Overtime – Episode #654: Jonathan Haidt, Fareed Zakaria, Dr. Mark T. Esper

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Moss.

All right, here we are with our social psychologist, NYU Stern School of Business, and author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and author of the new book, The Age of Revolution, Fareed Zakaria, and former Secretary of Defense.

His memoir is a sacred oath, Dr.

Mark Esper.

Such an esteemed panel, and here are the questions that people have sent in for Fareed.

Why do you say that oil-rich countries have a hard time modernizing?

Well, it's sort of like, think of trust fund kids not working hard.

Basically, if you have,

if you don't need to go through the hard work of modernizing your economy, educating your population, putting in the right infrastructure, if all you have to do is dig a hole, get oil, sell it to

America and Europe, it's the easy way out.

And it's one of the reasons why you've seen in almost every oil-rich country, Nigeria, Venezuela,

Iran,

there's a dysfunction, there's corruption.

And if you look at the countries that have really done well in the world, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, they had no resources.

So they had no alternative but to educate their population, build good infrastructure, put in place market-friendly rules, and guess what?

You get a boom.

Is it a function of the government

or the fact, I mean, the United States is an energy-rich country in a way, right?

Killing it in energy, yes.

Killing it in energy.

So there are a few, exactly right.

There are a few countries where we got our political and economic system first, and then the oil came much later.

And that turns out to help a lot.

Right, because there seems to be no way to have the oil without it just being siphoned off by that corrupt cabal at the top, right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

So all these countries could be doing very well.

Absolutely.

And by the way,

all the...

The Saudis are trying, actually.

The Saudis are trying, and the small Gulf countries are so small to modernize.

To modernize, invest in their human capital, to

not pay a stipend to every royal who's on the payroll.

But to just give you, you know,

in the Gulf, labor productivity, that is, you know, the productivity of every person who works, is among the lowest in the world.

And it's not national labor either.

It's imported labor.

So far it's not working.

All right, John, how does phone use and time on social media lead to a spiritual degradation?

Spiritual degradation, yeesh.

Well, because if you.

Oh, that sounds terrible.

It does, wild.

So if you look at what ancient wisdom tells us, if you look at what the religious traditions and the Stoics, if you look at all these traditions, they tell us things like be slower to judge and quicker to forgive.

They tell us things like, Slow down, calm down, regain control of your consciousness.

And what is life on social media?

It's exactly the opposite.

Judge right now, quick, no context, many times, never forgive.

And it's how about hooking up your eyes and your ears to a gigantic fire hose and just pumping it full of garbage all the time?

I've said it so many times on this show, but I'm going to say it again.

The phone takes everybody's worst innate feelings and makes them worse.

Shady,

needy, mean,

fake, passive-aggressive.

Have you ever

seen that?

That's what animal gets you, right?

Yes, that makes it worse.

I've often wondered if you said everybody who has an account, you can't use any avatars, any fake names, but you have to use your real name and your real location.

And no filters.

But

even if we let people, even if we let people use fake names for privacy's sake, at least companies, at least the platforms should have some sort of authentication so that they know it's a real person.

It's not

a Russian agent trying to manipulate us.

So even that would make it a lot better.

But I think, think about, Bill, you must have the same experience.

I'm out there in the world with my views, and

I travel around,

people are very polite, people are very

generous in person.

But on Twitter, on social media, it's a whole different thing because suddenly you gain this nastiness.

It's the point I think John is making.

You may gain this nastiness when you have this platform where you can do it quietly, pseudonymously.

It's very interesting to think about the contrast, at least I've noticed, between people coming up to you in person and what you get from their Twitter feed.

Yeah, okay.

What does the panel think of RFK Jr.'s choice and running mate, Nicole Shanahan?

Okay.

Well, if you missed this.

I didn't know the name either.

Then it was vaguely familiar because I read the gossip about it some time ago.

She is the ex-wife of Sergey Brin, who is one of the co-owners of Google,

10th richest man in the world.

The rumor was they split up because she had an affair with Elon Musk.

That's just a rumor.

I have no idea.

They both deny it.

I'm just putting it out there because you're going to see it out there.

Anyway, RFK chose her as his VP,

which is out of the box.

