MTracey podcast - How To Spot Psychobabble Fads

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Notwithstanding the comically intense online vitriol he often seems to provoke, Jesse Singal is a fairly laid-back guy. He also has a new book out this week, The Quick Fix, which I’ve read and can recommend. Upon its publication Singal has been greeted with a new wave of attempts to stigmatize both him and the book, primarily on the ground that he is allegedly “transphobic”—even though the book has nothing to do with Trans issues, and by no conceivable standard of reasonability could he be deemed “transphobic.” But that hasn’t stopped the LGBTQ advocacy organization “GLAAD” from placing him on their scary-sounding “Accountability List,” with the precise mechanism of “accountability” they are aiming for left suspiciously unspecified.The book provides a helpful framework to understand how bogus, evidence-devoid pop psychology concepts get transmitted through the academia —> journalism pipeline, and how the uncritical acceptance of those concepts encourages poor reasoning and bad political outcomes. So if you notice any questionable “fads” gaining prominence today, the book will give you a methodology to process them with some critical distance—which, as Singal demonstrates, the media is often uninterested in doing.Reminder that in addition to listening directly on Substack, you can subscribe to the podcast on all the typical platforms, as well as YouTube where I post video versions. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

Welcome to the latest edition of my podcast, Thingamajig, here on Substack. The guest is Jesse Single. Many of you are probably familiar with him, but he is a journalist. He's the co-host of the blocked and reported podcasts, and also an all-around swell guy. Notwithstanding the bizarrely intense online vitriol, he, often provokes. He has a book out this week called The Quick Fix, Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills.

And I recommend you by the book. There is a link to do so in this sub-sac post. Also, subscribe to this podcast on all the standard places you subscribe to podcast. Subscribe to the YouTube channel where you can get a video version of this podcast. And subscribe to the substack itself. That is supremely important.

All right, let's get into it. All right. Hello, Jesse. Hey, how's it going on? Doing okay. So you have a bookout, and just for the audience, if I have some background noise that appears in your ears at any time,

not what I can do about that, living on noisy thoroughfare. How dare you? I'm deeply offended. I know. I mean, if I were rolling in as much dough as I'm accused of rolling in, maybe I could afford a more sound issue. You have the city block off the street

when you record your podcasts. Everyone stop. Corruptly pay off like the councilman. That would be the 200th most corrupt event in New Jersey state government history. Even in Jersey City history. Alone, yeah. Yeah.

So you have a book that's out this week. I guess, you know, I'm in the process, early in the process of writing a book. Like, what's this sort of psychic effect on you of finally having something published and in the hands of the public after having worked on it for so long? It's incredibly weird. It is, it's a relief. It's also a fair amount of anti-climax, in part because, you know, I would have hoped there would have been some in-person events. There's none of those. Yeah, it's slightly lonely,

because, like, you've been working on this thing forever, and then it's out in the world, and you no longer have any control over it, and you're just sort of, like, waiting for feedback and sales numbers to come back in. But overall, I just feel incredibly grateful. I was given this opportunity. I mean, you know, this allowed me to leave my day job, and as of now, there's no sign I'll have to go back to a day job, which is an incredible luxury, as millionaires like you, as sub-sac millionaires like you know. So it's mostly grateful. It is psychologically weird

just because you're just, you know, you can't control who writes about it or what they say. But we've been fortunate with the promotion so far, so we'll see. Yeah. So I do want to get into some of the substance of the book, but it did occur to me that given a lot of the misplaced

antagonism that you provoked. that you provoke. It seemed like there was a possibility that that could sort of inhibit your ability to promote the book, like on your own terms. Whereas people just, I think, might assume that the book is all about some of the stuff that you discuss day-to-day

on the podcast with Katie or in your other writing, you know, campus controversy type issues, you know, gender identity issues that those sort of realm of that realm of topics and the book really isn't about that at all.

Maybe there's some kind of ancillary bearing you could extrapolate from the kind of thrust of the book on those subjects. But has that struck you as like some as a as a factor

you have to sort of navigate in just the logistical promotion of the book? Yes and no. I mean it's just hard to know like you can't control who reviews your book you can't control what they say about it it is on a totally different subject and the subset of people who know me from twitter i think probably have a pretty skewed view of me because of this i don't tweet in perfect proportion to what i'm most interested in like i tweet often in reaction to aspects of mainstream media i can't stand even though

they're they're like me very much left of center so yeah i can relate to that you can relate to that slightly, just a little bit. Tracy the super villain. Yeah, so look, we've been very lucky. We've set up a lot of podcast interviews. I can promote it on my own podcast. We have a major newspaper, adapted essay running Saturday. So I would have to be a big jerk to complain.

