The Tim Ferriss Show - #644: Jonathan Haidt — The Coddling of the American Mind, How to Become Intellectually Antifragile, and How to Lose Anger by Studying Morality

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Starting point is 00:05:22 Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to hop straight into the guest because I have so many questions I would like to ask.

Starting point is 00:05:48 My guest today is Jonathan Haidt, spelled H-A-I-D-T. You can find him on Twitter at John Haidt. He is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. Jonathan received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff. He has given four TED Talks and in 2019, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018, Jonathan has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health

Starting point is 00:06:30 and the rise of political dysfunction. He is currently writing two books, Kids in Space, Why Teen Mental Health is Collapsing, and Life After Babble. Great title also. Life After Babble, Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share. You can find him at jonathanheit.com and on Twitter, once again, at John Height. John, nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Well, my pleasure, Tim. Very nice to meet you. So I thought we would begin with influences, how your personality, how your thinking has taken shape. And I wanted to begin with the name Richard Schwader. Could you please explain who Richard is and how he factors into your life story? I have many mentors and sometimes I do what I call the gratitude parade in my head and people flash

Starting point is 00:07:25 past and there's a string of mentors. But Rick Schwader is the biggest on who I am and what I've written. Rick Schwader is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago. And when I wrote my dissertation at Penn, I wrote it on a debate that he was having with some other people who study morality, who were saying that morality is always about harm, rights, and justice. And Schwader said, well, you know, yeah, where you live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is, but around the world, the moral domain is much broader, and there's the ethics of community, ethics of divinity. So I planned a study to pit the two theories against each other, and I did a study in Brazil

Starting point is 00:08:03 and the U.S. across social classes, study in Brazil and the US across social classes. And Schweder's predictions really came out beautifully. I found big cultural variation, especially social class variation in morality. And in part because of that, I was able to get a postdoc doing research with him. So for two years after my PhD, I spent at the University of Chicago. And during that time, I got a fellowship to go to India for three months, where Schweder worked in Bhubaneswar in the state of Orissa or Odisha, India. And that period, that year, 1993, that I hope that's a year that we'll come back to a couple of times during this conversation, because that is the pivotal year in my life when my mind was blown in many ways. One of which was that I was reading Buddhism and Hinduism. And then I spent three months in India.

Starting point is 00:08:43 And it really was like, welcome to my world and my way of thinking. Because Schwader is the most brilliant, iconoclastic, thinking-for-himself, perverse, in the most wonderful way, intellectual I've ever met. So, that's the beginning of who Rick Schwader is. Perverse intellectuals. That might be the headline of this episode. So we are going to come back to 1993. We're definitely going to come back to Bhubaneswar. I was wondering how to pronounce that. So I'm glad you gave me the layup in advance. I'd like to visit a motto, I believe. You can't believe everything you read on the internet, but hopefully the Atlantic is reliable in this respect.

Starting point is 00:09:32 A motto of Rick's that I'd like to unpack, which is, if someone asserts it, try denying it and see if it makes sense. If someone denies it, try asserting it and see if that makes sense. Could you explain what this means and maybe give an example of how he used it or would encourage students to use it. It comes from, I think, a brother-in-law of Rick's who is a dermatologist. And the dermatologist once said to him, oh, dermatology is easy. Just follow this rule. If it's dry, make it wet. If it's wet, make it dry.

Starting point is 00:09:58 And Rick, being, again, this perversity, he takes that rule. And that was sort of the way he ran his intellectual life. So when I went to Chicago, it's like the most intense intellectual square mile in the country. And you'd be in these seminars with all these like, you know, Nobel Prize winning economists and people and someone would say something. And Rick would like turn it around and say like, is the opposite true? And then he would ask, well, you know, isn't also the opposite of what you're saying true? And then you'd have to think like, wait, actually, yeah, that is too sometimes. And so what I take from it is we have such pressures to fall into line with our team, to go with what the dominant view is. And if you do that, you're going to end up being kind of a hack. You're going to end up

