The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 138. The Anxious Generation: How Silicon Valley Has Rewired Our Brains (Jonathan Haidt)

Episode Date: June 8, 2025

What are the biggest lies we're being told about social media? How does unregulated social media help Trump and authoritarian regimes? How do you beat an addiction to your phone? Jonathan Haidt joins Rory and Alastair to discuss all this and more. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to Question Time episodes to live show tickets, ad-free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Sign up to Revolut Business today via: https://get.revolut.com/z4lF/leading, and add money to your account to get a £200 welcome bonus. This offer’s only available until 7th July 2025 and other T&Cs apply. Visit HP.com/politics to find out more. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] Assistant Producers: Alice Horrell Producers: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Feature availability varies by plan. Fees and T's and Cs apply. Whatever stage your business is at. With Revolut business, you're ready for what's next. Welcome to the rest of the policy leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. We have us with us today. One of my peers, Jonathan Haidt is a professor.

at NYU, and for those of you watching, you will be able to see he is in his office in NYU with an amazing move background. He has written a number of really striking books, one of them on happiness, one of them, the righteous mind, which here at Yale, I make my student's rate, which is an extraordinary book, looking at the way in which the right views the political left and the left views the political right, which we can get into a little bit more. And then a book on The Anxious Generation, which looks particularly at the way in which smartphones and social media are rewiring the brains, as it were, of younger people and contributing to anxiety. And of course, all these things come together very powerfully at the moment. We're talking just three months into the Trump presidency where issues of polarization, issues of social media and post-truth all come together.

So really, really grateful to have you with us. Thank you. John, thank you very, very much for being here. I actually want to start with one of those books, which is The Righteous Mind. And also I watched yesterday a TED talk that you did a while back about some of the same themes. And it seems to me that, I don't know if you know this, but our motto on this podcast is disagree-agreeably. And it seems to me that you think that is vanishing from a lot of our politics. But I get the sense that you also think that the right, the conservatives, as it were,

are better at engaging in agreeable disagreement than the left. Have I got that right? Sort of. First, thanks so much for having me on the show. I have a real sense of the Anglosphere, these days. days and for the last five or ten years because the same weird stuff that's happening to American universities and American politics in the 2010s and American childhood and overprotection has been happening at almost exactly the same time in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

and Ireland. So our countries are linked. A lot of this is happening in the rest of Europe too, but the Anglo countries are really linked socially and politically and intellectually. So it's a pleasure to be talking with you because I can sort of look at, you know, sort of almost like an not identical to him, but like a sibling that maybe didn't catch some of the same infections as we have in America. But maybe you can find a way through this. I don't know. As for your question about politics, the way that the righteous mind came about is that I was always on the left when I was younger. I was a kind of a Bill Clinton Democrat.

You know, he was the president during my very formative years. I thought he was wonderful other than morally. But, you know, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that. As a president, I thought he was great. And he was intellectual and empathic. And I couldn't understand why so many people were voting for Republicans. How did George W. Bush win twice? And that led me to really try to understand conservatives.

I was a well-educated American in my 40s, which means that I knew nothing about conservatism or capitalism. It just wasn't part of the curriculum. And I went to Yale as an undergrad. And so I started reading conservative writings. And here we're talking about like the conservative intellectual tradition, you know, Edmund Burke, Thomas Sowell, the real thinkers. And as a social scientist, I thought, wow, they have such deep insights into what makes a society work or not work that I have never encountered.

And of course, the academy is overwhelmingly on the left. There are very few conservatives. So that was sort of the background, that conservatives have certain ideas, especially about sociology and community and order and structure and moral order. So they know some things that liberals don't. Whereas conversely, there's almost nothing that liberals know that conservatives don't. And the reason for that is because the intellectual space and the media is dominated by liberals, you cannot grow up in our countries and not know what the left thinks.

But people on the left can be ensconced in the bubble have no idea what the right thinks. So that's, yes. So you're right at least that I think there's a difference of understanding as for who is more willing to engage. That's a separate question. So, Jonathan, so many things come out of this. but obviously this resonates with me as a former politician. The way in which, and I was a conservative, the way in which I would have,

Alistrovsky was on the labor side, the way in which I would have couched it in Parliament is that we tended to think that our labor opposition were well-meaning, if sometimes naive, whereas they tended to basically think we were pretty evil. And one of the things that I've noticed in the transition to a labor government is that quite a lot of the younger MPs I was interviewing seem to imagine things would magically improve when Labor took over because they'd got rid of a people

who were not just incompetent in the way that I imagined we were, but somehow the problem was that we were actually really kind of bad people and all that needed to happen was to replace us with good people and suddenly the government would start working. Let me approach it this way. In the United States, it's said that we have four political parties. There are two on the left. There's the center left and the far left. And the central left, that's the Bill Clinton left. They can deal with the right. They're pragmatic. And the far left is very ideological and really quite willing to destroy people. And the main tool is in American, I think in the UK too, is you call them racist or sexist or homophobic. I think,

think the really the bad direction that the left took in many of our countries in the 90s was to move away from class and a focus on helping the working class and to at least in America focus on race. Once it became race and then identity and then LGBT, once it became all those things, now it's sort of a moralistic, their evil, their oppressors, that mindset has come in on the far left. And the far left has a lot of influence culturally. On the right, it always seemed to me that the sort of the center right was quite large. It included all the business people and included the, you know, the Berkian conservatives. And then there was this fringe far right, which was, could be very nasty and that's where you really would find racist and

Nazi sympathizers. But they were very small, it seemed. And now it seems as though, at least in the United States, that the far right now has, is basically dominating the government. So, so I see what you're saying. I think for a long time it was the case that the left would more viciously attacked the right than vice versa. But now I don't know what's happening. What does that say, though, about the way that this has come about? Is part of your argument that those people on the left in the way that they have talked about people on the right have to some extent enabled this drive towards the right that now we have this racist, sexist, vile human being in charge of the most powerful country in the world? Yes, I think that's exactly

what has happened. The most stunning political fact about the last election here in the United States is that when you compare the vote, you slice it up demographically, you compare the vote in 2020 in which Biden won to the vote in 2024 in which Trump won, and you look, which groups moved which way. And normally, coalitions shift. You expect some groups move one way, some groups move the other. But every group moved towards Trump. And that includes especially Hispanics, Latinos. They, in a way, decided the election because so many of them moved away from the Democrats and towards Trump. And this was a big puzzle that's gotten a lot of airplay here.

