Derek Thompson: Negativity Bias

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Speaker 5 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

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Speaker 10 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 8 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 6 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 15 Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I am delighted to bring back, it's been a while, Atlantic writer Derek Thompson.

Speaker 15 He writes about big big trends in tech, culture, and politics. I'm a huge fan of his plain English podcast with The Ringer, and he's here with us today.
What's going on, man?

Speaker 13 How's it going, man? It's great to be here.

Speaker 15 All right. Here's my plan for the pod.
I'm fanboying for Plain English. So hopefully you get some new listeners out of this.

Speaker 15 What I want to do is you have these deep dive conversations on your show, you know, about cultural trends, things going on in our political, you know, sociological overlapping areas.

Speaker 15 And I want to do like a clip show. Remember the 90s? Like where we do like a sitcom clip show.
We do a little bit of each topic.

Speaker 15 And if people's whistle is wet and they want more, they can go back to the longer convos or articles. Does that sound good?

Speaker 13 I love it. That sounds fantastic.
Thank you.

Speaker 15 All right, let's do it. Okay.
The first one actually might be against my trend because I don't know if you had you. Have you done this? This was responsive to a tweet of yours, not one of the shows.

Speaker 15 But the question of the economic perception versus the reality. It's obviously something that we're talking about a lot here because of its impact on the presidential election in 2024.

Speaker 15 Many people have seen the Harris poll. 56% say U.S.
is in recession, actually seven straight quarters of positive growth. 49% say stocks are down year to date.

Speaker 15 We're having stock markets at record highs. 49% say unemployments at a 50-year high actually were at a 50-year low.
So, Derek, what do you make of that as an observer of the human condition?

Speaker 13 I think there's a lot of things happening at the same time. And let me try to list as many of these things happening at the same time as I can possibly remember them.

Speaker 13 The first thing that's happening is that we had a bout of inflation, which is incredibly unique for living Americans.

Speaker 13 We haven't really had any inflation like this for 40 years, which means that if you're really younger than, say, 50 years old, you have no living memory of anything like this. And inflation does...

Speaker 13 bad things to people. It makes them really, really upset when they can't afford groceries.
They can't afford houses. They can't afford cars.
Every single time they see a receipt, they get mad.

Speaker 13 We haven't had this experience in a while. And so inflation makes people mad in a way that other negative economic indicators don't make people mad.

Speaker 15 I feel it. I am deeply annoyed still.
And I don't want to be, but I am. Like when I go to the grocery store or when, you know, I get a hotel room or whatever, I get deeply annoyed from time to time.

Speaker 13 And that's because the long tail of inflation is different than the long tail of something like unemployment.

Speaker 13 When the unemployment rate drops from, let's say, 10% to 4%, what that means that that 6% of the population that got a job, well, they have a job now. They're doing okay.
They can make ends meet.

Speaker 13 But when inflation, which is a measure of the first derivative, falls from 10% to 3.5%, that means prices are still rising. on top of the 10% inflation that happened last year.

Speaker 13 So I want to begin at least this part of the segment by saying I do have a lot of sympathy for people who are frustrated at prices and are in particular frustrated at rates because mortgage rates or car loan rates or credit card rates are really high.

Speaker 13 And that's because the Federal Reserve raised rates in order to fight inflation. Now, that said,

Speaker 13 there is absolutely a mismatch between perceptions and reality.

Speaker 13 And the second thing you said when you were listing all the various ways that Americans are wrong in the perceptions of this economy, the second might be the most interesting to me.

Speaker 13 The fact that roughly half of Americans think that the stock market is down is astonishing. Something like 60 to 70% of Americans own stock.

Speaker 13 They don't need to go to Barron's or the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. They don't need to trust the big, bad media to tell them if the stock market is up or down.

Speaker 13 They can go to Fidelity. They can go look at their own investment accounts and see, am I up or down?

Speaker 13 Just the fact that half of Americans are telling pollsters that stocks are down at a moment when they're actually at their all-time high suggests to me that there is a lot of biased affect in these responses.

Speaker 13 A lot of Americans are just mad and they are associating or painting every single fact about the economy with their anger. That's the second thing that I think is really important.

Speaker 13 The third thing that I think is really important to say is that historically, Americans' attitudes toward the economy shaped their attitudes toward politics.

Speaker 13 If the economy is good, I like the incumbent. If the economy is bad, I don't like the incumbent.
Today, I think that's flipped. I think that people's politics shapes their sense of the economy.

Speaker 13 And you see this in the trends. When the University of Michigan asked Democrats and Republicans just before Donald Trump became president, how is the economy doing?

Speaker 13 The second Trump becomes president, Republicans swing toward this is the best economy ever. And the second Donald Trump leaves the office, they swing to this is the worst economy ever.

Speaker 13 And so a lot of this is, again, partisan affect driving survey responses. But it's important, I think, to keep all this on the table.

Speaker 13 Inflation high rates suck, and there's a general sort of negativity vibe in the American population. And number three, partisan politics is driving these survey responses.

Speaker 15 How do you talk to people about their experiences and try to break through when you're having conversations? We do plenty of this on what should Joe Biden say about this.

Speaker 15 And so I guess that's a sub-part of the question, but I'm talking about people in our lives.

Speaker 15 Like I got into like an actual fight yesterday with somebody who was like, you're just being an avocado toast eating elite and like whatever, you're in your bubble. And,

Speaker 15 you know, because I was like, look, it's objectively untrue that the economy is bad. Like, I get that it's annoying, but I, it's just not bad.
Like, it's annoying.

Speaker 15 For some people, there's like in any time, there's a, if you're on a fixed income, like inflation is going to hit you hard, right? There's certainly some people for whom it's, it's particularly bad.

Speaker 15 That's true at any point. But like as an objective measure right now, it's not, you're just annoyed because you're not used to paying X amount for Y product.
But like that makes people bristle.

Speaker 15 And so I do wonder how you think, you know, you can talk about that in a way that might nudge people a little bit into the light of reality.