Starting point is 00:10:43 being like everyone else. But if you just automatically question things, not to be a jerk, now you could do it and be a jerk, but if you just question it, just with pure intellectual curiosity, is it true if we turn it around? And usually it's not, but often it is. And that's how you get new insights. This is definitely good advice for anyone in a creative industry or in the academic world. Try turning things around. So how would, just as an example, Rick potentially use this in anthropology? Then that might have been a broader guiding tenet of his thinking that applied to much more outside of his declared field of expertise. But is there an example you

Starting point is 00:11:28 might give for how that would fit into anthropology or the type of research that you were doing at the time? So one pops to mind, but it's so offensive that I have to start with something else, because otherwise I'll lose your listeners. You have to warm up the listening hamstrings. Yeah. So, just one example is he was in a discussion with some psychologist, because he's an anthropologist, but he's in cultural psychology. I'm a psychologist. So, he was in a discussion with some psychologist, and they were saying, well, you know, I mean, we have experimental evidence on this, and that's just so much more reliable than ethnography.

Starting point is 00:12:02 I mean, ethnography, you know, an anthropologist goes someplace and they take notes and they report, but that's just one person's view. Experimental evidence is just much more reliable. And he turns around and he says, oh, really? Well, let's see. And then you look at experiments that often don't replicate. And then you look at anthropological accounts where often multiple anthropologists will go someplace and they will find the same thing. So the point is just, you automatically assume, well, of course, experiments with numbers and careful procedures are better. But he just sort of turns around and says, well, actually, maybe not. Okay, that's the easy one. I hope listeners are with me on that.

Starting point is 00:12:38 Here's the harder one. Just about the most offensive cultural practice in the world for anthropologists and enlightened people is called FGM. Now, that stands for female genital mutilation. And anthropologists and progressives are so tolerant, so quick to say, let's not condemn other cultures, let's look at it from their point of view. But on this issue, they don't. And what Rick was doing was saying, in the societies where they do this, let's try to understand what they're doing. And he's totally open to the fact that sometimes it really is a horrible operation that deprives the woman of sexuality. And I mean, so there are such a range of practices. But if you simply say, any modification on a female should be punishable by time in jail, then what happens is you have a variety of African and Islamic immigrant groups

Starting point is 00:13:31 in the US and Canada, where the mothers are put in jail. And Rick says, well, let's question this. And once you see what they're doing, and sometimes it's much more equivalent to male circumcision, which is common around the world. So anyway, I may have, actually, no, your listeners probably aren't going to bolt just because of that, but I might get in trouble in other parts of the academic world. If they bolt just because of that, then honestly, this is calling of the herd. Because let me, before you continue, please hold your place, bookmark. Folks, part of the reason I wanted to have John on, and I respect the work that he does, is that I believe using this type of examination and self-examination, you become more anti-fragile, and you can also see through the veil of your own conditioning in a more effective way. And you can examine your thinking and your assumptions vis-a-vis the

Starting point is 00:14:26 language you use, the language you've absorbed, the labels that are your defaults, etc. And I think this makes you a better, more effective, and hopefully, ultimately, happier person who's a better contributor to society. So there's my sales pitch. Wow, perfect. We're done here. You said it. That's exactly, that is exactly right. That's why I'm so grateful to Rick, because if you develop this as a habit, you become more intellectually anti-fragile, which we'll get to, I hope. It helps you step out of your team. It helps you think independently. And you can see that your team does a lot of stupid things. Every team does. So yes, what you said. What I said. All right. Let's then, we flash back to 1993. And I would love to revisit,

Starting point is 00:15:15 I'm going to write this down, sort of moral relativism and how we might think about that, and how we either embrace that or develop an awareness around it so we don't, you know what, let's postpone 1993 and actually just tackle this right now. So there are a number of books I read a long time ago when I was part of something called the Henry Crown Fellowship at the Aspen Institute. And one, I want to say it was i want to say hg wells but i don't think that is right who wrote an essay called shooting the elephant or something along these lines you may actually be able to track back the proper author of this but it spoke of social pressures and during british colonialism this series of events that led to someone feeling like he needed to