I will say that when you become capital C controversial, one of the goals of sort of the Twitter pylons and all that is to put doubt in the back of your mind, like, oh, why, you know, why didn't this outlet cover me or why did I not book this thing, but like, come on. A million writers every day have to deal with not getting exactly the coverage they want, and I've been incredibly lucky. So I'm trying not to worry about that. Yeah, I guess the thing that came to mind most to me in that regard

is your presence on this glad accountability list, which I guess they initially took down when you were first placed on it, and now there's like this revised version up there. and you're on this list alongside like Donald Trump Fox News personalities as an enemy of LGBTQ rights apparently so that's kind of weird it's really weird I mean the whole the whole point is to sort of

this stems from mostly from an Atlantic cover story I did about sort of the process of assessing kids with gender dysphoria and when to put them on hormones and puberty blockers And if you read through this thing, there's some stuff that's inaccurate. There's like situations where they just don't seem to understand the available evidence or what I'm drawing on. I will say at this point, after they took it down because it was pretty obviously defamatory and they had lied, they put it back up where it's now padded with so many random references

and so much hedging and caveating that I'm not sure a normally could read it and understand exactly what I'm being accused of. but obviously it's alarming to be put on a list like that. And I don't know, it speaks to something a little bit messed up in the present moment because I don't think anyone can fairly read what I've written and come to those conclusions. But it's a sort of crazy era in a lot of ways. But like you mentioned, it's not even clear what conclusion they're trying to draw, other than that you fit under this umbrella category as somebody who's hostile to LGBTQ rights.

Like, and I just, before we did this podcast, I reread entry and maybe it's just my implicit bias. But the quotes that they present from you are fairly denied. I mean, in other words, you come across better in the entry than the people who actually wrote the entry, at least in my reading of it, which might not be the reading that's most common amongst kind of foundation slash activist. Well, I mean, there's a huge gap between what people on Twitter think. And then, you know, I have been getting a lot of heat lately because I, for being against these laws that ban youth transition, that ban blockers and hormones.

And what people on Twitter don't realize is like they're, I think they're pretty far out of step with public opinion because I get a lot of notes from people who are clearly liberals, but are like, why would you medicalize kids? Why would you put them on blockers and hormones? And in my view, you know, for kids who are going to feel really, horrible forever without these treatments. There's a subset of them where you should do those treatments. I just want them to be assessed correctly. There are some horror stories of kids being put on hormones and blockers too quickly. There are also kids who are cut off from them entirely,

so it's complicated. But Twitter is just such a fun house mirror world where like opinions that on like left Twitter are sort of hegemonic are held by maybe 5% of the American population and this can help explain why journalism is getting so warped and bad because journalists spend all day on Twitter. Yeah. I also think there's another element now where because you have a new slew of legislative initiatives mostly in Republican states to curtail the access that trans kids have any trouble, but the whole content of trans kids

kid seems like it's somewhat fraught and beget some further interrogation, but just just shorthand, you know, trans kids, they're tempted to limit the access of those kids to certain medical services. And so now if you can be accused of harboring some sort of transphobia, even if the basis for alleging your purported transphobia is totally groundless, I guess the idea is now you're contributing to almost this drive toward what trans activists regard as like extermination or a really kind of enormously dangerous societal determination to impose massive suffering on them. And so that's why the slightest kind of wrong phrasing of something or like a willful misconstitutional. Strull, something when you wrote a few years ago is now, there's an extra moral urgency in their mind around it, which is probably why now you see these additions to something

like an accountability list. What accountability are they even attempting to institute? Like what does accountability mean? I don't know. They don't seem to define that. No. I mean, I think it's just trying to hurt people who say stuff they don't like. I'm sure there are people on the list, so I think are genuinely transphobic.

