The Joe Rogan Experience - #1221 - Jonathan Haidt

Episode Date: January 7, 2019

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. He's also the author of books such as "The Happiness Hypothesis" and "The Coddling of the American Mind".

In four, three, two, one. Hello. Hello, Joe. Thanks for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. Oh, this is exciting. I don't think I've ever had a conversation as long as we're about to have. I've been listening to the happiness hypothesis over the last few days, and I really, really

enjoy it. I'm really enjoying it. It's really fascinating stuff, man. But one thing I wanted to talk about, because we were talking about it right before we got started, was what's happening with Peter Boghossian at Portland State University. For folks who don't know the story, he and, I forget his two colleagues, James Lindsay, they released these fake papers on homoeroticism and rape culture in dog parks and just really preposterous papers that are almost like an article from The Onion.

And some of them, not only did they get peer reviewed and accepted into these journals, but they got lauded as being these amazing pieces of- One did, one got an award. And now he's getting in trouble. That's right. Yeah. And we were just talking about it and I just would love to know your thoughts as a professor. Oh, sure.

Yeah. So, you know, for those who don't know, I guess most of your listeners probably do, but, you know, it was called the grievance studies hoax. Yeah. Because, and this is one of the big issues going on in the academy, which I hope we'll talk about, is, you know, what does it take to have good scholarship? And the argument is that in some fields, as long as you hate the right things and use the right words, you'll get published. And that's not scholarship, that's activism. And so these three people who did this hoax, they were trying to show that that's the case. And so they wrote these papers. One of them was actually a section of Mein Kampf.

Yes. And they just substituted in something about feminism for Nazism, something like that. And I don't remember that one actually got published. I think it did. At any rate, the point is they were trying to show that this is some of these fields in the academy are not really about scholarship. They're just about showing that you hate the right things. They're activism. And so there's no way to break in within those closed worlds. So they did a time-honored thing. They did a hoax. They submitted these papers.

They made up fake names, and a lot of them got accepted. And now what's happening is that Portland State University, which is only one of the three, is a professor. He's an assistant professor, so he's not tenured. Of course, he has a lot of enemies. And, of course, I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but it looks like some of them wanted him investigated for violating the IRB, the Internal Review Board, because the claim is they fabricated data. Because one of the papers says, I inspected the genitals of 10,000 dogs in the dog park. It's obviously absurd.

And he said, you know, and 63% of the attempted humping, because the thing of the article was the idea that, you know, you go to a dog park and you see dogs humping each other. And they were interpreting this as rape, as doggy rape. And so he's got all these, you know, fake numbers in there. So is that fraud? Is that data fraud? He's got all these fake numbers in there. So is that fraud? Is that data fraud?

And if you read – so I'm writing a letter for – a lot of us are now writing letters in support of Boghossian. Thank you for doing that. But if you read the – they – at his university, a committee was impaneled, and they looked at the literal definition of data fabrication. And it's possible that he does fall under that. But the point of this whole thing, so it's not, I can't weigh in on whether or not technically, but these rules are put in place to prevent the corruption of the scientific record. corrupt the scientific record. It was done to correct it. They were doing it to show that there's a huge problem, and then they were going to unveil it. So the question is, is the university going to interpret this in the worst possible way, in the narrowest possible way, and thereby make fools of themselves look like laughingstocks? Or are they going to use some common sense and recognize this for what it was? It wasn't data fabrication. It wasn't a fraud.

Yeah, it was an expose. That's right. Yeah. And I hope that they come to their senses. And they do have a point, if I'm going to be completely objective, about data fabrication. I mean, technically, I mean, maybe they could have written that paper without saying that they actually tested 10,000 genitals of different dogs. But what's really important, I think, is that they recognize that regular people are paying attention to this now. People that aren't involved in this very insulated world. And they're going, this is crazy.

Imagine if your children are going there and your children are being taught at this school that's willing to accept this kind of nonsense. What happened at Evergreen State University is another example of that and right it's incredibly damaging to them as a university I mean their their enrollment is significantly down that's right their funding is in real big trouble and it's a real bad situation for them and if you talk to Brett Weinstein it was a wonderful place just a few years ago when he was teaching there. And it's gotten crazier and crazier on these campuses to the point where nonsense is not being questioned at all. It's just being accepted as just some,

it's almost like some religious dogma that you have to follow. That's right. So I think the way to make sense of all of this is you have to always look at what game is being played. So human beings evolved in small-scale societies. We have all kinds of abilities to function in those small-scale societies. One of those is religious worship. We're very good at making something sacred and circling around it. Another is war.

We're very good at forming teams to fight the other side. And we love that so much. We create sports and video game battles with team versus team. So there's all these different games you can play. And the truth-seeking game is a really special one and a weird one. And we're not very good at it as individuals. And in my view, the genius of university is that it takes people and puts them together in ways where each person, like scientists aren't these super rational creatures that are looking to disconfirm their own ideas. No, we're not looking. We want to prove our ideas. We love our ideas.

But a university puts us together in a way in which you are really motivated to disprove my ideas and I'm motivated to disprove yours, you put us together, we cancel out each other's confirmation biases. So the truth-seeking game is a very special game that can only be played in a very special institution with special norms. Okay, so we're doing this for my whole time in academia. I started grad school in 1987 at the University of Pennsylvania. And then just in the last few years, it's like some people are playing this really different game. And it's like if I'm playing tennis and I hit the ball to you, like we're in a seminar class. I give you a question. I challenge you.

You come back and we go back and forth. And in the process, we learn. So that's like kind of like playing tennis. So I'm doing this. And then suddenly, like someone tackles me. Like, what? You don't do that in tennis. No, no, but they're playing football, you see. And in football, it's a much rougher game, and you're trying to destroy the others. I mean, not really in football, but I'm saying, you know, it's, and so as norms of combat come in,

and what I mean by that is political combat, as some people within universities see that what we're doing here is not seeking truth. We're trying to fight fascism, or we're trying to defeat conservatism, or we're trying to fight racism or whatever, some sort of political goal. And these games are completely incompatible. And so that's why this madness has erupted, where you see professors saying something, maybe it's a little provocative. I mean, going back to Socrates, that was kind of the point was to provoke. And you see these bizarre reactions, emotional reactions, groups organized to demand that a professor be fired, because we're playing different games. Yeah, how did this start? How did it start? Because it seems there there has to be an event or something

or yeah a trend well so so the you know the book that uh the book that i just put out in september with greg lukianoff the coddling of the american mind um i read the first chapter of that as well okay well thank you for admitting that it was only one chapter usually uh you know you're into that one because uh the unfortunately uh i was I was reading that and then I got on a flight and I just wanted to zone out. So I listened to this one on tape. Okay. Well, I'll tell you all about it. But the key thing is that that book, The Coddling of the American Mind, was something that we wrote because Greg began observing this weird stuff happening in universities in 2014.

It all starts in 2014. this weird stuff happening in universities in 2014. It all starts in 2014. Most of your listeners have heard about safe spaces, microaggressions, bias response teams, trigger warnings, all that stuff. That stuff didn't exist before 2014. It just begins creeping in then and then it kind of blows up in 2015.

And so our whole book is an exploration of why. Why did this happen? And so to your question about was there an event, our answer is there are six different causal threads. There's like all these social trends, some going back to the 80s and 90s, that came together around 2014 so that students are a little different, and then there are certain forces acting on them that are different. And so you get this weird new game, you get this explosive mix, you get some students who are actually very drawn to grievance studies. And so very briefly,

like it's things like rising political polarization. So left and right never particularly liked each other. But in the 70s and 80s, if you look at surveys done of how much you hate people on the other side, it's not that intense. It begins going up in the 80s and then especially after 2000. It's going up very steeply. At the same time, university faculty, who've always leaned left throughout the 20th century, but it was only a lean. And in the 90s, it begins shifting much further left so that now faculties, especially in the social sciences and humanities, are pretty purified. They're overwhelmingly on the left. So you have a more left-leaning university at a time when left-right hostility

is getting more and more intense. And so any question that has a political valence, now there's a lot more people who want to do the football game, not the truth-seeking game, but that we got to defeat the other side. Don't give me nuance. Don't give me data. We know what we believe, and damn it, we're going to – so you got this changing political situation. And then you've got a couple of threads about what we've done to kids. So – and this is a whole other area of conversation for us, but we basically took away free play and gave them social media.

Basically, kids who were born in 1995 and after, Gen Z, they had really different childhoods, and they're not as prepared for conflict and college. We'll get into that later. But you put all these things together, you get kids who are much more anxious and fragile, much more depressed, coming onto campus at a time of much greater political activism. And now these grievance studies ideas about America's a matrix of oppression and look at the world in terms of good versus evil, it's more appealing to them. And it's that minority of students, they're the ones who are initiating a lot of the movements. It's such a strange time to be on the outside and watch this because a person like myself has always counted on intellectuals and professors and people like yourself to sort of make sense

of things and to reinforce the idea that freedom of speech and free debate are critical aspects to knowledge. And one of the things that's most disturbing when you see in schools is people that are even marginally right-leaning or centrist, being called Nazis and being silenced and they're pulling fire alarms when they're speaking.

Even people like Christina Hoff Summers, who's a feminist, gets shouted down and people are yelling at her and calling her a fascist. It's just very strange. It's very strange to watch from the outside. And it's also very strange to not see any pushback by the professors. So sitting here and seeing this happen and thinking,

well, these poor kids, they're going to have to go into the workplace. They're going to have to – right now they're in this very insulated environment. They're going to escape that environment when they graduate. And then they're either going to push this ideology into the workforce, which you do see now. That's it. Especially with tech companies. In the last year. That's right. No, that's right.

I know it's strange to look at it from the outside. And believe me, it's stranger from the inside. But one thing I can say that might be helpful here is that from the outside, what you see is the news reports. And the news reports are going to be very selective. And so especially what happens is because, you know, universities have always leaned left. And so the right leaning media have always been suspicious. So the right leaning media has huge coverage of every little thing. And sometimes it's exaggerated, sometimes it's misinterpreted. For the most time, there was something there. Left-leaning media tends to ignore it.

And so I go around the country and, you know, people on the right expect that, oh, my God, it's chaos and mob violence on campus, which isn't true. That's an exaggeration. And the left is like, problem? What problem? There's nothing changing. And so I think the key thing to keep in mind here is that there's about 4,500 institutions of higher education in this country. Most of them are not selective schools. They'll take anyone who comes. And in those schools, not much is

happening. But if you go to the elite liberal arts colleges in the Northeast and the West Coast, then usually something is happening. And so at Heterodox Academy, it's a group that I co-founded of professors that are pushing back. It's bipartisan. We have as many people on the left as on the right. We created a map of where all the shout-outs have taken place. And they're all right in the northeast or along the Pacific coast, like from Evergreen down to Berkeley and all that, and then a couple in Chicago. So in most of the country, this stuff is not happening. Most schools, the culture hasn't really changed much.

But at the top schools in general, it has. So that's one thing to just keep in mind. There is a moral panic on the right about this, which doesn't mean that there's not something real. There really is a huge problem. But it's not as pervasive as it's sometimes made out to be. So is it akin to looking at violence in the news media? akin to looking at violence in the news media. Like when you read about violence in terms of robberies and murders, in general, you're not going to encounter much in your life.

The world is a large place. Yeah. But we concentrate on these really bad moments. Yeah, it's a little bit like that, except that, you know, one of the reasons that we took free play away from kids is that we were afraid that they'd be abducted. And that was so rare.

But we got a lot of coverage of that in the 80s and 90s. And we changed our behavior because of that. And that was a gross overreaction. The situation on campus is not like that. Your odds of being nailed are much higher than that. odds of being nailed are much higher than that. And so, you know, I hear every day, or at least every week, I get an email from a professor who says, you know, I used a metaphor in class, and somebody reported me. And so once this happens to you, you pull back, you change your teaching style. What we're seeing on campus is a spectacular collapse of trust between students and professors.

of trust between students and professors. And when we don't trust each other, we can't do our job. We can't risk provoking, being provocative, raising new ideas, raising uncomfortable ideas. We have to play it safe. And then everybody suffers. Is social media partially to blame? Oh my, it's huge. Social media is a huge part of this problem in a couple ways. So one is the generational thing that we have kids born after 1995 got this in middle school. It had a variety of effects on them. So kids coming in are more conversant with call-out culture, and that's a big part of this. The other thing, though, is that we used to have what you would call a reasonable

person standard. So, you know, for Professor, what's one? So a professor just wrote to me recently, he said, he, you know, he got frustrated while trying to explain something. He said, shoot me now. And a student was offended by this, because are you making fun of people committing suicide? And okay, you know, had she come to him and said, you know, professor, I know you didn't mean anything, but that was kind of insensitive. Okay, that would have been great. Like, that's the way to handle it. But for this generation, raised with call-out culture and social media, you almost never hear of a student coming to someone else in private, because you don't get credit for that. So you only get credit when you call them out publicly. And so that's why we're all walking on eggshells because most of our students are great. Most of them are fine.

