The Ledger, every show

“And this means we have, we might have a generation that's afraid of, afraid to take risks, afraid to Play with ideas afraid to challenge dominant ideas. it's gonna lead to a lot more conformity and a lot more, a lot less creativity.”

“I've heard from a number of people in journalism, the arts, and media, and tech. In those four industries, it seems as though the organizations are changing to accommodate the students.”

“If you're a homo sapien, you evolved for group combat, you evolved for confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. We're not really evolved to be academics or scientists searching for a truth in an unbiased way. We evolved to basically, you know, CYA and win in…”

“For academics, I, you know, we used to be able to be provocative, and in academic seminars and at conferences, we could be provocative. We could raise hypotheses that could even be, you know, upsetting to some people. But that kind of ended in the last few yea…”

“The five best candidates for being the taste buds of the moral sense, or the moral foundations were, Care, you know, care and compassion because we're mammals. We nurture our young. Fairness, reciprocity versus cheating. We're all sensitive to that. Loyalty, y…”

“TikTok and then YouTube shorts are the ones copying it you know, Instagram reels. They're uniquely horrible.”

“Adolescents are, they, you know, 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.”

“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.”

“Businesses have to actually make money, and so by 20, 22, a lot of businesses were rolling it back. They're saying, whoa, this stuff is terrible. This is not making life better for members of minorities. This is actually just turning everyone against everyone.…”

“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…”

“Conservatism in every era is a reaction to the excesses of the left.”

“And I guarantee you, the great majority are gonna pick option one, because they do want to grow.”

“Twitter in particular, Twitter is the worst here, but it's also on Facebook and Slack and other channels.”

“It's not the Democratic Party that's stupid. The Democratic Party Has moderates and the far left and guess who wins? Usually the moderates. So the democratic party is a functional party. They have debates. The moderates usually win.”

“The Chinese have much more focused interests. Of course they want us to think well of China. They want to suppress anyone who criticizes China. And they're probably in the long run a lot more competent and capable and persistent than the Russians.”

“They won't do anything about it because if they do keep kids off below 13, then the kids will just go to TikTok. So, you know, I understand why Instagram doesn't do much about underage use but it's a trap.”

“The rates of self-harm, that is kids who are hospitalized because they cut themselves, that, that's for girls only. Boys are not changing on that. That goes way up in the same pattern, and then it's also suicide. The boys' suicide rate in the United States is …”

“Kids learn best from feedback, from experience. And beginning, especially in the 19 nineties in the United States, and I think perhaps in Canada too we began really overprotecting kids. That is not giving them unsupervised time where they could learn from thei…”

“And people who were born before 1982, the answer is always six plus or minus a year. We used to always let kids out outside with other kids at the age of six or seven, and then I ask just kids born after 1995, and the answer is usually between 10 and 14.”

“But what a call out culture does, and this was Manning and Campbell's point, Is that it incentivizes people. It gives them status for finding errors in the speech of others. And it's remarkable how often that error is a single word. It's not usually the argume…”

“Because once we had social media, all the reputations are on the line all the time, but not in a consistent or honest way. That is anything you say can and will be distorted, taken out of context, used against you, so you better watch what you say. And we're f…”

“And that's why I'm actually optimistic that this is going to change, because as I said, two years ago, we didn't know the suicide stats. We didn't know the terrible things that are happening. It's only in the last year or two that it's really become public kno…”

“I think that we are changing the nature of childhood, and we're too focused on skills that actually Don't matter as much. And what we're creating is a generation of people who do well on tests, but may not have the, may not develop, may not have a chance to de…”

“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... So that's great, like, you have a car with a gas pedal and a brake, like, yo…”

“It's hard to hold the line on, 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.”

“About five, depending on how you measure it, about five to 12% of the boys do get, do become problematic users of video games.”

“Major, major kudos to Coinbase. They were the first one, Armstrong, he was the first one to really put that out there.”

“Americans are getting smarter over the decades. IQ is rising in our country and around the world. It's not that Americans are getting stupid.”

“There is no government agency that has jurisdiction over social media. It doesn't go out over the airwaves. So it's not FCC.”

“Just as the crime was plummeting in the nineties, we totally freaked out about child abduction, and we literally stopped letting kids out of our sight.”

“Girls have more of what are called internalizing disorders. That is disorders, emotional disorders where they make themselves miserable. They ruminate more than boys do. Boys have higher rates of what are known as externalizing disorders which is they make oth…”

“In Silicon Valley, the norm has been, you know, we, they don't let their kids use social media and that's been going on a long time.”

“Just teach everyone CBT because it helps you think better, even if you're not depressed.”

“And if we surround ourselves with people who confirm our existing thoughts, we get stupid, quite frankly, stupid. And in this age of social media bubbles, that's a real problem.”

“And I was referring back to the story of the Ring of Gyges from Plato's Republic, in which Plato asks, if a man had the mythical Ring of Gyges, in which if you turn the stone, the, you know, the gem inwards on your hand, it makes you invisible. He asks what ma…”

“And learning from feedback from experience is 10 or a hundred times more effective than telling kids a fact.”

“Teachers, doctors used to have much more leeway to exercise common sense, and then they could learn from feedback and they could develop skills of judgment. But the kind of the bureaucratizing mindset, the increasing use of metrics has led us to in a sense, st…”

“When you have humans interacting, they almost immediately develop norms about behavior, and then they judge each other based on those norms. So that's morality.”

“You can make something a moral issue, but it's not gonna really stick or work unless it's at least related to one of the moral foundations.”

“In biological evolution, there's no guide, but in cultural evolution, there can be political movements that can be more or less skillful. So yeah, I think that human intervention does happen in cultural evolution.”

“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 f…”

“Literally half of American teenagers say that they are online almost constantly.”

“Rates of depression and anxiety before puberty are fairly similar. But at puberty there's a big divergence and depression and anxiety generally go up for girls.”