Why did this happen? And, you know, what some of us have been saying, Greg Lukianoff and I said this in the collier in American mind, is that this oppressor-victum mindset, this idea of seeing everything through the lens of oppressors versus victims, that is very popular on the far left among especially white intellectuals. But Latinos don't think that way. They came to America to pursue their dreams to help their families. They're not here to fight racism. They want to work and raise families.

And so the left's relentless messaging that everything is about race, gender, LGBTQ oppression, didn't resonate with anyone. And then they would put in place policies that would just alienate what we call normies or normal people. So yes, I think that it was sort of the free reign or the excesses. of the left that pushed a lot of just normal people. People are not ideologues. Pushed them to the right, even though Latinos were moving towards a president that's saying such horrible things and doing such horrible things with regard to Latin America. So yes, there's a very bizarre dynamic happening and yes, it's very upsetting. Some of your work, John, reinforces the idea that we are a very, or the United States is a very polarized nation and that it's very

been a very polarized nation. Going back, I guess, probably to the 90s and Newt Gingrich and all this kind of stuff. And that led many of my friends to say that if Trump were to come in and try to be pretty authoritarian and radical with his policies in the Constitution, America is the place where there would be very little compliance, where you would, in fact, the problem would not be that people would sort of go along with autocracy, instead the risk would be that you'd almost lapse into civil war, that this is a country with such a tradition of kind of resistance, polarization, and that the place would tear itself to pieces. But oddly, you know, I'm talking to you from Yale, all my students who are out demonstrating against Gaza are not out demonstrating

against Trump. I've been very struck over the last three months by the fact that there hasn't been what some people propose, this massive uprising of organized resistance against, autocracy. So first, let's start with the rise of autocrists in the U.S. because it is, you know, I'm a centrist, my whole career who's been trying to understand both sides, not rushing to judgment. But what Donald Trump is doing is showing complete disregard for the Constitution, the separation of powers, checks on his power. He seems to feel that if he wants to do something, he can do it. If the courts don't like it, that's their problem. He's already disregarding several court orders, we'll see whether he disregards the Supreme Court. That would be the ultimate

test. And the surprising thing has been that despite his breaking of major constitutional norms, despite his betraying our allies and siding with our enemies, I mean, those shocking things that any American would have thought 20, 30 years ago, this is impossible. This could never happen. Despite that, there's not, you're right, there's not much of an organized resistance. That's in part because the left is in such disarray. It doesn't have any clear leaders or spokesmen. It doesn't have any animating ideas. It is lost philosophically. And I'm hopeful that it will get back on its feet and abandon the oppressor victim mindset and come up with something else. But here's the really alarming thing. There's an essay I read by a Turkish political scientist, I think it is. He looked at democratic

backsliding. You look across the world. There are various organizations that rate how good is the democracy in 100 countries or whatever it is. And the rule one is the scandal. these always win. That's right. That's right. They win on everything, but yet we wouldn't want to live there. Well, whatever. But this essay, I've got it in one of my lit reviews, he finds that the places where you get

Democratic backsliding, where you get a move away from high scores and democracy down to lower scores and the sorts of problems we're having in the U.S. right now, are the countries where there is affective polarization? And what that means is where you hate the other side. and it makes sense psychologically that if you were in a deeply polarized country where you think the other side is evil and my guy wants to break what we thought was the law but it's for a good purpose well then you know I'm with him this is an emergency and there have been tweets from Trump and from Vance to the effect you know that he who I can't remember the exact quote it was

he who saves his country cannot break the law thank you that's it that is a terrifying terrifying quotation. Let's just say that again, he who saves his country cannot break the law. Yeah. Yeah. So that, I mean, if the founding fathers of the United States were to come back and hear that, they'd say, wait a second, what planet are we on? This is not America. So it is extremely alarmed. That's the first part of your question. Authoritarianism, it now seems really could succeed here. And that is a horrifying thought. You know, we are the most powerful nation, the biggest military. Although I just read that China is actually large than ours in most ways. So it's a terrifying thought for us to go rogue and become an authoritarian state.

Now, as for the protesting students, I can't say for sure, but I hope we'll be getting into in a moment, we'll be getting into the anxious generation and why Gen Z is so different. A lot of them are really locked into certain causes and identities. And so protesting Israel is, you know, that fits with the victim. press her mindset. Whereas protesting Trump doesn't, I mean, they don't like him, but it doesn't, it's not really where their social order is. Interesting. We're definitely going to talk about the anxious generation, but can I just go flip back to something you said about Bill Clinton? You said it as an aside about, you know, putting to one side his morality, and that was because of all his sexual shenanigans. That's all I meant by that. I shouldn't have said that. No, no, no,

but it's really interesting because you've written a lot about morality, and it's not been that kind of morality. It's about moral purpose, moral courage, and the values that ought to underpin people in public life. And I can remember during the Clinton period, I saw a lot of Bill Clinton during that time when he was really engulfed in the scandal. And he, I think, deep down, always felt that the American people were able to separate that personal and political. And ultimately, I think he was probably proven right on that, even though it was very difficult for it. Whereas I think what we see now, maybe this goes to your polarization, point. We had Boris Johnson here. America's now got Donald Trump and got him back again. They

strike me as people who are what I would traditionally define as amoral people. And yet lots of moral people, people who do believe in good being a thing that you should pursue, do believe in community, do have values, they vote for them. So does that mean that they separate politicians into a completely different category of moral judgment? I think that they do. It's easy to condemn the morals of a politician when he's on the other side. But it's not so we're much more tolerant of those on our side. I want to bring up, there's a really helpful concept, a scholar with the University of Michigan who wrote a great book on Disgust, and he has a section, William Ian Miller.

He's a section in the book on what he calls moral menials, people who do our moral dirty work. And it's a kind of an insulting term, but it's a really interesting idea that when you hire a lawyer or elect a politician, what is it to be an excellent lawyer? What is it to be an excellent politician? Does that mean that you are extremely honest all the time? No, it does not. Now, of course, you can't, you know, as a lawyer, you can't literally lie, but you do need to kind of mislead. And a lawyer who refuses to mislead, who has the standards of, say, the academy where, oh, no, it's all about, you know, truth and footnotes. A person who is conventionally moral in that sense may not be an excellent lawyer or politician. And so that's part of, I think, the excellence of Bill Clinton. And that's why I think people were, especially certainly on the left and the middle, were willing to forgive it because he was an excellent president in most ways.