And, you know, I push back a little. I'm going to cancel you over this. I think there's some kids who are, who are trans kids who are, some kids from a very young age are just, I think born in the wrong body is often the wrong model, but there's a subset of kids where that really applies. And the first generation of sort of puberty blockers and hormones for kids,

it was like kids who are well diagnosed in this clinic in Amsterdam. And like, I really think they will basically suffer forever if we can't give them this treatment. And there's some evidence in that context, not great evidence, but evidence. there's less evidence for situations where like kids have multiple other mental health comorbidities or they seem to have determined very quickly out of nowhere they might be trans. My only argument is that in situations like this, you would want to carefully assess kids

the same way you would carefully assess them ideally before even putting them on riddlein or an antidepressant or other medications that are a lot less serious than puberty blockers or hormones. And what I just described to you has been described as a trans eliminationist perspective. perspective. Trans eliminationist. I don't, it doesn't matter, genocidal. It doesn't matter how many people yell at me on Twitter. It does not change the words I actually wrote, nor does it change my belief that these bills are bad, nor does it change my belief that on balance, I would want to transkey to have access to these hormones and blockers if competent adults determine them to be the best choice. I think there is this belief among people who spend all day on Twitter that if you repeat

the same lie long enough, it becomes true. And I mean, they're technically, they're right, because it does become true. But I'm not going to go along with that ever. Yeah. And just to break myself out of cancellation jail, I wasn't asserting that trans kids quote don't exist. You son of a bitch. I just noticed that there seems to be a flippancy on the part of a lot of people who are newfound adherence to the kind of framework that's operative here in just applying that designation to any kid

that they may vaguely associate as meeting certain often vague criteria well that's what's interesting you about this is like so there's just like just as an example I mean on transvisibility day last week there was a thread that went enormously

viral journalists were praising it to the hilt all kinds of blue checks were showering it in adulation and it was this podcast host in L.A. who was saying that his kindergartner was a trans

kid. I mean the kindergartner was no long, or in other words the kid started identifying as trans when the kid was kindergarten age. The kid's now a little bit older. And there was not even any question. raised as to whether that's like a methodologically valid label to affix to a kindergarten.

And so that's why I have a little bit of hesitation when I just hear that term bandied about without any kind of accompanying kind of rigor behind it. Yeah, what I've heard from clinicians is that there is this thing sometimes where like your little boy acts in a girly way and parents are uncomfortable with that and they're almost more comfortable. if their kid is just a girl than a really effeminate boy. I do think parents sometimes prefer these really constrictive categories. So it's this weird horseshoe theory thing where you almost have liberal parents looking at the gender boxes in just as restrictive way as conservative ones. But this is all just to say that I wish there was a better crop of actual experts in gender clinics who could just talk to kids and let them explain what they're going through.

This is not, it shouldn't be that fraught to say that before you put a kid on puberty blockers, you should just make sure they meet the DSM criteria for gender dysphoria. That, like, if we can't agree on that, that you should meet the criteria for the serious medication, you're putting a kid who cannot legally consent to medical treatment on, I don't know where we are, but you see, you will experience what seems to be intense pushback to that. I'm curious what would happen if you then got one of these guys saying that, on a podcast and you force them to defend that opinion. But it's just, it's weird, man.

They seem to be very much against any of the sort of like differential diagnosis you'd want with any condition. I don't get it. Yeah, like, and this is just one Twitter thread that happened to be circulated on that one day. But this person was claiming that his child started began to socially transition in kindergarten. And what I found, what I was averse to in reading that was the notion that a kindergartner has the capacity to make these fully autonomous decisions that are being ascribed to them by adults. And by adults who have a particular set of political and cultural values that interrelate with trans, quote unquote, ideology or gender identity ideology. So it seemed like, you know, celebrating that as some kind of fulfillment of the child's true nature as opposed to a set of conditions that the adults knowingly placed the child, the result of a set of conditions of the adults knowingly placed the child in.