Speaker 13 Well, let's start with understanding something that I think is really complex and hard to talk about. When we say something like the economy is good or the economy is bad, that's an incredibly

Speaker 13 abstract statement. It's almost like saying America is good or America is bad.
What do you do to someone who says that? Well, you say, what part? America is Taylor Swift and the NFL.

Speaker 13 It's Republicans and it's Democrats. It's lefties and Marxists and it's MAGA rightists.

Speaker 13 It's all of it. And the same really is true for an economy.
Sometimes people will say, don't tell me the stock market is up. The stock market isn't the economy.

Speaker 13 To which I always say, yes, but it's a part of it. And we can say to some people, unemployment has been below 4% for the longest period of time since the 1960s.

Speaker 13 And that's a part of the economy, but it's not all of it. Inflation.
has been relatively high, high relative to the prices they were four years ago.

Speaker 13 That's a part of the economy, but it's not all of it.

Speaker 13 And so I do think that one of the difficult things about persuading somebody that something like the economy is good when they think the economy is bad is it's just like having a conversation with someone who thinks America is bad when you think America is good.

Speaker 13 Everyone in this economy is experiencing a part of what makes it strong. Unemployment is low, there's productivity growth.
The stock market is at an all-time high. It's easy to find work.

Speaker 13 And if you have money that's invested, it's a really good economy for you. And also, yes, prices and rates are absolutely higher than they were four years ago.
It really is a question of attention.

Speaker 13 It's a question of focus. What are you choosing to describe when you say the economy is bad? And in terms of what Joe Biden should say,

Speaker 13 I mean, we don't need to go all the way into this.

Speaker 13 I think one of the difficult things about Joe Biden making a counterintuitive case right now, is that Joe Biden at the moment, I don't think, can persuade anybody of anything.

Speaker 13 I think Joe Biden has been an effective president, but I don't think he is very effective at running for president. That's a different job than filling the office.

Speaker 13 He's not a very effective campaigner right now. He is very old.
And so if Americans are going to be persuaded that the economy is good, that persuasion is not going to flow from the Oval Office.

Speaker 13 It's going to flow from some changes in real conditions, including, hopefully, real wages continuing to rise faster than prices.

Speaker 15 Is there anything they could do if Jared Bernstein called you? He was like, Derek, you know, we've got five months to juice this or to depress it. I don't know.

Speaker 15 I don't know what the right approach is.

Speaker 15 Is there anything that would hop to mind for you?

Speaker 13 I ask almost every single economist and political thinker this question on my podcast.

Speaker 15 I know, I was hoping you were going to take the best of those answers and provide me a synthesis.

Speaker 13 Well, here's the problem. The problem is that if you asked me a year ago, then we could talk about deficit reduction.

Speaker 13 We could talk about certain things that you could do with releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve. You could talk about things that could allay prices in the medium term.

Speaker 13 There is no medium term.

Speaker 13 The election is November, and economies don't move at the speed of light.

Speaker 13 Economies evolve over a long period of time, and especially things like overall prices and overall wages move extremely slowly. There is no lever to change prices and rates very quickly.

Speaker 13 You know, the unfortunate answer is here is, and I'm truly, I'm not a particularly pessimistic person generally, but I am pessimistic about the idea that Jared Bernstein and the Council of Economic Advisors and the White House itself, I am pessimistic about the idea that there exists some secret button that they could push that will dramatically change people's sense of the economy.

Speaker 13 Here's what we should hope for. What we should hope for is that stock prices slow down a little bit

Speaker 13 and prices moderate a lot and the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates maybe twice, God, even three times before November, what that would do is something like the following.

Speaker 13 It would combine declining prices with declining rates. And with declining rates, mortgages would be more affordable, cars would be more affordable, credit card debt would be more affordable.

Speaker 15 Static crisis, declining increase in prices. Prices wouldn't actually decline.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 That's right. But the rates would decline for mortgages and cars and credit card debt.
And that would make people feel richer if they felt like they could afford the big ticket items in life.

Speaker 15 Then maybe they would spend more money and that would help keep inflation persisting. So it's not, it's a tough call.

Speaker 13 That's exactly right. It's exactly right.
And this is the problem with inflation.

Speaker 13 It's always been the devilish problem with inflation is that if you get inflation undercover, if you bring down interest rates, it's going to stimulate economic activity, which stimulates spending, which stimulates even higher prices.

Speaker 15 A related question, and this is not really for Joe Biden, but a broader problem that is similar in its challenge is related to housing. You and I are totally aligned on this.

Speaker 15 I'm like of the view that the short housing supply is upstream from a lot of our other problems.

Speaker 15 You wrote recently about America's magical thinking about housing and specifically about the city of Austin, which has done the right thing, built a lot of new homes.

Speaker 15 I believe the stat that you used was that they've built homes at nine times a faster rate than San Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego.

Speaker 15 That might be something for Gavin Newsom to look at when he's not on TV. And yet, now people aren't happy about that that because rents are falling.
There's some vacant buildings.

Speaker 15 Talk about that, the challenge that we have with ever-increasing housing prices, but the fact that there are huge constituencies, including voting constituencies of people that don't want to do the things that would bring housing prices down.

Speaker 13 Housing is such an interesting issue. And I think it's particularly interesting to think about housing from along two different axes.
One is housing owners versus people outside the market.

Speaker 13 And the second is to think of it through time, the present versus the future.

Speaker 13 So right now, we have a situation where, because housing is such an important part of many people's savings, you have home voters, you have people who vote on the fact that their home is the most important part of their retirement portfolio.

Speaker 13 And if your home is the most important part of your retirement portfolio and you perceive that an increase in supply will moderate the inflation of your home value, which is absolutely valid, then you are encouraged in a somewhat rational way to discourage people around you from building more houses.

Speaker 13 And that is a local rational selfishness that cashes out in bad outcomes for everyone. Because more housing density is good for fixing the affordability crisis.
It's good for productivity.

Speaker 13 It's good for innovation. It makes people happier.
It makes people healthier to have more dense housing. There are so many benefits from an increase in dense housing supply.

Speaker 15 How does it make people healthier? They walk more?