But if I have a class of 300 students, a lecture class, I know that some of them subscribe to this new call-out culture, safetyism, morality. And so if I say one thing, it's not a reasonable person standard. It's a most sensitive person standard. I have to teach to the most sensitive person in the class. It's also that person has the opportunity to score, right? They throw up that virtue flag, like, I've got one on the board here. Look what I did. I nailed the professor on saying, shoot me now. And now I'm a hero. And I've made this a safer space for everybody else. That's right. And so that's really what is messing us up at so many levels of society. And the fact that a lot of these problems, the difficulties of democracy,

the rise of authoritarian populism, there are a lot of weird trends that are happening in multiple countries. And I think it's the rise of devices and social media is the main way we can explain why it's so similar across countries. Do you think that this is, is this some sort of a trend that will eventually correct itself when these kids get out into the real world and then go through a whole generation of that? And then people realize the error of their ways and the disastrous results of having these unprepared or emotionally unprepared kids?

No, I'm pretty confident that it will not correct itself. I think that once we understand it, I think there are a variety of things we can do to change it. But I think here's the way to understand it and why it's not going to change itself. So I'm a social psychologist is my main area. But I love all of the social sciences.

I love thinking about complex systems. And systems composed of people are really different from systems composed of stars or neutrons or anything else. And so if you have a complex system composed of people, these people are primarily working to increase their prestige. you know, food and things like that are set, we're always interacting in ways to make ourselves look good and to protect ourselves from being nailed, you know, or accused of something. So we're always doing reputation management. Now, think about in any group what gives you prestige. And so if you look in a group of teenagers, you might have a group in which it's athletics. And so if that's how you get prestige, then all the kids are going

to be working out and training and practicing. And that doesn't hurt anybody. That doesn't impose an external cost on anyone else. But you can have some really sick prestige economies. And so there's an ethnography about an indigenous population in the Philippines by Shelly Rizaldo, is the anthropologist. I think it's called Knowledge and Passion about the Alangut, which is a name for a tribe in the Philippines. And in this tribe, it's a headhunting tribe.

They find people and cut off their heads, not just for fun, for prestige. So in a lot of societies, you have a lot of male initiation. Boys have to do something to become a man. And if the thing you have to do to become a man is you have to cut off someone's head, okay, so that imposes rather a heavy cost on outsiders. All right, so this is a sick culture. This is not one where we can say, oh, well, that's just the way they do things. Okay, this has to stop. OK, this has to stop. And ideally, they would cut off a stranger's head like they find someone from another tribe or someone, you know, from, you know, a government agency that just cut off his head.

But if necessary, if there's a fight or if there's somebody within their larger community that can also get you points. So this is a really sick culture. Now, head now, call out culture is not quite that bad, but it's the same logic. So if you have a group of teenagers or college students who are all struggling for prestige, as we all are, and if you get a subculture in which the way you get prestige is by calling someone out, showing that they're racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, whatever it is, if you can catch them, you get the points. What you're doing here is you're

imposing external cost on others. And that's what makes you so insufferable, because you are playing your game, but I'm paying the cost of your game. And so that I think, it's hard to, people aren't going to break out of that themselves. But once we understand what's happening, I think in a sense, we can all come together and call out, call out culture and say, stop, stop imposing these costs on us. How, but how are we going to reach those kids if professors are so terrified to speak out and to cause controversy in class and no one wants to criticize them because if you do, you risk your job, you risk them organizing against you. I mean, how does this shift? So, I'm hopeful that we can shift it because most people hate it.

So even the people who do it recognize that they're always on eggshells. They can be next. There's the tendency of people in this culture to, you know, as we say, they eat their own. They eventually turn on each other. And the mental health costs of it, I mean, there are a number of essays that have been written by people who sort of left that. And it sounds miserable to costs of it. I mean, there are a number of essays that have been written by people who sort of left that. And it sounds miserable to be inside it. You're always, you know, there's no humor.

There's no fun. It's always, you know, hyper serious, angry. And so I think that, I think if we can raise kids or encourage them to see the games that social media makes them do and give them a vocabulary. I don't know if we should come up with some catchy terms for it, but give them a vocabulary so that they can be like, oh, you're a calling out or I don't know. That's clunky. But we can help them label this behavior.

Mock it. Mock it. Exactly. That's right. Yeah. Mock it. Mock it, exactly. That's right. Yeah.

There's patterns that you see in people that, from a distance, like if I look at it, when I look at them objectively, there's like these patterns where I go, oh, that's one of those MAGA guys. He's one of those, you know, he's got an American flag with an eagle and his avatar on Twitter. Right. And if you go through his page, it's all like talking great about POTUS and criticizing anyone who talks bad about Trump. It's all like talking great about POTUS and criticizing anyone who talks bad about Trump. It's strange.

It's like these patterns of behavior, these predetermined patterns. It's almost like there are stereotypes. Not just stereotypes. Like they've fallen into a well-oiled, slick groove that's very easy to predict. If you are one of those people, it's super easy to predict that you're going to be pro-Second Amendment. It's super easy to predict that you're probably going to be skeptical about climate change. There's all these different things that go along with these patterns of behavior. And you see them on the right, you see them on the left. And it's weird to watch. It's

weird to watch on the outside. It's like, well, this is such an easy pattern to slip into. Yeah. Well, that's right. So there's data from the Pew surveys. They've been measuring attitudes of Americans since the 80s or 90s. But they've been publishing this series on polarization in which they show that in the 90s, if you knew somebody's attitude on, say, gun control, that would only predict their attitude on abortion a certain percent. And a lot of people on the left, let's say, would hold six of the ten leftist attitudes and same on the right. But gradually, by the time you get to around 2010, it's like if you know one attitude, you know them all. And that's in part just because if you turn up the volume. So we evolved to do us versus them.

up the volume. So we evolved to do us versus them. And the more we see, if it's us, America versus them, communist Russia or Nazi Germany, well, then we all come together and that's great for social cohesion and trust. But as that fades away and as us versus them became increasingly left versus right, and as we lost the liberal Republicans and the conservative Democrats, those used to exist until the 80s or 90s. As we lost them, once it becomes us versus them is left versus right. Now, if you only hold your team's position on six out of 10 items, you're a traitor. And so you better get with the program. And so the pressures for conformity, the pressures to agree with your team on everything have been steadily rising.

And that means there's no nuance. And we can't do higher education without nuance. We can't do college without free thinking and the ability to say, well, you know what, wait a second, maybe they do have a point on this thing. And that's one of the reasons why it looks so weird from the outside and why it's getting so unpleasant from the inside. When you're teaching classes and a subject comes up that may be controversial, do you have like this overwhelming feeling that you're treading on dangerous ground? Yes. Yeah. So I taught Psych 101 at the University of Virginia,

and I would take them into sex differences, the origin of sexual orientation. I would even do race differences because there was a reasonable person standard, and I trusted my students, and they trusted me. And we had a great time, and we covered a lot, a lot of stuff. But now – and then I moved to New York University in 2011, when my previous book, The Righteous Mind, came out. And it's not about UVA versus NYU. It's just about the changing time. Now, as I said, I have to teach to the most sensitive students. So I teach a course on business ethics, on professional responsibility. And we have a section on discrimination and employment law. It's important to cover it. We have to cover it.

You know, MBA students have to know where the lines are, what the law is. And yeah, I'm kind of scared when I teach that because, you know, I'd like to get into all sorts of things. I'd like to get into, well, you know, what do numerical disparities mean if there's a gender difference in, you know, in the percentage of tech,

but not in the percentage of non-tech employees in Silicon Valley. What does that mean? I would like to talk about that. But if a single student thinks that I am denying the existence of sexism, they could be offended by that. And in every bathroom at NYU, there's a sign telling them how to report me anonymously. And they put these up in 2016 in response to student requests. And it means that all professors are on notice, that they can be reported anonymously at any moment. By children.

Well, these are, well, I'm not going to call them children. I mean, my students are MBA students, but the undergrads, yeah, 17 to 21-year-olds for the undergrads. Yes, that's right. Barely not children anymore. That's right. And there's an incentive to this, what we were talking about before, this incentive that gives them attention. They get prestige.

They get value from it. And this culture encourages these things. That's right. And this is a terrible lesson to teach them. and to teach them. So, you know, the subtitle of our book, it's called The Coddling of the American Mind, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.

And so these microaggression reporting systems, that's basically what it is, a microaggression reporting system has a good intention behind it. There are cases of professors who make ethnic jokes. Okay, they should stop doing that. I mean, maybe that was okay 30 years ago. There are legitimate complaints, and faculty do – there should be some accountability, some responsibility.

So there's a good intention behind it. But it's usually based on no empirical evidence, and because it's based on pressure applied to a bureaucracy, not by a committee thinking, hmm, how can we improve the climate for everyone? No, no. It's like, we make these demands and we demand 10 things and the administration says, okay, we'll give you five of them. There's not thought put into what would happen if we give the students an East German style anonymous reporting system. And so everybody's on notice that they can be reported at any point. What might happen to the social dynamics? Like nobody thought that through. So the net effect, again, is the spectacular collapse of trust on campus. God, to be in the middle of that, it's got to be so bizarre having taught for so many years before that and to watch almost like this virus overtake the institutions.

That's what it felt like. And that's why, so, you know, Greg Lukianoff came to me in 2014. So Greg, I'll just briefly tell this story of the book. Greg is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He fired, they defend free speech rights on campus. And they were always pushing back against administrators who would say, oh, you know, we need a free speech zone. And they're always afraid of liability. And so, but suddenly in 2014, Greg starts seeing students pushing back on speech rights saying, we want, you know, ban that speaker, you know, we need a safe space if a debate is going to be held. New stuff, weird stuff. And Greg, who is prone to depression, he had a suicidal depression in 2007. He's hospitalized. When he gets out of the hospital, he learns CBT, cognitive behavioral

therapy. And in that, you learn these 15 or so cognitive distortions, like catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, black and white thinking. So Greg learns to not do those himself, and then he goes back to record fire. And then in 2014, he sees students saying, oh, if Christina Hoff Summers comes to campus, people will die or people will be harmed, injured. And so there's this new way of thinking, and Greg thinks, wow, how are students learning to do this? Like, are we teaching them on campus to think in these distorted ways? And if we are, isn't that going to make them depressed? So Greg comes to talk to me in May of 2014 to tell me this idea. And I think it's really brilliant. I think it's a great idea because

I'd begun to see this, you know, the safe spaces, the microaggressions, the trigger warning requests. So we wrote up our essay, submitted to The Atlantic. It came out in August of 2015. And it was like we were just seeing the first outbreaks of a virus. And then in the fall of 2015, it becomes an epidemic. epidemic. And so many of your listeners will have heard of or seen the videos of what happened at Yale in November 2015, when Erika Christakis wrote an email saying, now, wait a second, Yale is telling you how to do your Halloween costumes. Maybe we should think this through ourselves. Maybe you're old enough to make your own decisions. Some students get very upset.

They protest. They bring demands to the president. They're screaming at her husband. set, they protest, they bring demands to the president, they're screaming at her husband. So it was then when that protest was successful, when the president of Yale basically said, you know, we're wrong, you're right, we validate your narrative, we'll give you as much as we can of your demands. When that happened, then the protest went national. And so throughout 2016, you have groups of students making these demands, demanding microaggression reporting systems. So that's when NYU put in its systems, its microaggression reporting systems. So that Yale event wasn't just an isolated incident. It really was the spark.

I think so. Yeah. So there's all these threads coming together. It didn't come out of nowhere. All these things are happening. It's almost like the whole room is like almost at combustion temperature. And then Yale was the spark that sent it national. What's crazy about Yale is anybody that's objective that's watching from the outside is like these students are out of control. They're screaming at this professor like this is supposed to be a safe place. And, you know, you fuck this up. And they're being incredibly hostile and aggressive towards him and surrounding him. And they're being incredibly hostile and aggressive towards him and surrounding him.

