, you never met. But if you're very much on the left, your twin probably is too. Something about our brains make us predisposed to the right or the left.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And it goes back to openness to experience and conscientiousness, a few personality traits. But basically, there's a liberal or progressive sentiment that says, it's captured by this Robert F. Kennedy quote, some men see things as they are and say, why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So progressives historically are the people who look at existing institutions and say, why don't we change this? Like, why don't we have some other thing which might be more just? So progressives are always pushing for progress, for change. But then the wisdom of the right is to say, you know what?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I guess, sure. For you guys, it's the first industrial, that's right, yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We may not understand our institutions, but if we just go changing them willy-nilly, it's gonna be a disaster because we don't understand what we're doing. In fact, I opened our conversation with that. That's actually something I learned from reading the conservative intellectuals, going back to Edmund Burke. You can't just go messing with institutions and expect it to work out well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So a good liberal democracy is one in which you have some people pushing for change. You've got other people saying, slow down, like not so fast, like let's be careful about this. And that's William F. Buckley's famous quote about national review is going to stand to thwart history yelling, stop, or at least slow down. So that's great.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Like you have a car with a gas pedal and a brake, like you need that. And what happens when there are no conservatives? What happens when there's no one to say, slow down? Progressive revolutions have an almost perfect record of disaster. I mean, it always descends into chaos and economic chaos and cruelty. And what happens when there are no progressives, when it's all conservative?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
You tend to get much more repressive, certainly LGBTQ rights. I mean, you get very predictable pathologies on either side.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And part of my analysis, what I think has gone wrong in our country, I'm very focused on what social media has done to society as well as to Gen Z, is there always was a distribution where most people on the left are reasonable left, they're progressives, I'm sorry, they're true liberals.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Right. And, you know, because often we can see that we can see changes on the surface, like, oh, people will now have more access to information. That's great.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They believe in a John Stuart Mill vision of a society in which people are maximally free to construct lives that they want to live. That I think is the heart of the liberal vision of a liberal society. And on the right, you have conservatives who generally believe in tradition, family, group loyalty, religion, the things that bind us together and limit bad behavior.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
This is Thomas Sowell talking about the constrained vision of humanity. So that's all healthy. And then you always have some far left radicals who they become Maoist in one generation, they become Robespierre in another, they chop off heads, prone to violence on the far left. You got a group prone to violence on the far right that are reactionary, that are authoritarian.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And let's say there was some distribution. Now then along comes Twitter, along comes Facebook, along comes social media. What happens? Mark Zuckerberg used to say, how could it be wrong to give more people more voice? That sounds great. But what if you're not giving the disempowered more voice? What if you're not giving everyone voice?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
What if you're bringing everyone into the Roman Colosseum and saying, okay, let's fight it out for the entertainment of the people in the stands. And the great majority of people don't want to fight with swords. They just go quiet. And some people pick up the swords like, yes, let's go. And so the far left becomes super empowered. The far right becomes super empowered.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And the center left and the center right go silent. And that's what I think is, you know, that's I think a real disaster for our country
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But a lot of the early sociologists like, you know, Weber and Durkheim and Tunis and all these, you know, German, European guys, they could see that something, something very deep about the way we live together is changing in ways that we don't really understand. And, you know, one of my concerns, again, we'll talk a lot about this, I hope, I love technology. I love my phone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So don't think of it as though liberalism and conservatism have flipped. Think of it as though the left and the right have really changed. One thing I learned from studying conservatism from the intellectual historian, Jerry Mueller, is that conservatism in every era is a reaction to the excesses of the left.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So if the left was the revolutionaries in the French Revolution, the right were monarchists. They wanted the restoration of the king. If the left... in America is about pulling down the founding fathers because they were slave owners. The right is going to be, no, we're gonna get extra patriotic. We're gonna wear funny hats like the 18th century Americans.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So you always have to understand the right as a reaction to what they perceive to be the excesses of the left. Now, a lot of what's happened is, as I said, the left is a political coalition that votes similarly in elections, same with the right. It's made of a mixture of different kinds of people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