Speaker 13 People walk more, absolutely, in cities than they do in suburbs and exurbs.

Speaker 13 And a huge part of, I think, declining longevity in America is an increase in cardiovascular diseases and diabetes that comes from the fact that Americans walk less than residents of almost any other industrialized country.

Speaker 13 Most industrialized countries, especially in Western Europe and places like Japan, you know, think about Hong Kong, Singapore, these are dense areas where people drive much less.

Speaker 13 There's some evidence that suggests that Japanese people walk about 70% more in terms of steps per day than Americans.

Speaker 13 Americans have the lowest longevity of basically any rich industrialized country in the world. That makes no sense because in general, longevity tends to correlate with income.

Speaker 13 So I was dilating on the answer, but basically it is a big deal that Americans don't walk as much. And I think a huge part of the fact that we don't walk as much is because of our built environment.

Speaker 13 But we're talking about housing here. And the other point that I wanted to make is the difference between sort of present and future markets.

Speaker 13 I was talking to a friend in Beverly Hills who was saying that he was very angered by the fact that there was construction going on. down the street from his Beverly Hills home.

Speaker 13 And it was really making him upset that they were trying to build more houses in Beverly Hills.

Speaker 13 And I asked this gentleman about how his kids were doing in terms of trying to find a house in Los Angeles because his kid and their families were looking to buy in Los Angeles. Is this Bill Simmons?

Speaker 13 This is Bill Simmons. No, it's not Bill Simmons.
No, no, I'm not exposing. I'm not blown up.

Speaker 13 I would have cut it if it actually wasn't Bill Simmons.

Speaker 13 And Derek.

Speaker 15 I thought I did see on the internet that he was selling a house recently. Anyway, go ahead.

Speaker 13 I have no knowledge of Bill Simmons' real estate portfolio, but this was not Bill Simmons, I promise you.

Speaker 13 But I was asking this gentleman about the buying experience of his children in Los Angeles, and he goes, oh, it's terrible. There's nowhere for my kids to live.

Speaker 13 And I was like, do you understand the gap between statements one and two, the frustration at current housing construction and the lack of future housing supply?

Speaker 13 A lot of people are a little bit like a dog that wants to play fetch with a ball, but won't let you grab the ball out of its mouth, like doesn't understand that a part of the process of fetch is releasing their mandibles so that you can grip the ball.

Speaker 13 When people hope for their children to be able to buy a house, a part of that wish, a part of that game is releasing your grip on NIMBYism and allowing housing to be built.

Speaker 13 And so it's not just one law or another that we need to fix in this country. It's an entire culture of housing abundance.

Speaker 15 Are there any good lessons from Austin, the Austin experience, like how they made it happen, how they broke red tape? Is there anything that stood out from you as you looked at that?

Speaker 13 There's absolutely good lessons from across Texas, where lower regulations and less zoning just makes it easier easier in general to build.

Speaker 13 But it's also important to say, I think, that there's no silver bullet here. You can't just fix one zoning law or another.
You can't just fix one permitting law or another.

Speaker 13 You need an entire culture and you need labor supply and you need financing. And it's only when all these things come together that you really get housing abundance.
Austin was in a sweet spot.

Speaker 13 They had low regulations. They had an easier permitting system.
They also had a lot of developers who could find financing.

Speaker 13 And they had the construction supply in order to actually finish these houses that got started.

Speaker 13 Because one thing we've seen in the last few years is a lot of housing starts, but a longer backlog for actually completing some of these apartments.

Speaker 15 You know, for the clip show, you should go listen to Derek's many episodes on housing. But I did a full interview with your colleague, Jerusalem Dempsis, on this a while back.

Speaker 15 I'll put it in the show notes. She's awesome.
We did a full hour on this question.

Speaker 13 She's fantastic.

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Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 5 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 9 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 10 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 8 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 6 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 15 Okay, right turn. I want to move into cults.
You have a recent article called The Unchurch, the True Cost of the Church Going Bust.

Speaker 15 I would like to connect that with a kind of obsession of yours about what seemed like a culture of cults that we have in this country around our politics, around crypto, around a bunch of other stuff.

Speaker 15 And I guess I'll just kind of let you cook on those subjects and we'll see where the conversation takes us.

Speaker 13 I'm interested in two phenomena that I guess are tributaries into the river of my interest in cults. One is the decline of religion in America.

Speaker 13 I'm not particularly religious myself, but I do think that America has historically relied on religion more than almost any other similarly rich industrialized country.

Speaker 13 And I'm very curious about what happens to the American identity as religion goes away for people? What do we fill that vacuum with? That's one question I'm very interested in.

Speaker 13 Another question I'm very interested in is what happens when

Speaker 13 you get a super abundance of supply in a particular industry like media.

Speaker 13 And a theory that I have about the riotous amount of competition in media is that more competition in media means more antagonism.

Speaker 13 So for instance, if you and I were going to start a new media company, The first thing we'd probably try to do is to point out why this media company is essential in the first place.

Speaker 13 Aren't there enough podcasts? Aren't Aren't there enough newsletters? Aren't there enough magazines?

Speaker 13 We would have to, as a new entrant in a very crowded space, point out how everybody else is wrong about the world. And that's why people have to listen to us.

Speaker 13 And this idea of people breaking away from a mainstream and creating a private sense of identity that disagrees strongly with mainstream culture, This historically is something very close to that which we have thought of as a cult identity.

Speaker 13 And so I think that one thing that's happening in media and maybe in many other media adjacent areas is that the logic of cults is beginning to colonize our experience of American life.

Speaker 13 And again, when I think of a cult, I think of a nascent, emerging movement that has a private set of rules or norms.

Speaker 13 And one of those rules or norms is a direct and specific indictment of the mainstream, right? So cults, I think of as being very high trust internally and low trust externally.

Speaker 13 And when you think about the decline of trust in American institutions, especially on the right, I think what you have is a kind of cult mentality.

Speaker 13 And so in politics, in media, and maybe even in aspects of the end of religion, I just do think that this logic of cults is ascendant.

Speaker 15 I want to put

Speaker 15 the unchurched question over there and come back to it for a second because I do think it's related.