And he is, you know, like all of us, he had flaws. And, you know, he was, as many pointed out, he's like a character in a Greek drama. He was an excellent man with very important flaws that ultimately damaged his reputation, but I think he did the country a lot of good. Jonathan, just to develop this idea of morality, because it really goes to the heart of the way that we think about politicians. So there is a very, very strong religious tradition that basically says that you should hold politicians in their public life to exactly the same standards that we hold people to in their private life.

And then there's a sort of the complete opposite tradition, which I guess is the tradition of Machiavelli and others, which essentially say that public life is completely different from private life. And in public life, almost anything goes provided you succeed and win and achieve glory. My instinct as a working politician, though, is that there's a very urgent business about defining what the red lines are within political life. Of course it's true that politicians are necessarily bullshitters and salespeople, and it would be absurd to suggest that they could behave like saints. But equally, we want to say there are certain things which are not acceptable, certain things you don't go along with. And that's just one of the things that worries me about the Republican Party, that in Britain, in the end, the Conservative Party, 21 people resigned when Boris Johnson came in from Parliament, and then ultimately 50 people resigned from. cabinet and brought him down. The party turned against this popular figure. In the United States, that hasn't happened. You get Republican Congresspeople and senators defending themselves saying, well, you know, I'd lose my seat in Senate or Congress if I turned against him. So how do we talk

about what the morality of a politician should be? You've talked about why they might be a bit naughty, but what are the limits to that naughtiness? So let's go back to the origins of moral and political order, which are small communities of human beings that get large enough that they have some leadership, some division of labor. Very small groups are always very egalitarian. There is no leader. But tribalism, eventually feudalism, there are certain ways of living that are very common around the world in history.

And to rise to the top of that is about your personal traits, your willingness to exercise power, all sorts of things. So we have some sort of intuitive ideas about political order. and about respected leaders. And if we look at small communities, imagine the founding communities in Massachusetts, of the pilgrims and various religious communities, there I think we would expect that the leader must share these values. And we are a moral community.

And if the leader doesn't share these values, well, then he's out. So that would be the case in smaller communities where everybody knows everybody and they have a lot in common. Okay, what's the United States? The United States is a gigantic country. where people don't know each other, even our Congress people don't know each other anymore. One of you mentioned Newt Gingrich before, one of the biggest changes in Newt Gingrich wrought on the United States is he changed the voting calendar. He changed the congressional calendar so that everything only happened Tuesday to Thursday. And he specifically said to all the incoming first year congresspeople, don't move your family to D.C.

You'll get co-opted. You'll make friends with them. just, you know, stay in your district, fly in on Tuesday morning, fly out Thursday evening or, you know, and then they would room with each other. They would literally just, you know, share an apartment with each other. They stopped knowing the other side. And that, David Brooks has pointed out, that really, that made it all come apart. There's no more personal glue. Whereas the UK is comparatively a very small country in which, as I understand it, most of your legislators at least have a place in London, or they can get there very quickly. They know each other. And so you have a lot more of that. An excellent politician is excellent at dealing with people. And they're able to use

those skills. In the United States, we've lost that. Our Congress is just a, it's a, it's trench warfare. On Gingrich, John, was that deliberate? Was that, was that part of a strategy to say, I want this, I want to polarize these people? Yes. Now, of course, the Democrats had controlled Congress for so long at that point by 1994, 1995. And they abused their power. And they treated the Republicans. I don't want to make it sound like, oh, Democrats were lovely. And then the evil Republicans came in. There are reasons why Gink, which was mad as hell. And he felt that Republicans would come to Washington. You know, he hoped they were going to do something. But then they just kind of, you know, wanted to get invited to the right dinner party. Well, I don't know what the reasoning was.

But yes, it was very deliberate. He wanted a much more confrontational Republican Party. And he created it. And that was just in the House, not the Senate, but during the 90s, the norms change. And this is when we really have the period of culture war. There's a great book by James Hunter in 1992. I think it was called culture war. It really heats up in the 90s so that by the time we get to the George W. Bush era, it is very much left, you know, left versus right. And what that means is that if, again, back to what we're saying before, if my leader, you know,

if he does a few bad things, I don't care because we've got to beat them. And so just to close this, there's a dictum I keep returning to it's a Bedouin saying, me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousin, me, my brother and cousin against the stranger. And when all of politics becomes left versus right, becomes Democrats versus Republicans, it doesn't really matter what your leaders do. And I think we're really seeing that with MAGA. John, one of the big thing of your work down the years is this, is this the thing of happiness.

And maybe this will be our bridge into the anxious generation. But before we get there, can I just ask you this? Do you think that politics and politicians think enough about happiness, either their own or more importantly, the happiness of the people that they're representing and working for? I don't get the sense that politicians think about their own happiness. I really have a lot of respect for them in that the ones I've known, they work incredibly hard. Their lives are very stressful. At least in the U.S., Congress people don't really even make enough to live on.

So I don't think people going into it are thinking much about their own happiness. And a lot of them end up being burned out and unhappy. It's a miserable business. And I respect them for going into it. As for thinking about the happiness of their constituents. Well, I think the UK kind of pioneered that, you know, under the labor government in the 90s. You were the first to have, like, I think, a nudge unit. And I've been part of positive psychology since the late 90s.

And one of the big ideas, or Richard Laird, you have a wonderful economist, Richard Laird. So Laird and Marty Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania sort of pioneered the idea that GDP, of course it's been long criticized as leaving out most of the things that matter in life. They really prioritized the idea of what, let's try to quantify sort of gross national happiness. Which they do in Bhutan as their main metric, just that Bhutan is a little bit smaller than Britain. But at least Britain gave it a try. And under Obama, I think there was a little bit of an effort. It didn't get very far.