There's a wonderful study from More in Common that talked about the seven tribes or seven groups of Americans. The progressive activists, which is the group on the furthest left, they were never liberal. In fact, they're really illiberal. They're not even about bringing up the bottom. They're much more focused on pulling down the top. That's like the ugliest side of egalitarianism.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So they're very focused on restraining rich people, pulling down privilege. They don't seem as concerned about bringing up poor people. So that's the far left. They're not liberal. But now, but for a while, they were really dominant. Not in the Democratic Party. This is an important point. The Democratic Party has two wings. Which one usually wins? The liberal, the moderate wing, not the squad.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So if you just look at the parties, the Democrats are a functioning center-left party with an outspoken progressive wing. That's great. That's viewpoint diversity. I love that. The right is different. If you just look at the party, you used to have all kinds of true conservatives, George H.W. Bush through Mitt Romney. They were true conservatives, very decent men.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I love all the convenience. I'm not anti-tech, but one thing that I'm thinking a lot about is how you guys, whatever, the tech industry out in the West Coast, you do employ a bunch of social psychologists, like especially Meta, a few other companies, not necessarily for good, I think sometimes for manipulation, but you do employ some social psychologists.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They believed in decency, family values. I mean, they have a lot of respect for traditional conservatives. But now it's the party of Donald Trump, and the Republican Party has gotten rid of nearly all its moderates. Now the Democrats pulled some dirty tricks that actually wiped out a few of those moderates, which I think they really have a lot to answer for.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But my point is, if you just look at the parties, the Republican party has been gutted of its moderates. Now they do crazy, insane things like let's work really hard to solve the immigration problem Oh, Donald Trump says, let's not do it. Okay, let's throw it out the window. I mean, insane stuff that is really hurting the country. So I just want to make it clear.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I talk a lot about universities where the villain is the left. There really is no right to speak up on university campuses. But in Washington, I think the Republican Party is the party that's really... gone farther off the reservation, or if one can still say that today, whatever, you know, that's gone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah. So the answer is collective action. So for each, each kid feels left out, but what if you, so I assume you you're in contact with the parents of your kid's friends, right? Cause you gotta drop them off, pick them up. You do all sorts of things. So what if you were to talk with the parents of a few of the friends who don't have, haven't given phones yet?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And you say, hey, we don't want our kids to have a phone-based childhood. Do you agree with me on that? If we work together, John Hite says, if we work together, we can actually give our kids a fun childhood. Are you in on that? And what that means is we're gonna follow the four norms. We are not giving our child a smartphone until high school. Let's just commit to that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Now, we should be sending our kids out, in which case, like I bought my daughter a phone watch, a Gizmo, it could call three numbers, that was it. And that was enough for two or three years. That was all she needed. She could go out and do errands. She could go get bagels. She could go bring food to my office across the park.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So it's okay to give kids a way to contact you, but you just all agree, no smartphone. And you all agree, no social media until 16. And that even includes Snapchat, which is what the kids are using to communicate, but just lots of bad stuff happens on Snapchat. And it just makes them-
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah. Well, yes, if you can, it's hard to hold the line on your own. It's much easier if you have three of you holding the line, but it's even better if it's not holding a line, it's offering a more positive vision of childhood. So you and the kid, so your kid and the other kids who were your parents who all agree,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I've never heard of any company that employs a sociologist. And what I mean by that is the changes that are coming to us because of tech are so earth shattering and so fast that they are changing the basic conditions of America's liberal democracy in ways that I think it may not survive.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
You make extra efforts to give your kids an exciting, fun childhood where they do exciting things together. The other kids can be home on their bed swiping all day long. Let them do that. They're going to end up basically anxious and never having really done anything to grow up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Whereas your kids are getting together for four-way sleepovers where you're taking them, you know, bowling and you just, you know, you just, well, to the extent that you're allowed to, you step back, like you let them be self-governing. You know, you give them money, you give them an allowance, I suggest in the book, be really clear about chores, allowance, and encourage them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Go ride your bicycles down and go get ice cream. You know, go get ice cream just before dinner for all I care. Be a little rebellious. So if you, you know, we've really taken almost all the fun out of childhood. There's very little adventure left in childhood.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, that's the common rule. That's right. Tell me how you do it because there's a lot of questions around it. How do you do it today?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's how we did it in Brooklyn. And that's why Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
It's the withdrawal, that's right, because once you've had hyper-stimulation of quick, easy dopamine, those systems down-regulate, they react, they try to restore homeostasis, and now it takes more stimulation to get them to the normal level.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Now you take away the video games, you take away the phones, and for, Anna Lembke says it's two or three weeks to overcome withdrawal symptoms, especially for more serious drugs. But in my experience, it's more like, it's like a few days. The first three or four days are really bad. But by a week, actually, they're mostly over it. That's what you find. Like summer camp.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That is all the assumptions made by the founding fathers about how we live together, how news travels, why passions affect the legislature, all those assumptions. might now be rendered moot in ways that we do not understand and no one is studying. And so anyway, that's just one of my causes for concern.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So send your kids to summer camp and never send your child to a camp that allows kids to keep phones on them. Never do that. That's a wasted opportunity for detox.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, that's right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