And when you watch that from the outside, you think, well, obviously, they've got to punish these students. I mean, they did the opposite. That doesn't make any sense. Well, it doesn't make sense from the outside. But again, you have to look at the different games being played. So I went to Yale. I graduated from there in 1985. I loved it. I was in Davenport College. It's one of the 12 residential colleges. And there were a lot of intellectual events that would happen in the colleges, like the master of the college or the dean of the college would bring in all kinds of people to speak. So, they were intellectual spaces as well as sort of home-like or not exactly home-like, like transitional places where there were places that you lived. So the Yale that I knew was a place that taught me to think in lots of different ways. And it just was constantly blowing my mind. Like when I took my first economics course,

it was like, wow, here's a new pair of spectacles that I can put on. And suddenly I see all these prices and supply. And I never learned to think that way. I learned about Freud and psychology or sociology. So a good education is one that lets you look at our complicated world through multiple perspectives and that makes you smart. That's what a liberal arts education should do. But what I see increasingly happening, especially at elite schools, is the dominance of a single story. And that single story is life is a battle between good people and evil people, or rather good groups and evil groups. And it's a zero-sum game.

And so if the bad groups have more, it's because they took it from the good groups. And so the point of everything is to fight the bad groups, bring them down, create equality. And this is a terrible way to think in a free society. I mean, that might have worked in biblical days when you got the Moabites killing the Jebusites or whatever. But we live in an era in which we've discovered that the pie can be grown a million fold. And so to teach students to see society as a zero-sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive. Now, in your book, you actually identify the moment where these microaggressions sort of made their appearance. And they were initially a racist thing? So yeah, so the idea of a microaggression, it goes back to, I forget the

scholars and African American sociologists in the 70s first coined the term, but it really becomes popular in a 2007 article by Derald Wing Sue at Teachers College. And so he talks about this concept of microaggressions. And there are two things that are good about the concept, that are useful. And so one is as racism, as explicit racism has clearly gone down by any measure, explicit racism has plummeted in America and across the West. But, you know, there could still be subtle or veiled

racist claims. So perfectly legitimate point. How do you know, there could still be subtle or veiled racist claims. So, perfectly legitimate point. How do you define the difference between explicit racism and- Well, explicit racism is, you know, calling someone a racial slur or I hate you because X. And they're identified because they've been reported as crimes or- Well, I would just say that if you're a member of a culture, you can tell when someone is saying something to insult, to put down, or to express hostility. Right.

And that's something, a judgment we can make. Right. And as that's become socially unacceptable in most circles, so explicit racism is way, way down. Right, but how, I'm sorry, but my only question is, how are they measuring this?

Well, how do you measure microaggressions? Well, how do you measure even explicit racism? how do you say it's down um certainly attitude measures so there are so surveys done in private um how would you feel if a you know if a black family moved in next door if a filipino family moved in so how would you feel if your child married a Jew, a Muslim? So explicit surveys show it. Certainly, I mean, when you do surveys of people's experience, people of every race, when they report how often this happens to them every year, the numbers are actually fairly low. So there are ways of measuring experiences of racism. Right. How accurate are these? Because, like, first of all, I used to have a joke about this, but the idea is that the problem with surveys is you're only getting information from people so stupid they take surveys.

Like, who's taking surveys? So some surveys are subject to that. But in general, if you approach a question from multiple perspectives and say in one condition you pay them for an accurate answer or not, or in one condition they're anonymous or they're not. So you can get a sense of how much the answer moves around depending on external conditions. And so anyway, the point I just wanted to make is that the acceptability of using the N-word or other things, you know, if a bunch of white people are talking, the acceptability of using the N-word, I think, has gone way down in general. Would you agree with that? Yes.

Yes, tremendously. I mean, I agree with the sentiment and I agree with the trend, that there is absolutely a trend away from racism. But I was just curious as how they measured it. Yeah. I'm not an expert in that area, so I'm assuming it's surveys and analysis of discourse.

Ultimately, for everyone's sake, I mean, even for the sake of the people that are embroiled in all this controversy and chaos, it would be fantastic across the board. If there was no more sexism, there was no more racism, there was no more any of these things. Yeah. I mean, it would be wonderful. Then we could just start treating humans as just humans. Like, this is just who you are. You're just a person. No one cares.

That would be, what a wonderful world we would live in if this was no longer an issue at all. Beautifully put. But how does that get, how does that ever get through? So we were getting there. We were getting there. I mean, that's what the 20th century was about. So you and I are shaped by, I don't know how old you are. I'm 51.

Okay, I'm 55. We were shaped by the late 20th century. And the late 20th century was a time in America in which, you know, earlier on, there was all kinds of prejudice. I mean, so when I was born, just right before you were born, it was legal to say you can't eat here because you're black. And so that changed in 1964, 65. But it used to be that we had legal differentiations by race. And then those were knocked down, but we still had social. And it used to be that if you were gay, there was something humiliating that had to be hidden.

So if you look at where we were in 1960 or 63 when I was born, and then you look at where we got by 2000, I mean, the progress is fantastic on every front. So that's all I mean when I say we were moving in that direction. And to your point about, wouldn't it be great if there was none of this? We just treated people like people. Okay, yeah, that was the 20th century idea, is let's get past these tribal identifications. And what is so alarming to me now is that on campus, it began on campus, but it's spreading elsewhere. And again, it's not everywhere on campus. It's mostly in the grievance studies departments. They're teaching students the opposite. They're teaching students, don't treat

everyone like a person. People are their identities. And you can tell some of the identities by looking at people, and so you know if they're good or bad. This, I think, is the opposite of progress. Well, it's also the differences between us are really fascinating. The differences between men and women, I think, are some of the more interesting explanations for human behavior. And I'm not meaning that people must be defined by their gender, defined by their sex. But it is interesting when you look at these gigantic groups, like why certain people tend to gravitate towards certain occupations or certain types of behavior or certain hobbies. It is really fascinating.

Yeah, that's right. And if we were playing the truth-seeking game, if all we cared about is trying to understand things, we would do the research and we'd figure out what do people like, you know, and do left-handers versus right-handers have different preferences? Probably not, as far as I know. Do boys and girls have different preferences? Yeah, they're really big. Do men and women have different? Do they enjoy different things?

Yeah. So we could take that and we could say our goal is to create a free society. This is what the word liberal traditionally meant, a society in which people are free to construct a life that they want to live. And so if you're born one race or another, that should not in any way be a limitation. And in the 20th century, we made a lot of progress towards that ideal. Same thing for sex. But you keep saying we did, meaning that you're implying that it ended, that the progress hit a wall. Yeah, I shouldn't imply that because overall, I think the trends are unstoppable. Right.

So I don't want to say that things are reversing. Yeah, I agree. But you feel like there's a slow down or an error, a glitch. Yeah. I think that, so in chapter three of The Coddling, Greg and I look at identity politics. And one thing we really try to do is there's all these loaded terms. And if somebody says social justice warrior, okay, you know a lot about them if they said that, like, they're going to come at it and say, oh, those SJWs. And we don't do any of that. We say there are people on campus who are very focused on identity issues and on injustices based on identity. And that's great, and there's a lot to be concerned about, and they're right to do that. Now, how do they do it? And there's two different ways. You can either do what we call common enemy identity politics, which is where you say, life is a battle between

good groups and evil groups. Let's divide people by race. So it's basically straight versus everyone else, men versus all the other genders, and white versus everybody else. And so you look at the straight white men, they're the problem. All the other groups must unite to fight the straight white men. So that's one of the core ideas of intersectionality. And so what we say in the book is that leads to eternal conflict.

Much better is an identity politics based on common humanity. So we don't say, oh, to hell with identity politics. We say you have to have identity politics until you have perfect justice and equality. You have to have a way for groups to organize, to push back on things, to demand justice, that's fine. But if you do it by first emphasizing common humanity, that's what Martin Luther King did, that's what Pauli Murray did, that's what Nelson Mandela did. This wonderful woman, Pauli Murray, she was a gay, black, possibly trans civil rights leader in beginning of the 40s. She says, when my opponents draw a small circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.

I shall shout for the rights of all mankind. And this is, again, what Martin Luther King did. He's relentlessly appealing to our white brothers and sisters. He's using the language of America, of Christianity. Start by saying what we have in common, and then people's hearts are open. We're within a community. Now we can talk about our difficulties. So it's the rise of common enemy identity politics on campus, in the grievance studies departments especially.

That, I think, is an alarming trend. Another thing that's alarming to me is the redefining of terms like sexism and racism, where sexism against men is impossible, racism against white people is impossible. This redefining as these prejudices only exist if you're coming from a position of power. That's really weird. And it also, it opens up the door to treating people as an other. It also, it opens up the door to treating people as an other. Literally, the people that are the victims of racism are now using racism against other people and feeling justified because of it. And having a bunch of people that will agree with them that this is in fact not racism. And this is pushing back on white privilege and saying all these different weird things that, you know, and they feel really comfortable in saying these open, racist, generalizing things about white people or about white men or about, you know, fill in the blank of whatever group that you're attacking.

And it's really strange. It's really strange to see. But again, it makes sense if you look at the different games. Yes. So if you're on a university and you think you're playing the truth game, and philosophers are great at this. They're always unpacking terms. And so you might try to define racism or any sort of ism. And a common sense view would be an expression of hostility or resentment or limitation on a group based on their identity.

But that's if you're playing the truth-seeking game. If you're playing the politics game or the warfare game, you want to define the terms to give your side maximum advantage. So there's a wonderful social psychologist named Phil Tetlock at Penn at Wharton, and he talks about these different mindsets we get into. And one of them he calls the intuitive prosecutor. So if my goal as a scholar is to prosecute my enemies and maximally convict them, and I am always trying to defend seven different identity groups against the straight white men,

they're the accused, I want to define my terms to make it maximally easy to convict. my terms to make it maximally easy to convict. And so I'm going to say racism and microaggressions, it doesn't matter what the intent was. All that matters is the impact. All that matters is what the person felt. That way, as long as someone's offended, I get to charge you with a crime. And also on racism, you can say, as a lot of kids are learning in high school these days, You can say, as a lot of kids are learning in high school these days, racism is prejudice plus power. So by definition, a black person or a gay person or whatever, cannot be racist or whatever other term because they don't have power, regardless of their social class. This is actually being taught? Yeah.

So the professors, this is coming out of their mouth? Teachers are saying this? So this is taught in a number of high schools. My nephews went to Andover. They learned this. That's an offensive thing. Yes, it's deeply offensive. To be teaching children. It's not just that it's offensive and obviously hypocritical.

It's that it's crippling. Yes. I mean, can you imagine? So look, you've got kids, right? You have two daughters now? Three. Okay, so you have three daughters. Can you imagine giving your daughters a cloak've got kids, right? You have two daughters now? Three. Okay, so you have three daughters. Can you imagine giving your daughters a cloak of invulnerability where you say, you put this on now.

You get to attack others, but no one can touch you. Right. This is going to warp their development. Power corrupts, and even moral or rhetorical power corrupts as well. How is this being taught, though? I mean, how is this being justified? How is this accepted as a part of a curriculum? So because the goal is not truth,

the goal is victory over racism, let's say. And so if that's the case, you're going to focus on educating kids about their white privilege and making, and so that's what a lot of these privilege exercises are. You know, you line kids up by their privilege and your goal is to make the straight white boys feel bad about their privilege and therefore talk less, take up less space. like instead of concentrating on the privilege it only exists if people do preferentially treat certain with a preferential treatment towards certain races if that doesn't exist at all

then white privilege doesn't exist well i'm not sure i'm not sure i'd agree with you on that so we also well so we had a funny episode uh last night and so my wife and i um were out in la we were invited to the golden globes by by a friend and so we're here in la so we we um uh we go to bed in the hotel room and at two in the morning the guy's pounding on the door saying come on let me in it's me it's me and you know i wake up and i go to the door and i and i say wrong room and he can't hear me so i open the door a crack and to show him you know like look i don't know I don't know who you are right

and you know some drunk some drunk guy and I said you know you've got the wrong room and I went back to bed and then at breakfast

this morning my wife says why did you open the door like how could you have done that I said you know we're in a nice hotel

I mean what's you know what's going to happen and she made it clear like a woman would never have done that like she said you as a man

you have the ability to go out in the world and engage with in a certain way that I don't have as a woman. And that's a great example. So there is a kind of male privilege. Sure. It exists even if there's no sexism. Yeah, that's an interesting example. That's a sexism one. But that's also a physical danger one.