So I think there are certainly elements of policy, and I think this is going to be more on the left. There's more utilitarian ethos that the point of government is to raise the standard of living and raise the well-being of people. But again, in peacetime, in a well-functioning democracy, that could rise up. But when everybody thinks that it's an existential threat, the other side is an existential threat, we don't care about happiness. We need to defeat evil. John, I was yesterday watching a doctor. documentary on a factory that closed in Dayton, Ohio. It was a GM factory where people were earning $25 an hour in 2008, and then it reopens as a Chinese-owned factory where people

are earning $12 and eventually $14 an hour, you know, 10, 15 years later, right? And it went very closely into the lives of these people. And firstly, it looks physically very bleak. You know, their incomes have halved or more than halved in real terms, they're struggling to meet their rent. They frequently have health problems. They're frequently overweight. Many of them are not that young, and they're working in quite tough physical work in very hot conditions in a steel factory, moving sheets of glass around. They're being forced by the new Chinese management to work ever harder, be ever more productive, put in ever more hours. And one of the guys says, you know, daughter is working in a nail bar and she's making $5 more an hour than he's making,

moving this stuff around. And I guess, obviously, I'm watching this and I'm thinking somewhere at the heart of the Trump Coalition are these people. It's such a sort of contrast with this idea of the United States as the wealthiest society on earth with the fastest economic growth of the developed world and all this kind of stuff. Can you just talk a little bit? Because I'm sort of getting there from happiness about what those lives are like, what politicians ought to be thinking about why we apparently failed so magnificently over the last 20, 30 years, to provide decent, meaningful lives for people. Well, you use the key word decency. I got a contract to write a book in 2014 titled Three Stories About Capitalism, the Moral Psychology of Economic Life.

going to be a follow-up to the righteous mind, which focused on social left-right. I was going to look at economic left-right. Why does the left and right in the economy, they have different economics textbooks, different values, different beliefs about what you do when there's a recession. And so I started working on that book. I ended up stopping because universities blew up, America blew up, I went in different directions. And this all went insane around 2015, 2016. But in any case, the key idea of that book on capitalism is going to be that a good free market society, is one that's able to maximize or raise both dynamism and decency. Now, dynamism and decency are not opposites, but they tend to be inversely correlated.

And each society decides. And so, I know, in Japan and France and Europe in general, they have gone all in for decency. And we look at them and, oh, look how humane it is, but then they don't get economic growth. In America, we've gone all in for dynamism. And we figure, you know, a lot of people are going to have miserable life. and not have enough money to retire. But look, we get much more rising GDP. And in the long run, rising GDP does help people. And I think the reason why so many people look to Scandinavia is that my book was going to come to this conclusion that while they're not quite as dynamic as the U.S.,

they're actually kind of close. In Europe, they're actually pretty dynamic and they're very high decency. So it's possible. Now, those are small countries. They used to have homogeneous populations. They don't as much anymore. They had a lot going for them that allowed them to do this. So that's the background. I'll just also say that, yes, those people you talked about, those used to be the core constituency of the Democrats, the working man. It was the working man's party. And this is just one of the shocking things and one of the reasons why the left is in such disarray. If the working class now votes Republican, if the Democrats are just picking up the coastal elites among people with a four-year college degree, the Democrats are cleaning up, among everyone else the Republicans are

cleaning up. This is a very sad state of affairs for the Democrats. When you talk about decency and dynamism there, so let's flip forward to your latest book, The Anxious Generation, which I don't know about the Anxious Generation, but I'm not Gen Z, but it made me quite anxious as well, reading it, I must tell you. But it's interesting that that context of dynamism and decency, because what you're arguing for is decency in our approach to the consequences of this tech revolution. And I think we're seeing very little decency from the people who are driving that revolution

because it is making them phenomenally wealthy and powerful. And that is something it feels to me is kind of a bit of a genie out of the bottle. I'm not sure how we get it back in. Yes, I fully agree. Technology is wonderful. Technology is amazing. The internet was amazing. In the 90s, we, you know, I think,

You and I are old enough to remember when the internet first came in. I guess we all are. And it was miraculous. It was as if God came down and said, do you want to know everything instantly? Do you remember the first time you used a browser? You type in a question and the answer comes back in one second. Like, it was magic. And so we were all techno-optimists.

And the early internet had a lot of promise. But then things got darker in the beginning in the early 21st century. You get a few massive companies that come to dominate. Now, Google, I think, has been not despotic. Google, I think, overall, has been a huge boon to humanity. No company is perfect. But I don't get the sense that we're not hearing whistleblowers coming out of Google saying, oh, my God, all the terrible things going on.

Whereas with meta, we are over and over again. People know the company say they've been warned. We have whistleblowers, Arturo Bejar, Francis Hogan. People who worked in the trust and safety teams who say, you know, look, Behar found that I think one in eight teenagers, on Instagram were being approached inappropriately sexually. They were getting inappropriate sexual approaches, one in eight. Not per year, per week, per week.

And by how pointed out, you know, we could end this if we just gave this reporting mechanism. I mean, there are ways to greatly reduce the predation. I mean, platforms that introduce strangers to children, this is insane. The companies ought to be very, very careful about this, but they're not. So, yes, I do think that the three giant companies that own our children's child, hood, and those are meta, snap, and TikTok. Those three companies dominate their attention, take up most of their free time. And we know that from insides, from memos that get brought out in lawsuits, we know that they

are designed for addiction. Whereas, you know, the early Internet was not. And so, yes, I'm in the Business and Society program of NYU Stern, and this is, I think, the biggest business and society issue out there. There are many others. but the idea that a few companies developed a business model, the advertising-based business model, which requires them or pushes them, I should say, to maximize time, not maximize the well-being of the kids that they are addicting and of whose childhood they are taking. John, we can keep developing this because I think it's incredibly interesting to all of us. And just to remind a listener, Mehta is, of course, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, I guess. and we can move on a little bit to X and Twitter as well a little bit later.

But before we get deeper into that, just talk us through the way in which this connects to politics. Because I guess there's a coincidence, isn't what seems to be. The moment at which these platforms are really getting going in the kind of mid-2000s then creates the Facebook Revolution, the Arab Spring, and then we're into. Modi, Putin, Trump pretty soon afterwards. And it's difficult not to feel that this is an incredibly important causative explanation. But overdo you on that. Sure. Let's just trace through the history of how the Internet changed and then we'll understand why

democracy and mental health plunge at the same time around 2012. So the early Internet, as we said, was open. There were people were utopian. Oh, you know, it's going to be the best thing ever for democracy. And then we get modern social media. In 2003, 2004, we get Facebook and MySpace and Friendster. And at first, these are very benign. It's like, here's my page.

I can link to your page. There was no news feed. There was no algorithms. There was no like button. It was just a way to connect people. And that was pretty benign. And this connects people in ways that do seem likely to help democracy. But the big innovations were as follows.

In 2007, the iPhone comes out. It's not until a few years later. that you can have social media on your iPhone. So the iPhone's also very benign at first. In 2009, the like button and the retweet button come out. And these are the transformative innovations. They're small, but they completely change the nature of online life. The retweet button, of course, is the definition of virality.

