SOLVED with Mark Manson - How Bad Therapy Can Harm a Generation (ft. Abigail Shrier)

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

If the story of humanity is about loss, privation, suffering, and resilience, why are kids having nervous breakdowns about bad grades? In today’s episode, I talked to Abigail Shrier about what parents and mental health experts are inadvertently doing to rob young people of the resilience and grit that past generations had. It’s a spicy one. Enjoy. Get 50% off your first Factor Meals box and 20% off the next box using my link ⁠https://factormeals.com/idgaf50⁠ And use my code “IDGAF” for 20% off + free shipping when you purchase online from ⁠https://manscaped.com⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose. That is purpose. dot app. Abigail, it's so good to have you here. It's great to be here. Thank you.

Welcome to the show. The book is bad therapy. It is all over. It's blowing up right now. I have to admit, I got triggered. I needed a safe space when I read this book. I was not expecting to be as. upset by it as I was. And I think the reason is I came up in the self-help industry. I think I really

built my career by pointing out a lot of the hypocritical and self-defeating tendencies in self-help. You know, the idea that just because something makes you feel better doesn't mean you are better. And optimizing for your feelings all the time is actually, it's kind of counterproductive in a lot of ways. And I guess throughout all of this, I always assumed that clinical psychics, Psychologists had their shit together and were on the correct side of that dynamic. And reading your book was really upsetting because it showed all the ways that they're not. And so I'm curious, let's start with the idea of bad therapy. What triggered this for you?

What inspired you to pursue this research, pursue this book, and what kicked this whole journey off? I started by wondering, why was the generation that had received the most, mental health, the most wellness tips, the most therapy, the most psychiatric drugs, the most frantic worry over their mental health and happiness, why were they so unhappy because they are? And why did they seem to have no interest in adulthood? Why didn't they show up to work on time? Why couldn't they be relied on? Why did they not want to form families? Why were they living with mom and dad in numbers we'd never seen? And they were content to do so. It's not like they were unhappy about living with mom and dad. They seem pretty happy about it. So I kind of wondered,

why they weren't thriving generally, but I didn't think it had anything to do with mental health experts at the time because, you know, 40% of them have been in therapy, which is still the highest percentage we've ever seen, but it was less than half. So I thought it had something to do with the way they were being raised.

Maybe they raised more gently, and I sold the book to the publisher with that hypothesis. But then I attended a three-day conference of public school teachers here in California, and it was all about the mental health of this generation. I thought, okay, let me find out what they're doing in schools.

And what I realized was that schools were all playing therapist. Parents were reading the best-selling therapists, you know, parenting books. And I started listening to the way they talked. And they never say they're shy. They say they have anxiety or social phobia. They never say they're sad. They say they're depressed or they have depression. And they never say, oh, gosh, I have a bad memory.

They say, I have a flashback. That's my PTSD. So I realized this was a generation flooding. with what I call bad therapy. They are swimming in the language of psychopathology, and it's making them sick. The education piece, it's funny because the book kind of starts with a more focus on therapy itself. And as I read it, I was like, okay, I get this. I mean, there are bad therapists out there. Like, I run into plenty of them. But they're also a really good therapist out there. And it's still, you know, in aggregate, as you said, it's not the majority of the population.

it goes to therapy. And especially older generations, it's even less. But when I got to the education piece, that was really eye-opening because it is introducing a lot of therapeutic concepts and psychological language into a domain where the people delivering it don't have the expertise or the experience to actually be having those conversations, especially with kids.

And I think you also make the point that approaching a child, with therapy is very different than an adult. Can you explain? Yeah, I mean, that's what I want people to know. It's totally different. It's totally different. You know, an adult can say, listen, I know my mom shouldn't have said that, but I wouldn't call her emotionally abusive. An adult can say, look, I had a bad experience in middle school, but I don't think I have PTSD. And an adult can say, look, I've been with you for two years. I'm just as depressed. I'm sorry. I don't think this is working. A child can't say any of that. And a teenager can't say any of that, especially if she's angry with mom anyway, right?

She's not going to say, I wouldn't call my parents toxic. That seems over the line. And so it's a totally different experience to put a young person in therapy because they can't work with a therapist to do the hard work of therapy at its best, right? They can't push back. And that's because they don't have a frame of reference or... Yeah, they don't have any life experience. They have no basis for saying, listen, that's not emotionally abusive of my mom, okay?

She took away my phone because she thought I was overusing it. I don't think it's fair. I mean, what 14-year-old is going to say that, right? No, they're going to lean in. They're going to lean into that pain. They're going to lean into the idea they may have PTSD. It's natural to do so. You need to sort of be a grown-up to say, look, I have responsibility here, too.

It's very hard for a teenager because, first of all, they are struggling. A lot of them are in distress. A lot of them do have angst. We all did. And what they don't know, this is the most important thing. They don't know it's normal. They don't know it's normal. They don't know they can get through it.

They don't know that every generation has. So if they're sitting with someone who is getting paid regularly by their parents to encourage the idea or at least talk to them one week, you know, one day a week about their anxiety, gosh, that's better than sitting with a bipolar patient, a schizophrenic patient or anyone who might be violent in your session but desperately needs your help. How would you define bad therapy and how does it differ from good therapy? Right. So bad therapy is anything that introduces new.

symptoms or makes existing symptoms worse. And there's a whole body of really good research on the harms of therapy, which doesn't mean all therapy is bad. Every good intervention also comes with harms. We know this from x-rays to Tylenol. They can offer to surgeries. They all can introduce a harm. So the question is, do you really need it? And when they've done research and they do that, you know, with a control group and actually rigorous research, they have found that people who burn victims, first responders to catastrophe, breast cancer survivors, people dealing with normal bereavement have all left therapy feeling worse. Because sitting around once a week, talking about your pain can make you feel worse. And the problem is we're doing this to school

children every day. In school, their parents, their teachers, everyone is saying, how does that make you feel? How do you feel? Think about your feelings. Dwell on your bad feelings. And here's the thing. People might say, oh, well, they're asking about their feelings. It doesn't have to be negative. They could be asking about good feelings. Okay, that's true, but that's not how it works. Why?

