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Episode: #392 — Technology & Culture

Author: Sam Harris
Duration: 00:52:59

Episode Shownotes

Sam Harris speaks with Christine Rosen about how technology is changing our culture. They discuss the courage of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, lost practices like handwriting, tradeoffs in our use of technology, social media, conspiracy thinking, X as a platform for breaking news, the future of journalism, the importance of local

news, the asymmetry right and left politically, the strange case of Tucker Carlson, the antisemitic hallucinations of Dan Bilzerian, expectations for a second Trump presidency, antisemitism in America, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_00
Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.

00:00:17 Speaker_00
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00:00:28 Speaker_00
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00:00:45 Speaker_00
Well, Trump is off to a running start with his appointments, or desired appointments. Some have been comparatively normal, and some have been not.

00:00:59 Speaker_00
I guess the ones that have provoked the most alarm are Pete Hegseth at Defense, Tulsi Gabbard for the Director of National Intelligence, Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, and Robert Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services.

00:01:16 Speaker_00
I guess I'm going to abide by my policy, which is to not react until something actually happens. There's some debate about whether all of these are legitimate appointments or trolls of some kind.

00:01:30 Speaker_00
On its face, it looks like affirmative action for kooks and ghouls, but let's see what happens. We'll see if these survive confirmation or get appointed during a recess. Let's wait and see. Today I'm speaking with Christine Rosen.

00:01:49 Speaker_00
Christine is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for Commentary Magazine. She's also a senior editor at the New Atlantis and a fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

00:02:03 Speaker_00
And she's the author of a new book, The Extinction of Experience, Being Human in a Disembodied World. Christine and I spoke just as these cabinet appointments were getting started. Marco Rubio had just been mentioned for Secretary of State.

00:02:18 Speaker_00
that is comparatively normal, but the rest hadn't come in yet. We talk generally about how technology is changing our culture and politics and society. We praise the courage of our friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

00:02:33 Speaker_00
We talk about lost cultural practices like handwriting, trade-offs in our use of technology, social media, conspiracy thinking, X as a platform for breaking news. The future of journalism. The importance of local news.

00:02:49 Speaker_00
The asymmetry between the right and left, politically, with respect to information. The strange case of Tucker Carlson. The anti-Semitic hallucinations of Dan Bilzerian. Our expectations for a second Trump presidency. Anti-Semitism in America.

00:03:05 Speaker_00
And other topics. And now I bring you Christine Rosen. I am here with Christine Rosen. Christine, thanks for joining me.

00:03:20 Speaker_01
Thanks for having me.

00:03:21 Speaker_00
So I'm a big fan of yours from the commentary podcast that you do with John Puthoritz and others. And also you have a new book, which I really enjoyed, the title of which is The Extinction of Experience, Being Human in a Disembodied World.

00:03:37 Speaker_00
I want to start with the book because it's interesting, and I think it touches on many larger issues that are worth thinking about.

00:03:45 Speaker_00
But I think we will, in short order, feel the tractor beam pull toward American politics, given that we're just about 10 days out from the presidential election, and given your political experience and your perspective on history and American culture.

00:04:03 Speaker_00
Maybe we can start with you just giving a potted bio here. How do you describe your background politically and intellectually?

00:04:11 Speaker_01
Well, I was trained as a historian. I went to graduate school in history, studied American intellectual history, but realized I didn't want to go into academia, that I wanted to do something else.

00:04:22 Speaker_01
And like many young, naive Americans, I found my way to Washington, D.C.

00:04:27 Speaker_01
and stumbled into the think tank world, first at the American Enterprise Institute briefly, and then to some other institutions, Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is right of center, and then I moved to New America, which is left of center.

00:04:40 Speaker_01
I found myself, again, like a lot of people, Politically, somewhere in the middle on some issues, social and cultural mainly, but on things like foreign policy, strong national defense, I was always more conservative.

00:04:55 Speaker_01
So it became very clear when you come to Washington that you're supposed to choose sides, particularly if you go to work on the Hill.

00:05:00 Speaker_01
The beauty of many of the think tanks in this town is that you can actually find a very comfortable home where people like to argue about the issues and the ideas, and they don't really care if you have a D or an R after your name or how you vote.

00:05:13 Speaker_01
So I eventually landed at the American Enterprise Institute, which is where I am now, and I've always found it to be an ideologically diverse place in the sense that we have people who started out on the far left and people who started out further right,

00:05:28 Speaker_01
Some of us meet in the middle, others don't. We have libertarians who argue with social conservatives. I would place myself kind of where I started. I've probably become a bit more hawkish on national defense issues.

00:05:42 Speaker_01
But on cultural issues, I've remained largely more centrist, and having raised children has probably made me a little more culturally conservative.

00:05:53 Speaker_01
So I do define myself as a conservative, but I think nowadays a lot of these labels are shifting, and even in the last week for a lot of people, I think their understanding of those labels has shifted considerably.

00:06:04 Speaker_00
Were you among the never-Trump conservatives? Or never-Trump Republicans? I never was.

00:06:10 Speaker_01
I was not a never Trump Republican. I think because, and this is actually where reading history books is very useful. It gives, I think it gives some humility about the ability of our system to stand up to almost anything that challenges it.

00:06:24 Speaker_01
I was not a fan of Trump. I did not vote for Trump. But I didn't think he was quite as evil a force as he was often portrayed to be.

00:06:34 Speaker_01
I have a fairly healthy skepticism about mainstream media, which comes out of having grown up not in the class of people who go into mainstream media work and from Florida, and just a sort of healthy skepticism about what we're often told to believe.

00:06:48 Speaker_01
And I felt like a lot of the reaction to Trump initially came from that very elite sense of, he's not one of us, we don't understand where he's coming from, he's brash, he's crude.