Starting point is 00:16:07 shoot an elephant that was causing all this ruckus in the village, even though he didn't want to. That was describing social pressures and how those can lead to actions that we find immoral or reprehensible ourselves. But putting that aside, that's just an example. We also read a lot about morality, not in a structured way, I think, that would maybe stand toe-to-toe with the type of research you do in any way, but reading various accounts of people succumbing to moral relativism, where everything is okay because it's in a different culture, it's in a different time. How would you suggest people think about that? Because on one hand, I think that's dangerous. On the other hand, there's so much intolerance masquerading as tolerance, and there's so many issues that I'm sure we'll get into. But just with the subject of moral relativism, how do you think about that? This is a great topic to tackle in a longer discussion because it's one of the oldest questions in philosophy. It's an important one, and it takes a little doing. There are a lot of intellectual puzzles where we just sort of naturally think about it on like a single dimension or as a binary. And if you kind of break it up into multiple dimensions, then you see solutions. So the typical way of thinking about this is, is morality real? Like, is it a real thing, like the laws of physics, such that if people are behaving contrary to it, they're wrong, even if they don't know it? Or is morality just, you know, Herodotus and ancient Greeks,

Starting point is 00:17:36 they, you know, they saw this, like, well, in this country, you know, they kill their parents when they get old. And in this country, they eat pigs, and they could see that practice is different. And so, well, maybe, you know, it's just like language. It's just like whatever, you know, whatever happens in your culture. Well, that's what's grammatical. But what I learned in part from Schwader, and also reading a lot of philosophy, some of which he guided me to, was I'll put out a couple of concepts. So, the first is moral monism versus moral pluralism. So, the question isn't, is there moral truth or not? It's, is there one moral truth or multiple?

Starting point is 00:18:11 And once you do that, now you've loosened things up. Because a hallmark of my work, and this is where I departed from Rick a bit, is I've always been very influenced by evolutionary psychology as well as anthropology. So we are evolved creatures. We are homo sapiens, and we are all homo sapiens, and we are primates, and we have a lot in common with chimpanzees and bonobos. So that's the evolutionary site. And then there's also the anthropology. We vary. And so when you look around the world, you don't find infinite variation. You find a few major

Starting point is 00:18:40 patterns. A wonderful book, Dancing in the Streets, A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich. She says when the European explorers went out in the 16th, 17th century, they found wherever they went, people danced around campfires, had rituals that bonded the group together. They often used psychedelic substances. They had beat-heavy music. So, this is human nature. But feudal systems are also pretty common. There are a few major patterns. And so, one possibility is there's not just one way of doing things, but it's not anything goes. It's that there are several different sort of grammatical human forms.

Starting point is 00:19:13 And this actually became the basis of my major work in psychology, which is moral foundations theory, which is my effort to say, what are the taste buds of the moral sense? Because cuisine varies around the world. You wouldn't say that the French are wrong if they don't cook like the Vietnamese, but I think you could say that the French and the Vietnamese are both much better cooks than the English, or at least, you know, they were historically. So, there is some truth. You know, it's not that anything goes, there is some truth. But here's where we're bringing the second kind of abstract but really powerful concept, which is anthropocentric truth. So that means something can be true relative to humans, to who we are. So if intelligent aliens come to our solar system, they will find that

Starting point is 00:19:58 the Earth is the third planet from the Sun. And that was true before we existed, and it'll be true long after we're gone. And they would find that gold is a better conductor of electricity than is aluminum that was true before we were here it'll be true you know so those are non-anthropocentric truths and many people have been on a quest to find what are the you know what are the moral truths like and so sam harris who for a brief time was my intellectual enemy we kind of had like a feud for a few years now we're friends we actually like each other quite a lot but we had kind of a feud over this because he has a whole book, The Landscape of Morality, arguing that moral truths are like the truths of chemistry. And I say, no, they are anthropocentric truths. This is from a philosopher, David Wiggins.