Because if you're going to have something like social, emotional learning in school, where the whole point, supposedly, is to teach emotional regulation, well, if you talk about a time when you were happy, there's nothing to teach. Right. So the whole conversation gets going when they say, okay, let's talk now about a time you failed, we're left out, we're rejected, we're disappointed, or had your feelings hurt. Now we're talking. Now we got something to talk about.

So it leads them towards the negative. Right. Always the negative. And there's a subtle form of social validation, right? So it's like if a kid comes in and notices every time they say, I'm happy, I feel good, they get no attention. Right. But every time they come in and say, well, I'm really upset because, you know, Susie was mean to me yesterday. Right.

That gets them tons of attention. Well, guess what? Now they're like looking for things to be upset about and to come in and talk about. Exactly. And what would be better for kids than sitting around and talking about their pain before a math test? And here's the thing. It doesn't help with math. Anything.

They could literally be picking up trash around the school, paint the gym. Dancing is really good, apparently, for dealing with mild to moderate depression better than, you know, psychotherapy or antidepressants. So literally anything we had them do that had an outward focus would be better than sitting around and talking about their pain. But that's what we're inviting them to do all day long. My frustration with a lot of this, too, is that I think arguably the most important things school teaches you is to still take the math test when you feel sad. Yes. Or still study for a big project when you got dumped and your heart's broken, right?

It's like that's where the resilience comes from. So if you keep interrupting the academic pursuits to accommodate the emotional issues, as they happen, then you're robbing the kids of the chance of actually developing a sense of resilience. That's exactly right. And you know, one of the great things about being an adult is that we can pick and choose which emotions to lean into, right? We develop this strength. If we go through heartache in life and we say, okay, I'm not going to let that derail me now. I'm just not going to. We can make that decision, right? Because we've been through hard things before. But a kid who's being told over and over know every bit of pain is important. We need to examine it. They're not going to

have the ability, and they don't, to put some of it behind them or to one side so they can get some other things done that might make them feel better long term. And I think that's what we're seeing. We're seeing the most fragile generation, and it's because we made them that way. So explain to me what is socio-emotional learning, because I wasn't familiar with this topic before the book. So social emotional learning is the giant project that's supposed to help kids with their mental health. We've had it in schools for at least 15 years now. It's in almost every public school. And the idea is that it's going to teach kids things like emotional regulation and resilience.

Well, that's all sounds really good, right? I mean, if you can give kids a techniques for dealing with hard times, well, why wouldn't we want that? We should want that. Except it doesn't work. Yeah. It doesn't work. It's worse than that. It's counterproductive.

And while I was writing the book, so the book explains why it's counterproductive to have a bunch of kids sit around and talk about their feelings, focus on their feelings, focus on the sad emotions, why it would make kids feel so miserable and sad and actually focus more unable to ever put aside their emotions. So that's what the book explains. But while I was writing it, I didn't know this, but two sets of researchers in Europe were actually testing it. So a set of researchers in England, they were doing something similar. social emotional techniques and a set of researchers in Australia. And they actually had control groups. And they put the kids, they sent some of the kids through these programs, wellness techniques, anti-bullying, social emotional regulation techniques. And they had control groups. And in both sets of studies, the kids who went through the program ended up sadder, more anxious, more depressed, and more alienated from mom and dad. And you might say, well, why would they be more alienated from their parents? Well, they're kids. So, If you're going to sit around talking about their emotional injury, well, whose fault is that?

Whose job is it to keep them safe in some sense? So the criticism of the parents is just built in. So when I was doing research on SEL, I came across their website where they cite a 2011 meta-analysis. They claim that all these benefits over 700 studies, 10% decrease in emotional distress, 9% decrease in conduct problems, 9% improvement in attitude and classroom behavior. behavior, 11% improvement in test scores. Although there was a weasel phrase in the meta-analysis that I noticed, which I said, gains and outcomes resulted only when SEO program was quote, unquote, well implemented, which what the fuck is well implemented?

Right? It's like anytime it doesn't work, you can just say, well, it wasn't implemented well. So I'm curious, first of all, how familiar are you with that body of research and what are your thoughts on it? And second of all, the other thing that I noticed is that most of these studies came from the 2000s, like they're 15, 20 years old. And so part of me also wondered, you know, with smartphones and social media and all that stuff, like maybe it's different. So a few things. First of all, there's brand new research, even out of America showing that these things

are counterproductive. And it's going along that it's either ineffective or making kids sadder. But the other thing is, you bring up a really good question. Have things changed? Yes. And it's not just social media, although that's a major driver. The amount of feelings, feelings focus on this generation is so intense. These kids are never outside of their own heads. That's why they think they need a mental health day off, right? These are not combat vets. These are kids raised in Brentwood who need a mental health day off of school and or work. So I think that the context does matter and that we've never had a generation more focused on its feelings and frankly not one more tyrannized by their feelings. And they really are. So yeah, I don't think

there's been any good research to showing the improvement. By the way, if you interview teachers today, they will tell you the kids are so dysregulated who have been through these programs. We've never seen this level of dysregulation. Teachers are quitting. Why kids are throwing tantrums in high school, in middle school. And they're just truly emotionally out of control in a way that we haven't seen. So I think it's hard to argue that they've been help. I mean, I argue that they're counterproductive, but I think they clearly haven't helped for sure. Yeah. It's funny. This paradox is something that we have come back to on the podcast multiple, multiple times

with multiple guests of there has never been a moment in history with as much mental health information and intervention. And there has never been worse mental health. And since we began recording these sorts of things, clearly something's not working. And yeah, the medicine might be part of the, poison. I mean, I think so. I mean, think of it this way. It's not that I don't respect the mind. It's the opposite. The mind is so strong, it can convince you of almost anything. The suggestion that you might be ill, that you might have anxiety that's debilitating, that you have trauma

is so strong. And you will begin to manifest if you believe you have those things. See, if you think you're shy, you can overcome that. But if you think you have social phobia, now you need a pill. That's why it's such a big deal to start going down the, you know, mental health pipeline because now you don't have agency. You can't do it on your own if you buy that. There's an amazing new study out by this, I think British researcher. I don't know if she's British or American, but I believe British named Kathy Wydom, who's just amazing. I've never met her, but she does these incredible prospective, very rigorous studies. And she often looks at childhood trauma, traumatic events that affect kids. And her most recent study that came out in the last couple months

showed that she had taken kids where she verified the traumatic event. So it was real. It wasn't just a misremembered event. And then followed them 15, 20 years later and sent in blind researchers, meaning researchers who didn't know which camp they fell into. And what she found was that some of the adults had made the potentially traumatic incident a major part of their narrative. And those were the adults who were suffering in adulthood. And the ones who had decided whatever they went through wasn't a big deal. They didn't build a narrative of their life around it and in fact were dismissive of it. They were thriving. They had gone through the same kinds of things in childhood. But it's really important. If we are going to attribute a lot of importance

to a hard time, we're likely to make it worse for us. And that's what we're doing to kids today. We're telling them everything they went through that's hard could be with them forever, could imprint their bodies with trauma. I still feel like the research around post-traumatic growth is just way, way under broadcast, and I don't understand why. Actually, there's a great author.