It's not just that I'm calling you up and telling you something. It's that I can put it out to my thousand followers. And if a tenth of them put it out to their thousand followers, whatever it is, you know, you can reach millions in a day. Also, the like button allows me to show Facebook what I really like, and that allows them to customize a feed to me. So the internet, over the next few years, 2009, 2012, it becomes super viral and super addictive. It wasn't like that in 2008. So now we have a much more addictive super viral internet.

And now the possibility of shared knowledge collapses, the possibility of getting a story out or rebutting a story, because now we have fragmented. attention. You know, in California, they have 100 years of more of experience fighting wildfires. They know everything about the wind conditions, the humidity. They know everything. They've got it all mapped out. And still, they get overwhelmed as we saw. Now, what if one day God said, you know, that Earth planet that I made with 20% oxygen, let's just bump it up to 80%? Let's just see what happens. Let's make it 80% oxygen on Earth. What would happen? Any spark would turn into a conflagration. And that's essentially what happened. When we, when we all got hyper-connected at first, there was the possibility of some virality. But once you get the like

button, the retweet button, addictive social media, everyone glued to their phone on Twitter, on Facebook, political life has changed. And in democracy, as Noah Yuval Harari says, democracy is a conversation. It's always been a conversation. And when that conversation suddenly moves from talking to people that you know to fighting in the Roman Coliseum where everybody wants to see blood, that is equivalent to changing the Earth's atmosphere from 20% oxygen to 80% oxygen. So what happened? Fires raged politically around the world. Donald Trump could never have gotten elected if it wasn't for the dynamics of Twitter and his ability to offend and be aggressive on Twitter. And at the same time, teen mental health collapses

because the phone in their hand is no longer like a flip phone or a cell phone that they use to call or text, it now becomes basically the thing that sits in front of their face most of the time. Half of our teenagers in the U.S., and I think it's the same in the U.K., half say that they're online almost constantly. The phone is always in their hand. It's always, they're never fully present. This is a transformation of human sociology and human consciousness beyond anything that has ever happened in the history of our species. This is equivalent to going from 20% oxygen to 80% oxygen, and our democracy and our next generation are really hurting because of it.

Quick break, and then back for more. This episode is sponsored by HP. Now, Rory, I hear that Windows 10 is finally being put out to pasture this year. It is, and something pretty relevant for you, Alistair, given what I've seen as some of your technology. It's going on October the 14th, to be exact. And after that, Microsoft is going to stop supporting some of those old laptops. of yours. No updates, no security patches. So if you were still using it or a business was still

using Windows 10, it would be really exposed to cyber threats, for example. It would be like locking the door, but leaving the key in the lock. So it's time to move on and HP are making that refreshingly straightforward. Yes, they are. HP's latest business PCs comes with Windows 11 Pro as standard. They're faster, more secure, built for the AI tools, which are already reshaping the way we work. And you don't have to figure out all in your own. HP's business advisors help you pick the right kit. So no baffing jargon, just practical advice. And here's the bonus. Restis Politics listeners get 10% off business PCs at HP.com using the code Trip10 term supply. So unlock efficiency and innovation upgrade to Windows 11 Pro PCs with HP and get 10% discount. Visit

HP.com slash politics to find out more. Hello, I'm Gordon Carrera, National Security Journalist. And I'm David McCloskey. CIA analyst turned spy novelist. Together, where the co-hosts of another goalhanger show called The Rest is Classified, where we bring you the best stories from the world of secrets and spas. We have just released a series on the decades-long battle between the CIA and Osama bin Laden, and this week we are stepping into the devastation of the 9-11 terror attacks to understand how Osama bin Laden was able to carry out such a plot right under the nose of the CIA. It was a moment that changed global politics forever, shifting the focus of spy agencies away from nation states towards hunting for terrorists

and understanding the extremist ideology that drove them. We will then go into the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden, which culminated in a dramatic raid at his compound in Pakistan in 2011, which killed the world's most wanted terrorist. So if all of this sounds good, we've got a clip waiting for you at the end of the episode. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's

largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash.

The rest is science. Listen, I've read your book and I agree with it. I'm just going to put the opposite point of view. Please. Yes, hit me with the hardest criticisms you've read. So Candice Rogers, Psychology Professor University of California, says she's reviewed 40 studies, which came out in the same year, and found no cause-effect relationship between smartphone ownership,

social media, and adolescence, mental health. And she, I think people like her point to things like guns, drugs, exposure to violence, sexual abuse, opioids, economic inequality, social isolation, etc. We interviewed, Rory and I interviewed, one of your predecessors of our interview, is Nick Clegg, former British Deputy Prime Minister, who went on to be Zuckerberg's right-hand man, and he was absolutely adamant. There is no evidence of the link. So tell me the evidence of the link.

Sure. So first, the idea that crime and racism and other things are what caused this spite, So they're saying that things got so terrible in Obama's second term and they were fine in Obama's first term. What the hell changed that? So it can't explain why it all happens around 2012 and why it happens around the world. It's not just the U.S. I don't think that in Iceland and Australia, crime and racism suddenly spiked in 2012. That's the first thing.

Second thing is this repeated claim that there's no evidence. This is a bizarre claim. First of all, we have signed confessions practically by the perpetrators. We have their own words. They say that they are destroying the ability to attend. They are causing it. So they say what they are doing, and they prove this with their own actions. A lot of them, most of them don't let their kids on the stuff.

They send their kids to the Waldorf school where they don't have these devices. So that's not evidence. A confession by the perpetrators is not evidence. And then there's eyewitness testimony. What do the kids say? the kids point to, now maybe not the younger kids, they're excited to get on these things, but we interview Gen Z in the 20s. We have surveys. Gen Z in the 20s. They regret what happened. Half of them in one of our surveys said they wish TikTok had never been invented. There's a lot of regret.

So there are many different kinds of evidence of harm. Now, let's turn to why is it that the researchers can't agree? And here's the reason. When Candice Rogers says, look at all these studies, she says sometimes there's a positive, sometimes a negative effect. All of those studies are what we call blender studies. Okay, so a blender study. If you want your kids to eat spinach, they don't like spinach, but you put it in a blender with a lot of other stuff, and then they don't notice it, and it goes down. The same thing happens with social media research. So Instagram, whenever you zoom in on, first of all, when you zoom in from screen time

to social media for girls, the correlations increase. So this is not random noise. There is a repeated pattern of the data. Instagram in particular is closely associated with depression, anxiety, and eating disorders in girls. So that's the spinach, let's say. That's like the thing that you want to. I'm not saying they're trying to hide. I'm just saying it ends up getting hidden.