Starting point is 00:20:34 There are things that are true because of the creatures we are. So, there are things that are beautiful because of our senses. There are things that, you know, so Shakespeare is a better writer than Kurt Vonnegut. Now, I love reading Kurt Vonnegut. I probably enjoy it more than Shakespeare. But man, I can see, and almost everyone can, Shakespeare is a complete genius at crafting words. Now, it's a fact. If aliens come here from another planet, they're not going to agree because it doesn't make sense. It wouldn't fit with their nature. Anyway, so putting this all together, I think what we can say is there are moral truths and moral orders that are emergent. I am not a relativist. I'm not a monist. I'm a moral pluralist. There are multiple moral truths, and these truths are emergent from human nature interacting as people interact in societies.

Starting point is 00:21:22 Okay, wow. I think I just did it. Oh, it was great. And I want to tag on a follow-up, which is how do you personally, and we're going to come back to the from feud to friends story, because I think that could be an instructive case study. Plus, I'm just curious, because I'm friends with Sam also,

Starting point is 00:21:40 who is a great, he's a very formidable sparring partner. Yes. When you look at global events, how do you think about, personally, human rights violations, what to accept, what to oppose yourself as a pluralist. And I'm not saying that because I'm viewing myself as the opposite of a pluralist. I'm just curious how you personally think about what you are proactively going to push back against. It doesn't need to be outside the US.

Starting point is 00:22:21 Because I'm an emergentist, that is, I believe that morals emerge as we interact. I don't think that 50,000 years ago, societies were wrong in dividing labor between male and female. It's not like they were wrong and they should have fixed it, they should have had perfect, like, no. As we now have modern societies with labor-saving devices, and you don't have to divide labor between male and female, and there are other ways to live. So now, any society that was to say, well, you know, women can't do certain things, only men can. Like, well, you know, well, that would be wrong. In a modern Western society, that would be unethical. That would be a violation of civil rights. Now, when we look at things like countries in which the secret police grab people in the night and take them away and torture and kill them, you don't have to be a very advanced society to realize that this is horrific, this is wrong,

Starting point is 00:23:08 this is brutality, this is not justified by appeals to morals. So I once developed a kind of a three-part test, let me see if I can remember it, because what we want to do is we want to separate things like veiling or things where they might be broadly accepted in a culture, but we're offended by them from things like chattel slavery, where some people accept it, but the victims of it didn't accept it. So I think we can point to things. It's often tricky, but we can point to things where we can say, we can criticize that practice and that culture. And in extreme cases, we might even say we should try to undermine it or try to stop it. So we'd have to go case by case on, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:44 widow burning in India and things like on, you know, widow burning in India and things like that, you know, which I think will clearly fall on one side. But that's how I would generally do it in the abstract. Now, I think you asked me a slightly different question which was more like me personally, not like philosophically, right? Yeah. So, a funny thing happened to me as I've studied morality, which is that i almost never get angry anymore so before 1993 i was a normal person who got angry a lot you know i'm pretty even-tempered so it wasn't like anger i had anger problems i'm just saying i'd read the newspaper i'd be you know angry at the goddamn

Starting point is 00:24:16 you know ronald reagan or whatever and you know or someone cuts me off or something slow so i've been sort of you know quasi type a pushy you know, quasi type A, pushy, you know, smart aleck, son of a bitch Jewish kid is what my neighbor once called me. So, I used to be like that. And then in 1993, I changed. The key thing there was actually taking LSD for the first time while I was studying to go to India and reading the Bhagavad Gita and reading Hinduism and Hindu philosophy. And I was 29 years old. And so here I am studying moral psychology and all these things. And in that year, I kind of stepped out of the matrix. I kind of stepped out of the world that I had been living in. And that is what allowed me that year, allowed me to do the work I've done with the rest of my

Starting point is 00:25:04 life, which is saying, you know what, let's try to understand progressives and conservatives in their own terms. Before then, I was just a standard straight issue, you know, Ivy League, liberal, progressive type person. But a roundabout way of answering your question is I don't get mad, I look at systems, and I always think, how can we make them better? And systems that are producing terrible results for human beings should be changed. So actually, I'll share. So one thing, this was actually, this was before my turning point. In 1987, just before grad school, I traveled alone across Eastern Europe. And so I went to Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. And when I was in Romania, where Ceaușescu was the dictator, the people were