I should try to get them on the show who's done a lot of the research around this. But it's actually, if you experience a traumatic event, I think you're six times more likely to actually later attribute that event to being a growth-related event than a PTSD-related event. Left alone.

Left alone. If you have a therapist come in and tell you've been traumatized, no. Then you're going to say, oh, I've been injured. But that's right. That's the lie that gets cold. It's so upsetting. We're telling kids that they aren't resilient, that their trauma is so important. We all have to address it.

No, actually, the story of human beings, of humanity is loss, right? Privation, suffering, and resilience, overcoming it. And if you talk to anybody who's old. Right? Talk to anybody in their 80s. God, they went through a lot. And most of them overcame it and actually thought it made them stronger. That's what we should be telling kids. I talk about this in my second book. I call it like the theory of pain relativity because it's, you know, if you grew up in a war-torn country and you watch your entire neighborhood get bombed, that will be one of the worst experiences of your life and that will affect you extremely negatively.

If you grow up in Brentwood and the worst thing that ever happens to you is you get cut from your high school JV team, because you have never experienced anything worse than that, the pain of that experience will be proportional to the person who grew up in the war-torn country watching their neighborhood get bombed, right? Like it's all pain is ultimately relative to the other experiences we've had in life. So if we're always preventing ourselves from having adverse experiences, we don't build up that library of resilience. and we don't build up that context to understand like, oh, getting cut for my JV team, it's not the end of the world. There are a lot of other things I can do. I've bounced back from other things before. There's not like an objective metric of what is traumatic and what's not.

Right. And if someone suggests to you, either the culture or school counselor that you've had trauma, you won't get over it. It will be like you live through something significant. There's a little bit of like a Barnum effect where, you know, you read a horoscope and it's like you're going to feel lots of passion this week. And you're like, oh, my God, I am feeling passionate this week. We have a tendency to just adapt our experiences to whatever we read or hear about us. I had Lori Gottliebond, and she was describing this as like anytime you get

a headache and back of your head, you're like, oh, my God, I have cancer. Oh, my God, I have this. Oh, I have this. Like every symptom that you see online, you like immediately convince yourself, you have that disease. And that works with mental health as well, right? It's like, Like if I'm feeling anxious in this kind of awkward social situation, well, let me Google that. Oh, my God, I've got this. I've got a phobia. I've got anxiety. I've got a disorder, you know.

Well, what if you talk to your shrink about it once a week? Yeah, that too. I mean, let's go back to that relationship you had in the seventh grade. How did it feel when you were dumped? You know, I mean, that's what they're doing in the culture and literally in their offices. and I think parents are effectively reinforcing it by being way, way over solicitous focused on kids' feelings.

And you know what? I'm not saying ignore kids' feelings. You know, you deal with a kid who's suffering. The problem is we're treating everyone as a patient. I'm glad you brought that up because it seems like there's a Goldilocks zone, right? Because if you look at, say, our parents or our grandparents' generation,

they were completely, like their pain was completely ignored to a point that was probably unhealthy. Now we've got a generation that their pain is indulged to a point that it's unhealthy. So it's like ignoring the pain, you know, it's like, let's pretending the trauma never happened or pretending that that horrible event in your childhood never happened. That's not healthy, but also dwelling in it, creating personal stories around it, building your identity around it, validating it constantly. That's also not healthy.

So it's like, it's this tricky tightrope walk. That's right. Of like acknowledging that the pain exists, but not allowing yourself to be defined by it. That's right. And there's no balance today. That's the problem. It's that there's no balance. We've over corrected.

Way over. I mean, think about it this way. You haven't heard, no one has heard the phrase, you'll live in a generation. No one says that. It's not that the problem isn't that everyone doesn't say it. Is that literally they will never hear you'll live. They don't know sticks and stones. They can't complete the sentence, right?

They don't. No one is telling them you'll live. You'll live. You're fine. No one. And so they believe. believe they're sitting around crying over papercuts. And by the way, this is hypocondriasis or being a hypochondriac. Right? I interviewed the world expert on this, Arthur Barski of Harvard Medical

School. And I asked him like, what is what they now call illness, anxiety disorder, or somatic symptom disorder? But what is being a hypochondriac? And he said it's not people faking it. It's people applying hyper-focused to the normal pains we all feel and magnifying them. And then if you make it an organizing principle of your life, you'll never get over it, right? And that's what they're doing with their emotional lives. They are absolutely having mom call their boss because of something said to them at work. Their emotional pain is always front and center. It's always magnified. It's been magnified by their parents since they were little. And now they show up at work. And all they are is feeling pain all day long. And unfortunately, that means they also can't get through a normal day. and the way that we're used to seeing generations, just show up on time. Just do the job. Just take feedback, right?

If one of my employees' moms called me, I would fire him so fucking quick. It's happening. It's happening. Everyone has told me these stories. I'll take something else. I had a physician friend tell me the other day. He said, I loved your book,

and I want you to know something. He said they're doing it to physicians now, too. They're constantly giving us surveys about physician burnout. He's like, if you don't tell, All the time about physician burnout, they'll do fine most of them. But because they're obsessing over a physician burnout, now you've got a lot more people thinking they're burned out.

