The Ledger, every show

“I think that American democracy is likely to fail catastrophically at some point in the next decade or two decades. It's very hard to predict the future, but I think we are, the way we're headed is a very, very bad direction.”

“Immigrants who are from non-English speaking countries. That's right. They have a better work ethic.”

“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.”

“Just as like the move from heroin to fentanyl kills lots and lots of people, because fentanyl is so incredibly concentrated, the move from television to algorithm-driven social media, where It's not just like mass marketed, we think this show, you know, Nielse…”

“Social media is wildly inappropriate for minors. It's full of extreme sex, violence you know, men from all over the world reaching out to you because they want sex.”

“They're less ambitious, they're less successful, they're less happy, they're less competent.”

“So that was the precedent that was set, 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 …”

“I spent so many years trying to help the left using moral psychology so that they would stop losing elections, and I finally decided they're beyond hope.”

“Progressive revolutions have an almost perfect record of disaster. I mean, it always descends into, Chaos and economic chaos and cruelty.”

“Mandatory diversity training you know, all these things we did in response to protesters that don't work or that make things worse.”

“A small number of young people use social media, not to make arguments, not to respond to arguments, but to destroy anyone who contradicts their sacred values. And that's what makes a group stupid.”

“Social media gave everybody a dart gun, and as a result, Because most people don't want to shoot anybody, but the far left, the far right, trolls, a few groups of people shoot moderates in their institutions, and they shoot the leaders of the institutions. So …”

“The hidden tribe study and others find that majorities of everybody hate wokeness, black, white, male, female, even majority of Democrats don't like wokeness.”

“But the Democrats aren't, are likely to get wiped out because Most people really hate what the cultural left is doing in their schools, their companies and their country.”

“Yes, of course they took some easy steps, but there is no way they can get a handle on this. This has to be, and I think they call it for this. This has to be a sort of a government-wide partnership between Coordinated between the CIA, the FBI, NSA, Facebook, …”

“I would like us to consider that the federal government mandate That if you want the benefit of level of, you want the benefit of section two 30 protection and this incredible freedom from lawsuits that only you and the gun lobby have because of lobbying, you …”

“They say reflects a new moral culture in which you achieve status, not by being strong, not by being beautiful, not by being smart. You achieve status by being, by emphasizing how much you've been victimized, and if you haven't been victimized, then you achiev…”

“It's that they've been raised with a set of norms. That's really bad for them. That makes them very bad cooperators. And if you can't cooperate, you can't be employed.”

“There are about a hundred people, a hundred kids abducted a year in the United States by strangers. At present rates of abduction, you'd have to leave your kid alone in a car in a parking lot for 700,000 years before they would probably be abducted.”

“Our argument has always been that the classroom must not be a safe space, that classrooms must be places where any claim will be challenged, not Not attacked not shamed, but counterarguments backed by evidence will be given.”

“How many of you use TikTok or one of those programs at least once a week? The great, 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.”

“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 conta…”

“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 so the far left becomes super empowered, the far right becomes super empowered, 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,”

“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.”

“The Republican Party has been gutted of its moderates.”

“You take away the video games, you take away the phones, and for, you know, Anna Lemke says it's, you know, two or three weeks to overcome, ah, withdrawal symptoms for, especially for more serious drugs, but in my experience, it's more like, it's like a few da…”

“And never send your child to a camp that allows kids to keep phones on them.”

“And these are boys who are spending You know, three, 4:05 hours a day on video games for years and years and years. They don't develop social skills. They don't develop dating skills.”

“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. They're going to go for signs that you traveled alone, you traveled on your own for thr…”

“Just as you can have structural racism, even if nobody is a racist, you can have structural stupidity, even if no one is stupid.”

“The group furthest left, the progressive activists, that's the second whitest of all the groups. It's actually very interesting. This is mostly young white people who have a kind of politics in which, again, they don't learn to make arguments. They don't persu…”

“Social media was not at all toxic in 2004, you know, when the Facebook came out and in my space, and if you're sharing photos of your dog, there's no problem. It really was the move to the newsfeed and then especially The implementation of the retweet button, …”

“We're talking about a small number of platforms where people do the labor. They create the content in exchange for prestige. That's what I think is, is destroying a generation in terms of mental health. And that's what I think is most damaging to democracies.”

“There are two other groups that use this very effectively. One is trolls and these are men. They're almost always men. I've never heard of a female troll who enjoy harassing, burning things down, causing trouble.”

“The Republican party is the stupid party. They shoot their moderates. They don't have any more moderates other than Liz Cheney and a couple, you know, but they used to have more than three and now they down to whatever, just a couple. The Republican Party is a…”

“Human ID.org and world coin, those are two that would work for level two authentication.”

“Kids born after 1995 have really high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide.”

“What they show is a big rise in depression and anxiety only. There's no change in bipolar disorder, schizophrenia no other category. It's just mood disorder, so depression and anxiety. It begins going up around 20 11. It goes up steadily and sharply. It goes, …”

“There's an amazing statistic we found, that if you look at the total number of hours that women spent doing childcare in the 19 fifties, when very few of them worked outside the home, and you compare that to the total number of hours of childcare that they do …”

“And so from age eight to 12, I think, is a sensitive period where kids are supposed to have adventures with other kids they play all kinds of games, they self-organize, and what we've done is we've taken that critical period, and we've said, stop, you don't ge…”

“There are now a number of experiments in which they randomly assign people to get off social media for a few weeks and lo and behold, you see very direct improvements in mental health.”

“They're having exactly the same gigantic increase in girls' depression, anxiety, and self-harm and suicide in the US and UK and Canada. We're all at record high levels for teenage, for female teenage suicide. So this is throughout the Anglosphere.”

“When the millennials got social media in college or later, they weren't damaged by it. There's no sign that millennials had a crisis of mental health, because their social nature was largely, their brains were mostly developed.”

“I think the case can be made and should be made, and I'm beginning to make, that every middle school principal should say, parents, please don't let your kids have a social media account. There should be no social media In middle school.”

“So any parents who are listening to this podcast, I urge you to follow a few simple rules. That is two hours a day of screen time. And actually, the Apple controls are very good for that. The new ones just out a few months ago are actually very good for that. …”

“It leads to an attitude in which everyone is afraid to judge on a case-by-case basis, and the response is pretty much always to give the students what they want. So individual professors do that. Administrators do that. And so if students are saying that somet…”

“Ideas of trauma are important in psychology and psychiatry, but now trauma has expanded to mean just unpleasant experience.”