So Instagram has that connection. Snapchat isn't making kids anxious and depressed. Snapchat is making it easy for them to buy drugs that contain fentanyl. Snapchat is making it easy for extortionists to get to them and then extort them after they get a naked photo of them. And those kids who are extorted, and we're talking literally in the ballpark of a million a year, based on something we learned from internal communications, all of these kids are now traumatized. They're horrified, but what happened to them. I think this counts as harm. But the hours you spend on Snapchat aren't going to show up as depression and anxiety. Oh, and then TikTok is especially destructive to the human capacity for attention. TikTok is making the whole planet stupider. We can come back to that because it's hugely important for democracy. So you take these three platforms that have different harmful effects, let's blend them all together. And our only independent variable is the hours per day that you spend on these platforms. Some kids spend six hours. Some kids spend three hours. So we're going to blend it all together. We're going to blend

boys and girls together. And we're going to blend all the well-being outcomes together. And even still, you do get correlations. The more time you spend, people who are heavy users always turn out to be doing less well. It's just that the correlation is around. point one, R equals point one. And Candice, Odgers, and others say, oh, it's only point one. You know, therefore it's not big enough. We can ignore it. But wait a second. When you zoom in, the harm is there. A million kids are getting extorted. Dozens are committing suicide. So I think the evidence of harm is coming from multiple sources and the claim that there is no evidence. They're free to debate it with me. But the claim that there is no evidence is just

not tenable in 2025. John. Final thing on this, presumably one of the challenge, is that it's not that easy to get into the back of these algorithms and work out exactly what X is now doing, what Facebook is now doing. And there was a general optimistic idea that what we would try to do, particularly in these more political, you know, Twitter, Facebook platforms is bring in content moderation, adapt the algorithms to make it less likely for harmful social and political effects to follow. And those things seem to have been dismantled relatively recently. So just what's been going on in the last few months in terms of our ability to actually penetrate the back end of these things and their willingness to actually moderate the content and deal with these problems?

That's a red herring. That's a path that's not very fruitful. So the great media theorists of the 20th century like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, they kept telling us over and over again, the medium is the message. Don't focus on the content of what's on television. focus on the fact that television has now changed the way we live so that we're not outside seeing our neighbors, we're sitting in the sofa. So the medium is the message. And what Zuckerberg and the others want to focus on is the content

because then they can say, oh, but Senator, we remove a billion pieces of harmful information a year. We have best, you know, they want to keep the focus on content, not on design. The reason why these companies are culpable is not because someone posts a video on why you should kill yourself. The reason that these companies are culpable, I believe, is because their algorithms will send that to a kid who expresses any sort of interest in something vaguely related. They're culpable because they have designed the platform for addiction. They're culpable because they are connecting strangers with children. So they want to keep the focus on content moderation, but that is a red herring. Think of it this way.

You want to send your kid to a summer camp, let's say. In the United States, we send our kids to summer camps. Florida and Australia are the major places on earth where there are shark attacks. Okay, so suppose there are three different summer camps along the coast of Florida. And one of them says, we pull 50 sharks a week out of the water. And the next one, oh, we pull 100 sharks a week. We're doing such a good job on content moderation. The next one, oh, we pull a thousand sharks out of the water every week.

Now, which one do you want to send your kid to? And I think the answer is none of them. But now suppose there's a fourth camp down the road where they say, we put up a shark net. We have a bay. We have an area. We put up a shark net. There are no sharks in our waters. And that's a design choice.

And what the platforms keep doing is saying, oh, but we've spent, look, Senator, we spend more than anyone else on pulling sharks out of the water. No, this is a design choice. And, you know, Pinterest is a nice example of a company that they have a lot of teenagers on it. They put up a shark fence. They said, you know what? If you're under 16, you can't talk to strangers. There's just none of those social features. if you're under 16.

So these are design choices. I don't want to even talk about content moderation. Yes, we have to have it, but it's a red herring. The other thing you do in The Anxious Generation is you link it to the previous book you wrote about coddling of the mind. And you say we're overprotecting our children in the real world whilst underprotecting them online. And I don't know if you're aware, because I know it was a Netflix thing, this series about adolescence. Oh, I watched it. It was so powerful.

And that sparked an extraordinary debate in the UK. and I think in other parts of the world, it's been Netflix's biggest hit for a long time. So I wanted your take on it, and I just wanted, because they feel, I guess what you're saying is parents are now so scared about their children being harmed

that they don't want them to do the old things that we did growing up, sort of just wandering around, getting into trouble or not getting into trouble, but just sort of being out there free and playing, now to being utterly addicted and obsessed with our phones, and kids getting, thinking that all,

All of their lives are in there. But as adolescence showed, we have no idea about what they're looking at, the extent to which they're looking at it, and the impact that might have. That's right. I think adolescence was so powerful. Now, keeping in mind the critics, the critics say this is just another moral panic and pieces like adolescence or my book, they're just stoking a groundless moral panic. There's no problem.

There's nothing to fear. These poor parents, they shouldn't have to worry, but we're making them worry unnecessarily. That's the counterargument. The reason why my book did so well, and the reason why the Netflix series is going around the English-speaking world, is because we all saw it. Almost everyone who's a parent saw it. I mean, the first time you give your kid a touchscreen and you realize they're just so drawn to it. And then when you take it away, they get irritable after, you know. So we've seen it from the time they were little through the time they were adolescence.

And if we haven't seen it in our own kids, we've seen it in our sister's kids or our friends' kids. So something weird is happening, and the data in Chapter 1 of the anxious generation, the data is stunning. I mean, these hockey stick curves, there was no trend in mental illness from the late 90s through 2010, 2011. And all of a sudden, in so many countries, it goes through the roof. Recently, we've learned that the human ability to pay attention is doing the same thing. We're losing the ability to pay attention. It started around 2012. So everyone sees it.

And that's why I think the Netflix documentary touched a nerve. also because as you said, we're very careful about what our kids do outside and we always think instantly what's the worst thing that could happen. Yes, my child wants to, you know, and I have a 15-year-old daughter in New York City and an 18-year-old son who's in college. And, you know, it took us a while to accept, okay, my daughter wants to ride a city bike around the city. That's great independence. But we had to get over like, yes, she could get hit by a car. Well, that's true. She could. She could. But we have to balance those fears. And we all rode bicycles around when we were kids. And we haven't been doing that online.