Every day they come in and they don't feel 100%. They're like, oh, is this burnout? Maybe I'm burned out. Right, exactly. I should slow down. I think part of what makes it so upsetting, and this is true in the self-help space, too. Like I've always described it as optimized for making people feel good instead of being good, right? It's like you can take a bunch of people, throw them in a hotel conference room,

make them dance around, hug each other, maybe share a couple personal stories, cry once or twice, and they'll leave feeling significantly better than they did when they walked in. But are they a different person? Probably not. Most of them are probably going to go home and revert back to the exact same behaviors, keep the same identity, tell themselves the same stories about themselves. And that's the problem in my industry. I think most people aren't aware that just feeling better doesn't mean.

you're actually changing. Same thing with therapy, by the way. Most people feel purged after they leave a therapist's office, so they say they're better, even when the objective markers of their lives get worse or stay the same. It's the same thing. And, you know, it's funny because your book is, you know, I know you're right about, you're sort of the antidote to self-health books. This is sort of the antidote to parenting books.

Because the amount of parenting nonsense by these so-called parenting experts who are constantly telling parents to act like therapists, oh, I see you're having big feelings. Oh, instead of throwing your bowl of Cheerios at Mommy, what else could we do? You know, it's all this, they're aping this therapeutic language. They're pretending to be amateur therapist. First of all, it's very phony. It's very time intensive, but it's also very artificial, right? It's making parents crazy. They're like, oh, shoot, I got to go back to page 194 to find out what to do next. He just smacked me across the vase. And we've done a few bad things for these. kids. So kids need authority. They actually need it. I know no one in our generation wants to assert

authority because they're afraid for some reason or they feel like it's bad, right? It feels like Principal Rooney. I don't want to be like him. I want to be the cool friend dad. But kids need authority. They need someone in charge. And when they don't have someone in charge, they really feel scared. I mean, I think they could go into a kind of panic. Like, I'm in charge here and I'm three or I'm five, right? And my mom's crying. I just hit her again. Like there's no consequences. No one even uses the word no. And they show up at school. And the first thing the teacher says is your child has ADHD. You should take him for, you know, diagnosis and medication because the kid can't control himself. The other thing we're doing that's so bad is we treat every child is totally unique

and separable from the world. And I tell the story in my book about I sat on a plane behind, this is so classic an American family, so two parents. and two kids, and this girl starts to scream. And I mean scream. Like this was ear piercing. I guess her sister had pinched her or something. And their father, who's a very gentleman, is like, sweetie, what's wrong?

Can we talk about it? Okay. And as this soliciting her feelings, he was trying to be very empathetic to his daughter. The thing he never said, and I listened to him to, okay, well, what else might you have done? The thing he never said to her is, you know, there are other people on this plane. We don't tell kids. that they're part of a society. They're part of a community, and they need to think about others.

So they don't. That their actions have repercussions. Right. Never mentioned. So I asked a woman I interviewed who was a cross-cultural psychologist, and I said, what would, like, Japanese parents or, you know, more collectivist cultures think of this? And she basically said they would think that was bananas. Yeah.

Because you have to be told, no, you're part of a society. And by the way, that's really good for our, you know, mental health. It's really good for us to know that we're not wanting. wandering alone like free radicals in the world. It was interesting. My wife and I, we read the book at the same time. And we had very different upbringings. You know, so I had a pretty upper middle class, waspy American upbringing.

My parents were pretty lax. And I was very bratty. But she said something really interesting when we were talking about the book. She said, you know, my dad was awful. But when he said something, you knew it was true. Like if he said be ready in 10 minutes where I'm leaving without you, you knew he was going to leave without you. Like there was zero doubt in your mind. She said if my brother and I, we were in a restaurant and we started acting up and my dad looked at us, we immediately knew to stop.

Like we knew there were consequences. There was very clear if this than that. Like if you behave this way, these are the consequences that are going to happen to you. And it's funny because she said, even though I can recognize that he was kind of an awful person in a lot of ways, I have a respect for him that I don't have for other people in my family because of that. Because there's like structure and like a certain honesty to it, you can depend on it. Right.

Even if you don't agree with him, it's dependable. Yeah. And look, certainly I'm not saying that anyone should be cruel or unloving or anything like like that to children, of course not. You know, God forbid, abuse or anything like that, but that's not what we're talking about. It's like, you know, there are things that kids need. And you can be as an affectionate and gentle as you want, but what they need is authority. What they need is consequences and high standards for their behavior. So however you want to deliver those things, they have to happen if you want to raise a good, sturdy adult. I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition

because it's ultimately like my wife is extremely organized and dependable. And like if she says one thing, you know, she does it. And I wasn't that way until I was probably 25, you know, because I didn't have structure a lot of the time. And I could kind of run loose. And there weren't always consequences if I didn't follow certain rules. You know, you make the point in the book that there's, I believe there's like a, I guess you call it a trichotomy.

of the permissive parenting, the authoritarian parenting, and then the authoritative parenting, whereas like the permissive is anything goes or no consequences, authoritarian is rigid, unaccommodating, whereas authoritative is, it's almost like you draw the boundaries, and then within those boundaries, the kid is free to kind of do whatever they want, be whoever they are. But it's like, hey, if you're not in bed by eight, this is what happens, right? And it's like you stick to that. There's no, there's clear rules, there's clear guidelines. clear if this than that. Yeah, and there's really sturdy research showing that's best for kids.

They have lowest anxiety, lowest depression. This is the rule-bound but loving, you know, parents. And today we don't even have permissive parents. We have something worse because permissive parents, this was Diana Bout. There's a very old psychological research going back to the 1960s, but it's been replicated hundreds of times. It's really good research showing that kids do best with authoritative parents. And today, she was talking about permissive parents. We don't even have that. Why? Because permissive parents usually gave their kids genuine independence. What we have now is the surveillance parenting, where parents just hover. They've never given their kids any rules. They never even say no to a child. And they walk around hovering and monitoring them all the time and then interfering or interceding with the teacher, the coach, the boss even, the second the child's unhappy and try to smooth the way for them. So these kids are in no sense growing up. And it's really bad for kids. Why do you think that's happening? It's a great question.

I think a few things. I think that the trauma gurus really got to us. And they really made us think that saying no to a child, yelling at a child, punishing a child could traumatize the child and leave a permanent mark. Now, by the way, it was never true. Even with truly traumatic incidents, the majority of kids will absolutely be resilient. The majority of us adults are resilient. But instead, they made us frank.

that if someone teased our child, that could leave a lasting mark. And you hear parenting experts ape this all the time. They're reciting this. It's not true. The best research shows, on resilience, shows it's not true. Kids overcome, and most kids will leave no mark if they're made fun of in middle school. Now, you might say, well, things are a little different today with social media. And I agree.