Starting point is 00:25:46 literally cold and dirty. Like they literally did not have soap to clean their clothes. They did not have heat in the winter. They were kept like animals. And they behaved like animals in some sense, like, you know, we try to get on a bus, like there's so few buses, people push and shove. And, you know, it certainly didn't make me angry. It's like, oh, my God, like, actually did make me angry. All of my my god like actually it did make me angry all of my feelings were against Ceausescu and I thought if I could kill this man with my bare hands right now I would do it and I would love it it was so horrific to see what this man had done to this society him and his half million secret policemen and so when he was shot in the

Starting point is 00:26:20 mud in a courtyard in 1989 I was thrilled So I guess that's more of a direct answer to your question. If I see someone oppressing a whole society or acting in that monstrous way, not for any morally legitimate reason, yeah, I think we need to take action. Could you tell me more about your LSD experience? Why was that such a seemingly crucial ingredient in that turning point or that period for you? I know you've had a fair amount of psychedelic coverage on this podcast, and I'm sure your listeners, many will be experienced or familiar with it. So the turning point for me, it was June 11th, 1993. Like many other such experiences, one feels reborn and you feel like you remember the day you remember

Starting point is 00:27:05 exactly when it happened i was in i was a postdoc in chicago working with schwader and i went back to philadelphia where i'd been a grad student and where my ex-girlfriend we're still good friends was there and our a lot of our friends and she got some acid and we all all did it it was my first time doing it at the age of 29 and the And the metaphor that I use in making sense of it afterwards was, it felt to me as though I'd spent all my life living in this amazing mansion with thousands of rooms. And I loved exploring this mansion, and I love to travel. And there were all these rooms to explore. And I thought I was doing, I was like, you know, seeing all this stuff. And then that night, it was like, God punched a hole in the roof, reached in, picked me up, took me out of the mansion,

Starting point is 00:27:49 and took me around the whole world and said, you thought that was the world? No, this is the world. And it's, you know, beyond anything you can imagine. And then he puts me back in the mansion, seals up the roof, and says, go on. And I don't mean literally God. I'm, you know, I'm a Jewish atheist. I don't believe literally in God. But these experiences have really helped me understand the way we evolve for religion, the way almost all societies have a way of using psychedelic plants. You interviewed Michael Pollan, so, you know, what he said. So, that experience certainly changed me as a psychologist thinking about the human mind and consciousness and self-transcendence and all that but it changed me as a human being because afterwards it was like small things just don't

Starting point is 00:28:37 matter it changes your perspective that's trite to say but it also just helped me you know what it did okay what it did was, here at the same time, I was reading the Bhagavad Gita. In the Bhagavad Gita, there is a specific scene, I talk about this in The Righteous Mind, or The Happiness Hypothesis, there's a specific scene where Krishna gives Arjuna a third eye to see the world as it really is. And he's like gasping for breath, he's like, he can't process it, But he comes back and he wants to serve Krishna. Now, I didn't come back like, I want to serve my fellow man. But I felt like all my old pettiness, all that just sort of burned off. And I just, I don't know, I just had a kind of an independence,

Starting point is 00:29:15 like I'm not on a team. Atlantic article, the power of rituals and viewing a commitment have come to those conclusions on your own in India? Or were they mutually dependent in a way? I think they were mutually dependent. Yes. I don't think I could have done it. It would have been just more of a standard intellectual experience like, hmm, this is interesting. Let me write this down in my notebook. Let me try to make sense of this. Because the other piece we want to bring in here is that in grad school, I read Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, and really comes out in The Righteous Mind, like Rick Schwader and Emile Durkheim and Charles Darwin, like those are the three heroes of the book. Those three men, their ideas just transformed my thinking. And so you put those all together in a 29-year-old brain

Starting point is 00:30:22 who's having a tremendously good time at the university of chicago and then going to india and then as you're shaking it up you put in just a tiny little bit of lsd and like boom it comes out into a totally new configuration so that's kind of what happened to me in 1993 it was like the the msg of spiritual multi-dimensionalism just a little little bit of pixie dust of ls. Pixie dust, yes. Well, if you think about your frontal cortex, it kind of locks down between 13 and mid to late 20s. It's kind of locking down. It's very open to change in your teen years, but it kind of settles in by your late 20s.