Yeah. There is a difference between just the way women have to go out into the world being vulnerable and also being the target of just a male sexual attention. It's a very different thing. It's an aggressive and dangerous thing. Yeah. But I think you could say the same thing about race in this way. Because there's racism, though. Well, okay.

Okay, you're right. If there was absolute zero racism anywhere, but we're never going to get to that. But the thing that we're worried about is the racism. So, like, if you say you have white privilege, well, that only exists if you're being dealt with in a racist manner. So if you're a black person and there is racism that's being directed towards you and it's not being directed towards me, then you can say, well, I have a white privilege. But if there's no racism directed towards anybody, that doesn't exist anymore. So the issue is racism. Yes. But okay. But so look, I think it's helpful to always try to look at it from the other person's point of view and to listen to their arguments. And so, for example, when you and I go into any social encounter, it never occurs to me that something's going to come up and someone's going to call me a kike, let's say, because I'm Jewish. And it just never crosses my mind that someone's going to humiliate me because I'm Jewish.

it never crosses my mind that someone's going to humiliate me because I'm Jewish. But if you're black, even if you're in a very tolerant society, at some point, someone is going to make an assumption. It might not be hostile, it might be. So all I'm saying is you and I don't, there are certain things we don't have to think about. And that, whereas if we were black or other identities or visibly gay or, you know, there would be the risk of spoiling of a social interaction. So I'm totally comfortable saying we should be telling our kids about this. But what follows from it? What follows from it?

Should we therefore be telling kids, okay, so, you know, judge people based on their appearance, be suspicious of people based on their race and gender. That's where I get off the bus. That's where I say now the bus. That's where I say, now we're really hurting kids. We should be turning down the moralism and we're turning it up. Right. But what I'm getting at is pointing at someone and saying, you have white privilege. If they are not racist, you're giving this person, you're putting this person in a category that really only exists in the face of racism, where the real problem is racism. Yes. With the male-female thing is a very different thing.

I agree. Male privilege, I think, is way more slippery because it's biologically based. There's a creepiness to men. Yeah, that's right. There is. As much as a nice guy, as I'm sure you are, and I try very hard to be a nice guy, Jamie's a little slippery. Look at him over there. Just kidding.

Every woman's encountered creeps. Yes. It's inevitable because there's a game being played, this pursuing of sexual pleasure or of sexual encounters. This doesn't exist or shouldn't exist with races. The real problem, in my eyes, is racism. And if we could figure out a way to just complete obviously it's not gonna look people are flawed they're they're going to be until there's some sort of new way that we interface with each other that eliminates lies and deception and

allows each other to completely understand each other's feelings and appreciate them which may happen someday probably technologically driven until that, there's going to be a certain amount of it. But the real enemy is racism. It's not white people just getting lucky. Yeah. Okay. But I would say – Not that we shouldn't acknowledge it.

Yeah, yeah. So you said earlier about how definitions change. Yes. So we are evolving as a society. We're getting less sexist and racist. And so our threshold for what counts as sexist and racist. And so our threshold for what counts as sexist and racist is going down. That's a good thing. That should happen. But I think what we need to call attention to is that if you lower the threshold faster than

the reality changes, then you make progress, but yet people feel worse and worse. And so I think that's part of what's happening on campus. That makes sense. So the loudest protests tend to happen at the most progressive schools. It's places like Middlebury and Yale and Berkeley. And, you know, so I think that we are – if you bring in a diverse student body and we're all trying to diversify. We're all – every school I know of is trying very hard to create a very diverse student body. to diversify. We're all, every school I know of is trying very hard to create a very diverse student body. So if we do that and we bring people in and we give them a common humanity approach, it's going to work great. Diversity, if you handle it well, it can confer many benefits.

But if you handle it wrong, if you try to make people see race and other groups more and you attach moral valences to it and you give them a lot of the stuff that they get in the grievance studies, of course, they're going to be angry. And of course, they're going to feel that people hate them. It's a terrible thing to bring people into a university and to teach them, you know what, this institution is white supremacist, people have implicit bias against you, wherever you go, people are going to hate you. Like, no, this is a really bad thing to do to create an open, trusting, inclusive, diverse environment. Right. The right thing to do would be to emphasize how foolish racism really is and about how

damaging it is, not just to our culture, but to you as an individual, to look at people in that way and not open your heart and your mind to all these different races. And I think one of the worst examples of modern racism that's gone unchecked is what's going on at Harvard with Asian students, where Asian students are, instead of being completely neutral in terms of how they approach all these races, Asian students actually have to try harder to get into Harvard because there's so many of them and they're doing so well. They're being punished for excelling, which is really racist. I mean, it's racist against the people that are doing the bestlling which is really racist it's racist against the people that are doing the best which is

really crazy and they're a minority which is even more crazy and because of their culture because they're so hard working and they're not in general they're not the type to be really loud and protest these things it's gone on

to the point where now they've had to have a class action lawsuit. That's right. That's right. So, you know, my hope, again, I'm a 20th century person. My hope is that as time goes on, we'll get past all this. You have to be a 21st century person. No, no. I think that you have to.

Well, okay. But you know what? There are, okay, wait. Moral cultures evolve and they don't always evolve in a positive way. Right. And so I think the evolution of the late 20th century was incredibly positive. And I think young people are losing touch with some of the hard-won lessons of the past. So I'm not going to say, oh, we have to just accept whatever morality is here.

I still am ultimately a liberal in the sense that what I dream of is a society in which people are free to create lives that they want to live, and they're not forced to do things, they're not shamed. There's a minimum of conflict, and we make room for each other. If we're going to have a diverse society, we've really got to be tolerant and make room for each other. That's my dream. And I think in the last five or 10 years, we've gotten really far from that I mean the you know my first book The Happiness Hypothesis was about ten ancient ideas and you know one is that we're too judgmental

you know judge not lest ye be judged but I think the new version of that if there was a 21st century Jesus he'd say judge a lot more judge all the time judge harshly don't give anyone the benefit of the doubt and don't let anyone judge you like that is not going to be a recipe for a functioning society. So no, I do not accept this aspect of 21st century morality. Well, you're obviously much more entrenched in it than I am.

My hope, and this might be naive, is that what these far left and far, like the really extreme, what it represents is the extreme poles of this shifting thing so that the whole thing is going to move closer to a better place. And you're always going to have really extreme, but you're always going to have white supremacy and you're always going to have extreme social justice people. Well, you're suggesting it's a pendulum. Yes. Some things are pendulums, some are not. are not yeah okay so there are problems of progress um there are some things that are kind of one way so um you know so i'm i'm often pessimistic about certain social trends but

i'm very influenced by steve pinker who i know you've had on the show uh and matt ridley and others who say look the arc of progress is amazingly rapid it's all good and you know nick Nick Kristof just had a column that last year was the best year in human history if you look at overall human welfare. So that's all true. But there are certain things that happen with progress that lead to certain countervailing trends that are not like Pendula. And so, for example, okay, here's one. like Pendula. And so, for example, okay, here's one. Kids, it seems pretty clear that human beings need a certain amount of hardship, stress, and challenge in order to develop basic human abilities. Kids who are neglected and abused are damaged. I mean, if it goes beyond certain limits, and abused are damaged. I mean, if it goes beyond certain limits, you have chronic stress,

you can have brain damage. So as we've gotten rid of a lot of the worst things, that's great. But as we're making life better and better and easier and easier for kids, as we're protecting them from more and more, we're preventing them from basically expanding their abilities. basically expanding their abilities. And so it's possible that as we get wealthier and safer and more humane and more caring, and as we have smaller and smaller families, as we get richer all over the world, so that you have two parents spending all this time with one kid, it's possible that we are interfering with kids' development to the point where we might have an epidemic of anxiety and depression that could happen. Oh, wait a second, it has. So I think that there are certain problems of progress that are not pendula.

They change things, and those changes have some negative repercussions that we're gonna have to actively fix. It's not gonna swing back by itself. What concerns me when you're talking about all these ideas That we're going to have to actively fix. It's not going to swing back by itself. patterns can form and how, you know, this pattern can be ultimately damaging to them, but yet it feels rewarding in the act of doing it and that their own patterns that they're involved in right now might be incredibly problematic for them in the future. But if you bring it up, you're criticizing who they are as a human.

You're disregarding your white privilege. You're doing all these different things that you can't really do. You're doing all these things that could run into these problems with this sort of new paradigm. And how do you mitigate that when you're teaching kids? Like, how do you talk to them

about the way the mind works when it's involving these critical things that are, like, incredibly sensitive to discuss today? Okay, so let's, you might be talking about like issues like race and sex yes race and sex gender okay but let's go back to the beginning let's start with child development okay let's let's let's start with um what should we be doing with kids to make them tougher so that you know as they live in the world, it's safer and safer. Cars are safer.

The death rate for kids has been plummeting for all causes other than suicide, which has gone up. So as kids live in a safer and safer world, they also have the Internet, which is going to expose them to virtual insults forever and ever. So how are we going to raise kids to be maximally effective in this new 21st century world, which is physically very safe, but virtually unsafe? Okay, how are we going to do that? And I think the key idea that we need to put on the table here, and that I think everybody who works with kids needs to keep in mind every day is anti-fragility. I know you've talked about that on the show before. But I'll just, I should but I can just give a very brief explanation of it because it's such an important concept. So anti-fragility, a lot of listeners will know, is a word coined by Nassim Taleb, the guy who wrote The Black Swan, because there are certain systems, and I think he was motivated by the collapse of the banking system.

So he had predicted the collapse because he said the banking system is really convoluted and it's never been tested. A system needs to be tested, challenged, shocked in order to then develop defenses against it. And our system has not been tested. So if anything goes wrong, it's all going down. All right. You reference him quite a few times. Yes, that's right. The concept of anti-fragile.

That's right. It's a key idea in our book. And I find as I talk about this around the country, once you explain this to people who work with kids, like everybody gets it right away. All right. So Taleb says, there's no word for this property. He says, we know that some things are fragile. And so if you have a glass, you know, if you have a wine glass on the table, you knock it over, it breaks. Okay, it doesn't get better in any way. And so, you know, you don't give kids a wine glass. You give them a plastic sippy cup because plastic is resilient. But if a kid knocks over a sippy cup, it doesn't get better in any way. And Taleb wanted to know, what's the word for things that do get better when you knock them over? And the classic example is the immune system. So the immune system is an incomplete system. It's a miracle of evolution that we have this system for making antibodies. But it doesn't know exactly what to be reactive to. That has to be set by childhood experience. And so if you keep your kids in a bubble and you use bacterial wipes and you don't let them be exposed to bacteria, you're crippling the system. The system has to get knocked over. It has to get challenged, threatened. It has to learn how to expand its abilities. And so this is why peanut allergies

are going up. Yeah, that was a really shocking part of your book. That's right. It's stunning how fast this happened. Please explain that to people, the whole peanut allergy thing. Yeah. So peanut allergies used to be really rare. And most of us, you know, older folk, we brought peanut butter sandwiches to school. And when my son Max started preschool in 2008, you know, they went on and on about no nuts, nothing that touched a nut, nothing that looks like a nut, nothing that has the word nut. I mean, it was crazy how defensive they were about nuts. And as we were writing the book, I thought back on that and I said, wait a second. Like, why? You know, we're freaking out about nuts.

And the more we freak out about it, the higher the allergy rate goes. And it turns out there was a study done and published in 2015 where the researchers noticed that the allergy to nuts is only going up in countries that tell pregnant women to avoid nuts. And they thought, well, maybe that's why. And so they did a controlled experiment. They got about 600 women who had given birth recently and whose kids were at higher risk of an allergy because they had eczema or some other immune system sort of issue. So about 300 of them are told, standard advice, your kid's at risk of a peanut allergy. So you should not eat peanuts while you're lactating and keep peanuts away from your kid. And the other half were told,

here is an Israeli snack food. It's a puffed corn with a peanut powder dusting on the outside. Give it to your kids starting at three or four months, whenever they're ready to eat. And they monitored them. They made sure that there weren't, you know, fatal reactions or strong reactions. And then at the age of five, they gave them all a very thorough immunological test. And of the ones who followed the standard advice, 17% had a peanut allergy. They would have to watch out for peanuts for the rest of their lives. That's such a high number. Because these were, because these were kids who were already predisposed. Yeah.

number. Because these were kids who were already predisposed. But the half that were predisposed, but given peanut powder, 3%. Just 3% had a peanut allergy at age five. In other words, we could almost wipe out peanut allergies by giving peanut powder to kids. And just a few months ago in Science, the front page article was on doing that. And so again, good intentions and bad ideas. We're trying to protect our kids. so, again, good intentions and bad ideas. We're trying to protect our kids. So, oh, keep them away from peanuts. But that's exactly the wrong advice because kids are anti-fragile. And so we're doing the same thing.