Speaker 15 But on this exact point, since we're both in media and it's something I think about a lot too, the parallel I like always come back to and I've used a couple of times, I think, on the show is when we were growing up, the 80s and 90s, if you go to the grocery store, you know, we're still buying periodicals.

Speaker 15 Right there, you know, at the register, you know, they had the tabloids, right? You know, whatever.

Speaker 15 Hillary Clinton has a love child, you know, aliens come, you know, have inhabited Michael Jackson's body, whatever.

Speaker 15 And The Economist, et cetera, if it was there at all, was over in the aisle somewhere in the periodical section. And there was like, there's a reason for that.
It's human nature, right?

Speaker 15 Like humans are more interested in things that are titillating or gossip or contrary to what is common view.

Speaker 15 And that was managed, I feel like, in a way, in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, because people are getting information from other places too, right?

Speaker 15 They might buy the Inquirer, but then they go home and watch the news.

Speaker 15 But now, when it's in your phone and it's like a constant competition, like, do I click on this TikTok or that one, this YouTube or that one? And one YouTube is, everyone's out to get you.

Speaker 15 The elites are terrible. Everything you've heard is wrong.
Let me tell you the truth. And then the other thing is like, well, you know, it's complicated.

Speaker 13 It's nuanced.

Speaker 15 Like, Joe Biden's facing some tough challenges here. There are good points on this side and that side.
Like, people are going to click on the former.

Speaker 15 And so I think that those two instincts, like the human instinct to be drawn to something contrarian and conspiratorial with what you're talking about of the kind of the need for the producers of that material to, you know, in order to be successful in a competitive set.

Speaker 15 Like, those two things seem to be working together in our disfavor, and I'm not really sure how to unravel it.

Speaker 13 You remind me of a paper that was published in 2010 that I was just reading for some reporting that I'm doing right now. It's a paper that's called What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from U.S.

Speaker 13 Daily Newspapers. And the economists who wrote it were Matthew Genskow and Jesse M.
Shapiro. And I think people can just look this up.
It's the PDF I'm looking at as it was available online.

Speaker 13 This is a paper that looked at the question of of essentially, where does media bias come from? I think some media critics say that media bias comes from owners.

Speaker 13 If your owner is conservative, then their newspaper is going to be conservative. If the owner is liberal, then their newspaper is going to be conservative.

Speaker 13 Liberal, excuse me. All right, well, maybe that's one possibility.
Maybe you could say media bias comes from reporters' preferences, right? It comes from the biases of reporters.

Speaker 13 And this paper looked at some evidence and ran some surveys. And their conclusion was: no, actually, firms respond most strongly to consumer preferences.

Speaker 13 Consumer audience preferences drive media bias more than ownership or reporter bias. This is, I think, one of the hardest things for casual media consumers to understand.

Speaker 13 Lots of what we hate about the media is as much the audience's fault as it is the media's fault. Now, people always hate it when I say that.

Speaker 15 JVL will love that, though. My colleague will really appreciate that.
Anything that blames the people, he'll like. So we can pull that out for him.

Speaker 13 People hate it when I say this because they think that I'm letting the media off the hook. And that's not what I'm doing.
What I'm saying is popular media, popular news media, is a co-production.

Speaker 13 We, the journalists, are producing information that we hope you, the audience, will like.

Speaker 13 And the more accurate our feedback mechanisms are in terms of audience behavior, the more we see exactly what podcasts you listen to and exactly how long you listen to those podcasts, and exactly what headline you'll click on.

Speaker 13 And if we offer you 17 different headlines, what is your rank order of headlines one through 17?

Speaker 13 What kind of headlines you more likely to click on than others? The sharper that feedback loop, the more the news media comes to be a kind of mirror held up to audience preferences.

Speaker 13 And that's happening to media right now. We are becoming, we are much more sophisticated in our ability to understand what it is that audiences want.

Speaker 13 Audiences want negativity. Bad is more powerful than good.
It's an evolutionary fact of attention that we pay more attention to bad things in our environment than good things. This keeps us alive.

Speaker 13 The fact of a poison berry is more important than the fact of a beautiful blade of grass. Negativity bias is one of the most fundamental biases.
that shapes media today.

Speaker 13 And if people are upset at the media for being too negative, they should look in the mirror and think about what articles am I clicking on? What podcasts am I listening to? What stories am I sharing?

Speaker 13 And how am I sharing them? Because I'll bet that if audiences, like myself, I share the same negativity bias. I'm as human as anyone else I'm describing in the audience.

Speaker 13 I think if audiences paid really close attention to their behavior, they would see how powerful negativity bias shapes the way they interact with the news.

Speaker 13 And they should go that next step further and say, if every media organization that I interact with had a perfect understanding of how much I love negative, catastrophizing news, wouldn't they just keep serving up negative, catastrophying news in order to get and keep my attention?

Speaker 13 The answer is yes. So I'm not trying to make it oversimple.
It is complicated. Media is a co-production between producers and consumers.

Speaker 13 But a huge piece of this is that the smarter media companies get, the more negative media, quote, ought to become, because negativity is a reflection of consumer preference.

Speaker 15 All right. Well, I'm going to give the consumer what they want here because I'm ready to catastrophize in response to that.

Speaker 15 I am with you. I think that on the individual level, people,

Speaker 15 once they become aware of this, can be more thoughtful about their media choices.

Speaker 15 At a group level, this is getting worse before it gets better because we're coming into a time where not only do we know more and more about user inputs, but we'll be able to have computers and supercomputers and artificial intelligence tell us exactly what, not only tell us exactly what our reader or viewer wants, but be able to just create it and give it to them actually without very much human involvement.

Speaker 15 And so I'm curious what you think that world looks like and what the dangers are of the world we're heading to with AI-driven, you know, confirmation-biased supermachines.

Speaker 13 The first answer I have is: I have no idea.

Speaker 13 I don't know what a world that is more

Speaker 13 generative and algorithmic looks like.