00:06:59 Speaker_01
And I didn't like him for many of those reasons as well, but I had a really strong faith in our political system and our system of government and our founders' vision of the upheaval that over the course of hundreds of years we've been able to weather.

00:07:12 Speaker_01
So he, January 6th, tested that for me significantly. I actually do believe he should have been impeached and removed and not have been allowed to run for re-election. But that's not what happened. And the history books will judge accordingly.

00:07:27 Speaker_01
And we shall see with the, you know, beginning in inauguration in January, how he governs. And I think some of his choices for cabinet, a few have been fine, others have been slightly alarming.

00:07:38 Speaker_01
And I think our system is stronger than any one individual who might test its limits.

00:07:47 Speaker_00
OK, well, needless to say, we're already feeling the tractor beam pull toward politics. I blame you. And the presidency. I'm going to resist, however ineffectually, for a few more minutes here.

00:07:59 Speaker_00
First, let me say that I've never had any real connection to AEI or really any direct connection to any of the think tanks, right or left.

00:08:09 Speaker_00
And I always felt that AEI probably was distant from me politically, but I have undying gratitude for the organization, given that this was the only think tank that would take in my friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali when she really needed

00:08:24 Speaker_00
a perch in the West, in America in particular, but just to see her in flight from theocrats and to see her shunned from liberal think tanks and embraced by a right-of-center think tank that had to assume some considerable security costs for her, I will never forget that.

00:08:44 Speaker_01
We were very, very lucky to have her here in Washington for the time that she was here.

00:08:49 Speaker_01
Wonderful, wonderful person who I think taught a lot of us who study, write about, think about virtues like courage, what it actually looks like when you have to behave in courageous fashion. And she has done that again and again for decades.

00:09:04 Speaker_01
at risk to her own life. And I too was very proud of AEI for never hesitating to say, yes, you're someone whose ideas matter, whose freedom matters and will protect you and give you a place where you can work. And they did that for many, many years.

00:09:20 Speaker_00
The story is not yet fully written on Ayan's place in the world, but the fact that she has not been recognized as a feminist icon globally, and you have the Nikristoffs of the world still perpetually confused about which way is up here morally and politically, it's really

00:09:43 Speaker_00
This is one of my hobby horses, which we need not get on, but it's... I just find it infuriating.

00:09:48 Speaker_01
Well, her foundation has done... Yeah, her foundation has done wonderful work in this arena. And I find her description of Kristof quite diplomatic, actually. So I'll just leave it at that.

00:09:59 Speaker_00
Okay. Well, so your book is really focused on the impact of technology on culture, and you argue that essentially that we need a new approach to humanism, right? So maybe you can just jump into your thesis here.

00:10:14 Speaker_00
What has worried you about our engagement with technology of late?

00:10:19 Speaker_01
Well, I think the way I would put it is that we are now in a time and place where we have to actively defend the human. And by that, I mean

00:10:30 Speaker_01
It is much easier now, going through our days, in our personal relationships, in our work lives, in our leisure time, to mediate all of our experiences through technology, whether that's our smartphone, our computer screen, wearable sensor-based technology that more and more people are adopting.

00:10:47 Speaker_01
It means that we measure the quality of our experiences based on the data that's created when we have them, and we compare and contrast ourselves to others in ways that weren't possible before. And some of these tools are incredible.

00:11:03 Speaker_01
It allows us to do a great many things, to connect to lots of people. But after several decades of living this way, I feel we're going through life with a worldview that has started to devalue what it means to be an embodied human being.

00:11:18 Speaker_01
And by that I mean we are all attached to physical bodies, but our world in a daily basis doesn't remind us of that often enough.

00:11:26 Speaker_01
And so we lose some deeply human skills when we mediate everything, whether that's the ability to read those around us, their emotions, their responses,

00:11:36 Speaker_01
Whether that leads to less patience when we have to deal with things that we can't have on demand or immediately swipe right and get. So in all of these ways, some of them that we can quantify, but many, many more that are qualitative, intuitive,

00:11:52 Speaker_01
we have changed the way we live as human beings and our technologists would very much like us to continue swiftly going in that direction.

00:12:02 Speaker_01
So my book is an argument to say maybe we need to pause and reconsider some of the ways we're mediating our relationships and our lives because it doesn't always make us happier, healthier, or even able to get along as human beings in the way that I think these technologists promised us when they created these incredible tools.

00:12:22 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, there's so many examples of this kind of thing. The one that on its face seems somewhat trivial, that you focus on early in the book, I think might not be trivial, and you don't think it is.

00:12:36 Speaker_00
You go into the neurological reasons why it may not be. But the fact that we no longer teach our kids to write cursive And I just discovered to my horror that one of my daughters can't even read cursive writing.

00:12:51 Speaker_00
It never occurred to me that in not being taught to produce handwriting, she would have not been taught to read it.

00:12:59 Speaker_00
And so I showed her, I think it was, it might've been a note written to her by her grandmother or something that she should have been able to read. And she looked at it like it was the Rosetta Stone, What, if anything, does one do about this?

00:13:16 Speaker_00
Clearly, there's only so much bandwidth in a human day and a human life, and there are new things to learn, and these, just by sheer logic, will have to replace some old things that we no longer learn. Let's take handwriting as an example.

00:13:31 Speaker_00
What are your thoughts about the fact that we now have... I mean, the truth is I can't comfortably handwrite. I've never... I always printed.

00:13:40 Speaker_00
I mean, this might just be a neurological fact about me rather than a cultural fact about our cohort in school. I actually never was somebody who wrote cursively, although I've done a fair amount of printing.