Starting point is 00:31:02 And so as it's kind of setting, that period of change, had it been five or 10 years later, it might not have had that much effect. Yeah. It would strike me as a critical formative window. So if you are able to slow the setting of the concrete, or something along those lines metaphorically, then interesting things can happen. I will say, not to spend too much time on the psychedelic component of this, but the loosening of self-identity, even at advanced ages, let's just say in terminal cancer patients who are suffering from end-of-life anxiety, the ability, and there's some evidence to suggest, although I think it's simplistic, that the down-regulation of the default mode network helps to inhibit self-referential thinking and that type of executive function, and therefore people experience this ego dissolution or ego death.

Starting point is 00:31:52 But even in a less extreme instance of that, it frees you from the constructs that have been the lenses you've always worn but not realized you've been wearing. And to that extent, I do think it allows you to see something like, for instance, these behaviors and beliefs in India with a very different set of eyes than would otherwise be possible. 1993, I must say, just as coincidence, 1992 to 1993 was also the year that probably most dramatically changed my life. So we were having transformative experiences in the same 12-month period of time. It was my first time overseas, and I landed in Japan as an exchange student, going to a Japanese school, living with Japanese families for a year. And that broke open my mind in such an incredibly, at points, difficult ways, but in such a beautifully profound and productive way, because it forced me to question what it meant to do things the right way. It was my first time being in a country where people drove on the opposite side of the street. It's my first time being anywhere where the entire

Starting point is 00:33:10 family shared the bath, didn't change the water, and you had to clean yourself beforehand. And the examples just where they cool their food by slurping it in with great noise as opposed to blowing on it with exhales. And so it was like this Alice in Wonderland, topsy-turvy upside-down world for me. And I realized, oh, wow, all these things that I have assumed are just the way things are done are, I don't want to say arbitrary, but they're social conventions. I mean, these are cultural emergent patterns.

Starting point is 00:33:58 They're not laws of physics. And so during that same year, I also really, I think, unlocked my ability to start to ask at least questions about my assumptions. Like, is that really true? Do we really have to do that? Yeah. Even the structure of thought is mirrored in language. I mean, Japanese is very, very different. Instead of being subject, verb, object, you know, I eat the apple, it's I the apple eat, I to school, go, that type of thing. And it was a very productive year. I want to come to a passing comment. Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on a second. I just want to pick up on that for one moment. Because I think you had your experience at a sort of a more opportune age than mine. I mean, mine worked out great, but you were in college at the time, right? You were a student at Princeton.

Starting point is 00:34:27 No, actually, this was before Princeton. This would have been high school. So I was age 15 to 16. Okay. Right. So there's research on how we create stories about ourselves, and our stories are wide open. From about 14 or 15 is when it kind of opens

Starting point is 00:34:45 up through the mid to late 20s. That's like the key period. And so you had yours right at the beginning of that. And listening to you, because I think so much about left-right differences, there's research that foreign travel makes people more progressive, more liberal, because you see how things can be different. Did it have that effect on you? Were you progressive or liberal at the time? And did it change your politics at all i am grateful very very grateful i don't want to throw my parents under the bus but my dad was very vocal about various political stuff and i completely turned off that listening function so i did not this is going to be embarrassing perhaps to admit, but I effectively paid little to no attention to politics until perhaps 10 years ago.