Online, we had the idea. And this comes across very clearly in adolescence. I thought they were safe. I thought he was safe. He was up in his room. What could happen to him? We don't know what's happening. And if you try to find out, I mean, yes, you could have your child's password.

You could look at what's being posted. But they can have 10 other accounts that they make, you know, that parents can't get to it. As long as kids can get to a browser, they can be talking with strangers around the world. And you'll never know. And so a beautiful thing about the Netflix series was that it wasn't so heavy-handed. It wasn't like, this is the evil thing that caused the murder. I mean, this is all complicated. Adolescence is always complicated.

But it's hard enough as it was, especially those around 11, 12, 13, that's when bullying peaks. It's hard enough as it was. And now you put it all online where it's super fast, super viral, the cruelty of the cruelty of, humans when they are separated and they don't have the face-to-face, the cruelty that comes out. So the idea of putting our children in this cruelty factory and saying, you guys work it out, it's not working well. John, this has been wonderful, and we could obviously keep going for a very long time. But my final question is to encourage you to try to push maybe five, ten years into where you

think societies like the US and the UK are going, because my, if I'm going to be gloomy, let's take the worst case scenario, and I think it's relatively plausible, these companies will manage for a whole series of reasons to avoid being regulated. And despite your best wishes over the next five, six years, the likelihood is a new generation will come on. And not just our kids will be spending a lot of time. A lot of us as we get more anxious will think, geez, I'm pretty depressed today. I don't have to look at my TikTok screen or it will cheer me up. It'll distract me, right? So let's try to put this stuff together, accelerate it and think about where you think our societies and our politics might go over the next five, ten years in the worst case scenario. Well, the politics, it's very hard to see us getting off this path and the worst case scenario is really frightening. So I'm not even going to talk about it. That's the subject of my next book, which will be called Life After Babel, adapting to a world we may never again. and share. And it's, yeah, I don't want to even talk about it. John, can I just say, Rory and I are in veteran bookpluggers, but I admire the way you

plugged your current book, your past books, your next book and a book that you'd ever wrote. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And John, we would love to have you back for your, for that next book, the After Babel book. Okay. All right. It's a deal. But even though I'm gloomy about the future of American democracy at least and possibly democracy around the world in the social media age and the AI age, which is going to supercharge it. I'm actually very optimistic that we're going to make huge changes to protect children, and here's why. So in the book I proposed, in the anxious generation, I propose four norms. I wrote the book as an American assuming that we will never get help

from Congress, that our Congress has never done a single thing to protect children ever on the internet. And I'm assuming it never will. Okay, but we can still do a lot of things ourselves. And so here are the four norms. No smartphone before high school, before age 14, let's say. This is not a law. I'm not saying ban them. I'm just saying we should have a norm. You don't give your kid a smartphone or an iPad when they're two, three, four, or five.

Wait until high school to give them a touchscreen device. No social media until 16. Now, this week can, I'm doing it as a norm with my kids. It's hard because my daughter says she's the only one who doesn't have Snapchat in school. But you can do it. And my daughter is going to be much better off for it. That's the one where we do need law. And Australia has come to our rescue.

Australia has passed a law. They're going to raise the age to 16 and require the companies to enforce it. So I think many countries are going to be following Australia on that. And the UK, I think, is likely to. So no smartphone before 14, no social media before 16, phone free schools. And this is happening at lightning speed around the United States and around the world. This one we're winning on. Very soon, most students will not be able to text or watch videos during class or even between classes.

they're going to actually talk and laugh and play with other kids. And the fourth is far more free play responsibility and independence. And this one is harder because parents have to overcome their fears. But there's a clear movement. This is happening. So I think the four norms are actually advancing. But here's the problem. You asked me to prognosticate.

Here's the problem. The people who are really driving it and are going to live this are primarily the educated, married families. where you've got two parents, you've got some resources, you can hire a babysitter, you can do things other than just give them a phone. Whereas what we know is that parents who are from lower social class or single parent, single parent, or black and Hispanic, all of those groups, their kids are spending a lot more time, more like 10 to 12 hours a day, several hours more than other groups. So they're already spending huge amounts of time.

And that's in part because if you're a single mother with three kids and you're working, just give them each a device and they sit quietly. It's okay. It seems okay. So I think we're going to see a huge social class divergence and we're going to see a lot more wealthy kids with college educated parents having a more analog childhood, delaying addiction, letting their brains develop, developing the ability to concentrate, restoring the ability to read a book. A lot of kids, a lot of teenagers and college students now can't read a book because they get distracted too easily. So I think we're going to see some social bifurcation as we saw with junk food. You know, junk food and obesity, you know, for a long time, obesity has been inversely correlated

with income and with social class and education, I should say. So I think we will see that. But I think the evidence is coming in. We're bringing a lot of evidence to bear on this. All parents want the best for the children. All parents can see what's happening to kids. So I think we're actually going to make a huge amount of progress. If we start now, if we do a lot in 2025, within two years, AI is going to be so entangled

with our society. It's not yet, but in two years it will be. And AI is going to make everything super addictive, super powerful. Tech is going to be much more of a master. But we have to get back to the point where tech is a servant, not a master. Well, it's my last question, John, and thank you very much for all your time. And this is again, I'm afraid, sorry, sorry to the listener, this is all so heavy, but it's fascinating. You also say in your book, and this goes back to the point you made about TikTok, making us stupider, you talk about this whole ecosystem threatening the stability of democracy. I know it's a big subject, but can we maybe just close off on that?

What do you mean by that? Yeah. Well, so as Tristan Harris has pointed out, he's the head of the Center for Humane Technology. As he has pointed out, these digital technologies are making authoritarian's better authoritarian. That is China with its social credit system and its instant face recognition. China is able to control its population in ways that Mao and Hitler, and Stalin could never even have dreamed of. So the technology is a huge boon to authoritarian.

And since democracy is a conversation, and that conversation is easily disrupted, you know, the Russians have been messing with America since the 50s, trying to make us think we hate each other, race wars, religious wars, vandalizing synagogues, doing all sorts of things to make us distrust each other. Now they don't have to come here. They are extremely good at sitting in their headquarters in St. Petersburg and planting false stories and making us hate each other. So in so many ways, these digital technologies and unregulated social media is the best friend of authoritarians, both to maintain their populations and to destabilize democracies and interfere with elections. This is one of the reasons why I am pessimistic. I think the

future of democracy looks dark. We need to rise up now and start fighting for it. We need to recognize the threat, the way that these platforms are pursuing their advertising-based, business models, which are bringing down not just our children and grandchildren, but our democracies. As long as we're fighting each other so much in the U.S., we're not in a good position to do that. But that's what we have to do if we want our grandchildren to live in democracies, not authoritarian countries. Yeah, because my big worry about Trump is rather than challenging the way that Russia and China and others have used all this, that he's thinking this could be very, very, very helpful to me as I make America authoritarian again. It's an absolutely terrifying prospect.