Speaker 13 But I would have to think that if the question underneath your question is,

Speaker 13 what does a purely algorithmic news media

Speaker 13 look like? The answer is buried here in the present. It's something like TikTok, right? TikTok is probably

Speaker 13 the most sophisticated AI in curating and organizing news information.

Speaker 13 And I'm not not familiar with too many really rigorous studies of news on TikTok, but from at least my pinhole vantage point, it seems like a perfect explanation of the trends that I'm talking about.

Speaker 13 It seems like a lot of people recognizing that highly ideological news that identifies an enemy, catastrophizes the danger of that enemy, and holds oneself up as the true arbiter of truth against

Speaker 13 a world of lying imbeciles, that's a really successful way of getting and keeping people's attention. And again, I think that that's not only negativity biased, I also think it's a little bit culty.

Speaker 13 The idea that everybody is wrong, that I am right, is a really powerful idea in the history of cults. And I also see it consistently as a really powerful idea in news media.

Speaker 15 Yeah, the TikTok, I was trying to pull it up. Maybe you saw this news today too.
If not, I'll grab it and post and put it in the show notes.

Speaker 15 But there was a study today about young people's view of America and of elites and institutions and the world, and it's just overwhelmingly negative.

Speaker 15 And, you know, some of that I think is related to the facts on the ground. I've talked to this podcast.
Like we haven't had a ton of huge successes at the institutional level

Speaker 15 during the Iraq war, financial crisis, Trump years.

Speaker 15 Some of it, I think, also is obviously this information silo that is just hyper-negative, hyper-contrarian, hyper-tearing down of everything without much pushback from the other side.

Speaker 13 I would agree with all of that.

Speaker 13 And I would say further that it's possible that what we get with generative AI and a more AI-inflected news ecosystem is not an extension of the trends that we see with things like TikTok.

Speaker 13 It might be a rate change, right? You might see an entirely new kind of news culture develop online that is sort of inconceivable to people today. That's absolutely a possibility.

Speaker 13 But my guess is, or my observation would be, that what large language models do is they take an enormous corpus of information and data and language and they produce work that is generative of it.

Speaker 13 Well, what would a generative AI trained on audience behavior and news behavior decide audiences want?

Speaker 13 I think that if you pay close attention to audience behavior, it would decide that what audiences audiences want for the most part is catastrophizing news and negative news and clear enemies and look at the stupid person over here.

Speaker 13 I think that's what people want.

Speaker 13 There's a reason the tabloids historically were close to the checkout line because when people are ego-depleted after making a bunch of decisions in the supermarket and our guard is down, what do we want to read about?

Speaker 13 We want to read about Hillary Clinton's alien baby. And right now, Hillary Clinton's alien baby, that vibe is permanently and entirely on offer whenever we open up our phones.

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Speaker 15 This takes us to another conversation you've had of kind of a point-counterpoint-ish set of podcasts recently with Jonathan Haidt, who has a recent book about the anxiety generation and pointing a lot to phones, but also to some other factors for what's causing increasing anxiety.

Speaker 15 You had David Wallace Wells, who writes for The Times.

Speaker 15 I interviewed about climate change a while back, but you were having him talk about how he is a counterview to this based on data that you were seeing from other countries that maybe this rising levels of anxiety and depression among America's youth might not be about phones, might be about something else.

Speaker 15 I'm curious which one of those arguments, what were some of the most compelling arguments you heard from both sides of those discussions?

Speaker 13 It's a huge, big, complicated discussion, but let me try to boil it down to two words.

Speaker 13 The debate about smartphones and teen mental health is a debate between people who focus on time and a debate between people who focus on space.

Speaker 13 So on the time issue, just look at the graphs of rising teenage anxiety. This is clearly something that takes off in the early 2010s.
And it takes off in the U.S.

Speaker 13 and it takes off in Western Europe and then it takes off in the UK and also other parts of the rich industrialized world. What's happening at that time?

Speaker 13 Well, different things are happening in different places, but clearly smartphone penetration past 50% is happening in all of these places. That's one argument in favor of time.

Speaker 13 Another argument in favor of time is that there is really a growing body of evidence that suggests that the more time you spend on a phone, the higher the correlation is with rising anxiety, depression, and negativity.

Speaker 13 This is all research that's being done on teenagers. So that's the evidence on time.
It's just that it matches up with the time series.

Speaker 13 And the more time that people spend on these devices or teenagers spend on these devices, the more depressed they seem to be. Really strong correlation.

Speaker 13 When I say that it's a debate between time and space, what I mean is the most interesting counter argument to me about the smartphone thesis of John Haidt is

Speaker 13 why is this just about only happening in English-speaking countries? So if you look at where teen anxiety is spiking, It's spiking in the U.S. and Canada.

Speaker 13 It's spiking in Western and Northern Europe, where the the share of people that at least speak English is extremely high. And it's spiking in New Zealand and Australia.

Speaker 13 It's really not happening almost anywhere else. It's not happening in East Asia.
It's not happening in Japan. It doesn't seem to be happening in Africa.

Speaker 13 It's absolutely not happening in Eastern Europe, where rates of English speaking are lower. It almost seems like the more

Speaker 13 it's. What I'm saying is, yeah, it's gerins.
That's it.

Speaker 13 It's really bizarre that it's only happening in the English-speaking countries,

Speaker 13 unless you think that this is about an interaction effect between smartphones and social media and a particular kind of culture that originated in the English-speaking West when it comes to mental health.

Speaker 13 What if there's some way that Americans have come to think about depression and anxiety? and maybe even issues like trauma and negativity and catastrophe in the world.

Speaker 13 What if we are, as the chief cultural exporters of the world, just as successful at exporting our general anxiety disorder as we have been successful as exporting Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola?

Speaker 13 That's a possibility that I'm very interested in exploring, and I'm currently writing an article about that. So it could be the case, but we're still in the world of hypothesis here.

Speaker 15 I was super interested in this conversation. It was, I think, maybe last week.
It was with David Wells-Wells, who I liked a lot.

Speaker 15 The least compelling side of it to me was that there are actual suicides, though.

Speaker 15 You could sell me on this notion that the way we're talking about depression and anxiety is in some way exacerbating it. It's also helping certain people, of course.
So

Speaker 15 it's not a total bad, but because there's more awareness.

Speaker 15 And so some people are getting medication that they absolutely needed that they didn't, but that other people, because of just the cultural stew they're in, it's exacerbating a problem that might have been more minor in a different time or culture.

Speaker 15 The pushback to that is the actual suicide numbers, though, which are up, which is not really about language. That's about action, of course.

Speaker 13 Well, the surprising thing about suicide numbers, though, is that suicide is really only up in America and a handful of other countries. Suicides are not up in Europe.

Speaker 13 In fact, suicide rates among teenagers seem to be falling in Europe.

Speaker 13 And that, again, I think speaks to the fact that something's happening here that seems to be cultural in addition to being technological. And I don't think we have to choose.

Speaker 13 It's not smartphones or America. It's not smartphones and social media or English-speaking cultures of mental health negativity and cognitive behavioral trauma.
It could be an interaction effect.

Speaker 13 If I had to put my bet on something, I would say there's some really fascinating and complex interaction effect between the damaging effect of smartphones and social media and the fact that Americans in the West have, in the last few decades, arrived at a historically peculiar notion of mental health that might be damaging to some people, in particular young people.

Speaker 15 I just want to circle back to that poll I was referencing earlier because it's interesting and right on our topic today. Blueprint put it out, 943, 18 to 30 year olds.
64%

Speaker 15 say America is in decline. 65% either strongly or somewhat agree that nearly all politicians are corrupt.
Only 7% disagreed. That is insane.

Speaker 13 There's a Gallup study on institutional trust that basically asks people if they trust the institutions in their countries. I believe it was the study of the G7 countries.
So you got the U.S.

Speaker 13 in there and France and Germany, Japan. I believe the U.S.
is the only country with below 50% trust in its institutions.

Speaker 13 I do think we have to keep on the table the possibility that as strange and wishy-washy and namby-pamby as this sounds, there's a culture of negativity in America that is unlike anything that's existed in this country for decades.

Speaker 13 and unlike anything that exists in the rich developed world.

Speaker 13 And I don't know exactly where it comes from, but it seems like we should be looking for a skeleton key into that because the survey responses that we're getting, and I think we see reflected in our politics and our media, really do suggest a kind of very dark American exceptionalism when it comes to this negativity.

Speaker 13 And I'll add, to go back to the very first question you asked me: the U.S. is richer than every country in Europe that's more positive at its institutions.
We've done better since the pandemic.

Speaker 13 than all these countries. Our inflation rates are lower.
Our real wage growth is higher. Our stock prices are are higher.

Speaker 13 If you're a materialist and you believe that material well-being is good for people, and I certainly do, there's a lot to celebrate relative to the experience of Spain, France, Germany.

Speaker 13 Look at electricity prices. If Americans had the electricity prices of Germany, I mean, the White House would have been invaded already by roving bands of electricity depressants.

Speaker 13 There's a lot that's going well in this country. There's a lot that's not going well in this country.
And for whatever reason, the latter category is getting an order of magnitude more attention.

Speaker 15 It is crazy to me.

Speaker 15 That's something that I just, I'm also just obsessed with this because from the IDO Snapchat show, where I hear a lot from a lot of teens and just the negativity is just on it's like it's unbelievable.

Speaker 15 It's at a country where I mentioned all the negatives that have happened in these kids' lives, but there's been huge progress on LGBT issues. There's been huge awareness of

Speaker 15 ways that people have been discriminated against, certain groups have been discriminated against that are being alleviated, maybe not as fast as we want.

Speaker 15 I mean, like, there's a lot of ways where things are progressing.

Speaker 15 And to think that only 7% of people think there are no good politicians, not one, like, not their governor, not their congressman, not Barack Obama, not anybody. I mean, that is

Speaker 15 dark. And that is something that is culturally threatening.
Since this is a TDS podcast, can I posit that it's Donald Trump's fault? Or unfortunately, did all this stuff start in 2013?

Speaker 13 It's absolutely possible that it's Donald Trump's fault. I definitely can't disprove that thesis.
So we can absolutely keep that one on on the table, too.

Speaker 15 I mean, electing the stupidest and most racist person among us as the president for us to have some downstream consequences for people's confidence in the American system.

Speaker 13 It certainly isn't helping people's confidence in the American system, that's for sure.

Speaker 13 And this is someone whose political success is entirely tied up with criticizing institutions, the deep state, the facts of democracy. I'll say one thing.

Speaker 13 that might lean us back into optimism, because despite the fact that I write about a lot of depressing things, I'm actually absolutely an optimist to my bones.

Speaker 13 It's really interesting that if you ask people about how the world is going, they get more positive as their answers become more local. So if you ask Americans how is the U.S.
economy?

Speaker 13 Oh, it's absolute shit. How's your state economy? Oh, it's doing okay.

Speaker 13 How are you? Oh, I'm doing fine.

Speaker 13 I wrote this article maybe a year and a half ago called Everything's Terrible, but I'm Fine, about this phenomenon where people are consistently personally resilient, even as they are consistently globally depressed.

Speaker 13 And that juxtaposition between individual resilience and global depression is fascinating. And it might also be a particularly American juxtaposition as well.

Speaker 15 Okay. I'm also an optimist like you.
I just sometimes it's hard to find. I'm like looking under the covers.
I want to close the loop on the unchurch. You said something that was fascinating to me.

Speaker 15 I was on a road trip with a friend of mine. Road trips may be the wrong word, but we had a lengthy drive together.
Also, not religious like you. Also said the same exact thing, right?

Speaker 15 Where he's just like, I'm looking around my community and I don't believe in God.

Speaker 15 It was never a church person, and I just assess that like we need to get some people back into the churches because, like, that's the best idea I've got for just, you know,

Speaker 15 a slew of problems that he was seeing in society, including, you know, just obsession over politics, cruelty, you know, the lack of third space.

Speaker 13 So, anyway, I just wanted to let you kind of close the loop on that challenge and whether there's anything you learned looking at the research on that well tell me what direction you'd like me to take it I couldn't go as big or as small here do you want me to talk about sort of the decline of socializing more broadly or do you want me to talk about religion specifically religion specifically I think one thing I'm interested in in terms of my own approach to the subject is that sometimes I feel nostalgic for a feeling I've never experienced I've never been particularly religious and yet in a way I'm like homesick for a feeling that was never home for me it's a very strange thing.

Speaker 13 And maybe it has something to do with the fact that as an American, you sort of can't extricate yourself from

Speaker 13 the deep Judeo-Christian culture that permeates the way that Americans think of ourselves and our institutions and each other.

Speaker 15 Christmas is church and

Speaker 15 you have nostalgia. It's wrapped up in memories of movies that you liked and childhood trips, Christmas and Easter Catholicism or whatever.

Speaker 13 It could be all that. And I also am very taken with the idea that there's lots of aspects of American culture, like our hyperindividualism, that are essentially an outgrowth of Protestantism.

Speaker 13 You know, we think about the world very differently than many people around the world think about reality.

Speaker 13 There's a great book called The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich, which points out that many biases and mindsets and frameworks that we have to think about what the self is and whether we owe our alliances more to the law or our family, that many of these ideas that seem normal are actually extraordinarily Western and sometimes even uniquely American.

Speaker 13 And so I'm interested in that.

Speaker 13 To scope out and to get to the 30,000-foot level here, what's most interesting to me is the possibility that we are in a century where some of the most important sociological trends all point in the same direction, and that direction is antisociality.

Speaker 13 We can just start with religion. Well, Every year between the 1930s and 1990s, more than 70% of Americans said they went to church regularly.

Speaker 13 Last year, it fell below below 50% for the first time ever. You go to work.
I work remotely from my basement. Looks like maybe you're in your home.

Speaker 13 The rise of remote work, I think, is a really positive phenomenon in a lot of ways, but it's also a phenomenon that is at least somewhat anti-communal. You know, I am around fewer people when I work.

Speaker 13 And I think that for some people, that's fine.

Speaker 15 Did you see the study that about like, was it like 40% of people that were working from home said that they go days without leaving their home?

Speaker 13 I can't bring myself to believe that that's possible, but I suppose it is. And it also goes to the point that at first you're like, how do they eat?

Speaker 13 Well, once again, I wrote an article when I came back from parental leave about the trends in the restaurant industry.

Speaker 13 Delivery and takeaway makes up a far larger share of the restaurant industry than it ever has. Once again, that's a little bit anti-communal.

Speaker 13 Whereas we used to dine together, now we're more likely to dine alone. One by one, these things aren't so bad.

Speaker 13 But when you put them all together, it's interesting they all point in the same direction. And the direction really cashes out is this.

Speaker 13 According to the American Time You Survey, Americans spend 35% less time face-to-face socializing than they did in 2003. For teenagers, they spend 50% less time socializing face-to-face.

Speaker 13 There's been an extraordinary de-socialization phenomenon in the US in just the last 20 years.

Speaker 13 And I wonder how much of the inexplicable phenomena that we're trying to describe at least touch the phenomena of de-socializing.

Speaker 15 Well, I'm happy we went out to 30,000 foot level because you're really, you know, tickling one of my hobby horses on this right now.

Speaker 15 I think that at an observant level, you're the one that's looking at studies.

Speaker 15 I'm not, but

Speaker 15 I think about the people in my life that for whatever reason, during the pandemic or the post-pandemic, or you know, something, you know, they got divorced or something happened.

Speaker 15 Like the people in my life who have the least social contact with other humans are the ones that feel to me the most unstable, the most susceptible to radicalization.

Speaker 15 It's like a natural human thing, right? If you're alone a lot, that's a lot of time for your mind to work and start thinking, you know, oh, these people aren't calling me because they hate me.

Speaker 15 I think it's very unhealthy. I think it's one of our problems.

Speaker 13 And turning back to a subject that we touched on earlier, which is news media. I also wonder how the antisocial trend touches news media.

Speaker 13 So there was an interview that Barack Obama did with Ezra Klein, where he said that he, when he went to rural America.

Speaker 13 Ezra? Ezra Klein?

Speaker 15 Ezra Klein? Yeah.

Speaker 13 I'm not familiar.

Speaker 13 It must have been on his local town tour where he was actually talking to Ezra about how when he ran for president, he went to places like Iowa and he's visiting these local towns and talking about how easy it was for him to talk to these crowds and how much harder it is for him to talk to them now.

Speaker 13 And he said, he made this comment where he said, they all get their news from the same sources. It's all Fox News or Sinclair-owned television stations or Facebook.

Speaker 13 And it's interesting because, obviously, if you're in the media industry, you're well aware of the fact that local news is in secular decline.

Speaker 13 I think something like 250 newspapers close roughly every year. Local newspapers close roughly every year.

Speaker 13 As local news declines and people become less in touch with their community news, they become more in touch with the news as it exists as a national global phenomenon.

Speaker 13 And there might be something berserking about that. This idea that when I read the news, I know more about what's happening in Rafah than I know what's happening down the street.

Speaker 13 Because it's more interesting for me to pay attention to debates about Israel-Palestine than it is for me to even understand the local laws that affect why my favorite restaurant might have to close down.

Speaker 13 I think there's something happening there too that also touches this antisocial phenomenon.

Speaker 15 Well, I could do a whole podcast on that, so maybe we'll have have to have you back in a couple of months. But I want to end on two positives.

Speaker 15 You do one of my favorite things you do at the end of the year at the Atlantic as a fellow optimist. You write about the breakthroughs of the year.

Speaker 15 I glanced at this year's before we got on, and I picked out four, and I just want you to pick your favorite to tell us about.

Speaker 15 CRISPRs, malaria, and RSV vaccines, Furvo and Hydrogen, Engineered Skin Bacteria. The other ones I already knew about.
So those are the four that I don't know a lot about.

Speaker 15 I want you to get me excited about something.

Speaker 13 Man, they're all incredibly exciting.

Speaker 15 Do them all in one sentence or do one and do one long? It's your call.

Speaker 13 Let's talk about engineering skin bacteria. I think this is one of the coolest, most surprising things that I read in anything last year.

Speaker 13 To catch people up, every year I ask a bunch of my favorite scientists, what's the coolest thing that happened in science technology in the last 12 months?

Speaker 13 And I get all the responses and I rank my 10 favorite responses. And this was certainly the weirdest response that I got: that there is a technology for engineering skin cells to attack diseases.

Speaker 13 And the way that you essentially apply the therapy would be to essentially paint a person's, I mean, in this case, it was a rat, but paint a rat's nose to deliver a drug that travels through the skin into the bloodstream.

Speaker 13 And one reason I find this story really interesting is that, you know, we think about taking a drug really in like one or two ways, right? It's either a pill or it's an injection. Like, that's it.

Speaker 13 Every drug is a pill or an injection. You know, maybe time to think a little bit bigger, darling, right?

Speaker 13 Like, let's talk about like painting our face, but putting a little patch in our skin, putting a little bit of like of a cream on our cheek that would have the same molecular properties as the pill that we're taking or the chemotherapy or the IV that is dripping.

Speaker 13 That's really powerful when you think about the fact that a lot of anxiety about vaccines, I think, isn't just an anxiety about the goo in the vaccines. It's an anxiety about the needle.

Speaker 13 And if we could make vaccines a spray in our nose, if we could make it a paint on our skin, that might increase uptake of life-saving medicines significantly.

Speaker 15 That's interesting. Well, all the other ones were interesting.
People can go read it in December.

Speaker 15 If you're an Atlantic subscriber, Jeff Goldberg really should be giving me a cut of Atlantic subscriptions at this point. I keep telling people to go subscribe to the Atlantic.
All right.

Speaker 15 Lastly, because you're at The Ringer, The Ringer, like me, shares an obsession with the NBA. I'm still licking my wounds, as listeners know, about the Nuggets.

Speaker 15 But I thought that in the spirit of your nine breakthroughs of the year, we could just spend a moment together on the brilliance of Victor Wembanyama.

Speaker 15 I just don't think people understand what is about to happen with this guy.

Speaker 15 In some ways, he might have ruined the Nuggets year because we randomly lost to the Spurs, who are terrible with two games left in the season to move us from the first seed to the second seed.

Speaker 15 But even still, I'm not bitter at him. I've got to go see him twice this year.
He's like a gazelle. He's like seven.
I think he lies to make himself shorter. He's like seven foot five or six.

Speaker 15 He can shoot threes and do crossovers and touch the rim without jumping. The direction of where we're going with these kinds of athletes now in a globalized game.

Speaker 15 I mean, does it just fill you with the joy and wonder of a child that it does for me?

Speaker 13 It's amazing. And it's fun to think about it historically too.
I did a fun podcast with Kurt Goldsbury about his new book, Hoop Atlas.

Speaker 13 And one of the things we talked about is this really interesting history of MVPs. So just about all the MVPs, the 1960s, 1970s, went to centers.

Speaker 13 And then for a long time, no center, essentially, one MVP, maybe except for Shaq. In the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, you have MVPs dominated by Magic and Bird and Jordan.

Speaker 13 And there's a little bit of a keem there, and there's a little bit of Shaq here and there. But basically, you had wings and shooters taking over the league.

Speaker 13 And especially in the era where the Warriors were dominant, it seemed like the future, the center position, was going to look like Draymond Green. That is to say, 6'6, 6'7 and strong as an ox.

Speaker 13 But what ended up happening is all the skills developed by wings and guards ended up being bundled up in these big guys coming from Europe and, I suppose, Africa as well.

Speaker 13 And so you have Embiid, who can shoot threes, and you have Jokic, who's the best passer in the league, and you have Wemby, who's...

Speaker 13 probably in the next five years going to average something unbelievably stupid, like a 30, 15, 8, 7, and 5 or something.

Speaker 13 And that's just going to be normal. That's just going to be the norm.
And I think that we're just entering the age of, you know, we went from the age of the center to the age of the do-it-all shooter.

Speaker 13 And now we are in the synthesis. We are in the age of the do-it-all center.
And it really would not be crazy if centers won every MVP of the 2020s.

Speaker 13 I mean, they've won the last five, essentially, if you count Yannis as a center. It wouldn't be crazy if centers or de facto centers won 10, 10, 15 MVPs in a row.

Speaker 15 It's unbelievable. Even for folks who aren't like well into basketball, the Wimby YouTube clips, I mean, it's almost like if you're into sci-fi, it's almost interesting to be watching.

Speaker 15 When I first saw the European clips of him,

Speaker 15 he would come from off-screen.

Speaker 15 I was like, oh my God, like, who is the Velociraptor?

Speaker 13 That shot when he misses the three and then catches the rebound in the air and in one motion dunks it. I was like,

Speaker 13 this is a video game. Like God cheated, and now we just have to live in the aftermath of God cheating.

Speaker 15 It is phenomenal. Derek Thompson, his podcast is plain English.
He writes for The Atlantic. Please come back to the podcast soon.
Give us a little dose of optimism and hope to see you around the bend.

Speaker 13 This is fun. Thanks.

Speaker 15 All right. Thanks, everybody.
We'll be back. I'm not sure when we're going to be back.
We pre-taped this one because we don't know when the Trump trial is coming.

Speaker 15 So we'll see you on the next podcast because I do this every day. Peace.

Speaker 15 really wanna go out.

Speaker 15 I really wanna go outside, start to see you fade.

Speaker 15 You,

Speaker 15 you really wanna hold out.

Speaker 15 You really wanna make signs, leave the light away.

Speaker 15 I

Speaker 15 really wanna go out.

Speaker 15 I really wanna go go outside and feel in my old days.

Speaker 15 You,

Speaker 15 you really wanna hold up.

Speaker 15 You really wanna stay inside the king where you live.

Speaker 15 But I know

Speaker 15 I

Speaker 15 could

Speaker 15 exactly what I haven't there before.

Speaker 15 The Bullwork Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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