You've got to say that.

Obviously, people are, first thing people are going to say is, well, now he has access to billions of dollars.

In a way, it's kind of honest.

Like, let's cut out the middleman.

Vice President.

Right.

It's like making Sheldon Adelson your vice president.

Let's go right to the...

Let's just remember that it only helps in this one country.

There is no other advanced democracy in the world with campaign finance laws that would allow a multibillionaire to spend, and you can spend billion dollars dollars electing yourself.

Berlusconi didn't do that?

No, no, you know, there are very tight campaign laws in all of Europe.

Sophia Berlusconi in Italy did not buy that presidency the same way we do.

No, no, no.

He wasn't.

Was it a coincidence he was the richest man in Italy who also owned all the media?

He owned the media.

That helped us all.

But there are campaign laws.

We are the only country where you can spend essentially unlimited amounts on yourself.

The interesting point about RFK is he's polling at 12 percentage points right now when Trump is upbeating Biden by about five nationally.

So where are those 12 points coming from?

That's the question, and that's why everybody's trying to push him one way or the other.

So the question is,

is it going to be like Ralph Nader?

Right.

There are some people who think, on the other hand, since RFK's platform seems to be conspiracy theories, maybe he's drawing from the Trump vote.

I don't think we know for sure.

Okay, what will the fallout be from the ISIS attack in Moscow?

Yes, if you missed that story, ISIS attacked Moscow.

Hey, they hate somebody other than us

There's always some good news in all the news, right?

Look,

I think it says a few things first of all ISIS has international reach beyond you know where they're based in either Afghanistan or Pakistan number one and number two They're able to elude most intelligence services except for ours apparently we knew about it and look it's been a tragic attack 100 and what 37 or so Russians killed but here's my point what was the goal not taking away anything from the tragedy though Russia's been killing Ukrainians for two plus years now bombing with rockets and missiles and drones, maternity wards and hospitals and everything else.

But ISIS didn't do it to defend Ukraine.

No, they didn't.

Russia has a long history of very brutal subjugation of Islamic militants.

In Chechnya, nearly 10 years.

In Chechnya and Dagestan, and this is payback for Syria.

Don't forget, the Russians allied with Assad, the government of Syria, when he faced militant Islamic

kind of insurgency, and they were pretty brutal.

So Putin has been you know, one of the enemy, enemy number one, or two, or three for these guys for a long time.

The really interesting part about it is.

But it's not a false flag operation.

No.

It really is.

No, no.

I mean, it seems like I think Mark's point is very important, which is the U.S.

intelligence warned the Russians not only of a possible ISIS attack, but that it might be in a theater.

They had very good intelligence.

I mean, I think it's a complete, you know, we keep talking about how terrible the U.S.

government is on this, on Ukraine.

U.S.

intelligence has done pretty well.

Here's what Putin's going to do with it, though, and you already see this happening.

He's going to blame the Ukrainians, and the view is he's going to use it to do another mass mobilization of 200,000, 300,000 Russians to throw into the meat grinder that we call Ukraine.

So keep an eye out for that.

What does the panel think of Sam Bankman-Fried being sentenced to 25 years in prison?

Is that just?

I don't know.

Obviously, far less than what the prosecutors wanted, but 25 years is a long time.

I don't know if he gets off for good behavior.

I just wish I'd love to hear what John thinks about it.

Well, I think it's really encouraging because one of the problems with the global financial crisis and the meltdown here is that pretty much nobody went to jail.

And I think that really contributed to the disillusion, to the sense that the elites can get away with what they want, nobody gets punished.

And here you have a guy who is just such an obvious fraudster, and so at least the system worked in this case.

But the whole thing is a fraud.

How can you have fraud?

I mean, I'm not saying he shouldn't be in jail, but the whole thing is just funny money.

It's based on nothing.

I was hoping it would go away because of this.

And

the only thing people it's good for are criminals.

Yeah, I agree, and I don't get it, but as you say, Bitcoin is at

70,000 right now.

And it's horrible for the environment.

The amount of electricity they need to do this mining is a little bit like Trump.

You can point this out all you want, and you just...

I agree.

All right.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you, LiF.

We'll see you next week.

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