Most of them. The real issue is the people that have an actual severe allergy. If that's your child. Yes, but that's what this science article was about, was that exposure therapies are being tested and they are the most effective. So even with people with extreme allergies? Yes, you just have to start slow. So you just give them a very small amount. Exactly.

Because I was on a plane once and they informed us that they didn't want us to even eat peanuts on the plane because there was someone on the plane that was so allergic that if you eat peanuts and you chew it and it's in the air, it could adversely affect that person. Yeah, and that could well be true. So I have no objection to that. But the reason we got to that point is because we started banning peanuts long ago. So this is one of these, well, I'm not sure if it's a problem of progress, but as we, no, it's not necessarily, but it's an example of anti-fragility. Okay. So now let's bring this to the playground. All right. So when you and I were

kids, boys and girls have different social interactions, but boys tease each other, right? Insult each other. You throw around insults, right? Yeah. And that's part of developing to be a boy. Now, if it turns into bullying, like a bunch of kids or after one kid day after day, okay, that's terrible. We have to do something about that. I'm not saying bullying is okay.

Okay, that's terrible. We have to do something about that. I'm not saying bullying is okay. But as we've cracked down on bullying, and as we've gotten more and more sensitive about harm in general, we're cracking down on any kind of teasing, cruelty, exclusion. So my kids go to New York City public schools, which are generally pretty good. But on the playground, you know, there's a monitor and the playground monitor, you know, if there's conflict, he comes and checks it out. If a kid is crying, he checks it out. Seems like a good thing to do, but it's like treating kids like they're allergic to peanuts.

Kids have to have thousands and thousands of conflicts. They have to be exposed to insults and exclusion and teasing. And if you can imagine, if you could keep your daughter in a protective tank where nobody would tease her or insult her or hurt her feelings for 18 years. Would you do it? Absolutely not. Yeah. It's important that they do experience some assholes. They just have to know. But on the flip side, there are certain people that are damaged for the rest of their life by bullies.

Like I have a friend, and his brother used to beat him up when when they lived together and it still fucks with him to this day and he's in his 50s yeah like i i think he has a certain level of depression that's directly correlated that's right yeah i mean i can't say about your friend but the research shows the research does show that um bullying can leave permanent scars yeah um so there are a couple things we have to keep our eye on. Kids are anti-fragile, yes, but two things. One is they need challenges that are graded to their level of ability. So if they're overwhelmed and if the suffering goes on day after day, so if kids are if their brain is bathed in cortisol, so cortisol is a normal stress hormone.

You have to experience stress. You have to have cortisol, and then it drops, goes up and down, up and down. But kids who are raised either in an environment where they're bullied or they're abused at home, they don't have a secure attachment relationship, then they get brain damage. Then you're hurting kids if it's chronic. So I'm in no way saying bullying is okay. You've got to keep the line. But again, you have to look at each institution. So each school is not thinking, hmm, how can we carefully draw the line between bullying and valuable sorts of conflict? No, they're thinking, if we do this, will we get sued? And if we're not really careful at bullying, we're going to get sued. And so let's overreact. Let's go this way. Yeah. Yeah. That's unfortunate, really. But how do you decide how much bullying

is acceptable? It's almost like snake venom, like giving them a little bit so they develop a tolerance. Yeah. So we did some research on bullying. We didn't put it in the book because while we suspect that anti-bullying policies that go too far and that ban conflict, while we suspect that those are harmful, we couldn't prove that. So we didn't put this in the book. But the traditional definitions of bullying are actually pretty reasonable. I hope I can remember it exactly. It's like there's a power differential and it's chronic, you know, it on for multiple, multiple days. And originally there was actually a threat of violence.

It had to be at least a threat of violence. I think that was the original definition. And then that was expanded gradually. So that doesn't have to be necessarily a threat of violence, but it has expanded so far that like my kids use the term, if one kid is mean to another, they'll call that bullying. And that's too far. So I think you have to keep your eye on the key feature.

It's too far if a kid is mean? Yeah. Like how so? You can't call it. So like on the playground for my daughter, the girls would form these clubs. And so my daughter was in the kitty cat club. That's what three girls called themselves. And they'd be in a corner and they'd say, oh, you can't join us. You're not in the kitty cat club. That's mean. That's exclusion.

Right. We can't have that. Right. So you'd have to allow everyone in your group because you don't want to be a bully. That's why you're saying it goes too far. I don't know they called that bullying, but her teacher had a conversation with them. Now, I don't think she exactly ordered them never exclude. So, I mean, it'd be okay if you use it as a grounds for discussion. But some schools have even tried to discourage the existence of best friends because if you have best friends, you're excluding others. That's hilarious. It is hilarious. But again, if you fail to understand that kids are anti-fragile and you think, oh my,

there's a rise of anxiety and depression and girls are cutting themselves at such high rates, we've got to relieve them of stress. No, that's not the right way to go about it. And there really is an epidemic of kids that grew up in that era of participation trophies where everyone won. That's right. And there's a lot of parents that don't want to see their children lose. Yeah.

But that's a giant learning opportunity. Exactly. If you think the goal is to cultivate self-esteem directly, you're crippling the kid. Giving your kids self-esteem is not beneficial. In fact, if kids have high self-esteem but it's unstable, then they're actually more likely to be violent. They have more problems. You don't want to build self-esteem. What you want to build is capacities.

You want to give them abilities and skills that they do things that then indirectly give them self-esteem. And compassion, right? I mean, how do you teach that? How do you teach it? Well, there's lots and lots. I mean, it's one of the biggest things that is happening in schools is efforts to teach compassion. I don't know. I've not surveyed the research. I don't know if they work. I don't know. want to teach them directly. And so there's all these efforts to teach compassion. I have no idea if they work. But I would think that doing things together, and this is a point made by Peter Gray, an expert on play who co-founded letgrow.org, a wonderful organization that I hope we can talk about. One way that kids learn compassion is by playing with each other when there's no adult who can step in, where they have to look out for each other to keep the game going.

But when there are adults present who are supervising, then if there's a conflict, the skills that kids need to learn are how do you make your case to get the adult to come in on your side? And this is called moral dependence. So one of the best ways that kids learn compassion, cooperation, tolerance, teamwork, leadership, is free play, unsupervised free play. And that's what kids did from time immemorial, certainly throughout the 20th century, up until the 1990s. So I'll ask you, how old were you? Where'd you grow up, first of all? Well, all over the place, honestly.

I was born in New Jersey, lived there until seven, San Francisco from seven to 11, Florida. Okay, that's the key period, seven to 11, that's the key period. Okay. When you lived in San Francisco, were you allowed outside? Were you allowed to go to a friend's house? Could you and your friends go places? Yeah, I was a latchkey kid. Okay. Yeah, my parents a latchkey kid. Okay.

Yeah, my parents were gone all day. And now they would be arrested if they did that. Yeah. When I was eight years old, I did a magic show on Fisherman's Wharf by myself. Fantastic. Yeah, sort of. Wait, what happened? I dodged a bunch of bullets.

What do you mean? What happened? Well, I almost got molested. Some guy tried to abduct me. Wait, wait. Literally tried to abduct you wait wait literally tried to yeah yeah i was in a library some guy tried to get me to go out to his car with him to check out some books and some uh lady librarian saved me she screamed out joseph you get away from that man he

just got out of jail wow the guy ran off yeah he was super creepy but you know i was eight i didn't understand what was going on i just thought he had some good books. Okay. Okay, good. No, right. So this is a nice example of how we've made progress. So a lot of what I'm saying, we're saying in the book is we have to let kids out. Now, yes, there are dangers out there. And so kids have to learn, you actually can talk to strangers. It's not a problem to talk to strangers, just never, ever go off with them. Never under any circumstances. But really the problem with talking to strangers is when's not a problem to talk to strangers. Just never, ever go off with them. Never under any circumstances. Well, you know, but really the problem with talking to strangers is when you're eight, you don't understand manipulation. You understand, you think of adults as being someone who's going to, you can count on.

Okay. So, so back then we were negligent in that we just, we sent our kids out and we didn't think about the dangers. Now, the dangers are actually extremely low. At least the danger of abduction. The number of kids who are abducted in America each year is on the order of 100. Now, many more are abducted by the non-custodial parent. Right. But what you're talking about is a stranger. Now, there are creeps out there.

There are guys who masturbate. I mean, there's all kinds of creeps out there. But abductions is extraordinarily rare. So, yes, we have to deal with it. We have to teach kids. But what happened was there was a crime wave. When you and I were growing up, there was actually a lot of crime in this country. In the 70s and 80s, there was a lot of crime.

And then the crime wave begins to end rapidly in the 1990s. And just as it's ending, we changed our norms to say, if a kid is outside and there's no adult watching him, that kid is likely to be abducted. And therefore, the parents are responsible. The parents can be arrested or at least child protective services should pay them a visit. So just as the crime rate was ending and rates of all kinds of crazy violence were plummeting, we locked our kids up and we said, you're not going to be able to have the kind of experience that you most need in order to become an independent functioning adult. Yeah. And so we don't know why depression, anxiety and suicide are skyrocketing for teenagers, especially teenage girls.

But the combination of overprotection and then social media seems to be the main part of the example. So I totally sympathize with the fact that, yeah, you know, there are risks out there. But the risk of overprotection is it kills a lot more kids. There was a story that I read about, I want to say the kids were 8 and 10, and they were walking home in New York City. And the police officer stopped them and talked to them and then eventually interviewed their parents and said, why are your children walking home? He's like, because I taught them how to walk home. I showed them how to walk home. I showed him how to get home. This is a valuable thing to give them the independence to leave school together. They look out for each other, and then they go home together. And the cops were

making it like these people were negligent and criminal. And they were saying, no, I'm trying to prepare my child for the world. So it's sort of a debate about the philosophy of raising human beings and exposing them to a certain amount of independence and a certain amount of personal sovereignty. That's right. And so this is, I think, the most important lesson that Greg and I hope will come from our book is that if you see the world as dangerous and threatening and you raise your kids accordingly, you're going to raise emotionally stunted kids who are at much higher risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide. So stop doing that. We got to stop doing that. Unfortunately, it's hard to stop doing that because if we let our kids outside, we can be arrested. Now that happens very rarely, but it does happen. Or more concerning, your kids can be harmed. That's extremely rare. But it can happen. And to the people that it does happen to,

the idea that it's extremely rare is not comforting. Well, that's right. So we think about probabilities in very ineffective ways. Actually, do we have those graphs? I sent in some graphs of depression, anxiety rates. So if we think that kids are at risk of harm from letting them out, but we don't see that they're at risk of harm from keeping them in, then we're going to make the wrong decision. Right. So there's a silent, secret, sort of invisible harm of coddling them. Exactly. And then there's the small percentage of possible harm that you could get if you go out into the world. Right. So, okay, so you're raising your kids here. What's your policy on letting them out? Man, it's slippery. How old is your oldest?

Well, I have a grown one who's 22, and then I have a 10 and an 8. Okay. And it's hard, man, because I don't even like when they go over on sleepovers over a friend's house. Why not? Because it's scary. Whose problem is that? It's everybody's problem. Well, I mean, the parents, I mean, we're pretty selective about the parents,

but there's a lot of parents that don't pay attention to their kids at all, meaning they just tune out and they get on the phone. The kids are sticking forks into the fucking outlets. And, you know, there's a lot of weirdness when it comes to the styles that people have in raising their children. What is this graph you just pulled up? Yeah, so, you know, so. Depressive episodes. that people have in raising their children. What is this graph you just pulled up? Depressive episodes. Yeah.

So I guess I'll just narrate it for people who are listening and not watching the video. So you said before it's like a virus came out of nowhere. And that is sort of what it's been like. So what's happening in America, and I know it's happening the same in Britain and Canada. I haven't looked at other places yet. I haven't dug into those stats. What's happening is that rates of depression and anxiety were fairly stable from the, you know, 90s through the early 2000s. And what you see here, and this is a graph that's in our book, is that the percentage of kids age 12 to 17 in America who met the criteria for having a major depressive episode, that is, they're given a symptom checklist with nine symptoms. And if you say yes to five of them, you know, feeling hopeless and couldn't get out of bed. If you say yes to five or more, you're considered to have had a major depressive episode.

