As smart phone use has soared, Generation Z’s mental health has plummeted. But just how bad is this crisis, and who should we hold responsible?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt sets out his comprehensive diagnosis of the problems caused by the mass integration of smartphones into every aspect of most children’s lives.

In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Haidt takes square aim at Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok, the three companies he believes are wrecking childhood. They discuss whether targeting young girls with beauty adverts counts as abuse, and what it’s like going for dinner at the Zuckerbergs’. Haidt tells the story of how we are sleepwalking into this crisis, and shares his ideas for how to break out of it, before the damage is too great.

Downstream: Big Tech Is Making Our Children Depressed and Anxious. Here’s How w/ Jonathan Haidt

This week’s guest is best known for hijacking a panel at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, where he told a room full of billionaires to stop avoiding taxes. He now claims that this form of protest has been proven ineffective in the struggle for progress. The last 25 years have seen some of the biggest protests in history, yet we’ve seen wars erupt and inequality widen.

With his new book, ‘Moral Ambition’, Rutger Bregman lays out a history of how societal change actually happens, and how we can learn from the agentic groups of thoughtful individuals who improved our civilisation.

In conversation with Aaron Bastani he discusses the true origins of abolitionism, what the left gets wrong about Elon Musk and why we might actually see the end of history.

Downstream: How to Be a Morally Effective Person w/ Rutger Bregman

Dale Vince is a former new age traveller. In 1985 he was beaten up by police and arrested during the infamous Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge.

And he's also the inventor a string of transformative technologies: the world’s first green energy company, the electric supercar, and the Electric Highway charging network. The last of these got him into in a David-versus-Goliath legal battle with Elon Musk – a battle Vince won.

Since then, he's funded Just Stop Oil, become a major donor to the Labour Party, and owns Forest Green Rovers, the world’s first vegan football club.

His next project? Creating an edible form of high protein-grass.

He spoke to Aaron Bastani about how the new age traveller movement prefigured the world today and whether he'd ever buy a Tesla.

Downstream: Britain’s Most Powerful Multi-Millionaire Hippy w/ Dale Vince

During the 2008 economic crisis, the Obama administration had an opportunity to enact widespread market reforms. Instead, they bailed out the banks and laid the groundwork for mass inequality and a political culture that has given us a second Trump administration.

This week’s guest was in the room where those crucial decisions were made, and argued that financial institutions should not be able to escape the consequences of their recklessness.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and author of ‘The Road To Freedom: Economics and The Good Society’.

He sat down with Aaron to discuss the collapse of American democracy, his relationship with Milton Friedman and whether China is actually a socialist country.

Downstream: American Democracy Is Collapsing, and This Man Predicted It. w/ Joseph Stiglitz

Michael Lewis is an American author, journalist, and former bond trader. His best-known book, The Big Short, explains the 2000s US housing bubble and helped many people understand the 2008 financial crisis. In this interview, Lewis speaks with Aaron Bastani about his latest book, a collection of essays on federal government employees.

Lewis finds that many of these workers are actually doing a good job, far from the stereotype of inefficient bureaucrats and the ire the likes of Trump and Musk direct at them. Why is Trump so effective at capturing public anger? Could Trumpism continue without Trump? What is Obama’s true political legacy? And what is the next major crisis?

Downstream: Trump & Musk Could Start a Global Meltdown w/ Michael Lewis

What can the collapse of the Ottoman Empire teach us about the danger of the current discourse around migration?

‘Re-migration’ is not a new concept conjured up by the far-right, but rather something that would be familiar to many Europeans of a century ago. What would those involved in these tragedies think of the direction in which the world is heading?

To answer these questions and more, Aaron Bastani is joined by Lea Ypi, Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and author of a new book, ‘Indignity’.

She spoke about the myths surrounding migration, the surprising relationship between the British state and Balkan Communists and her grandfather’s time with Enver Hoxha.

Downstream: Are We Living Through the End of an Empire? w/ Lea Ypi

Economist, and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis joins Aaron to discuss his most recent book Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance, a memoir about the women in Yanis’ family who raised him, and gave him his political conscience.