Starting point is 00:35:30 And so I didn't identify politically at all. I was really issue by issue. If they came up, if it was something that affected me or that I thought I might want to change, that was the extent of my radar pickup. I will say that in retrospect, looking at my experience, probably also given the way that Japanese society is structured and the availability of healthcare and this, that, and the other thing, that many of those issues would probably be associated with a sort of left-leaning progressive mindset, I suppose. I would have to imagine that to be the case. I don't see how it would go the other way because I wasn't,

Starting point is 00:36:11 even though in Japan there is some pretty crazy nationalism and super hardcore, I suppose, right extreme stuff, I was not exposed to that. Okay. Because the thought, the idea that I was just developing from what you were saying was this. I've long thought, since I wrote The Righteous Mind and since I really tried to understand conservatism and libertarians and really got sort of the wisdom from those traditions as well as the progressive or liberal tradition. And I've really come to see that a functioning society needs a sort of progressive wing pushing for change and it needs a conservative wing saying slow down, tapping on the brakes, you know, William F. Buckley, you know, Stan Thornton history yelling, stop. You need both in a healthy

Starting point is 00:36:48 society. We don't have that now. Our left is not liberal. Our right is not conservative. We're a mess. But societies need those two impulses. And just from when you were saying, it didn't occur to me, it's like, actually, I wonder if in a person's development, you kind of need both of those. That is, early on, you kind of need to like open up and travel and see the world and question things. But if you stay that way the rest of your life, you might kind of be kind of dysfunctional. Because there's interesting research showing that it's not age that makes people become more conservative. It's having children or starting a business or taking on responsibility. Once you take on some responsibility, you realize, you know what, we actually need some rules here. We need some, you know, there has to be some authority or some

Starting point is 00:37:27 hierarchy. You know, there have to be punishments for cheating. So in the course of a human life, maybe there's like the opening up travel period, and then they're like, okay, you got all this stuff in your head. Now you have to apply it. You have to kind of focus. You have to be conscientious. All right, just a thought. Keep going. I like that idea, and I've never thought of it that way. I would also say Japan deeply resonated with me on a lot of levels that my experience in the United States did not. focus on detail, just the level of meticulous attention to the most minute of details, which can be crippling. It's not all upside, but that so deeply, to me, felt like a warm bath for maybe my predispositions or my neuroses, that it was a, it felt like a rebirth of sorts. I mean, I would have friends who would say like, Tim, you're Japanese.

Starting point is 00:38:33 They'd be like, they would just be like, you're not American. I don't get it. Like you look, you're white and you look like what you look like, but you're more Japanese than I am. They would make these jokes because it came so easily to me culturally in a way. To whatever extent that makes any sense, there was that. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors

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Starting point is 00:40:00 Earn 3.8% on your cash today. Plus, it's up to $2 million in FDIC insurance through partner banks. Visit wealthfront.com slash Tim to get started. That's wealthfront.com slash Tim. This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront. I did want to ask you about your comment, the label you used of Jewish atheists. So I am a Jewish atheist. And I want to provide some context for this, which is Paul Graham, who's famous for co-founding Y Combinator, had a tweet, I think it was actually in one of his essays also, along the lines of, the more labels you apply to yourself, the stupider you become, something like that. I'm

Starting point is 00:40:43 paraphrasing it, but be careful with the labels that you use. I'm not forcing that on you, but I'm curious to know the thinking behind Jewish Atheist. And I'm friends with a writer named A.J. Jacobs who's said… Oh, yeah. I love A.J. Yeah, one of the funniest writers in the round. Yeah, he's hilarious. He said something like,

Starting point is 00:41:03 I am to Jewish what Olive Garden is to Italian or something like that was his explanation when he wrote the book, The Year of Living Biblically, which is a fantastic, fantastic book. How do you think about being Jewish? What does that mean to you? So first, you know,

Starting point is 00:41:24 if we're having this discussion in the context of a Christian background culture, you know, Christianity is somewhat unusual, although Islam is similar, in making it's all about your relationship with God and faith. And Judaism is a more ancient religion, and it's very much about a story about a tribe, a group that has these ups and downs in history and we're bound together. And of course, God is a very, a group that has these ups and downs in history and we're bound together. And of course, God is a very, very important part of the story. But as Jews have lived in different cultures around the world, well, that shapes your identity. And you can be Jewish and not believe in God, just like you can be Italian and not be Catholic. So, as an ethnic