And what you see is that the rate for boys is around 5%. And then around 2011, it starts going up. And now it's around 7%, which is actually a somewhat substantial increase. But as you can see in the graph, the line for girls starts off higher because girls have more mood disorders, more anxiety and depression. Boys have more antisocial behavior, alcoholism, crime and violence. But girls turn, it's called an internalizing disorder. Girls basically make themselves miserable. Boys make other people miserable. The girls' rate is higher, but it was stable from 2000, or at least in that graph, from 2005 through 2010. And then right around 2011, 2012, it starts going up,

and it goes way up to the point where it goes up from about 12% to now about 20% of American teenage girls have had a major depressive episode in the last year, one in five. So this is huge. Okay, next slide. Now let's look just at college students. So this is more selective. These are kids who've made it into college. And what we see is that in 2010 and 2012, when college students were all millennials, the rates were pretty low. This is do you have a psychological disorder? And they didn't specify.

Or they said such as depression. specify, or they said, such as depression. And so we see about 2% to 3% of the boys, college men, and about 5% to 6% of college women say yes to that question. That's when it was millennials. But beginning in 2013, Gen Z begins arriving. That's kids born in 1995. Gen Z begins arriving. And so by 2016, colleges are almost all Gen Z. And the rates shoot up, way up. Yeah, we're looking at these charts right now. And folks who are just listening, it's like a jump ramp for a BMX racer. I mean, it really is crazy for women. It came out of nowhere.

And it hits, at 2012, it goes on a very sharp upward angle. Right. It goes from less than 6% to almost 15% in the space of four years. That's crazy. It's crazy. Oh, you can't say that. That's a microaggression. Can't say crazy?

Can't say crazy. What can I say? Fucking nuts? Can I say that? No, because some people might have a nut allergy. Ah! Oh, boy. Ludicrous?

But yeah, it's... Preposterous? How about just frightening? Outrageous? It's really frightening. It's really frightening. Yeah. And sorous. Preposterous. How about just frightening? Outrageous. It's really frightening. It's really frightening. And so this has huge ramifications. Now, let me just make clear.

I think we have another slide there. Can you bring up the next one? Okay. So some people say, oh, come on. You guys are catastrophizing. The increase isn't real. It's just that, you know that this generation, they're really comfortable talking about mental illness. And so the fact that they say they're depressed

just means they're comfortable. It doesn't mean that there's an epidemic. I've heard this argument that it's just an argument of recognition rather than of- Perfectly reasonable. That's right. Diagnostic criteria change. Perfectly reasonable argument. Is it true? Well, let's look at behavior. So what this graph shows is the number of boys out of 100,000 who were admitted to a hospital every year because they deliberately harmed themselves to the point where they had to be hospitalized. And what you see here is that there's no change over time. So boys, these graphs from 2001 to 2015, the lines are flat for all the different age groups. And just notice that the highest rates are around 280 out of 100,000 per year. That's the situation for boys. Next graph. Bang. The situation

for girls is really, really different. So the averages are higher. So self-harm has always been more of a girl thing than a boy thing. Except for suicide. Exactly. We'll get to that. That's right. That's next. So if we look at self-harm, what you see here is that the rates were fairly stable up until 2009. And then, bang, just as in the last – same thing. The rates for girls go shooting up. So the rate for 15- to 19-year-old girls is up 62% since 2009. Now, notice the rate for the millennials, that is the rate for the oldest girls age 20 to 24, that's only up 17 percent. So whatever happened, it's not affecting the

millennials. It's affecting Gen Z. I think, wait, is there one, hit the advance key because I think there's one number missing there. Ah, okay. I'll just, no, go forward. Okay. The number, oh, there it is. There it is. The rate for the youngest girls, check that out. Now, the youngest girls, these are 10 to 14-year-old girls. These are preteens, okay? They didn't used to cut themselves. They used to have very low rates. But bang, beginning in 2010, it shoots up.

It's up 189%. It has nearly tripled in the last five or six years. What's the cause? We don't know for sure. But the reason why, so because of the huge sex difference, the leading candidate and the timing, look at that timing, is social media.

So if you look at what happened in this country and all around the world, Facebook opens up to the world in 2006. You don't have to be a college student, but very few teenagers have a Facebook account in 2006. 2007, the iPhone comes out, but it's very expensive and very few teenagers have one. By 2010, 2011, around half of American teenagers have an iPhone or Samsung. They have a smartphone and they have access to social media in middle school. Because even though for Facebook and Instagram, I think the minimum age is and was 13.

You know, I mean, my son is 12. A lot of his friends have Instagram. You just lie. So middle school kids are now getting on social media. By 2010, 2011, you've got a lot of them. And that's what I think is the main cause of this. Because social media does not really affect boys very much. But man, does it affect girls.

Why is that? So if you look at, so a couple reasons. First, look at the nature of aggression within the sexes. Boys bullying is physical. Okay. Boys are physically dominating and then the risk is that they're going to get punched. Okay. So you give everybody an iPhone, what do they do with it? Games and porn. They don't use it to hurt each other. Boys, you're saying? Boys, that's right. It doesn't affect their bullying. But girls' aggression, girls are actually as aggressive as boys. There's research from the 80s and 90s on this. If you include relational aggression, girls don't bully each other by threatening to punch each other in the face.

Girls bully each other by damaging the other girl's social relationships, spreading rumors, spreading lies, spreading a doctored photograph, saying bad things, excluding them. It's relational aggression. And so it's always been really hard to be a middle school student. It's always been harder to be a middle school girl than a middle school boy, okay? So beginning around 2010, 2011, we throw in this brand new thing into the mix. Okay, girls, here's this beautiful thing in your hand. And here's all these programs where you can damage anyone's social relationships any time of the day or night with deniability from an anonymous account. Go at it, girls. And so the nature of girls bullying is hypercharged by social media and smartphones.

That's one mechanism. The other two mechanisms are the social comparison, because it's always been hard to be a teen girl emerging with beauty standards and impossible beauty standards. And when we were kids, you had impossible beauty standards that these models were all doctored up and then Photoshop. Okay, so you've got these impossible beauty standards out there. But beginning with social media, especially in recent years, your own friends can put on a filter on Instagram to make their lips bigger, their skin cleaner, their eyes bigger. So your own friends are more beautiful than they are in real life. You feel uglier. So that's the social comparison of beauty. And then probably the biggest single one is the fear of missing out, the fear of being left out.

So all kids are subject to this. Everyone's concerned about whether they're included or whether they're excluded. But girls are much more sensitive. And so suddenly when everybody is tracking each other's who was invited, who's there, and especially any program in which a girl puts something out and then waits to see what other people say about it. That is what's really damaging, I think. Again, let me stress, we don't know for sure. There are some experiments on this, but it's mostly correlational stuff we're talking about here, correlational data. But the overall experience of being a girl who was born in 1995 or later

and got this stuff in middle school is different from being a girl born in 1990, let's say, where you didn't get this stuff till college. Are you concerned that this is a trend that as technology becomes more and more invasive, and with these new technologies as they emerge, that this is going to be worse? Yes. But it doesn't have to be. So I think in the last two years, we're really waking up to this. The founders of this technology, it's really interesting. So first of all, it's important to note, as many people have read, a lot of the creators of this technology do not let their kids have it. So they know that these things were made to be addictive. They're made to grab eyeballs and not let go.

So that's one thing. We should keep that in mind, that the makers of this are wary of it. Second, they've gotten more and more addictive as they've gotten better and better, as they've evolved. So they're getting more and more, and Fortnite is an example of an extremely addictive game. So if you've ever been to a casino and you've seen people sitting at those machines like zombies, just, you know, hour after hour pulling that crank, because there were psychologists working out the variable reinforcement schedule for the gambling companies. Psychologists, they're helping companies manipulate users. And that's happening to our kids, too. They're manipulated to stay on

the device. So once we're beginning to realize this, the nature of these technologies, the fact that what is good for adults may be terrible for 12-year-olds, 10-year-olds. And once we realize that these things are so attractive that they crowd out all the other healthy activities like playing outside, playing with groups of friends. Once we realize that, I think and I hope we'll get some reasonable norms. And what I'd like to propose, this is fantastic to be able to talk to so many people, what I'd like to propose is if you have kids, especially if you have kids under about 16, please do what you can to talk with other parents, and especially with the principal of any schools you know, and say, we need some sensible norms because we can't solve this problem by ourselves. So I want to keep my kids off social media. But my son says, well, most of my friends have Instagram accounts. Now, if it was every

friend and he was the only one who was excluded, it would be really hard for me to stick to my guns. I would do it, but it'd be really hard. Whereas if it was only a few of his friends, and most of them weren't, it would be so easy. And I hear this from parents over and over. I don't want my kid on social media, but I don't want her to be left out. And so if the principal would just say, parents, please, this is getting out of hand. This is harming kids. Look at the data. Look at the suicide rates. Look at the self-harm rates. We've got to do something. What do you do? A couple of things. I think it's a couple of pretty simple norms. One, all devices out of the bedroom by a set time, at least half an hour before bed. There is no reason why kids should have an iPhone or a computer or a screen in their bedroom because so many kids are attracted to it. They'll check their

status overnight and it interrupts their sleep. We can't be having teenagers who have interrupted sleep. There's just no benefit from that. I gave my daughter a Fitbit, my 10-year-old, to monitor all sorts of different things. She was interested in it, so we got her one for Christmas. And she slept five and a half hours the first

night she had it on, because we could check. We're like, what are you doing? She's checking the Fitbit. What's going on here? I'm like, this is not good like you can't wear this now and she's like trying to make all these arguments to keep it i'm like listen she goes it's not distracting me i go if it's not distracting you then you shouldn't care if you don't have it on right because then it's not going to mean anything yeah and then there's like this like a shit like she got checkmated yeah that's right no because, because these things are so attractive. So addictive. I had one of those goddamn watches, those Apple watches.

I had it on for one day. And while I was doing the podcast, it kept vibrating. I'm like, oh my God, I'm getting text messages on my wrist. My wrist. So, right. And your brain is all developed. Yeah. You're an adult.

Well, okay. Sketchy. Okay. But imagine if you're a 10 or 11 year old kid. Oh, I see it. And you put something out there and you want to know, did Bill like it yet? Why did Mary like Bill's but not mine? So that's rule number one.

You've got to get devices out of the bedroom. Give them an old-fashioned alarm clock. Let them wake up with an alarm clock. That's one. Two, no social media until high school. There is no reason why kids in middle school or elementary school should have Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, any of those. I agree. They can text each other.

When we were kids, you'd call each other on the phone. That's fine. They can text each other. But there should be no social media until high school because it's a social dilemma that we can't solve alone. We can only solve it if there's an agreement among parents and guidance from the principal. Please, parents, don't give your kid an Instagram account until they're in high school. My only concern is that they're not going to learn how to mitigate it or how to navigate it, rather, if we say nothing until high school. And then when they get into high school, then they're confronted with it.

I would like them to have some skills or at least some understanding of what's going on. Now, wait a second. So I'm not saying don't let them have access to these machines. I'm not saying don't let them play out. No, I know exactly what you're saying. You're saying don't allow them to have social media. And how about this? The bullying that takes place in middle school is primitive and destructive. And the bullying that takes place in late high school is a lot less and is not the same way. Why do you think that is?

Well, middle school kids are just coming into this. There's some research. So Jean Twenge has a book called iGen. And she has some data in there that suggests that when you get social media in college, it doesn't seem to harm you. But when you got it in your preteen years, it does. And she thinks that it's in part the nature of the bullying as such. So, you know, sure, we want them to know how to deal with this. But, you know, they can learn it pretty quickly when they're 15. It's not like they need a running start from 11 to 15. So I just see no good whatsoever coming from social media in middle school, and I see a lot of harm.