00:13:54 Speaker_00
But as you discuss in your book, there's actually some research that suggests that the difference between typing words on a screen and writing by hand runs pretty deep cognitively.

00:14:07 Speaker_01
Yes, handwriting became a source of fascination for me. I happen to be left-handed, so the world is sort of against us. If you're left-handed, you understand what that means. Scissors don't work.

00:14:17 Speaker_01
It's much more difficult to learn to write because you drag your hand across the page, and there are all kinds of challenges.

00:14:23 Speaker_01
And I remember as a child, they had the Palmer cursive letters above the chalkboard, and we all had to painstakingly learn to write them. And I didn't enjoy that experience at all.

00:14:33 Speaker_01
Like many kids, I was impatient to do something else, but we all had to do it.

00:14:39 Speaker_01
So when my own children were younger, I have two boys, and one is left-handed and one is right-handed, I was shocked by how little concern educators had for any sort of proficiency in handwriting. And when I asked, you know, why is this the policy?

00:14:53 Speaker_01
I was told, you know, a version of what I think a lot of people assume, which is, you know, this is a society where we need keyboarding skills. So we're going to teach them that earlier.

00:15:02 Speaker_01
They use touchscreens, so they don't really need to handwrite that often. And this, of course, because I'm sort of wired as a contrarian, I thought, well, hmm, I wonder if there's anything bad about that? Are we going to lose anything?

00:15:16 Speaker_01
And as I started researching the embodied cognition, you know, how the mind and the body working together teach you things that without that really focused effort, and handwriting is a perfect example of this,

00:15:29 Speaker_01
There are later skills that will be implicated, skills related not just to how well you hold a pen and write, but to memory, memory formation, recall, all kinds of interesting ways in which our very mysterious brains operate by using our bodies and then there's a kind of habits of mind and learning that we teach ourselves through practice with a skill like handwriting.

00:15:54 Speaker_01
But there was this other part of it too, and you hit on it perfectly in describing, showing that letter to your daughter. And this is something a little less quantitative. It's qualitative.

00:16:05 Speaker_01
And that's that we will lose something important about human history if we cease to write by hand, because we'll lose the ability to, say, read our founding documents, which were written in script.

00:16:15 Speaker_01
We will lose an ability, from a historian's perspective, to read the letters of the dead. There's a lot of personality in handwriting.

00:16:24 Speaker_01
I spent a lot of time in archives as a grad student, and I got to know these long-dead sources because you could tell by how hard they were pressing on the paper with the pen or if they scribbled something out.

00:16:34 Speaker_01
And there is something deeply human about that ability. And it turns out that we do lose something technically important in terms of memory, in terms of patience as well, I should say.

00:16:47 Speaker_01
When you're a writer, I also, when I'm writing a shorter piece, I almost always do it on the computer now.

00:16:52 Speaker_01
But I do find if I get stuck, if I take out a notepad and try to jot down ideas by hand, it doesn't, I mean my handwriting's not great, but it does make me slow down my thinking in a way that can sometimes be really revelatory.

00:17:05 Speaker_01
So there are all kinds of ineffable things that when we, when something disappears, and handwriting is disappearing at scale, where we haven't stopped, and for me this was an example that throughout the book I tried to surface these examples,

00:17:21 Speaker_01
We didn't stop to think about it. There was no conspiracy against handwriting.

00:17:24 Speaker_01
I think there's a real focus on efficiency, particularly in education, and the thinking was, well, we have to do all these tests, we have to teach some computer skills, and this is just, this is obsolete.

00:17:35 Speaker_01
But I would argue some of those things are not obsolete. We need to make sure if we set them aside that we do it thoughtfully and knowing what we're giving up in return.

00:17:44 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, one of the things that changes when you move from writing by hand to typing is that obviously you can type much faster, and that seems to be intrinsically good, but we embrace that change without realizing that it actually changes the cognitive act of writing.

00:18:02 Speaker_00
I mean, if you're writing creatively, if you're writing your own thoughts,

00:18:06 Speaker_00
because you can get them down faster when typing, you forego a stage of editing that's happening naturally when you're reconsidering the words as you're writing them more slowly by hand.

00:18:20 Speaker_00
And if you're taking notes on, you know, if I'm trying to take notes on a lecture, say, as a student, because you can type so fast, you can almost get to the place where you basically just write down everything you're hearing.

00:18:31 Speaker_00
You become a stenographer.

00:18:34 Speaker_00
There's a point you make in the book, whereas if you're writing by hand, you can't do that, and so you're summarizing in the act of writing it down, and that leads to a different kind of memory encoding just in the very act of taking notes.

00:18:47 Speaker_00
There's something lost I mean, it's true, there's something gained.

00:18:51 Speaker_00
Obviously, we value the speed, too, and the ease of doing it, and so I'm not tempted to go back to handwriting or printing when writing myself, but it is interesting to realize that there is, just cognitively, the act has been transformed by the motor skills you're using to just get the words down.

00:19:11 Speaker_01
Yeah, and I think that that's absolutely right. And it would probably be less of a concern if we spent more of our day every day doing other things with our hands besides typing or besides swiping on a screen.

00:19:26 Speaker_01
And I think the opportunity cost here is another concern because I agree with you. I mean, I do, I write, I'm a list maker, so I do write my lists by hand and

00:19:36 Speaker_01
You know, I do have some friends with whom I exchange handwritten letters, not very many, and very rarely tend to send email or text messages.

00:19:44 Speaker_01
But there is something about the disappearance of these experiences, not just when it comes to writing, but to any way we use our physical bodies to interact with the world. Now, this is especially true, obviously, of the knowledge class folks.

00:19:58 Speaker_01
less so if you have a job where you work with your hands or you're an artist or musician and you spend your time, really spend most of your day in a form of embodied cognition because you're using your mind and your body.