It was unthinkable 10 years ago. Yeah. Well, John, it's been great to talk to you. Thank you very much indeed. And good luck with all the next books that you're going to write. Well, thank you so much, Alistair and Burry. And if anyone wants more information, go to Anxiousgeneration.com or my substack afterbabel.com. There, I plugged everything.

Oh, this is great. Great to see you. Thanks, you too. Thank you. Bye-bye. So, Alas, I was really excited to do that and actually quite unusually in terms of an interview. I was actually taking down notes desperately in certain little bits that he was saying. Because, you know, I do really believe this.

I think that, of course, there are profound economic and social problems in our society. But the way that I think about it is that we're getting some of the features of fascism, the 20s and 30s, but actually our economic conditions are not like that. You know, we don't have people pushing around wheelbarrows full of, you know, billion dollar Reichsmark notes. We don't have the Frye Cor and the streets and all that kind of horror. And yet it feels like that. And why does it feel like that? Partly, I guess, because of social media. And what I loved is the way that he explained how it works and how each platform is doing a slightly different thing. And if we'd had more time, maybe, you know, if we'd go in back,

someday, you know, we tend to focus on Facebook and X because they're the political platforms. They're the ones that people campaign on there where political messages go. He's of course explaining that there's a whole background world of things which aren't primarily political, but which are reinforcing many of the things that contribute to these problems. When the book arrived, you know, and you've got this ability to read 27 books at the same time. I very much, you start at page what did you go through to the end? that I, and I like to, if I'm into a book. Now, and I actually quite like it when I get a book,

and I sort of get the gist of it very quickly. Then I feel I can skim read and just plow through it and what have you. I found with this that I had to read it sort of very quite intently, and he sets it out very, very well. I mean, there's one bit here. He talks about the four foundational harms, sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention, fragmentation, and addiction. Now, they're all in their own ways.

very, very big subjects. He then goes through them. He does put in, you know, a lot of research. He's obviously coming from a perspective. He has a perspective on this. But I just, I tell you what it made me think. So my kids are now all in their 30s. He's not even talking about that generation.

He's talking about the next generation, a younger generation. And so the point I'm making is that then there will be other technologies, which will then hook in the next generation, in even more sophisticated ways. So it just made me worry about the state that the kids are growing up today, but it also made me worry about this point about democracy. It made me worry that, and you see it with Musk,

and we talk a lot about Musk, as you say, because he's political, but you see it now with Zuckerberg, you see it with Bezos. These are people who have landed themselves in these incredible positions of unimaginable wealth, which is now translated into a sense of power, both of which they want to protect,

And when you have that level of wealth and power, it is easier for you to protect something for longer, even if it is wrong. And that's why I think the stuff that he says about morality is interesting as well. And that's how it's interesting. He didn't go for Google, did he? No. No, that was interesting. My final thought is that just how good he was. And in a world in which we're often obviously bashing the United States and terrified.

it was a reminder of one of the things that's always made me so impressed and proud of America and American universities. I mean, that really is a public intellectual and not of a sort of kind of traditional kind of French philosopher sort. It's somebody who is a serious tenured academic, but who's able to communicate and use that kind of very analytical, precise mind. You know, there's division into four things, the research, to make a really important political point and make a really important political point and make a as think and funny, I just, I love it.

And I also think, you know, one of the nice things in leading is that we can sometimes balance active politicians at the Bill Clinton's the world with these figures

like Jonathan Haidt who are able to frame things so clearly and help us think and who, as I say, make me take notes while I'm listening to them. Yeah, but also he does it

from a position of not disrespecting politics per se. I thought it was interesting what he said about Clinton. His first reference to him was about his morality. But then actually he talked about how he saw him as a great president who'd inspired him and got him interested in this stuff and what have you.

And no, I think he's a, and the TED talk I mentioned, he's also very funny. He can be very, very funny. And this is what's so tragic about what Trump is trying to do to the universities. To take, to undermine people like that who have original thinkers, interested in research, interested in fact, interested in big arguments about the state of the world. but unless you think Donald Trump is a great guy and the best president who ever lived,

then there is no place for you in America. And what he reminded me, it reminded me, I remember I told you when I was in Paris and we did the live stream on the pattern on the tariffs, and I told you about the American couple I met who apologized for being American. You've got to remember through all of this, because Trump is so dominant in the global media debate, Trump is not America. Trump is a part of America,

and he's brilliantly strategic. in a genius kind of way, co-opted all of the people who might be part of his America, but that is not the whole of America. So more, more height, less Trump, I say. Let me try this, more height, less hate. Oh, Rory. He was almost as good as his plugging. Very good. See you soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.

I'm Gordon Carrera and I'm David McCloskey. together where the co-hosts of another goalhanger show called The Rest is Classified. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on. When I look back on it now, you still see that, you know, there's plans, there's memoranda, there's notifications, there's all these things. But they're never actually executed. They never actually kind of pull the trigger on anything, do they? I'm a little bit of two minds on this because I agree with you that the theme of this episode

really is a series of missed opportunities to get Osama bin Laden prior to 9-11. Yeah. But we should also note that once Tenet and the CIA understand that Osama bin Laden is coming for us, in particular after the East Africa bombings, there is a push to improve our collection and our understanding of al-Qaeda pretty significantly. I mean, there's a bunch of human sources who get recruited in this period, There's a lot more technical collection. Alex Station is beefed up to more than 40 people.

There's a bunch of connections with foreign partners on Al-Qaeda that hadn't existed before. I mean, interestingly, there's a PDB, President's Daily Brief, in December, December the 4th of 1998, which is titled, quote, bin Laden preparing to hijack U.S. aircraft and other attacks. And so there's a lot of strategic warning, I think you could say, about what Al-Qaeda is up to. And yet there's an inability, I think, to translate that into practical efforts and operations to stop these attacks and just stop Al-Qaeda from ultimately carrying out 9-11. If you want to hear the full episode, listen to the rest is classified wherever you get your podcasts.