Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
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I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely.
We crushed your questions. Admit it. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What do you guys think? That was fun. That was great.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the all in podcast. We're trying something new today. You all love when we do interviews. You love the great content that came out of the all in summit. But you also want to not miss an episode of the four of us talking about the news of the week. So today, we are doing our first episode of what we're calling the all in interview. What is the all in interview? Well, it's two of us interviewing one guest as opposed to 4v1, which is quite unfair sometimes and a little bit unruly. And so we're planning on doing these as an experiment, maybe 10 times a year. Since we know you love interviews, and today we are really excited because we have Jonathan Haidt with us. He is a fearless author of some really amazing books. Freeberg, you have read all four of them.
I have read two of them. So why don't you give us your take on these four books, Dave, and then we'll kick it off to John.
It's great to have you, John. Thanks for joining us. I know you've done a lot of media lately, and a lot of it has focused on the anxious generation, which has obviously got some really important topical conversations embedded within it and that people are now having because of it. I first read the happiness hypothesis years ago. In fact, in one of our first episodes of the All In pod back in 2020, I referenced it and I referenced some material from the happiness hypothesis. my general take on the themes of your work is evolutionary biology meets modernity. Does that sound like a reasonable take that the nature of the human being in a modern age causes these really interesting kind of points of tension and conflict and behavioral shifts that maybe are undesirable or that are different than what we've had as a species in the past. And so much of like how we're wired, how our brains work in the context of modern technology, modern society is causing some behavioral system changes that maybe are a bit scary. Does that sound like a fair way to describe the art?
If you can just do two terms, I'd say evolutionary biology meets the problems of modernity. But if we can add in evolutionary psychology meets anthropology and cultural psychology with a little smattering of sociology in the head of a guy who is just really bothered when he sees systems and institutions screwing up, messing up, and he thinks to himself, wait, if we just did this, it would work better. And so I get deeply involved in what's going wrong with our democracy, and that's the righteous mind. What's going wrong with our universities? That's the coddling the American mind and my project at Heterodox Academy. And now what's going wrong with family life and children and people born after 1995? So I would just put a few more terms in there, but yeah.
So from an institutional perspective, fair enough. Yeah. I thought about this deeply, like outside of the context of your book that, you know, humans in the last kind of century and a half have had this kind of industrial production thrust upon us, then digital media thrust upon us, and then open markets and globalization thrust upon us. all of which give us kind of instant access to knowledge about the state of the world in a way that we've never had. Historically, humans maybe saw a family, maybe their village. It wasn't like mass communication, but with digital media, I can see the good life of someone on a private jet 1000 miles away, and I can live stream their private jet experience, I can theoretically order a Louis Vuitton bag and have it arrive in a couple of hours, if only I had the means that creates this kind of like tension, I can have any experience I want to because of the system of markets that have kind of put in place.
And I think like historically took generations for things like the Bible or the Quran or monarchical systems to kind of permeate and, you know, kind of make society believe a certain system. But now you can kind of pump the right message to someone and shift their brain and things change quite considerably.
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