If you want your – look, I go around the country. I talk about this. Almost the rule now is when someone says, oh, well, my daughter's in high school, and, you know, she's had it. And I say, how is she doing? Does she have anxiety problems? The answer is almost always yes. And if it's not her, then her friends are all crippled by or suffering from anxiety. So I think you have to weigh costs and benefits. A few years ago, we didn't know for sure about the costs. Now we do. Yeah, no, you're making total sense. I'm purely playing devil's advocate, and I'm on the same page with you. My kids't give, my kids don't have phones and my 10 year old, it's shocking how many girls in her class have

phones and Facebook accounts and Instagram accounts. And they, I'll say it right now, her friends are at higher risk than she is of having an anxiety disorder, of being hospitalized because they're going to cut themselves and ultimately of suicide. Yeah. It's so common. And it's most of the kids in school now. And when they get older than 10, the number increases. Like parents hold out for as long as they can, but as they get older,

and the kids want phones, man. Everybody wants a phone. That's right. So let me put in a plug. So I gave my son, so I'm saying two contradictory things. One is I'm saying we gotta let our kids out. Gotta start letting them out at least by age eight,

at least to go with their friends to playground stores. We've got to start doing this. And at the same time, I'm saying that the technology has some negative effects. Okay. If you're going to send your kid out, I totally get what you were saying about the panic. Like the first time that we let our son out in the park and then he didn't come home right when he said like – and it was real panic. Yeah. So two things.

One is we have to get used to that because he always does come home. But secondly, I didn't realize this when I gave him an iPhone, my old iPhone. There's a great little product, I don't know if Verizon, no, they don't make it. It's I think LG makes it, but it's a Gizmo or a Gizmo gadget.

And so it's a simple, it's a watch. It's a big clunky thing, but my daughter loves wearing it because it's kind of like a James Bond, Dick Tracy thing. It's a watch, you press a big clunky thing. But my daughter loves wearing it because it's kind of like a James Bond, Dick Tracy thing. It's a watch. You press a button. You turn it on. You can call three phone numbers.

That's it. Three phone numbers. So she can call. And so now I can send her out to get bagels on Sunday morning. She walks about six blocks in New York City. It's incredibly safe. How old is she? She is nine.

Whoa. Yeah. And she is a much more independent, confident girl because of it. And she is proud of this fact that she is a free range kid. She can walk around our neighborhood. I mean, we live in Greenwich Village. It's incredibly safe. So she can go get bagels. And she has no sense of direction. So a couple of times when she's been out doing an errand, she gets lost. She just presses a button. Daddy, I don't know where I am. And she's calm. Right. And we talk it through. And I can track her. That's the reassuring thing. Wow. I can see on a screen roughly where she is. So I can say, you know, what do you see?

And I say, oh, come back this way. And she always knows. If she gets in trouble, just walk home and start again. Yeah. Whew. What are you thinking, Joe? What's that facial expression for? Nothing.

It's just children wandering around on their own. Yeah. As always happened. And as they have to do at some point. I know. But listen, look at how you're even reacting to this. What? You're beaming up and you're adding emotion to your voice and you're smiling.

Everything's going to be fine. You're doing this and sort of you're not just reassuring, you're selling it. You're right. I am selling it. Yeah. Because we as a society bought into a set of beliefs that are based on falsehoods. The risk to our kids is minuscule. Someone calculated at present rates of abduction by strangers.

If you put your kid in a car and you go into a store and you leave the windows open, your kid's sitting there in the parking lot, you'd have to stay in that store for 700,000 years before your kid is likely to be abducted. Well, doesn't that depend on what neighborhood you live in? I suppose so. Yeah. But still, the point is that there's hardly any actual abduction. And so actually, this brings up a really important point I'd like to say. One of the sticking points here is that we're afraid to let our kids out because bad things

can happen to us as well as to the kids. Sure. I would hope that would be the least of your concerns. I hope your number one concern would be your children's safety. But you getting in trouble I would hope would be the least of your concerns. Not the least of them because I am selling something. I am selling the idea that the gigantic rise in mental illness of teenagers is caused in part because we've overprotected them. We have denied them the experiences of independence they need to develop their basic social sense.

And so I am selling an idea that we've totally botched this and we need to undo it. And a big piece of that is we need to be removed from the fear of legal prosecution. And so Utah, the state of Utah, passed a year and a half ago, year ago, yeah, they passed the first free-range kids bill, which says, it puts into state law, it says, I forget the exact terms, but the gist of it is, a parent cannot be considered to be negligent just by having the kids be unsupervised. So if you send your kids out to the park, you know, you have to use judgment. Obviously, if there's a pattern of neglect, that's a totally different story. But the mere effect, as you just said, the story about, well, I'm teaching my kids to go outside. I know that

they're outside. I told them to go outside. You can't be arrested for that. And until we have legal protections, it's going to be very hard for anyone to do it because the risk is you could be drawn into months and months of supervision. Your kids can actually be taken away from you if you give them independence in some parts of the country. It's interesting that Utah would be so progressive about that. Yeah, I don't know the history behind it. It's such a safe place. It's one of the reasons why, I think. That could be. That could be. So a big part of this is we don't trust each other anymore. Right. You know, if you don't trust your neighbors, then you're not going to let them out. You're not going to let your kids out.

and meditation, those three factors being enormous aids in acquiring a certain amount of happiness. I found it very refreshing that you also added in Prozac, you added in SSRIs, because there's a lot of people that seem to take this approach with antidepressants in particular, that they're overprescribed, which I think they probably are, and that they do more harm than good, which is debatable. But the fact that they do do good, I have had two close friends that were in really bad places, and they got on an SSRI, and it cleaned them up. And they eventually weaned themselves off of it and now very productive and very happy. But they were in a place in their life where they, like my friend Ari put it best, he's like, my brain was broken. And he goes, I needed to fix it. And I fixed it. And then once it was fixed, I realized it was fixed.

And then I weaned myself off. That's right. Yeah. So in chapter two of the Happiness Hypothesis, so the book is based on 10 ancient ideas. And one of the ancient ideas is the world is what we deem it. With our perceptions, we make the world. The world is not an objective thing. We don't react to the world as an objective fact. We react to it through filters. an objective thing. We don't react to the world as an objective fact. We react to it through filters. And one of the major personality traits is sort of positivity, negativity, or overall happiness. Some people look at the world, they see threats. Other people look at the world, they see opportunities. And if you take a bunch of kids, five, six-year-old kids, and you put some weird toy in front of it that makes noise, some of the kids are going to go towards it and say, oh, what's that? Some are going to move away, like, oh, this could be threatening. And from that behavior,

you can predict, not with a lot of accuracy, but you can do better than chance, who's going to go to the high school prom, who is going to be successful in any sort of social endeavors, because some people's brains are set to fear and avoidance. When your brain is set to see more threats, you have a bias towards interpreting things negatively. And if the world is incredibly dangerous, well, that might be adaptive. But if the world's incredibly physically safe, as ours is, you're losing a lot of opportunities.

You're going to be less successful. And so the point of that chapter was there are ways you can change your filter. Even though this is highly heritable, identical twins reared apart tend to be pretty similar on these traits. But you can change your filters. And so that chapter two of the happiness hypothesis shows the three main ways of changing your filter. So it was meditation, cognitive therapy, and SSRIs. And all three work.

There's a lot of evidence for all three. Meditation has only good effects. It's wonderful, but it's hard. That is, I've assigned it to my classes, and most undergraduates, if they have to do it for a few weeks, most of them stop. A few continue and get benefits. Cognitive therapy is easier. When I've assigned students to do it, most have success. I have a real hard time with that phrase, it's hard, that meditation's hard. I really do.

I don't think it's hard. You find it easy to sit for 20 minutes? It's not easy, but it's not hard. Coal mining's hard. You know what I mean? Doing something you hate is hard. This is just complicated. I don't think it's hard. You know what I mean? Doing something you hate is hard. This is just complicated. I don't think it's hard. You're right. Let me use a different word. Meditation is such that the noncompliance rate ends up being quite high. Well, there's a massive... People have a problem with a few things. One, discipline. Two, avoiding

discomfort. This is one of the reasons why people don't like exercise. And it's also really just starting exercise because the actual exercise itself is oftentimes kind of pleasurable. Once you develop a habit, it's a lot easier. This is, I think, what you have with meditation. It's this procrastination. Your brain tries to find ways to avoid whatever difficult, especially in some strange way,

if it's been shown to be beneficial. Things that have been shown to be beneficial, your brain wants to avoid. I do not know why that is. But things you get, I have a theory that, especially when you're growing up, that you associate work with schoolwork, jobs. so anytime you have these thoughts in your head

you're like oh it's that thing it's one of those things that i don't want to do i want to go play video games want to play fortnight why do i have to do the work but the doing the work really it's just a matter of how you interface with it how you how you view it and we're's many, many years of conditioning that this is mundane, dreary, boring horseshit when you could be out playing. You could be out doing fun stuff. That's right. There's a great little scene in The Simpsons where Bart is on a video game and

he's shooting down state capitals. And he's shooting, you know, like something appears like, oh, there's Helena, there's Springfield. And then at a certain point he says, wait, I'm learning. And he throws it down like, to hell with that. Yes, exactly. So that's your thesis.

It really is what it is. I mean, it's kind of amazing that we have done such a shitty job teaching kids that we make school out to be this dreary thing that they have like a deep avoidance of. Well, that's right. And this is Peter Gray's point. Peter Gray, this wonderful developmental psychologist at Boston College who thinks that schools are not designed with kids' learning in mind. Kids learn best from interacting with the world, from experience. We get experience from feedback. And so we make learning painful. And so, you know,

an example would be, you know, like, how do you learn to climb a tree? You know, when we were kids, you'd climb a tree. And, you know, do you know that feeling when you go out on a branch and a certain point, you just get the sense that it's about to crack and you pull back. Okay. Now imagine that you had a hundred kids who learned how to climb trees by climbing trees. You take another hundred kids, you give them tree climbing class, but you never let them climb a tree. Okay. But you bring in the world's best experts on tree climbing, and they teach these kids how to climb trees. And then you put them all out and you give them trees to climb. In general, I would put my money on the kids who actually learned from experience. Oh, for sure.

And so the general principle, again, is that... Well, actually, here, I'll bring up one other idea from the happiness hypothesis. I find it really helpful to think of the mind as being divided into parts like a rider on an elephant. And the rider is our conscious reasoning. It's the little guy up on top who has language, and it's what we're aware of. But the elephant is the other 99% of our minds, and that's almost all automatic processes. It's intuitions, it's emotions, it's habits, phobias, all sorts of things. And so child development can't be just training the rider for 18 years. Wisdom, knowledge, skill, competence, those have to involve

training the elephant. And when the two work together, then you get the best results. And I think what we've done in America especially is we've said, we want our kids to be really good in math. So we're going to teach them math earlier. Let's give them math in kindergarten. But there's no evidence that that helps. There's no evidence that teaching academic skills earlier will make them advance to a higher level at the end. What they most need when they're young is to play. And we've taken that away from them.

We've given them too many after-school lessons and too much supervision of their play. Yeah, the saddest thing in the world is when my kids come home and they're really frustrated because they have homework. Ten-year-olds that have hours of homework. You're at school all day. That's right. And I don't know how to address that. I mean, do you bring it to the teachers and say, hey, you guys are fucking up,

even though I've never taught anyone ever in class? I'm telling you, you're doing it wrong. Yeah. So, you know, it's a case where you certainly need the research. And the research, we cover some of the research in chapters 8 and 9 of The Coddling of the American Mind. And as far as we can tell, the research seems to show that there are essentially no benefits to doing homework in kindergarten and first grade. Maybe a little bit of like, you know, they learn to organize

their time, but barely any. By fifth or sixth grade, there's more evidence that homework is beneficial. But in between there, it really isn't clear. What's really clear is that play, free play, is beneficial. So it's hard for you as just one parent to say, hey, don't do this. But I think as part of a larger program to say, our kids are being messed up. Look at these graphs. Look at the rates of anxiety and depression. And when I talk, I talk about the book all around. You talk now, people now come up to me and they'll say, like, I'm a guitar teacher. I've been teaching guitar for 20 years. And suddenly, like just in the last few years, I give them negative feedback and they crack. So everyone's beginning to notice that our kids are frail and nobody wants this.

And so I think we're going to find people more open to changing what we're doing. Boy, I hope so. open to changing what we're doing. Boy, I hope so. It's also, it's got to be so incredibly difficult to cater a lesson where you have, you know, 30 or 40 kids in the classroom with varying abilities and varying interests. And you're sort of catering a lesson where you're trying to excite them about astronomy or whatever it is you're teaching and get it through into their heads and make it seem fun. Yeah. Yeah. And still teach them.