Right. Because I don't think we're of evolutionary built to have one million people, humiliate us. That's different. That's really different. That's like sending a kid to a knife fight, I think. But teased in middle school, sitting next to an obnoxious kid, dealing with a teacher who's really strict who you don't get along with, that you got to learn to do. Yeah. And well, this is one thing that Jonathan hates talking about with his new book is that we are overprotective in the real world and underprotective in the digital world. Right. So it's, you let your kid get on TikTok and look at whatever they want and have anything posted about them.

that they want. But God forbid they go down the street for an afternoon without, you know, checking in every hour or play with the neighborhood kids unsupervised. Right. And the thing is about the smartphones, we've known they were bad for at least eight years now, right? You try to take away an iPad from a kid or a phone from a kid and they shriek. They act like addicts. So parents were aware of this. They didn't do anything about it. And I think part of the reason they didn't was because they were afraid to assert their own authority. They were really afraid. They were told by mental health experts that this could inflict trauma if you separate them from their social world. So they were afraid to ever say no. I think there's also a little bit of like a threat inflation. There's a lot of

really interesting data. Like people have less trust and more anxiety about their communities than ever before, even though, you know, crime rates are all-time lows. And I mean, you're, there's never been a time where you're less likely to die, you know, get hit by a drunk driver or be kidnapped by a sexual predator. Yet, I think maybe because of social media or just the news media in general, like there's the perception of how dangerous the world is seems to be at an all-time high. Yeah, and I think we're really lousy at evaluating risks, right? Yeah. We think that the risks all come from the sexual predators trying to kidnap our kids.

We don't realize that keeping a child in a cage is its own risk. You're creating a child who will be harmed by normal life events because you've never done anything to help them be resilient to them, to help strengthen them. You've never given them normal life events. Right, right. So, like, it's not that child predators or, you know, don't pose a risk. And by the way, most of the child predators are probably on TikTok. That's true, too. It's self-defeating in both ways.

Right. That's true, too. But you have to know that putting a child out in the world who doesn't have a, has never built up any resilience to distress, disappointment, not getting cut from the basketball team. Now you're sending a young adult into the world who's really vulnerable. Yeah. So that's why they show up in college campuses and they get a bad grade and they're having nervous breakdowns. I'm curious, the process of researching and writing this book, how has it changed your approach

to parenting? It's changed it a lot. It really has because I became aware of that. So like I tell the story. My book, my nine-year-old at the time, my daughter really wanted to walk home from the bus stop by herself. It's a couple blocks. It's a few blocks and you have to turn a corner and whatever. And I did not want a letter at nine. She was so little and everybody drives these giant SUVs and I just didn't, I didn't want to.

I mean, I felt like a nervous wreck about it. But I learned a couple things. First of all, parents are the number one, you know, vector of anxiety and children. So I realized that if I could easily pass on my anxiety about it to her. But there's something else too. I learned from talking to all these parents and I interviewed a lot of them that when they stopped their children from doing risky behaviors that they could do when they were young, by the time they were older, they didn't even want to leave the house.

So there were 12-year-olds who had never been allowed to walk around the neighborhood by themselves who didn't want to be dislodged from the couch. So that was its own risk. I wanted my daughter to get to know the neighborhood. Why? Because there might be a time where I, for whatever reason, no, was there. And she needs to get home. So I have to give her the strength to have a sense of the environment.

There's a sense of the neighborhood. So she isn't like a babe in the woods the second she's in the wrong block and has no idea where she is. Is there any anxiety around being judged by other parents? Yeah, for sure. I think that's a lot of it, right? Is it a little bit of like a collective action problem, like a game theory type thing? where it's everybody secretly wants to be more, give their kids a longer leash,

but they're afraid that if they're the ones who do it, all the other parents are going to judge them. So I don't think so. I think it's primarily an entire generation that has lost confidence that they know what they're doing because they think that parenting requires a professional. If I don't know about, this is what the neuroscientists

and who are parenting experts will tell you, the popular ones. Basically, if you don't understand the fight or flight response and the lizard brain, you can't raise a child. It's ludicrous. It's nonsense. But nonetheless, they've really made insecure a generation of parents who had come from a tradition of pretty good parenting. We're pretty good at this in this country. We have been for generations. We have raised wonderful people to adulthood who are strong and brave, who can take risks and build up great companies and do great things. And now we are raising a generation that is not producing any

tech founders because they're afraid to take any risks. And I've heard that from so many employers that no matter how smart these kids are, they won't take a chance on their own. You have to tell them everything, even though they have great grounding in whatever it is, the sciences or whatever it is, they have all the knowledge they need. They're afraid to do for themselves. It's just from personal experience, I would say the level of talent in Gen Z is the highest I've seen, and the level of execution is the lowest I've seen. I mean, it's just my experience has just been finding these, like, incredibly smart, brilliant, interesting 22 to 25 year olds who don't get things done. Right. That's been my experience. By the way, that's a classic side effect of too

much therapy, which is you don't trust your ability to do things without checking in with an expert. You feel like you have to check in with a grown-up before you do anything. It's the way we've conditioned these kids, and it's what they are taking with them to the workplace. If you haven't given me specific instructions, I don't know what to do the second I run into any problem or any obstacle. Maybe I should just hire their moms with them. That's what people are doing. Seriously? No, no, no, not hiring the moms, but they're hiring the older generation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're seeing this from employers.

They're saying, I want the older generation. And it's like, it's ridiculous. These kids do have the ability. They do have the skills in theory. They're just afraid to execute. Just imagining doing a job interview with a kid and his mom simultaneously. I'm curious, let's start internationally. Is this an Anglo thing?

Is it a North American thing? Is it a Western culture thing? It's a Western thing. It's a Western thing. Yeah. And people. who come to our country from other cultures have a lot more sense about child rearing,

and they're generally horrified by what they're seeing in American parents. And they say the same thing, because I interview. I love talking to immigrants. First of all, because they'll tell you the truth. Yes. They're not so afraid to say the truth, the way Americans are.