00:20:10 Speaker_01
But most people, a lot of people, mediate even their daily work now at a level that I think they end up lacking those experiences.

00:20:20 Speaker_01
And so taking away handwriting on top of that, and particularly for children whose childhoods are now absolutely saturated with technology, it's just one example among many where I think we haven't made a thoughtful trade-off and really discussed and thought through the choices we've made.

00:20:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, so that phrase or that term trade-off is, I think, important here because there are trade-offs with any technology, and the one that comes to mind was the very act of reading or consuming your book in anticipation of this conversation.

00:20:51 Speaker_00
I mean, I have the hardcover and I read some of it there, but I also listened to many hours of audio while hiking.

00:21:01 Speaker_00
So there too, this is somewhat ironic given the contents of your book, because from one point of view, I'm degrading the experience of hiking in nature by imposing the mediated layer of an audiobook on it, right?

00:21:18 Speaker_00
But in reality, I was given a forced choice on that given day, which happened to be the most beautiful day of the year over here, which I could be stuck at my desk reading your book, or I could be listening to it and gleaning nearly as much from it while hiking in the hills.

00:21:36 Speaker_00
And that really is a form of multitasking that seems to be the right side of the trade-off here, because nothing much was lost in terms of my comprehending your thoughts, and I'm good enough with my attention so that I can really enjoy nature while also listening to your book.

00:21:56 Speaker_00
And it's not a pure experience of either, but it really does seem like the sort of sweet spot of this encroach of technology into our lives that, at the moment, I wouldn't want to give up.

00:22:09 Speaker_00
I wouldn't want to be the purist who says, no, no, I'm going to be stuck on the couch for three hours now reading, and I'll hike tomorrow. I feel like this was a kind of have your cake and eat it too experience.

00:22:21 Speaker_00
Do you see that differently, or how do you view the push and pull here between technology and having a 20th century or a 19th century experience of the world?

00:22:31 Speaker_01
I love how you describe that because I think the difference between what you just described doing and how a lot of people mediate their daily lives is that you are aware of making a choice for yourself and of making a trade-off.

00:22:44 Speaker_01
And I certainly, I would be a hypocrite if I argued that everyone should just read the hardcover book and be sitting there, you know, stationary and not use any of these tools because I use them every day as well.

00:22:56 Speaker_01
And then there's the separate issue of people who might struggle with reading but can absorb information by listening to it. I mean, there are all kinds of reasons to embrace this choice that we have.

00:23:07 Speaker_01
But you made a choice knowing that you were going to potentially slightly dilute that experience of just being outside on a beautiful day, hiking with nothing else to distract you. And that worked for you.

00:23:20 Speaker_01
And that's the way I think we largely as a culture have not made those choices. I think we rush to mediate experiences.

00:23:28 Speaker_01
Now, if you had told me that while listening to the book, you were also live streaming on TikTok all of your observations about your hike, I would scold you profusely. But I do think that that, for example, is

00:23:41 Speaker_01
particularly for younger generations, far more likely to be the way they go on a hike. It has to be documented, it has to be shared, and in the documenting and sharing, they aren't even aware they are giving something up.

00:23:53 Speaker_01
So you understood, and this is one of these interesting generational things where those of us who grew up without this stuff take a lot for granted in terms of our awareness of the trade-offs and our awareness of the choices we're making.

00:24:08 Speaker_01
And that's no longer true. You know, our children and all of the younger generations don't have that option unless they willingly stop and think about it and choose it.

00:24:19 Speaker_01
And I am, the older I get, the more grateful I am to have been, you know, a sort of Gen Xer who was sent out into the neighborhood with a beat up bicycle and told to come home when the streetlights came on and no way to track us.

00:24:31 Speaker_01
And I think some of those experiences now are disappearing, particularly for children. And again, they lose something in the offing of that experience.

00:24:41 Speaker_01
So I would not scold you, but I would applaud you for being aware you were making a trade-off and a choice.

00:24:47 Speaker_00
So what about the rest of our engagement with digital technology at this point?

00:24:52 Speaker_00
I'm thinking in particular, and this is now bending us back to the chaos of the present moment, I'm thinking of social media and what it's doing to our politics, to our culture, to our sense of ourselves, just the sense that you exist not merely in the real world or in the face-to-face interactions you can have with

00:25:14 Speaker_00
with friends and colleagues and even strangers, but you exist as a digital persona, too, and you have a digital reputation to be concerned about, and it's really, in terms of what's truly indelible and what truly scales, the digital version of you has grown beyond what any terrestrial impact is likely to be of any given life, right?

00:25:44 Speaker_00
We're all trailing, I mean, some of us more than others, but we're all trailing just whatever a Google search says we were. I mean, that's more and more the impact we've had on human culture. How do you think about this?

00:25:57 Speaker_00
How would you describe your engagement with social media at this point?

00:26:02 Speaker_01
So I, and now I will come off as a Luddite, although my reasons for doing this, I will explain. I've never used social media. I'm not on any social media, in part because some friends and I started a journal 20 years ago called The New Atlantis.

00:26:16 Speaker_01
And my focus when I started writing essays for the journal was on new technology, new personal technology. And so I started studying MySpace. Really, it was old.

00:26:28 Speaker_01
and then Facebook when it first appeared on the scene and all of the new social media platforms.

00:26:33 Speaker_01
And, you know, I talked to people who were working, you know, early Facebook employees, people who were devising these platforms, many of whom were really sort of idealistic about what the possibilities for these tools were.

00:26:46 Speaker_01
And I don't know if it's because I'm pretty certain that there is something called human nature and it's not always amenable to transformation. I worried about these places bringing out our worst impulses, the anonymity.