That's what I find off-putting. Yeah, I just think you've got to let kids be themselves and understand they have limited understandings of gender that ever since I first wrote about this in 2016. Dean, it's like, you can just sit a kid in a psychologist's office and be like, hey, what's going on with you? What's your sense of why you're a boy, why you're a girl? And you're not going to push back or not accept their answers, but the answers they give you a telling. I had a friend whose daughter, at a very young age, got confused and thought that if she'd be a boy, she'd have shorter hair, she'd run faster on the soccer field. So you just want to make sure that what's going on is a little bit more deep-seated than that. I would say before doing, you know, even a full-blown

social transition. I just, I don't think there's any downside to letting kids dress and play and act however they want. But, you know, when it comes to kids and the possibility of kids being harmed, people have understandably strong feelings. Yeah. I agree. So let's transition, quote, unquote, into the book, which I do recommend people read. You know, one, one thing that's, I think, sums up, a core theme of the book is a quote here that I'll just read from briefly. You say, as an idea without firm basis and clear conceptual boundaries, gains more and more purchase in the public imagination,

there's less and less rhetorical precision in how it's used. And in a way, that could relate even to the trans kids issue that we just touched on, not trying to get you to go down that road, but I think you know after you see that happening over and over again in so many different domains you begin to wonder like what is the precise genesis for that kind of concept creep or this kind of diffusion of an idea to the point where it's sort of unrecognizable from the initial idea and you sort of recount that like the initial impetus for the book

was you working in the field of science journalism and constantly getting these, you know, publicity emails, which journalists are always inundated with, where it's like, oh, the one weird trick that will solve some kind of complex social malady. We have the new study that, you know, has all the inside info. And as I was reading the book, I kept coming back to the culprit for a lot of this. yes, there's a lot of lazy science and lazy communication of science by the scientists themselves or advocates who are kind of leveraging scientific knowledge to generate income or status for themselves. But a lot of it seems like it does come down to me to the media in that we're reacting.

When bad scientific ideas percolate, they percolate through media channels mainly. I mean, people are not sitting down and reading scientific journals, for the most part. And yet it didn't seem like you, the question of the media's relationship to this stuff, meaning the kind of the bad ideas of pop psychology that have proliferated, you touch on that here and there, but you don't really give a kind of stirring, you don't give as stirring of an indictment as the media as I might be inclined to for their complicity in that. Is that a fair, fair reading? Yeah, I think I'm sympathetic.

I was just on another podcast where people, very bad wizards, where I was told I was too sympathetic to one of the sort of arguable scientific bad actors in the book. I think when it comes to journalists, the reason I'm somewhat sympathetic is like, we're just overwhelmed and journalism is collapsing. And I've been that guy who had to produce multiple stories a day. I don't think it's good. Hey, can you hear the, we'll edit this out, but can you hear the siren in the background? No, I can't.

Okay, good. We can just leave that in because people find these snafu is sort of funny. It's incredibly charming and endearing. We're just too normal. It's real. It's authentic. We're just two guys. Two blue-collar podcasters in the content minds.

I didn't have it in my heart to blame journalists that much. I mean, throughout the book, I do mention how credulous journalism helps these ideas to spread. But there's so little scientific training among journalists, And there's so much pressure to just produce, produce, produce content that I can understand how they get hoodwink by like an excited seeming press release from the University of Pennsylvania or Harvard. I wish they would do better. What's up with the University of Pennsylvania? I mean, that particular university came over and over again as a source of some of these bad ideas that went bizarrely unquestioned for like years. Yeah.

Some of this comes down to the positive psychology guru and sort of co-founder Marty Seligman. and then one of his students, Angela Duckworth, who is like a widely celebrated social psychologist, I do criticize her. Like, I don't think she's been particularly dishonest, but, you know, she came up with a concept called grid, and I think she sort of stretched the evidence for it. So a lot of these guys are guilty of that. Yeah. So, I guess maybe if you were, if you had it in you, there is maybe a more structural critique

of the journalism or media industry that might have been. on offer? Yeah, well, I make that a little bit. I just... A little bit too far flowing from the fourth piece of the book. Yeah, and I think from reading it, it'll be clear that if we were 30 years ago

and there were a lot of journalists who still having to hustle and work hard had the luxury of like writing, you know, two or three newspaper articles a week instead of multiple articles a day, I do think the science coverage situation would be a little bit better.