And they will tell you, these parents have no authority. And by the way, if you interview immigrants, and it almost doesn't matter where they're from, they generally have much more orderly children who are genuinely, much more respectful of adults and their parents. And that's where we used to be in this country, and we desperately need to get back to that because, look, a child who's never learned to show respect for his parents will then be a

child who never shows respect for his teacher and never shows respect for a boss. And I think that's what we're seeing. I found it interesting when I was doing research for this episode. I tried to look up mental health interventions by race in the United States. First of all, extremely difficult data to find for whatever reason. And then when you do find it, what you find is that white people have way more mental health issues than other races. But the explanation was funny because the researchers that I found at least, they were like,

well, it's because minorities don't feel comfortable seeking. They're all repressed. Seeking help, right? Isn't that nice? They're disadvantaged. I'm sitting there. I'm like, wait a second. You know I know I know that self-flattering bit of nonsense.

I'll tell you, they actually call this the Latino immigrant paradox in the psychological literature. It's a paradox that Latinos who come to this country from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are do so much better in terms of anxiety and depression and mental health. Mental health outcomes. That's not a paradox. They're giving them better lives. They're giving them authority.

They're giving the community. They're making them help out with chores and contribute so they feel they matter. They're giving them all the things that we should be giving them. That's not a paradox. It's something to celebrate and admire, but it's not a paradox. Yeah. What about within the country? Do you see this evenly distributed within the country or is it worse in some pockets than others?

It's a good question. So there's some indication. Gene Twenge did some research in her book, Generations, where she reported that even though teenage girls are the worst demographic in terms of mental health suffering, teenage boys from liberal families where generally had worse mental health than teenage girls from politically conservative families.

The question is why, and people speculate on many different things, we know it's not social media because teenage girls are on way more social media, whatever their parents, politics. So the question is why, and I would guess that the answer has something to do with what I wrote the book about,

which is that parents from conservative families tend to be more religious, they tend to be more comfortable asserting authority. They tend to be more, you know, have more community around them, you know, getting kids to participate and contribute, whether it's showing up for church or whatever, they tend to have more structured lives. Now, they're also not scaring the hell out of their kids about the climate catastrophe, right? Which is another huge problem. I mean, an entire industry has arisen.

They're so excited to treat climate anxiety that there are now climate therapists. So if you don't see the conflict of interest in that. We need jobs. Right. Exactly. to do it for the economy. Exactly. The ride that steals the spotlight

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with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like Habiniero. Yes. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Yeah, I mean, just anecdotally, it's been interesting moving, I grew up in Texas and moving to California in particular. I mean, you know, so I lived in New York city for a long time. New York's a little bit different. It is definitely liberal, but New York,

you just, you get shit done. Like everybody has to get shit done all the time. And so there's not really much time to sit and dwell or worry about certain things. It's been interesting moving the California, I have definitely noticed just socially that there is a lot more self-consciousness around basic day-to-day behaviors. One of the things that I've found really surprising is that I will simply go to a lunch or a dinner party with a group of people, and people, they will try to curate the conversation to make sure that everybody feels included, that everybody's sharing something vulnerable, that everybody's like talking about, like there's talking points, for it. I'm like, can we just have dinner? Like, let's just, let's just hang out and have dinner.

Like, what's wrong with that? I find that it backfires. It actually prevents me from getting to know people because now once the conversation becomes curated, now you're seeing, you're kind of seeing a presentation of somebody and that's designed to elicit certain emotions instead of just having that spontaneous. And I think there's a lot to human interaction in human life that is only meaningful if it is spontaneous and unconditional in the way it emerges. Like as soon as you try to control it, and this kind of ties back to the school counselor thing or the SEL thing, like as soon as you try to control an emotional response, it starts feeling inauthentic.

It stops feeling as meaningful and purposeful. And I think as well-intentioned as it is to try to intervene in people's lives and mitigate anxiety and promote happiness and joy as much as possible, sometimes the intervention itself robs that happiness of any sense of meaning, meaningfulness. I totally agree. And here's the thing. You know, it denies our experience as humans because as human beings, we have this amazing variety of personality, of all kinds of likes and dislikes. And you know what? We can roll with it. Yeah. You know, we have friends that are nothing like us. And that's fun. And when you try to make everything into a group help session, right? So, you know, one of these self-help sessions where

everyone says the expected thing. Yeah, you're not friends anymore. Those aren't your friends. And by the way, it's the same thing with raising kids. You know why people love their parents? Because they're theirs. Because that's my mom, even if she's crazy. And that's what used to be. And now instead, we have parents pretending to be amateur shrinks. And by the way, the rising generation is cutting off its parents and rates we've never seen. They're deciding that their loving parents were toxic. And I'm not talking about abusive parents because when I interview psychologists who treat them, they say it's not abusive parents who get cut off. It's actually loving parents. And the, you know, young adult goes to therapy and they just are like, I can't deal with you anymore. You're toxic.

I'm done. You emotionally abused me. And it's over slight, you know, things that were said that hurt feelings and that sort of thing, or maybe they were, you know, they didn't translate across the generations, you know. And I think what you said is right, like all this professionalizing of social relations has robbed those relations of their vitality of the quirks that make us love them, right? I mean, sometimes you're with friends and you try to explain to someone else why something was so funny or why, and you can't even communicate it. Yeah. Because it's so particular to your experience. And we're losing that when we try to mass market all of our social relationships. Yeah. And I, you know, I would argue that really what friendship is is having people in your life

that you can feel whatever you feel around, right? It's like if I go to dinner with somebody and I'm just in a cranky-ass mood and just want to complain and bitch for two hours, that's what friendship is. You're there with them when they're feeling bad. You're, bad, you're there with them when they're feeling good, you're there when they're anxious, you're there when they're happy and joyful. Like it's trying to control the outcome removes the significance of it. It's a weird place. I do think people have such good intentions around it, both in the psychological world, the self-help world, the therapeutic world. I do think all these people think they're doing a good thing. I definitely see it in my industry. I think, you know, the straight up like,

and charlatan, it's the minority. It's nine times out of ten, it's somebody who actually thinks they're doing a lot of good and that they're helping a lot of people. They're just not looking at the second or third order effects. For sure. But I think that their role got way too big in our society. I mean, what made, therapists are always giving advice like, now you should say, I'm setting a boundary.