00:26:59 Speaker_01
There were very few barriers to entry. There was no way of assuring people that what you said was true or who they even claimed to be was true. And this was the early internet, right?

00:27:10 Speaker_01
So there used to be this contrast between IRL in real life and the internet. But now, even that is not an appropriate way to think about how we live. Everything is online.

00:27:22 Speaker_01
And even if you're not online, someone else is, or commenting on you, or your profile is somehow out there in the world.

00:27:29 Speaker_01
And we consume more information about other people's experiences than we have unmediated experiences of our own, day in and day out, for most people. And what that means is that we, even though we're doing that, we somehow lack a shared reality.

00:27:45 Speaker_01
And I think this is where, in politics in particular, it has become toxic, not because the internet lets people scream and yell at each other and social media rewards that kind of anger and hostility and anxiety, although it does because that brings greater engagement than happiness looking at unicorns and puppies and kittens,

00:28:04 Speaker_01
But it's that we can't even agree on what reality looks like because the power we have now to carefully curate our reality and to not listen to what someone else says or to do our own research as people like to say when they are going down a conspiracy theorist rabbit hole.

00:28:24 Speaker_01
and prove that what the other person's saying is not reality. And you do see this play out. I've read a lot of books about conspiracy theories, both the history of them and the sort of personality types that are drawn to them.

00:28:37 Speaker_01
And what worried me was realizing that we've created a world in which one day, pretty soon, we're all going to be conspiracy theorists of a type, right? We cannot agree on truth and fiction.

00:28:50 Speaker_01
We cannot agree on, sometimes even with AI-generated images now, if what we're seeing is real. So all of these things are very destabilizing to our individual sense of identity, to our sense of community.

00:29:03 Speaker_01
But in politics at scale, what it means is that we don't trust anything, and we are at risk of becoming not cynics, but almost nihilistic about our ability to do that and to rebuild our trust. And that's what worries me

00:29:16 Speaker_01
in our current moment with regard to how social media has sort of dominated and become a kind of public square but without any of the virtues of the old-style public square.

00:29:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, well this really is at the center of my concerns at this point. So when you say you don't use social media, you don't have any profile yourself on it?

00:29:36 Speaker_01
I don't even have a LinkedIn. I've been scolded for that.

00:29:39 Speaker_00
But do you ever go on X or any other platform to see breaking news as just a lurker?

00:29:44 Speaker_01
Yes, so I lurk. The only one I lurk on is X, to be honest, because that's generally where breaking news happens. So because I yammer every day about politics with my colleagues at Commentary, I do check that when something's happening.

00:30:01 Speaker_01
But what I find is that everyone I know is on social media, and they always send me stuff.

00:30:06 Speaker_01
I'm on many, the most active thing I do is all my various text chains with friends and colleagues, and they curate the most important stuff for me, and then I'll double-check, obviously, if what they sent me was a true story or not.

00:30:20 Speaker_01
But I don't miss it, but that is a luxury that I know I have, because many, many people have jobs where they have to be on social media, whether it's because they're a small business and they have to be on Facebook to

00:30:31 Speaker_01
advertise, whether they're in any sort of knowledge job that requires them to have that social media presence. So I understand that my choice is a luxury because many people don't have that choice.

00:30:43 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, I question that. I mean, I do think that, I said in my last podcast, I really think serious people need to leave X at this point.

00:30:51 Speaker_00
I mean, that we just need to boycott what has become a digital sewer and an increasingly radicalized one politically. I mean, the level of antisemitism and racism and just frank insanity, I mean, it is the epicenter of

00:31:06 Speaker_00
so many crazy conspiracies at this point.

00:31:08 Speaker_00
And the reason why it's not like the other platforms, apart from the way it's architected, is just that the man who owns it has become an amplifier of all of its worst tendencies just by the way he uses it, not even policies aside and algorithmic tuning aside.

00:31:26 Speaker_00
It has become the digital playpen of a digital maniac. I say this as someone who used to be his friend, But I guess I'm wondering what you think about that. I mean, I get the fact that it is a way for certain kinds of news stories to break, right?

00:31:42 Speaker_00
I mean, so I think anti-Semitism is something I know you're focused on over at Commentary and I think we should talk about as well. But

00:31:49 Speaker_00
So I know for instance that it's conceivable, I don't know if this is strictly true in this case, but you take the recent pogrom-like eruption of violence in the Netherlands around the soccer teams, and I don't know if that's still ongoing or not as we speak.

00:32:06 Speaker_00
So that's the kind of thing that you could see breaking on X as a platform. Maybe it was just as prevalent on other platforms too, I don't know.

00:32:16 Speaker_00
And then you could reasonably worry, well, but for the fact that there was so much noise on X, maybe the New York Times wouldn't have covered it, right? And I don't know if we live in that world or not. I'd love to get your opinion.

00:32:31 Speaker_00
But even if we just stipulate that that's true and that certain stories that we really do want to hear about would effectively go dark if a sufficient number of people walked away from X,

00:32:42 Speaker_00
I still think it would be a good trade at this point, given the level of conspiracy thinking and the way it gets amplified on X, in particular, given just the sea change in attitudes toward truth and error correction that has occurred over there.

00:32:59 Speaker_01
No, I think, I hope this is right, but we won't know for some time. I feel like we're in a real period of churn with some of these platforms, X most predominantly.

00:33:11 Speaker_01
Two things X does now, not always well, but that are necessary in the current media environment. The first is the one you mentioned,

00:33:20 Speaker_01
it can surface stories that otherwise, and often real-time images of things that are happening that we should know about.