Then again, I'm sure if I went back to the 1980s, I would see a lot of bad science writing there. So who knows? Well, there was some, and you cited some overly credulous reporting, for example, on the self-esteem movement. Yeah, that's true. It began in, like, I think it was the late 80s, right? And, you know, obviously you don't present the full breadth of coverage of this self-esteem

movement that was burgeoning at the time. And you got to assume that there were some more, there were some skeptical renderings of its potential, of its claimed efficacy, right, in the popular press. But at the same time, you know, it was true that a lot of the supposed findings that found a vast value in the institution of these self-esteem programs and schools and other institutions, it was just kind of passed along to the public in quasi-press release type form. And it seems like a big reason why it gained attraction.

that did. Yeah, and I think part of that is just like everyday beat reporters who aren't science reporters per se when they encounter scientific claims that authorities experts are providing them, they're just going to be stenographers. They don't have the tools to really skeptically analyze those claims, and that's a big part of the problem. So it's not just people on like the dedicated science beat. It's, you know, culture reporters you get pulled into reporting on science or political reporters. It's everything. Yeah. So there's another quote from the, that I'm going to to just read here from that self-esteem chapter, which I think is really instructive because it relates to how these ideas become so intractable and how like a, how an industry

sort of forms around them that militates against ever recognizing their invalidity on the part of the proponents because they have so much professionally and socially invested in these ideas. So the quote is here, the cottage industrialization of self-esteem might have further disincentivized many people, including the school district and corporate decision makers who had already shelled out money for them from doing the concept of too skeptical of an eye. And that's sort of like a simple point in its way that if there's like a, if you have like a fiduciary interest in a certain idea's mass acceptance, and that's going to disinclining you to applying the proper rigor to an evaluation of it because that could then limit

your financial opportunities. Yeah, well, and you can make the same argument about social incentives. If you have a social or professional incentive that's not directly monetary in saying you believe in something, you will say you believe in that thing. Yeah. And I think the self-esteem stuff is interesting because I hadn't really thought about that ever in much depth, but then, you know, you kind of talk about your own. childhood and there were these self-esteem exercises where people like passing around a kush ball

and kids were told to compliment each other until their classmates that they were good at something like you know you can kick a soccer ball bar I don't know that I have specific memories of that but I do remember this kind of ethos of self-esteem infusing a lot of my early childhood education I hadn't really thought about it before I read that chapter a lot of them are kind of the most obvious examples of that are there's those cheesy posters that it would be hung in the library where it's like, you know, a girl looking out on a sun-drenched field and saying, you know, you can do it. And the caption is like, you can do anything that you set your mind to or something.

Yeah. And yeah, it just, I hadn't really tied that to like a specific policy initiative that had a lot of resources behind it. Yeah, I find that satisfying when you can like take some, you can't always do this, but often you can take some like cultural fatter crazy. And like sometimes trades it back to like specific rooms where specific decisions are made. And I find that process pretty fascinating. Yeah.

So yeah, on this on this issue of self-esteem, and I think one thing you do a good job in the book is like you always acknowledge that there's a kernel of truth to a lot of these fads. And critically evaluating the methodology that's been. employed to kind of promote them as like monocausal solutions to complex problems doesn't undermine the idea that like it's probably prudent to give kids a positive give reinforce kids having a positive view of themselves um as opposed to a negative view um and so like i have a hard time really

like condemning the people who were invested in this idea of like the promotion of self-esteem because you know who could be against a child self-esteem being fostered the the problem always comes

when it turns into this cottage industry where you have like hordes of consultants attempting to monetize the fad and claims being made about certain techniques that go far beyond what those techniques can be proven to actually accomplish in the real world.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, if this was just like helping kids not feel horrible about themselves or helping people with horrible low self-esteem feel better, there'd be no gripe. The problem is always these much grander claims that catch on and become sort of like get recited like a mantra, which happens throughout my book with different ideas. You can go so far as I say like a fictionalized version of this narrative of self-esteem being this kind of all-powerful solution to the woes of America's children. That's the narrative that end up winning out.

You know, Bill Clinton endorsed the project, as you mentioned, you know, Barbara Bush, Colin Powell. And, yeah, I mean, it does, you know, once you're able to look back on a, you know, this kind of self-esteem craze through a more critical lens, I think it just necessitates that you look at your current crazes with the same lens, which is why I think the book is sort of helpful. I mean, have you heard from people, have you heard like variations of that from people where they will tell you, oh yeah, I mean, I hadn't even really given much thought to something like self-esteem even being a craze.

but now I'm going to try to adjust my interpretive framework for other potential crazes that are swirling around now that might benefit from more to more scrutiny. Yeah, I mean, well, I've heard that more actually with the implicit association test. That's, you know, this test that supposedly reveals your unconscious bias. People just took it at face value and assumed it was true, assumed it was scientific. But it's the same as self-esteem in the sense that like you're making a lot of assumptions. about the underlying evidence and it's much more a fad for cultural reasons or sort of corporate reasons than because of the strength of the evidence. Yeah.

