Yuval Levin

And I always want to point this out, that when I'm talking about kind of healthy politics and healthy tribalism, it does not mean that we all have to get along, that we all have to agree.

As the author Yuval Levin has said, that unity is not believing the same thing.

Unity is acting together.

And the Constitution is the thing that forces us or gives us the framework for acting together, knowing we won't always get our way, but there's a path forward to at least getting some of what we want if we're willing to build those coalitions.

Yuval Levin, thank you for joining me.

Where does today's recording find you?

Well, thanks very much for having me.

Well, I don't know.

I mean, in defense of our biotech friends, I think it would depend on the course of study, right? I mean, there's all kinds of ways I can imagine someone getting their hands dirty, so to speak, in the lab, figuring out how this actually works outside of the classroom.

That does have the features that I'm interested in.

But you're taking us there already.

And some really thoughtful people, I think, have identified that.

Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, said that in a conversation with Sean O'Brien, in a conversation you moderated.

He's like, look at all my Yale grad friends in the elite circles I've run in.

they will not handle it well if they lose their white collar job and don't know what to do.

before you even talked about the voters.

And, you know, we've all been in institutions where there are certain individuals that everyone just recognizes have greater wisdom, greater integrity, whatever, but they may not necessarily play well at a stump speech kind of thing, right? You know, like at AEI, I think you would get on the first round of balloting a very high number of people who would make Yuval Levin a czar, if we could.

But, like, Yuval would not be a great rally speaker, right? And I'm wondering...

When you have sort of so much more, I mean, was it Talberg, the democratic totalitarianism or whatever? When you're empowering the masses to make decisions more, I'm not saying that democracy hasn't led to everyone being a demagogue.

But in this episode, we're going to do something a little different and talk about one of the populations schools serve, adolescents.

How are technologies such as social media, AI, and location tracking affecting teenagers? What are gender relations like among high school students? And how do teens today think about religion, politics, and America? To discuss these questions and more, I invited my colleague Dan Cox back onto the podcast.

Dan Cox is the director of the Survey Center on American Life here at AEI.

He's also the author of a recent report, A Digital Divide in American Adolescence, Gender, Class, and the New Teenage Experience.

Let's go.

Let's see how quickly you can think on your feet.

It's interesting how clearly this reflects on our colleague Yuval Levin's observation that sort of disorders of youth that we used to think about might be transgression or aggression or other kinds of things that we thought, well, kids should not be doing those things.

And now it seems like there's more disorders of passivity, which are not actually excesses, they're doing too little.

Mark Bauerlein takes a chapter.

Yuval Levin takes a chapter, Melissa Muskella, a number of scholars and think tank policy education reformers, most of whom have some knowledge of curriculum, civic ed, liberal arts in that field.

And so it's kind of a deeply knowledgeable both about education policy and reform, but also curriculum and the sort of traditional horse sense of how we have successfully educated in the past.

Yeah.