For the heavy users, especially. I mean, I try to avoid saying brain melted. I try to be a little more precise. For the heavy users, and this is the thing, about five, depending on how you measure it, about five to 12% of the boys do become problematic users of video games. So for most boys, video games are okay. They're a lot of fun. And I wouldn't say video games are melting most boys' brains.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But 5% to 12% is a lot of boys to lose. And these are boys who are spending, you know, three, four, five hours a day on video games for years and years and years. They don't develop social skills. They don't develop dating skills. These boys, I think, are... That's right. Exactly. Exactly. It's just...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah. Tell me more about what you're seeing in Silicon Valley in the tech industry. Are you talking only about boys? Are you saying girls are this way? Girls aren't making eye contact?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Internalizing disorders, that's right. Internalizing disorders, yeah. And tell me how Gen Z employees are working out in general. They don't.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And that's what I hear very widely.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Well, Canada is almost as bad as America. Canada has problems too. They're very much like us. But I agree, immigrants who are from non-English speaking countries, that's right, they have a better work ethic. And I'm going to, you know, what I'm hoping that we'll get to is because this problem is so wide, like this is what I, you know, I work in a business school.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I talk to a lot of people in business. I always ask that question. I always hear the same thing. I've never heard anyone say, oh yeah, young people are so wonderful. People are having problems integrating Gen Z employees into their companies. They're fragile. The top 20% are fantastic.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So what do you think about this? What about like, instead of like don't hire American kids, saying look for signs that this person can be a team player and work with other people. So especially go for anybody who's ex-military, anybody who was major team sports,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Okay, so that is similar to what I hear a lot from people who are hiring young people. But let me suggest one slight variation that you might try. Because a really good thing about Gen Z is that they're not in denial. All the things you say about them agree with what I say in the book. I think that's basically true.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
What I'm finding in my teaching, what I find in general, is that if you approach them in the right way and you, first of all, they have to understand the concept of anti-fragility. Very easy to explain, chapter one of The Coddling American Mind. If you go to thecoddling.com, I have chapter one, we put it up there so that everybody can use it. Send it around to all your employees.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
You know, it's what doesn't kill you actually makes you stronger. And you grow through adversity and it's stoic wisdom and it's wisdom around the world. So if you have that concept and you're talking about it, and then you say to your new Gen Z employees, okay, now we can do this in two ways.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
One is, since I really want you to be successful in this job, so I'm going to tell you everything I think you're doing wrong and I'm going to try to make you better. That's option one. Option two is I can be really sensitive about your feelings and really try to make everything gentle and try never to upset you. Which one do you want?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And I guarantee you the great majority are going to pick option one because they do want to grow. They're not in denial. They're not defensive. They're not like, no, I'm not like that. So I... I especially would not, I'm not giving up on Gen Z, especially those who are still in their early 20s, you know, because that's who I'm teaching at NYU and they show incredible growth.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Now, it's exciting because they're doing it together. I have a class of 35 students, we're doing it together. But if you have a cohort, you know, if you're selective in your hiring and you try to avoid the ones who are most, you know, showing the signs of the sort of, you know, the extreme activism and the extreme emotionality,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
If you have a group and you're explicit that you want them to get stronger, you want them to succeed, and that's why I'm going to give you some harsh feedback, I think actually they generally love it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Well, let's hope that parents and schools realize the truth of what you're saying. And we get to the point where college admissions and hiring is not just gonna go for the high GPA and the full resume of extracurricular activities. They're gonna go for signs of being a free range kid.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They're gonna go for signs that you traveled alone, you traveled on your own for three months someplace when you were 18 or 19. They're gonna go for signs that you actually can handle adversity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's right. Major kudos to Coinbase. They were the first one, Armstrong, he was the first one to really put that out there. And a lot of companies followed. Yeah, that's right. But he was right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Thanks so much, guys. I just want to put in just a quick note. To learn more, go to anxiousgeneration.com is the website for the book. Afterbabble.com is my sub-stock. We put a lot of research, a lot of writing. And letgrow.org is an incredible organization that we created with North Skanezi to give parents like you more help, more ideas in how to give your kids a free-range childhood.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So I hope if there are any philanthropists in the audience who are willing, it's a tiny little organization. We could do so much more if we had some money and could hire more staff. So letgrow.org.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Exactly, exactly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Thank you so much, guys. Thank you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I think so. And just to build on that, there was a lot of research on television. Television came in relatively slowly compared to what's happening now. And television was kind of hypnotic and some kids could watch for hours. I did sometimes. But just as like the move from heroin to fentanyl kills lots and lots of people, because fentanyl is so incredibly concentrated.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