Yeah. Yeah. And then still set them up to have a certain amount of discipline. If you're going to enter into the workforce, you're going to have to do things you don't necessarily want to do while you're doing them. That's right. don't necessarily want to do while you're doing them. That's right. And now you add to that the decline of authority of teachers and principals,

and you add to that the sense of empowerment that parents have to fine-tune or control and be involved. There are stories now about parents who come to the lunchroom because they want to see their kid at lunch. Principals and teachers, where once the teacher gives a bad grade, the parents would assume that it was deserved. I think there's more of a tendency in recent, in the last decade or two, of parents who are very competitive or concerned about getting their kid into college to complain. So if you have, I don't know how general these trends are, I don't want to overestimate this. But if you have a general decline of authority of teachers and principals, now they have less leeway to give negative experiences. So if someone fails to turn in a paper because they were responsible and you say, sorry, F. Yeah.

That could be a good learning experience. Right. It could be, but it would be devastating for their GPA. That's right. That's probably a good thing, though. It's for them to understand the consequences, right? Exactly. What about teaching children how to think?

And why is that not a massive part of the curriculum? Because I think that's something that I really had to learn on my own. And I think it's one of the most valuable things that I ever learned. But as I got older, I always thought, why didn't I learn this in school? Okay, a couple of reasons. So when in the 1980s, there was a huge emphasis on teaching critical thinking. And we don't hear about that anymore because nobody found a way to do it. So it's not that easy.

One of the things I cover in The Righteous Mind is we're all designed for confirmation bias. We're all really good at confirming what we already believe. And so it's very hard to train anyone to disconfirm their own hypotheses. What we really need to think better is the right system, the right community. We actually need critics. So actually, here, I brought you a copy of a little book that I co-produced. So this is John Stuart Mill wrote one of the most important books in the Western tradition, On Liberty. Chapter two of On Liberty is the best set of arguments ever made for free speech, for why it is that we need to let people talk and challenge and criticize. Even if we think they're wrong, we get smarter from having to rebut them. Whereas if we shut them down, if we have blasphemy laws, we get dumber because we never actually face tests of

what we believe. So this set of arguments in chapter two of On Liberty is timeless. I mean, we need like Mill anticipated every argument that we hear now about why we need to shut that person down and not let that person talk. And so I thought, wow, we need to get this book back out because college students don't read this anymore. And it's a little bit difficult, the text. So I happened to be friends with Richard Reeves, who's a Mill scholar. He's at Brookings Institution.

And he said, Jonathan, I love what you're doing at Heterodox Academy. If I can be of help, let me know. So I said, well, actually, Richard, would you co-edit this edition of Mill's second chapter? And he said, yes, I'd love to. So he made the selections. We worked together to reduce it. It's only 7,000 words, so it's easy to read. And then this wonderful artist, Dave Cicerelli, stopped by my office. He said, I love what you're doing at Heterodox Academy. If I can be of help, let me know. And I said, well, actually, could

you read this text, find Mill's metaphors, because Mill uses a lot of wonderful metaphors, and illustrate them. And so if you just pass it over, which is that camera? Okay. So what Dave did was he took Mill's metaphors. And so we've got these amazing graphic cartoon type images of the dynamics of what happens when we shame people. Because Mill was not concerned about government censorship. That wasn't a big deal in London in 1859. It was social censorship, just as it is today. So Cicerelli made these beautiful illustrations of Mill's point.

And so we think that this book, if this book was assigned in every high school for seniors or every incoming freshman class, we think that people would think a lot better. So you want to know how to do critical thinking? Read this book and then seek out your opponents. Seek out your critics. Seek out the people who can do for you what you can't do for yourself, which is challenge your ideas. your ideas are you concerned with this uh the trend that we're seeing now with social media of i mean i get removing blatant racism and sexism and in certain really awful types of behavior from certain social media sites but at a certain point in time it becomes an ideological battle and people that lean one way or another want that other side to be silenced

i'm seeing this way more from the left which is very disturbing to me because growing up my family was very liberal you know and i said my formative years in san francisco i was always around hippies and i always felt like the people that were on the left were the open-minded educated ones who were concerned with the future of discourse and humans developing the ability to really flesh out ideas and work their way through them, which only happens through real free speech. Giving people the ability to express themselves and then deciding whether or not you agree with that and why you disagree or agree and then then speaking your mind, and then everybody works it out together.

This is not necessarily the trend that we're seeing today. No, that's right. That's right. So first, let me just say, you can get this book for free. At least you can download the PDF. If you go to heterodoxacademy.org slash mill, or you can get a $3 Kindle. If you go to Amazon, look this up. It's $3 for the Kindle, or you can buy the $3 Kindle. If you go to Amazon, look this up. It's $3 for the Kindle, or you can buy the art book there too. Awesome. That's so cool that you're doing that and allowing

people to download it for free too. We want to get the word out. We think these are the ideas that are needed. So on to your question. So in part, there's an empirical question here, which I don't know the answer to. In Europe, they ban, in most of them, they ban hate speech or Holocaust denial. There are certain things that are illegal. It's a crime. And in America, we don't. Now, it's an empirical question, meaning it's open to actual investigation.

Does banning it push it underground and let the people feel that they are victims of being silenced, things that come back stronger, or is sunlight the best disinfectant? I don't know the answer to that. I think in general, I think the American system has worked better, but I don't know. There are scholars who could address that. As for what is happening to the left, is the left more intolerant? I agree with you that you would think the left would be more open. And in my research on left-right, the left is generally higher in openness to experience. The idea of dissent, dissent is patriotic. These are leftist ideas, not rightist ideas. So the left should be more open. Problem is, any group that loses variety, that loses

diversity, any group in which everybody thinks the same is at risk of turning it into an ideology, of turning it into a religion. And then you lose the ability to think straight. And now if somebody... So when I was in college at Yale, everybody sort of leaned left, but there were conservatives, there were some conservative professors. I'd been exposed to some conservative ideas. But now if you're in a college that has essentially no conservatives that will put out ideas, and you encounter one, now it's much more painful. It's much more shocking. Again, it's like you have a peanut allergy to ideas that are not your groups. And we want... So it's terrible if we're putting young people in systems that are

basically giving them ideological peanut allergies. That's a great way to look at it. I definitely agree with that in terms of young people, but I'm concerned with grown adults as well. I think that the way, in my personal opinion, the way to deal with bad speech is better speech. The way to deal with shitty ideas is to make those ideas look shitty through debate it's not to silence the person that's talking this is one of the more confusing things about people that are pulling alarms on speakers and and and shouting

them down while they're talking you have an opportunity when that person's in front of you to listen to their idea and there should be an opportunity to to debate that idea to to form your own opinion and have a really good argument against it and to present that argument and to have people see both sides and This is what learning is supposed to be all about especially recognizing the flaws and ideas recognizing bias, recognizing the lack of critical thinking, or recognizing critical thinking and plotting it. I will agree with you, depending on the context.

What I mean is, if you have a group of people interacting with certain norms or laws that ban intimidation and violence, that make people have some accountability for how they, the style that they use to argue. Sure. If you lie, if you threaten, something, your reputation, something bad will come back to you. Yes. And banning intimidation and violence are probably the most important things, right? Those are.

And so within a university, I totally agree with you. Now, if you look at the country as a whole or the internet as a whole, and you have a culture war going on or you have a sense of us versus them. Yes. And you have all kinds of bad actors. discovered, you know, before then, there was the fake news people who discovered they make fake articles and, you know, on the left and the right, and it just turned out that actually the right would click on them more. So they went that way. If there are people who are gaming the system, then your idea, which is Mill's idea, there are, I think there are conditions in which it wouldn't work. I'm not sure about that. But I think there are conditions in which that logic would not work.

And so one thing that I'm very concerned about, I don't see why it is that we can ever let people start an account where there's no verification of who they are. I'm not saying you can't have anonymous accounts. Like, you know, I understand there are reasons why you'd want to be able to post without your real name. That's fine. But if you make a death threat or what happens a lot is like, you know, there's research showing if you post something as a woman versus a man as a woman you're going to get a lot more rape threats and things like that if you if you post as a black person or white person you get a lot more racist stuff so at least the platform should always know that you're a person and that you can your account can be shut down if you if you talk this way because i think that um there are so many people

saying such nasty stuff that it feeds back and changes people's willingness to speak up. My concern is not necessarily free speech per se. It's free speech as a means to an end. And that end is that we as individuals are kind of stupid, and we only get smart if you put us together in the right way where we can challenge each other. That's what universities should do. And when we have a call-out culture, we're walking on eggshells, we can no longer do that. And in the marketplace of ideas, I think it's really interesting to see those two things play out. The one, the benefit of being anonymous, that you could talk about things without fear of retribution. You could talk about things without fear of losing your job.

And controversial ideas, especially in this day and age, that might not really be that controversial to you you or at least arguable to you, but that you could get shamed for it. People could take your words out of context and you could get in real trouble. So there's a benefit of anonymity. But on the other hand, when you're looking at slurs, attacks, threats, stalking, all that stuff, it would be nice if we knew who is behind all this. Absolutely. Yeah. So that's a case where while I don't think it's a pendulum, I do think that there will be some technological solutions and maybe some social norms so that people who critique in a certain way

where it slurs and it's guilt by association, those people will in some sense lose points, lose credibility, be downgraded. My big word for 2019 is nuance, that most things are complicated, at least the things we're talking about are complicated. And anybody who can say, I think you're right about X, but wrong about Y, that should be 100 bonus points. That is one of the essential skills of sincerely engaging with people. And anybody who uses guilt by association loses 100 points. So like one thing I'm finding, because I'm a centrist, I only vote for Democrats. I've never voted for Republican, but I consider myself philosophically to be a centrist.

And so now people will say that I'm alt-right adjacent. That's my favorite one. The adjacency? That's a wonderful one. I get that one because I've had people on the podcast that are right-wingers. Yeah. So what you should say to them, or at least say on social media, is anybody who makes an adjacency argument is McCarthy adjacent. That is – I'm sorry, let me say it again.

If you're making a guilt by association argument – if you say an adjacency argument, that's guilt by association. Anybody who does guilt by association is like McCarthy. Therefore, they're McCarthy adjacent. I wish I said that clearer. But it is a good argument. That's a good definition of what you're saying. It's a screwy thing that people are doing by this alt-right adjacent thing well you know and someone wrote a whole chart of like people interacting with people and connecting these people because they've had communication with these people and

so that somehow or another these things are all related like boy that is a yeah that's a squirrely argument no but but but actually this is the way the human mind works right we have to see is that we evolved to do this kind of religion with witchcraft beliefs and voodoo. There's all these patterns that recur all around the world. And the miracle is that there have been societies such as ours that developed norms of science, norms of discourse, norms of civility, norms of toleration and free speech. We're the exceptions and it's precious and it's easily lost, I think, I fear. We're the exceptions, and it's precious, and it's easily lost, I think, I fear. Do you think that it's also this newfound ability to communicate that we're experiencing because of the internet leads us to a lot of this sort of sloppy arguing and categorizing of humans and ideas that we're just not used to these tools yet. Yes, but it's not.

So I approach this as a social psychologist. So most of the commentary about this comes from cognitive psychologists or people who talk about the information bubbles, the filter bubbles, as though I have my ideas in my head, and if I'm exposed only to ideas from here, then I'm going to have an incorrect balance of ideas. So look at the information flow, obviously these tools have vastly changed the information flow, mostly for the better. We can Google anything at any time. So mostly for the better, but we have this problem

of unbalanced, like you eat only sugar or something, so you have an unbalanced diet. Okay, fine. Those are problems. I'm a social psychologist. I think the social dynamics problems are vastly bigger, vastly more dangerous. And they are that if whatever I say or whether I will agree with you or whether I'll even press the like button, I'm thinking what's going to happen to me? Who's going to nail me for it? And there are people who go through my Twitter feed and they look at what I liked months or years ago and they'll say, well, he liked this or he followed this. Yeah, I follow people on the alt right and the far far left and communists and fat. I mean, yeah, I study this stuff. But the idea that you could be somehow blamed for having some connection, this is what normal human people, normal human beings do, this guilt by association.

And we have to rise above it. We have to call it out when we see it, as it were, and realize, you know what? We all need critics. We all need to engage with a variety of viewpoints. That's what John Stuart Mill said. That's what common sense will tell you. And if we have institutions that don't expose students to a variety of viewpoints, it's possible that they are making them less wise when they graduate than they were when they arrived. Well, listen, Jonathan, we just cranked through two hours, and I want to thank you for illuminating these ideas and for your great books, and thank you for coming on the podcast. Oh, what a pleasure.

It's been great fun talking to you, Chuck. Anytime you want to do it again, just let me know. Let's do it again. Thank you. I'd love to. Thank you so much. Bye, everybody. Bam.

Wow. Wow. Wow. That's... Wow. Wow.