00:33:27 Speaker_01
And that I think sometimes our mainstream media outlets have an incentive not to show us and not to talk about and not to really want to discuss at all. And I don't mean conspiracy theories. I just mean

00:33:38 Speaker_01
stories that would be difficult, whether because the ideological tendencies of the newsroom or the editorial voices in those publications were against it, or simply because it would be difficult to verify.

00:33:52 Speaker_01
And, you know, if we look at the media environment now, you know, there are foreign bureaus in particular have shrunk. There's a lot of looming layoffs once again in media. So there are obviously bottom line concerns, too.

00:34:02 Speaker_01
But it does surface those stories and then prompts debate. And when Old school reporters then chase down some of those stories. They sometimes find them to be true. They sometimes find them to be false. But it does at least start a conversation.

00:34:14 Speaker_01
On that, I think it can occasionally be useful. And honestly, I will make a defense of community notes. I kind of like them in part.

00:34:23 Speaker_01
They're not always correct, but they're closer to correct than some of the mainstream fact checking that goes on these days.

00:34:29 Speaker_01
And in that sense, it's an example of crowdsourcing that can in real time say, actually, there's this you should look at or consider this.

00:34:37 Speaker_01
So those are two attempts to do something useful on a platform that I completely agree with you is very chaotic and is actually designed to bring out everyone's worst impulses. and doesn't really moderate much content.

00:34:50 Speaker_01
I know, you know, if you know people who are on the right, they have a healthy suspicion of moderation of content, particularly on X when it was Twitter. There were a lot of claims of, you know, censorship.

00:35:01 Speaker_00
The Twitter files, the biggest story of the decade, in case you missed it. right next to Hunter Biden's laptop as the most important thing that has been surfaced, right of center in our politics. Yes.

00:35:12 Speaker_01
Well, and I think if you look at rates of trust in the media now, it's not just people who are right of center who are mistrustful, it's spreading.

00:35:20 Speaker_01
And that I think is where I hope we are in a period of transition because what I would like to see are more reliable, independent, often small and focused on a particular set of issues outlets doing that work.

00:35:34 Speaker_01
not leaving it to social media and crowdsourced opinions of these things, but actually back it up with facts and reporting. And that's what's missing, because if you're a young journalist these days, you do have to ally yourself.

00:35:47 Speaker_01
Either you become, you know, an ex-personality and you have to really amp up the rhetoric and perhaps not do the due diligence of the reporting in the same way.

00:35:57 Speaker_01
Or you have to go find a legacy media institution that will hire you for nothing and you'll churn out six stories a day for their website. Neither of these are great options for surfacing truth and honest debate.

00:36:08 Speaker_01
But I do see a brighter future because of platforms like Substack and others that give people a place where they can do this less expensively, with less ideological baggage, and just try.

00:36:21 Speaker_01
Very entrepreneurial opportunities in the land of ideas and of journalism. And so I hope that this particular moment is going to be looked back upon in a decade as a transitional moment, but we'll see.

00:36:35 Speaker_00
Don't you think we need to build back these journalistic institutions, and if the market can't actually support the bureau in Beijing and a hundred other cities, that we need philanthropy to step in?

00:36:49 Speaker_00
I mean, you have someone like Jeff Bezos who owns the Washington Post. If he were convinced, he could obviously decide, well, this doesn't actually have to pencil out as a business.

00:36:59 Speaker_00
I can just take several billion dollars and make this a bulletproof institution with all the resources it needs. I mean, I think that's only a conversation away from happening, potentially, if one had the right argument for it.

00:37:16 Speaker_00
Why isn't that the direction of progress?

00:37:19 Speaker_01
Well, I would say two things about that. The first is that if you really want to invest, look, if you're a billionaire and you want to throw your money at a good cause, one of the best things you could do is to try to revive local news.

00:37:31 Speaker_01
Because most of the grift and corruption and really awful things that impact people in the day to day happens at the local level. And we do not have those newspapers anymore.

00:37:42 Speaker_01
We don't have the person covering the city council meeting, going to the school board meetings. Only when some huge scandal erupts that becomes nationalized do people go to school board meetings and cover them anymore.

00:37:53 Speaker_01
And what that means is that that's where the trust deficit begins for people.

00:37:57 Speaker_01
Because if your city's supposed to come fix a pothole on your road, and you've complained about it, and you think that someone's getting a kickback from a contractor, and that's why they're not fixing the pothole, how do you prove that if you're just the average citizen?

00:38:10 Speaker_01
That's the role of journalism. And that would do another thing that I think is important. And that's cultivate a new generation of journalists who don't come out of only the elite institutions.

00:38:21 Speaker_01
Because journalism, national journalism now, is drawing from a very small pool of talent.

00:38:27 Speaker_01
And it's, you know, Ivy and Ivy League plus universities, there's a lot of insularity to their worldview there, a lot of expectation of what the right people think. And that's always been the case at places like the New York Times and elsewhere.

00:38:41 Speaker_01
But I think that spread, and you do not have a contrast with like the guy who went to the State University and got his first job

00:38:48 Speaker_01
covering, you know, city council meetings at a Midwest newspaper and then worked his way up and then became a political reporter in his 40s at the New York Times. That used to be the trajectory. That's not how it works anymore.

00:38:59 Speaker_01
And I think we lose both the skill and training and discipline of requiring people to cover those local issues and report on them honestly and cultivate sources, learn what it means to be a journalist.

00:39:11 Speaker_01
And we also lose a diversity of worldviews and experiences and class-based differences

00:39:17 Speaker_01
that are extremely obvious now when you look at places like the New York Times, places like the Washington Post, when they talk about people who aren't from their class, it's glaringly obvious because they don't know anybody who didn't come through those institutions and shares their views.

00:39:31 Speaker_01
So they seem very out of touch because they are. So I do think that those two things over the course of a generation or two could give us a revival of the kind of journalism and reporting that this country really needs.