On that implicit bias test, one thing that occurred to me is that you, I think you pretty convincingly lay up why the implicit bias test does not have ample, not have an ample evidentiary basis. to believe that it's really effective at all, despite the kind of fictionalized narrow that was crafted around it. But the reason why it seems to be so popular is because it's very much conducive to the construction of these cottage industry, there's consultants and books and people giving well-paid speaking engagements and so forth. But on the racial question in particular, it seems like there could be an equally large

enough, a large cottage industry now for people who are more inclined to focus on, you know, structural inequities. Like it seems like that's pretty, that's almost become, I don't know if it's a fad unto itself, but it, that the, the, the popularity of that understanding of racial inequality is now popular enough, or now widespread enough that you could easily see it morphing into these kind of cottage industrialization. versions. What's weird to me about people who don't see the problem with a lot of this stuff,

from the IAT to Robin DiAngelo to even some like microaggressions trainings, when you say that, people say, oh, you're some right-winger, you're some reactionary. There's very good reasons to be against these programs or at least skeptical of them. And I think the role of capitalism,

ironically, gets left out by a lot of people on the left who aren't skeptical of these ideas. But there's a reason these ideas are structured in the way they are. There's a reason they focus on individuals. There's a reason they offload responsibility onto individual workers and students. And there's a reason none of them have anything to do with the structural reasons we might encounter racial discrepancies in the first place. So I think there's a certain level of usually unintentional,

but sometimes intentional scamming going on here. And that's why my chapter on this stuff isn't just about the IIT, but about this broader trajectory in American race talk and race training. There's also a reason why corporations are happy to indulge in these trainings, right? I mean, they don't threaten the corporation's self-interest at all. And there's even, you even see many corporate figures arguing that they enhance their self-interest by, you know, cultivating a more inclusive workforce or what have you. So, I mean, it's totally aligned with their kind of capitalist incentives.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm not the first one to point this out, but it should cause you to ask some questions about your own politics and your own radicalism when they're completely compatible with everything major corporations are saying. I think you've made that point before, too. I have, and people get really angry when you point that out. Like, when you wonder why when the protest movement erupted last summer, that it was immediate for all virtually of corporate America, for all the power centers of American society to embrace. it and adopt at least its kind of branding components. Like would they have done so if they felt like essentially threatened by the demands being leveled?

And of course, like it's impossible in a mass protest movement to reduce the quote demands like one specific list. But you know, there were a few key themes there. And and yet if you point that out, you seem it seems like you're inevitably accused of like discounting the entire movement or insulting every individual participant and you're and that was never really my intention my intention was kind of take a broader view at how it could have been the case that a movement that seemed to at least um posture as emanating this kind of radicalism was so easily um easily incorporated into

these mainstream power centers. Like, isn't that an interesting question to ponder? Apparently not for some people. I would think so, yeah. Yeah, so another interesting part of the book was the chapter on, like positive psychology and particularly what interested me was how the military ended up adopting, spending a, with millions of dollars on implementing these positive psychology trainings or workshops or

whatever to address the the epidemic of PTSD amongst soldiers returning home from Afghanistan and Iraq. So can you just explain what happened there? Yeah, this is maybe the craziest chapter in my book and the one I'm sort of most excited to have out in the world. The short version is in the late aughts, the Army recognized a lot of soldiers were coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, deeply traumatized and weren't getting the help they needed. And they turned to Martin Seligman, who's one of the co-founders of, there's some fuzziness there, but basically one of the founders of positive psychology. He started a positive psychology center at the University of Pennsylvania that gives out degrees in applied positive psychology. And he

convinced the military that he could take this pre-existing program called the Penn Resilience program and adapt it to the military. The problem was this was a program for 10 to 14 year olds to reduce their anxiety and depression symptoms. So right off the bat, there's that problem of like, how can you take a program for 10 to 14 year olds in normal school settings and then apply it to 20 year olds in like horrific warfare settings. There's also the problem that preventing PTSD and depression, which we don't have great evidence we can even do it that much, that's different from preventing PTSD and suicide. Obviously, PTSD and suicide and anxiety and depression all go together, but they're all different things that you need to treat differently. So as my reporting found,

