Gide, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

It can feel a little bit overwhelming, reading the news these days, thinking about the fate

of democracy and of civilization and of ourselves and our loved ones and our children.

The uncomfortable conversation we're having today, the dangerous idea we are considering,

is the possibility that every generation believes that things are falling apart.

And we're not really in a position to know whether or not they are.

But the best way for us to be constructive and sane is to assume that they're

not falling apart and that there's something that we can do. It's the basic idea behind the writing

of Adam Mastriani. He is a psychologist, a social psychologist. He has a PhD from Harvard,

and he studies how people think about each other, their group dynamics, and how knowledge and ideas spread.

He has a fabulous Substac newsletter called Experimental History, which is a sort of contrarian take on psychology and philosophy and cultural criticism.

And I wanted to get him on the show to discuss why things may not be as bad as they feel,

and even if they are, why they're more likely to be solved,

and you are more likely to be constructive if we assume that things are not beyond the pale

and that the world still has some hope left within it. I hope you enjoy

this conversation as much as I did with the one and only Adam Mastriani.

I must say going back to the States recently last month, I noticed something that you're

pointing to in a recent blog of yours,

which was this sense of almost joyful fatalism that people had. Like when I was there in Trump's

first term, everyone was, all my colleagues on the left were shocked and horrified. And, you know,

there was this sense of trauma and PTSD kind of.

...