00:39:44 Speaker_00
What can we do about conspiracy thinking? There are many people who won't even like that phrase because it has been used to stigmatize their cherished conspiracy theory that they're quite sure is true.

00:40:00 Speaker_00
This is one of those moments where you hope social media isn't real life, but then you discover that it is. I just feel like we're becoming a pizza gate culture politically.

00:40:15 Speaker_00
I mean, it's like most of us, much of the time, are showing up to rescue non-existent children in a non-existent basement, right? And that has just completely distorted the nature of our politics. I mean, the most egregious case

00:40:32 Speaker_00
or cases happens right of center, I think. Obviously, the left is not immune to this, but there's some fundamental asymmetry in the dynamics when you look at the penalty paid for error, left and right politically.

00:40:46 Speaker_00
If the New York Times gets it wrong, it's embarrassing.

00:40:50 Speaker_00
they'll be criticized, people will break trust with the organization, and many people, certainly right of center will say, look, you can never trust, they made this one mistake about Black Lives Matter, or pick your topic, and we can't trust these guys ever again.

00:41:06 Speaker_00
Whereas right of center, you have organs like Fox News, or Breitbart, or OWN, or people like Tucker Carlson, or Trump himself, and There's absolutely no reputational damage done by obvious lies, right?

00:41:24 Speaker_00
You can lie with a velocity never seen on planet Earth before and no one cares. It's just you're creating a mood, a partisan mood that your fans admire.

00:41:35 Speaker_00
And I mean, to take an egregious case around this election, you had in the run-up to election day and even on the day itself, you had people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump

00:41:46 Speaker_00
clearly lying about voter fraud and, you know, irregularities in Philadelphia and elsewhere in Pennsylvania. And this was all going to be enormously problematic should Trump have lost, right?

00:41:58 Speaker_00
Because they were clearly preparing the ground not to accept the results of the election. But when he won, you know, all of that, all of the concern around election fraud evaporated.

00:42:07 Speaker_00
And it seems like all the machines that Elon assured us could not be trusted, could not be trusted, et cetera. I mean, there's no penalty paid for this kind of behavior right of center. This is just the new normal.

00:42:21 Speaker_00
And again, this is a normal where you have someone like Elon promoting literally the people who engineered Pizzagate and that lunacy right there in the conversation with Elon and Tucker and Don Jr. and Trump himself.

00:42:37 Speaker_00
And there is no reputational penalty for having gotten something that wrong right of center. And I don't, I mean, as much as I criticize the left, there are some journalistic and scientific and academic standards that people are anchored to.

00:42:55 Speaker_00
They're still capable of embarrassment.

00:42:59 Speaker_01
I think I would agree with you until COVID coverage, I would say.

00:43:04 Speaker_01
Although you're right, the one thing I would say, there is a price to be paid for the right of center conspiracy theorizing and lying, but it's paid by us, the American people, and it's paid for in our trust. And there is the erosion of trust

00:43:19 Speaker_01
I think particularly on the right and particularly not even their erosion of trust in media, but the erosion of trust in all of our institutions of government is very worrisome because it's that over time as that builds, that erodes stability because people feel like not just that their government isn't working for them, but that it might be actively working against them.

00:43:40 Speaker_01
And that's where conspiracy theories can become quite dangerous for people who've been marinating in that mindset. I'm fascinated by conspiracy theories and I spent some time reading police reports and transcripts.

00:43:55 Speaker_01
I cited one or two of them in the book. of some of the people who've been arrested, you know, who, you know, the Pizzagate situation. And this is a guy who came to a bookstore here in Washington, D.C.

00:44:04 Speaker_01
and started, well, near a bookstore and started shooting at this restaurant because he thought Hillary Clinton was part of a pedophile ring and keeping people in the basement. The restaurant didn't even have a basement.

00:44:13 Speaker_01
It does have excellent pizza, so you should try it if you're in town. But what was fascinating to me is that he really became radicalized because he was lonely, isolated, and got an Internet connection and started just digging around.

00:44:26 Speaker_01
And he needed a sense of purpose in his life. And this gave him a sense of purpose. When he was shown that everything he believed was a lie, he's like, wow, I just, I really didn't have good intel on this.

00:44:37 Speaker_01
I mean, he recognized that he'd been had, but it was too late at that point. He could have killed someone. He certainly, you know, he was then sent to prison as well he should have been. But I think that sometimes we get too

00:44:50 Speaker_01
I think there are some underlying problems here in our society having to do with isolation and trust and loneliness.

00:44:56 Speaker_01
And particularly among young men, they are far more receptive to that kind of conversation, not because there's a deeply rooted toxic masculinity or anything like that, but because they have spent a lot of their life being told that being a male is dangerous and bad.

00:45:12 Speaker_01
being told their country is not a place that stands for important ideals that the rest of the world admires and people are desperate to come here because of those ideals.

00:45:21 Speaker_01
They're being raised on a diet of really cynical ways of looking at the world and particularly when it comes to politics. So I agree with you that the There should be some penalty.

00:45:32 Speaker_01
I think our system, and because our system is now playing out politically and in the information ecosystem, with people getting most of their information on social media, even about politics, those platforms really reward the most extreme views.

00:45:46 Speaker_01
And that's true on the right and the left. And until we can, en masse, step away from those platforms as a place where we have political discourse, the problem will continue.

00:45:55 Speaker_01
And it's a very difficult thing to remove oneself from because you get a lot of positive feedback.

00:46:01 Speaker_01
You can be sitting alone in your house and watch on Instagram or on X or any platform, all of the people who are telling you, yes, exactly, I totally believe that.