Well, if you're in an argument with your spouse and you hear, I'm setting a boundary. Now the therapist is standing there between you and your spouse. spouse, right? I mean, what a bizarre thing to say to someone else, right? Now you're not even relating as human beings, right? Or as friends or as lovers or whatever it is. Are they well-meaning? Yes, but what makes them friendship experts? Do they have good friendships? I don't know. And you see the ones who are parenting experts who would be either never raised children or we don't see their children the product of their great advice. It all sounds good. It sounds intuitively like getting on your knees to a child and saying,

I see that you're very angry. Can we talk about that? That sounds like something so compassionate and nice. Unfortunately, it's not what a kid needs. No, that's what you would say to an adult who knows how to process their anger and look at it objectively and understand if it's merited or not. A child has none of those perspectives. The child is just anger.

Right. And also a child wants someone who's with their mom, not a professional or their mom, like a professional inhabiting their mother's body, right? Like, they want their mom. Isn't it what that what we all want? Right? You want your husband, not someone who's like, I'm setting a boundary, you know? Like, it makes our relationships, which we love so awkward and artificial and professional. And I just don't see a lot of that is moving the ball forward. It's ironic. I guess that's another kind of facet of this paradox that relationship advice is at an all-time high is more well known than ever before. There's more books on it than ever before. for yet people are lonelier, have fewer friends, are getting married less, having children less, keeping in touch with their parents less. They're more socially isolated than they've ever been. Yeah, it's sort of like junior high in a way. In junior high, all the boys like the same girl, right? Because they are like pretty sure they all want the same, you know, the blonde girl,

whatever it is. And then you grow up and you're like, actually, I want something different for me. And we're almost going back to this idea of the therapist to prove, friendship, that they're, the mental health approved way to be with people. You know what the truth is? We love people who are really wacky. And they're just dear to us. And that's okay. Because you know what, we're pretty wacky too. And we lost sight in that somewhere along the line that you can be however you want with your kids, as long as you're not abusive, of course, or anything like that. But, you know, we all have different ways. I had this, I'll give me an example. My dad, who I've always been very, very close to. He used to call me ugly. Now, he wouldn't call me ugly in an insulting way.

He would wake me and be like, come on, ugly, let's go. And it was always with a smile. Yeah. And as I got to adulthood, I was like, God, I'm glad I never told a therapist that. Because it was kind of our joke. It was just our joke. I like, I know that my dad thought I was beautiful. I never doubted that. He made me more secure and how I looked than anyone, you know. But he always said with a smile, hey, ugly. And it always made me. me laugh. Like, no matter how angry I was or upset I was, it made me laugh. Now, if I tried to explain to someone else why that was okay, it's hard to do. I don't know why it was okay. It worked with his sense of humor and mine. It just worked. What right does anybody have to tell you that that's okay,

not okay? Right. Yeah. Right. So what are we supposed to do? What can what can parents do first? Let's start there. So I think parents need to stop obsessing over their kids' happiness. and start focusing on making their kids strong. And we're not bending any time on that. And that's everything from giving them skills, letting them go around the block, letting them figure something out. If you could figure something out when you were a kid,

if you could handle something, they can handle it too. We need to stop passing on our anxiety to our kids about everything. It's too much, but you do need to be an authority with your kids, which means I set the rules. I know best I'm your mom. Not somebody I hired. I'm your mom.

You know, a wonderful psychologist, Peter Gray, told me that whenever they're having psychological experiments and they want to introduce the element of stress, they do that by introducing monitoring. Monitoring is equivalent to stress. They're monitored in everything they do. We are stressing them out. You know, we need to raise them with rules so they know right from wrong. They need to face consequences, if they act badly, and then we need to trust them. It's amazing just thinking back on my own childhood. how many things that my parents let me do that would probably put them in jail today. I don't know, my brother and I, we would spend an entire day just like trawling through the woods, getting lost, you know, climbing up rock faces and falling down and scraping our knees and

stuff. It's pretty wild to think about now. But it's essential. It's actually essential for resilience. Like you need to get your knees scraped. You need to. You need to see that a scraped knee is not the same as getting your leg amputated. And you need to stop screaming out as if your legs been amputated when you scrape your knee. And that's what we're seeing.

Crying out for mental health days long, you know, off, these kids don't know they're fine. You're fine. Congratulations. You have dyslexia. You're not the first kid. You're going to be fine. Dyslexics have gone on to do great things. Instead, a kid gets a diagnosis.

They've been told they're dyslexic, and now they bring in a therapist, and sometimes they put them on psychiatric medication. Because of the stigma of dealing with their dyslexia, we are making their problems bigger. We didn't even touch on the medication piece, which might be the most upsetting of all. It makes sense to me why there's an overprescription of medication from the pharmaceutical side, obviously profit incentives and all sorts of kickbacks and whatever. There's plenty of documentaries about it. What was interesting in the book was when you talked about how they're sometimes parents and teachers

crave it because it validates or justifies their feelings of helplessness, right? It's like they struggle with a kid for a couple years and they're like, well, if he has ADHD, ah, that would explain everything. Right. And then it's not my problem. It's not my fault. Or the teacher feels like, okay, it's not, I'm not the one who's messing this up. it's he's got a condition, right?

Right, a kid who's badly behaved. They say he has oppositional defiance disorder. So it's not my fault. He just has this disorder. It's a brain problem. The problem is not only is it mostly not true in a lot of the cases of diagnosis, but when you give a child a diagnosis,

a mental health diagnosis, it comes with, you know, common side effect is demoralization. The person feels they don't have agency anymore. They feel limited by the diagnosis. Now, of course, if you have to give a kid a diagnosis because they really need it, then you have to. And it's worth the risk.