based in part on the few people who have looked into this, the Army has probably spent something like $500 million on this program for which there was never any evidence and no evidence has ever come out that it works. And I think, you know, as my own podcast, go-host said, like maybe don't send people to war if you're going to traumatize. Maybe that's the best bet, which of course, but if you are going to send people to war, maybe don't spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on programs that don't do anything. It's just a pretty outrageous story of science gone wrong. And do you look into the firsthand accounts that, you know, soldiers or whomever who underwent

these training programs, how do they feel bad? I mean, do they, Although, you know, this wouldn't be the most mythologically sound way to evaluate the efficacy, but did they self-report having gained benefit from it? Because it seems like it could just be one of these annoying administrative loophole, you know, hoops you have to jump through to satisfy a certain, like, requirement. Because the program was mandated, right? So soldiers were required to undergo one of these positive psychology type trainings. Was it annually?

Is there any reason to believe maybe even just anecdotally that they found some usefulness in it? Because I would doubt that they would. Yeah. So I actually did a newsletter on this. I did not, and I quoted soldiers about having PTSD or veterans. I did not really look into that question of how individual soldiers felt about it because it honestly doesn't really matter. What matters empirically is what effect it has on them. And people can't always self-reflect on their experience and they're like, this work, this didn't work.

there was one anthropologist, I think her name was Emily Sown, who looked into how this was administered day to day, and she found evidence of what I think you would expect, which is soldiers just viewed this as another task and did not take it seriously and just check the box. And the program was unable to generate good data and part as a result of this. So soldiers did, based on what she found, this one academic, soldiers did not take it seriously. Yeah, I can just imagine, you know, if I was required to do that, even if I felt like I maybe had an ailment that needed. to be addressed if it was this kind of imposition upon me, I would just kind of instinctively react negatively or exasperatively to it. And not that self-reporting is the be all and all. Obviously, it's not. But I am now curious after having read that chapter to see if there's any kind of data as limited as it might be in terms of its ultimate implications, how they individually

view themselves as having experienced. it because, you know, if it's just another kind of box you have to check in order to be in good standing and not be disciplined by the military, then, I don't know, at least it seems like it's worth taking into account. Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair. It just, it basically comes down to, like, you need to have a way to produce good outcome data and the Army, for reasons I explained in the chapter, couldn't even set up a proper way of generating data that could tell them if it worked. So it was just bungled in certain basic scientific ways from the start. Yeah, another thing I'm sort of curious about journalistically in terms of your method for doing the book is that it seems like you kind of reported, did the reported elements of it over the course of a couple years.

And the people, like this guy, Seligman, who you would reach out to for comment or clarification on certain things, it seems they're mostly pretty evasive or reluctant to provide you with substantiating evidence for some of their core premises. And that's the opposite of what you would expect for like a science entrepreneur or something who's secure in their notions of the legitimacy of what they're advocating. So, I mean, did you find that? Is it, was there kind of this recurrent evasiveness?

I know there was one exception that you mentioned, the woman whose name escapes me, but was it kind of difficult to pin these people down and get them to answer kind of direct questions in the main? Yeah, I mean, it varied. Seligman sort of would point me to research. So he'd point me to a list of studies he'd published, showing positive psychology to be successful,

or the Penn Resilience program. But that's not really how science works. You can't just let someone who designed a person, program cherry pick studies, you're supposed to do what's called a meta-analysis, where you find all the studies you can, average out the effects, and by that standard, the Penn Resilience Program wasn't impressive. So one of the points I make is that, like, I think it's a big moment character-wise and ethics-wise when you're a scientist and one of your ideas comes under legitimate threat, and the decision you make there can sort of define your legacy. And scientists vary a great deal in how well

they handle that. Some just double and triple and quadruple down. Others are, are open to input, at least, and to revising their claims a little bit. So I guess if I had to distill the main argument of the book, it's that these quote-unquote quick fixes that originate in pop psychology that then gets transmitted to the public through imperfect means, they tend to be have a workaround for addressing structural issues and that sort of explains

why they're so eagerly embraced by institutions who do not stand to benefit from wide scale structural reforms like even some of the going back to the self-esteem thing