00:46:10 Speaker_01
And the emotional experience you have, and again, embody, like you actually will feel good.

00:46:16 Speaker_01
because you feel that's a real feeling, but it's an unreal environment on which is rewarding things that really are not good for us and certainly not good for our political culture.

00:46:27 Speaker_01
So I do think, I mean, we'll see again, this is where more independent outlets fact checking Elon Musk. I mean, Tucker, I think is a lost cause. That's really someone should, it's It's almost, it's a tragedy, but also farce, what has become of him.

00:46:41 Speaker_01
I knew him back in the Weekly Standard days. He was actually a very good writer and journalist when he was young. That's a really difficult story there.

00:46:49 Speaker_00
What do you think, let's drill down on that because I really do think

00:46:53 Speaker_00
Tucker's character arc is the whole problem in microcosm because it's not, I mean, I take your point about young men not finding purpose and being demonized by the culture and all that, but you take someone like Tucker, there are many other examples I could give you, but I mean, he's the perfect one.

00:47:11 Speaker_00
Obviously he's self-actualized in some ways, right? He has a successful career, he's wealthy, he can do what he wants with his time and attention, He's talented. He's a very talented performer.

00:47:24 Speaker_00
He's a very talented actor, I would say, though I don't think I ever read his writing. He's rumored to have been a very talented writer, which you can confirm. But there's something quite deranged about his priorities at this point.

00:47:37 Speaker_00
I mean, his ethical compass is in a perpetual spin And it's not tracking anything like real integrity or compassion or wisdom, though he would profess to be a deep student of those virtues, above all humility and self-doubt and circumspection.

00:47:56 Speaker_00
I mean, he's a master at framing the next crazy and divisive and invidious thing he says with

00:48:04 Speaker_00
this false humility of, listen, I've gotten so many things wrong, and you wouldn't believe how ashamed I am to have been so wrong on so many important things.

00:48:12 Speaker_00
And so now here's the pivot right now toward this next odious thing I'm about to foist on all of humanity, but I'm doing it from a place of real humility and self-criticism and intellectual honesty.

00:48:24 Speaker_00
And here it is, some awful piece of pablum that you maniacs right of center are going to lap up and now I'm ready for the fourth Reich to be born for all the anti-Semitic nonsense I just replatformed somehow. Don't get me started on Tucker.

00:48:39 Speaker_00
Tell me what the hell happened with Tucker Carlson.

00:48:43 Speaker_01
You know, I don't, I don't know. And, um, what does John think?

00:48:46 Speaker_00
I can you, can you, can you play a play act like John?

00:48:50 Speaker_01
Well, I think John feels deep regret that he gave him his first job. And I know people who remain, you know, friendly with him. I, I was never his friend. I just kind of interacted in DC, especially in weekly standard may it rest in peace circles.

00:49:04 Speaker_01
Here's the thing about Tucker. I think he did believe he was humble and he did want to reach directly, especially once he left Fox News, reach directly an audience of sort of disaffected people. And he's a very intelligent guy.

00:49:20 Speaker_01
And what he quickly realized is that that was not going to keep him front of mind, as people like to say today, and that's where he needed to be.

00:49:28 Speaker_01
And you can see this progression over the course of those YouTube videos he started doing from his cabin in Maine with its sort of Unabomber-esque decorating style, where he became more and more hyperbolic, angry, really, a lot of the time.

00:49:43 Speaker_01
And I thought, well, surely this people don't really want to consume this, do they? And it turns out they do.

00:49:48 Speaker_01
And I think now he's pivoted both in his online presence and at these rallies he's been having all over the country, which in the lead up to the election, he's the guy who's going to tell you what's behind the curtain. Right.

00:50:02 Speaker_01
It's very conspiratorial in tone. It's, you know, They're trying to do this to you. I know, I know. And because, as you say, he's a very good actor. He has a way of connecting. That's why he was very good on television.

00:50:14 Speaker_01
It's believable to people who have already lost faith in the institutions. And so

00:50:21 Speaker_01
in a weird way, they're now in a feedback loop where he's confirming their priors, but doing it with a lot of performative zeal and with a lot of, you know, sort of in-the-know winks and nods.

00:50:33 Speaker_01
And where that ends up is, as you say, him platforming a guy who claims to be a historian but is not, who writes anti-Semitic, you know, fanciful rewritings of the history of World War II.

00:50:46 Speaker_01
And now what that means, because of the reach of his platform, is that people now are starting to think, oh, you know, Hitler, let's give him a reputational rethink. And that is really bad. That is just bad.

00:50:58 Speaker_01
And that comes on the heels of an educational system that actually has encouraged students for several generations to think counterintuitively, thinking that would make them more critical.

00:51:09 Speaker_01
You know, let's look at the things that, you know, the narrative history never taught us. but in fact might have primed them, some of them, for this sort of way of viewing the world, and particularly viewing the past.

00:51:19 Speaker_00
But on this point of the double standard reputationally and epistemologically that I think I detect as you move right of center, in Tucker's case we know, or I think we have good reason to know, that he was quite duplicitous at Fox News on the one hand shilling for Trump for years, but on the other in his private communications

00:51:43 Speaker_00
saying that he thought he was, literally as a quote, that he was a demonic force and he couldn't wait to be rid of him. After January 6th, he couldn't wait to see this guy disappear from our politics. We have those texts based on the Dominion lawsuit.

00:52:00 Speaker_00
How is it that his audience doesn't care about that level of hypocrisy?

00:52:07 Speaker_01
That's a very good question. I think a lot of them probably didn't follow in detail some of those stories. Or those were the things that were reported in media outlets that they don't consume, for one. And for another...

00:52:21 Speaker_00
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00:52:31 Speaker_00
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00:52:40 Speaker_00
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