The move from television to algorithm driven social media, where it's not just like mass marketed, we think this show, you know, Nielsen ratings say this show is popular. It's we have AI targeting this at you, we're targeting feed at you. So what happens when you have a society in which kids are consuming media, they're playing sports, they're reading books, they're doing all sorts of things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
What happens if the media consumption suddenly gets a hundred times more attractive or addictive or short-term dopamine focused? And I think there are huge, broad societal implications that we don't understand. And I'm very concerned by them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I'm baby boomer by two years. I'm the end of the baby boom, 63. Got it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, I think this is the right way to look at things, to look at how the changes in technology, even if they seem to be gradual, they can have just really outsized effects. When I wrote, I turned in the manuscript for the book in last August of 2023, and I'd only taught this undergrad class on flourishing once. I taught it as a grad class for a long time, but I teach at NYU Stern.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And in the fall, I taught it again after I turned in the book. And one thing I really learned from my students is that TikTok and then YouTube Shorts, the ones copying it, Instagram Reels, they're uniquely horrible. And there are many reasons why they're horrible. And let's start with the contrast.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So as a little experiment, I said to my class, how many of you watch Netflix every week, at least once a week? Almost every hand goes up. How many of you wish that Netflix was never invented? Nobody, no hands go up. because stories are wonderful. Humans live in stories. We tell stories. We've always told stories. The stories on TV are so much better today than they were when I was a kid.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I'm older than you guys, but I remember like, I Dream of Jeannie and, you know, The Brady Butt. There were stupid shows.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So stories are great. There's no problem with stories, no problem with Netflix. And then I say, how many of you use TikTok or one of those programs at least once a week? Not everybody, but the great majority of hands go up. How many of you wish that it was never invented? The great majority of hands go up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And what's happening, and these are 19 year old, they're smart kids, they're mostly sophomores at New York University Stern School of Business. But these things aren't stories. A story is entertaining, but it doesn't give you a huge hit of dopamine. If it's really well told, it can be an aesthetic experience. You lose yourself, but it's not about the quick dopamine reward system.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Whereas TikTok and that short form, it's able to optimize for whatever... whatever gives you that little bit of dopamine in your reinforcement pathways. And because there's a behavior response loop, which you didn't have with television, with television, you could raise the volume, lower the volume, or change the channel. That's it. Those were your options.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
There was not like a feedback loop where the television is rewarding you for certain actions. Whereas what TikTok pioneered is we don't care who you know. We only care what makes you pause, what makes you click, what makes you react. So TikTok is basically, if BF Skinner could come back to life, you know, one of the founders of behaviorism, and observe TikTok, he'd say, this is brilliant.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
This is so brilliant.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, exactly. Variable rewards. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So we have to go back before humans because the brains change very slowly. And whatever was built in by the time you get to mammals and primates is the basic architecture of our minds. So we have a reinforcement system which has worked really, really well for other animals. And it is, when certain things happen,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
when there are signals that this is advancing your evolutionary project, which is survive, eat, have sex, leave offspring. So if something happens, you're making progress towards, say, finding a mate. you get a reward and it feels good. And that doesn't make you say, oh, I got my reward, I'm done.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
The way dopamine works is the neurons, I think it's in the nucleus accumbens is one of the main reward areas. Those circuits that use dopamine, the dopamine says, oh, that was good, keep going, get more. And that's why potato chips are the way they are, because you don't eat one and say, oh, that was good. You eat one and say, now I want one more than I wanted the first one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So this worked really well for other animals. And by the time you get to humans, that's what we're stuck with is this, it's very much based on a few kind of, a few sort of imperatives. But another thing which is a little more uniquely human is the need for reputation. And so chimpanzees do have a whole lot going on about status. I mean, so these systems go back before humans.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And status is life or death. It certainly is among males, especially, it's who gets to mate. So maintaining high status is extremely important. And we certainly see this in adolescents. Adolescents are, they would gladly do something that knocked a few years off of their life at the end of their life if they could be more popular today. Again, it's the short term.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We've got to do the thing that seems so imperative to us now, and that's reputation. So we have so you know, I guess, Dave, you started off that I'm something about evolutionary biology. Yeah, I love evolution. It is it's like, it's like, what is the what is the design manual for humans? And then it's customizable. But what is the design manual?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And so once you start looking at things like, you know, reward reputation, you know, we like outdoor spaces that look like savannas and golf course, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff you can learn from evolution. And then you can understand what some of these guys hacked. And we have actually Chamath, I think is one of the ones who talked to, there's a great quote.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I think I might even, you know what? I think I even quote him in the book. There's all, you know, a lot of the guys who were in there early, they could see, they could see exactly what was being done to hack into young people's concerns for their reputation.