They discuss the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic, is patriarchy harmful to the perpetrators, as well as women? Did Tony Blair do more to privatise Britain than Margaret Thatcher? Does Keir Starmer have a plan?

And how does fascism end up destroying not just those it deems to be its enemies, but the motherland as well?

Sign up for the upcoming Downstream Newsletter here: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters/the-downstream-newsletter/ 

Get tickets for the next Downstream IRL, ‘Gaza: The Story of a Genocide’ (with Aaron Bastani) at EartH Hackney on Mon 13 Oct at 6:30 pm:  https://link.dice.fm/N3e5f1cbd3ee

00:00  Intro
02:27 Five women who inspired Yanis’ political life
09:34 The Greeks In Egypt
22:02 The Asia Minor Catastrophe
29:30 Fascism always wrecks the motherland
36:43 The root cause of fascism is capitalism
39:44 Was America ever great?
45:19 Why Yanis doesn’t take Steve Bannon’s call
50:16 Communism can save the climate
1:00:18 The problems with Starmer
1:05:25 “Tony Blair is as evil as they come”
1:09:09 The road from Thatcher to Reform
1:13:36 Feminism, the manosphere, and the master slave paradox
1:23:44 On pornography
1:32:52 Humans Need Rules to live by
1:34:34 Physics or economics?
1:42:48 Collective will
1:48:14 Coming back from a bad year

Downstream: Was the 20th Century a Catastrophe, or a Miracle? w/ Yanis Varoufakis

Artificial intelligence is set to be one of the most disruptive technologies this century. For some, a machine capable of augmenting its own intelligence is a matter of time — and could even arrive within a decade.

This week’s guest is philosopher and author William MacAskill. One of the leading thinkers in the Effective Altruism movement, MacAskill is the author of several highly influential books, including Doing Good Better and What We Owe The Future.

His work explores not only on how to live a life of purpose, but how we also shouldn’t discount the interests of generations yet to be born.

What new technologies, medicines, and workflows might AI invent? How could AI affect the distribution of power and resources across the planet? Will democracy, as a political system, be able to manage it? And what might it mean to live a good life in a world of intelligent machines?

Downstream: Democracy Is Under Massive Threat From AI w/ William MacAskill

Just over two years after the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, and just days after the announcement of a ceasefire, Aaron Bastani spoke to three Palestinian writers in front of a live audience at EartH in Hackney.

Ahmed Alnaouq is the host of Palestine Deep Dive and the co-founder of ‘We Are Not Numbers’, an organisation that provides international mentors for Palestinian writers.

Yara Eid is a war journalist, born and raised in Gaza, who has worked for Amnesty International and been published in The New Arab.

Tareq Baconi is a journalist and academic and is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah, and the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). Aaron spoke to Ahmed, Yara and Tareq about whether the ceasefire gives them hope, what really shifted on October 7th and how the genocide has changed them.

All of the panel guests’ work features in ‘Gaza: The Story of A Genocide’, which you can buy here: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3511-gaza

Downstream: What Really Changed on 7th October w/ Ahmed Alnaouq, Yara Eid and Tareq Baconi

The Gaza Strip, home to 2.2 million people, is a tiny land mass about the same size as the Isle of Wight. Yet in terms of munitions by weight, Gaza has been subjected to more than all of the bombs dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined, over the whole of World War II. Another even more terrifying statistic: in Ukraine, after two years of conflict, there were around 30 cases of child amputees. In Gaza, there were a thousand cases of child amputation in two months.

This October marked two years since the high-intensity genocidal assault on the people of Gaza began, though the attempt to erase Palestine and ethnically cleanse its people began a century before. To mark the occasion, we hosted a live event at EartH Hackney to raise awareness and raise money for Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Kieran Andrieu is a political economist, journalist, and activist with six siblings living under Zionist occupation in the West Bank. Earlier this year, he joined the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet of over 40 boats and 500 activists, taking humanitarian aid to Gaza in an attempt to break Israel’s naval blockade of the strip. In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Kieran tells the whole story for the first time. What was it like being kidnapped at sea by amphetamine-using IDF soldiers? How were tactics of sleep deprivation used against them? How did the activists maintain morale in such circumstances? And what were the political victories of the mission?

New tracks tagged #aaron bastani