I mean maybe one way to cultivate self-esteem in a child is to provide them with adequate educational resources so that they have a stable upbringing. Nope, too hard. Yeah, so like you mentioned at one point that, you know, this kind of depressing reality is that for very young children from like zero to five, if they are in a stressful environment where they're constantly having stressors and pinging upon them, that's going to have potentially lifelong consequences that any, you know, you know, that's, you know,

know, self-esteem pamphlet is never going to be able to remediate. Is that sort of like the basic takeaway that I should be coming away? Yeah. I mean, it's not a conspiracy, but I think it shouldn't surprise us that, you know, if you work in an office and you want to show you're committed to diversity, you're not going to have the time or the inclination to, like, really dig into the problem of like why, you know, your office is disproportionately white, if that's the case. What you can do is grab off the shelf a nifty implicit association test training or

microaggressions training and just sort of assume that doing that will fix things. And because it's so rare that people like carefully measure outcomes, you really can't just take that off your box of to-do items. So I think there's a lot of that going on here. Yeah. All right, yeah, that I think that's everything I've more or less wanted to cover. I mean, obviously, there's a lot more in the book that people should read and purchase. I'll have the link to do so in the substack post here and wherever else this audio conversation is published.

Is there anything that springs to mind for you that maybe we omitted? No, I mean, I would just say like if you're worried about the stuff we talked about the beginning, about mainstream media becoming more homogenous and less welcoming of sort of no-jiz and stuff and the book sounds at all intriguing to you, please consider buying it because those sales numbers make a very big difference. But there's also tons of interviews and stuff I've done with people where you can learn more if you'd prefer to just do that. You know, one last thing that I did have a note on, but overlooked.

So as I was reading the chapter on positive psychology and particularly the military chapter in the whole the whole reason why there was this push to address post-traumatic stress is because obviously soldiers are from Afghanistan they were dealing with this enduring trauma from really horrific experiences and you know when I think about this issue of you know the popularization problem I think is what it's referred to you know with with this increasing awareness around PTSD, a legitimate, legitimately debilitating malady that people have. It seems like, and just my maybe in my admittedly sort of limited, from my admittedly limited standpoint, it seems like this concept of trauma is now being applied

to like a whole vast array of different domains. And it's ironically because it seems to stem in large part, at least for, from this growing awareness of PTSD, which is much more narrow to, narrowly related to people undergoing truly traumatic experiences where, you know, they were in extreme physical danger or they were this like the killing of a fellow soldier, what have you.

But now trauma is in such, is so dominant in like mainstream parlance that it gets shunted into all manner of, even just like matters of disagreement sometimes or matters of, you know, slight but overcomeable misfortune or adversity. And I'm just wondering if that has ever occurred to you. Yeah. I mean, look, I just did an article for reason about how this professor was investigated

because she disagreed with a white fragility training. And there was a lot of trauma language justifying the investigation. People will say they've been harmed and traumatized when they're, are expressed to political opinions you can see every night on Fox News or every moment of the day on AM radio. So I also wrote an article about this for 1843 Economist magazine that maybe you could link to. But there's two things going on at once. One is that there's been a much needed recognition of genuine trauma and genuine PTSD

and how to treat them. There has been this weird harm inflation thing where more and more people seem to think they can get some cachet from saying they've been traumatized. And I'm not sure that that's that healthy in attitude. I mean, even just the way it might cause people to take genuine trauma claims less seriously. But I've definitely noticed that. It definitely worries me a little bit. Yeah, and even see, I mean, I've written about this recently,

even see, you know, professional adult journalists and major publications doing so in order to achieve various goals that they have. And that strikes me as the tipping point where we need to kind of more critically assess the functionality of this new kind of trauma jargon. But that's my hobby horse, I guess. Yeah. All right, Jesse. Well, thanks for taking out some time to do this. And good luck on the rest of the book.

I guess it's not a tour, but a virtual tour. virtual tour, which is kind of, you know, I wouldn't say depressing, maybe. No, it is a little bit depressing. On the list of COVID-related problems, not being able to promote my book in person is pretty low. So it is what it is. Yeah. I wouldn't do a sub-sac post with 2,000 words devoted to complaining about that.

I'm going to do a tweet storm about how unfair it is, how I can't infect people with COVID to promote my book. But thank you for having me on. And, yeah, thanks, man. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye.