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Hi, John.

Hello, Bob. How nice to see you sort of in person, face-to-face, whatever.

Good. Good to see you. Let me introduce us. I'm Robert Wright. This is the right show available on both streaming video and the audio podcast. You're Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at NYU. I guess it's a business school

there, more specifically, author of some well-known books, including The Righteous Mind, and your co-author

with Greg Lukianoff of The Codling of the American mind, big bestseller.

And that started as a story in the Atlantic, and you've recently written another piece in the Atlantic that got a lot of attention.

And that's largely what we're going to talk about today.

It's called Why the Past Ten Years of American Life have been uniquely stupid.

That almost understates how dismal the picture you paint is, I would say.

That's almost too lighthearted for the piece itself.

Let me quote a little.

You use a tower of Babel metaphor, I think reasonably enough.

You write the story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found

for what happened to America in the 2010s and for the fractured country we now inhabit. I should add,

of course, in the story of Babel, you know, people who previously spoke the same language no longer

do by virtue of God's punishment for their hubris. Then you write,

something went terribly wrong. Very suddenly, we are disoriented, unable to speak the same

language, or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

You go on at Babel is, quote, a story about the fragmentation of everything. It's about the shattering

of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community.

It's a metaphor for what is happening, not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right as well as within universities, companies, professionals,

...