You don't not diagnose a kid with anorexia if she has it, right? But the problem is we're doing that immediately. The first time a kid is doesn't want to sit down for the letter E in kindergarten. He has ADHD. You know, we're learning about the two sounds made by the letter E. Everyone sit down and the boy doesn't want to and now he is ADHD. I guess it's the default that needs to change. I mean, start by removing stuff in his environment that might be making it hard for him to sit down,

like the tech. You had to get an iPad in the morning. He's not going to find anything interesting in school. And that's the problem. We're going straight to mental health diagnosis and we give him a pill and we're like, oh, great, now he's bolted to his seat because of the pill with no sense that we're really changing a child in a huge way. And we're also divesting him of the resources of saying, you know what? I used to be a bad student, but then I buckled down.

became a great one. It's funny. I got diagnosed with ADHD when I was about 15. Funny, there was this whole wave of ADHD diagnoses in the late 90s, early 2000s, and then I feel like it kind of went away for a while, and now it's like back. Like now it's a huge topic again. I don't know if it's the social media or what, but I remember it was very much kind of that dynamic that you describe in the book. I was always a mediocre student. My teachers were always frustrated with me. Parents are always frustrated with me. And the ADHD diagnosis was like, ah, that explains everything. Like, we're all absolved of, you know, dealing with Mark's bullshit. And I took medication for about a year. I was actually very, very fortunate in that I had a teacher

who pulled me aside after about a year and basically talked me into coming off of it because he was like, look, assuming you actually do have it, which I think as an adult now, I think I do. He said, assuming you do have it, you can have to deal with this for the rest of your life. So you might as well learn how to deal with it now when the stakes are low. And besides, it's definitely changing your personality and you're young enough that it's probably altering your brain chemistry. Like it's probably not great that you're taking all these medications as a 15, 16 year old. I started feeling depressed as a side effect and I came off of it. And yeah, it was really hard for a couple of years. And I think by the time I was like 19 or 20, I'd kind of figured out how to manage it. Like, oh, this is how my brain works. If I do these, few things when I go to class or this helps me get through my homework or whatever, like, I can manage it now. But again, coming back to the point of like letting the kids fail and learn, I had to give myself space to develop the tools and reactions to the condition to actually get to a place

where I can function really well with it. Right. I mean, how many hyper-successful adults had something like ADHD as kids? So many. I mean, we could sit and just look. list them, right? I'm actually surprised these days when I meet an insanely successful person who doesn't have some sort of diagnosis in their history. Like almost all of them do. I mean, it's like, you know, obviously, like, it probably surprises no one that I'm fairly high anxiety. But you know what?

It also is incredibly motivating. Yes. I mean, gosh, I'm perfectionistic. No one's going to beat themselves up. I mean, any book I come out with is watertight because no one's going to beat themselves up more if they get something wrong, right? Yeah. And I'm not medicated for it. So I feel it. Yeah. I feel the worry. I want to get it all right. And I'm not saying no one should take, you know, because anxiety can be brutal when it's a diso when it reaches the level of disorder. It's brutal. And as an adult, if you don't want to live with that or you feel you can't, by all means, that shouldn't be stigmatized. You know, I have no issue with that whatsoever. I think it's a totally, you know, fine choice. But you have to know that there are consequences. And with a kid,

if you go in and delete a part of them, which sometimes you're doing, you might be deleting their sex drive with SSRIs. You might be deleting their normal resources for coping with a bit of adversity so that they never develop it as an adult. With anxiety, it not only increases performance. It makes us alert to dangers. It's the reason we check both ways before we cross the street. Don't get in there and delete that unless you have to. Yeah, I think people forget that a lot of this stuff is adaptive. in a certain way. I actually wrote an article ages ago, like 10 years ago.

I don't even remember what it's called. It's called like the benefits of being slightly crazy or something like that. But anyway, I came across this idea. There's this idea in evolutionary psychology called emotionally stable systems. Basically what they point out is that if you, if you're a species that evolves in a community like we do, it's not so much that like, oh, this gene is superior to that gene. It's actually like there's a certain equilibrium of a diversity of traits and behaviors. within the community that is optimal. That is like evolutionarily optimal. So an extension of this

theory is that people who are depressive, for instance, depression tends to make you more observant and more introspective. And if you're thinking about how we evolved in small tribes of 15, 20, 30 people, you probably want somebody in the tribe who is incredibly introspective and observant and is like always like assuming the worst about things because that's going to be adaptive for the tribe. That's exactly right. And you can run down the list of, you know, ADHD, even like a lot of schizophrenic disorders and schizophrenical people, like they tend to imagine things that aren't there or draw pattern, like pattern match way more. They overly pattern match and, you know, make discoveries that other people wouldn't consider. And in the long run over a large group of people,

that's actually extremely adaptive. But you have to be in an environment that is able to leverage it and honor it and take advantage of it. But we are in an environment that's able to leverage it. I mean, I love that. That's exactly right.

Like, we did develop with this diversity for a reason, for a good reason. And I'll give you an example. When I was a kid, I was always, in any group of girls, I was always the one who was saying things I wasn't supposed to say. People were always like,

girls were always saying to me, You can't say that. It's so rude or whatever. And I often had no idea what I had just said. Like, why can't I say that? I don't know. And I'm not saying that's great at an inner party because it's not always, great at an inner party.

But it turned out in journalism, there was a place for me. Totally. Because sometimes true things needed to be said. And someone who didn't even notice when they were upsetting people was, it's an easier for you to say them. And I think, you know, writ large, as we've all, you know, all been handed our scripts, our therapeutic scripts, or I'm drawing a boundary now. And we go and recite these scripts with our children. No, to make good choices.

We're all reciting these scripts. We forgot that it's actually exactly what you said, this amazing diversity that's adaptive. Yeah. We're all trying to get along and we're all a little different. And it works. You know, we all have some people are higher in disagreeableness than others. And it works. Yeah.

I'm a big fan of the idea that the best thing about somebody is usually also the worst thing. Like, it's like the thing that causes most of the problems in our lives is also probably our superpower. Totally. Right? And it's, and I, yeah, I just think that gets like neglected or overlooked. I'm curious, you know, as being somebody who says the things that nobody's supposed to say, your last book, which was about gender dysphoria and all the transgender stuff that's been happening

in the last few years, obviously you got. just absolutely crucified in the popular culture and the media. I'm curious, how much did that bother you? For sure, some of it. First of all, you know, people sometimes ask me, like, did you know you were going to get that blowback? No, most books get ignored. Yeah, that's true. I mean, so you have to know that, like, so many books are published a year and most of them are completely ignored. So did I know I was going to get that kind of blowback that they were going to, you know, you still can't find it in most libraries in America. And it's not because people don't, they donate my book and the library refuses them in this country. So did it? Yeah, I'll tell you, obviously,

when it affected me personally, so the people who were unkind to my family or my kids, that hurt. But lots of people angry with me, no, I thought I was right. I don't know. I was, by the way. So. I love it. Zero Foxgiven. You were on the right podcast. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. The book is Bad Therapy.

Very eye-opening. Check it out. A little bit upsetting. Trigger warning, everybody. Retreat to your safe space. Thanks, Abakia. Thank you.