Starting point is 00:42:00 group, as an identity, as a culture, I'm Jewish. And I recognize the influence of just the norms, you know, the argumentativeness, the, you know, and here we're talking Ashkenazi Jewish, I should always be clear that, you know, Sephardic Jews are different, there are different kinds of Jews, but the American Jewish experience is sort of dominated by the Ashkenazi, the Eastern European immigrants. All four of my grandparents came here from Russia and Poland and Belarus around 1907 when they were teenagers, roughly. It's part of my, so I was about to say it's part of my identity, I guess it is, but I'm playing these days with the idea that actually, I'm an anti-identitarian. I think part of what's wrong with the country is that America, of all countries, needs to be a melting pot. We need to have a generally assimilationist ethos, and that

Starting point is 00:42:44 worked so well for the Jews, the Irish, the Italians, you know, all the groups that came through Ellis Island into an assimilationist 20th century America. It worked out fantastically well. So, anyway, that's just, we can follow that down in a moment, the identitarianism. But you can be Jewish by identity and not believe in God. In fact, I'd like to do this formally. I always think if you ask a Christian, do you believe in God? Usually, if they've identified as a Christian, you know, they're usually going to say yes. Okay, try asking that with 10 Jews. Maybe one of them will say yes, and maybe two or three will say no, and the rest will say, well, it depends. I mean,

Starting point is 00:43:18 do you mean this? Do you mean that? Like, well, you know, sort of, maybe. So, being Jewish is different religiously than being Christian or Muslim. Mm-hmm. That makes sense. That makes sense to me. Do you, as an atheist, build in any rituals or traditions from the Jewish lineage, let's say? Okay, so this helps me clarify. Atheist is not part of my identity. I said I'm a Jewish atheist, but atheist is not part of my identity. I'm just a Jew who doesn't believe in God. And that maybe was part of my clash with Sam Harris, because that was, this was during the time of the, you know, the new atheists, and there was a combative movement. And I didn't want to be part

Starting point is 00:44:01 of that. You know, I thought there was a lot to respect about religion. And so, I would do the Schwader thing, you know, which is, okay, you're making these claims about religion. Well, let's see, you know, is that, you know, let's turn that around. Is that really true? So, but back to your question. So, no, I don't incorporate any rituals that are related to my being an atheist, but I do, yeah, I do have some rituals. This actually almost more comes from like Stoic traditions, just that, you know, the Stoics advise doing a morning routine, an evening routine, a kind of a meditations on philosophy in the morning, and then a kind of a taking stock at night. So I usually try to do that just as an individual practice to just set my priorities and reflect on my day and what I'm doing. And, you know, minimally Jewish in the

Starting point is 00:44:45 sense of like, so my wife is Korean American, but she was very happy to have us raise our kids with some Jewish identity. My son had a bar mitzvah. And so, you know, we go to synagogue on the high holy days, we light Shabbat candles and have a family meal on Friday. So fairly minimal, but it is important. I do have a feeling that something was passed down to the generations to me, and I don't want to break the chain. It's a very valuable thing that was passed down to me, and I want my children to have a sense that they're part of that chain. Let's talk about from feud to friends with Sam Harris. And I know you described it in passing, but what was the feud? And then the more interesting part of that is i shouldn't

Starting point is 00:45:27 say interesting but the part that i i want to focus on is how did you go from that to then friends because that is feuds are where things start and end a lot of the time these days and maybe forever given human nature but online, people get rewarded probably more for feuding than they do for being friendly. So, could you just describe that experience, please? Back when, you know, when Sam really burst onto the scene, you know, he's a great writer and a beautiful writer, and he was so persuasive, you know, writing those first two Atheist, New Athe atheist books.

Starting point is 00:46:05 And so, we would be invited to a lot of the same conferences, because I was beginning to write about how religion, you know, I'm a naturalist, I don't, you know, I believe we evolved to be, you know, I don't believe it's God who made us religious, but, you know, religion does all these good things, I was saying. And so, we'd be invited to conferences together. There was like the Beyond Belief Conference. Sam and, you know, all the New Atheists went the first year, and then Sam and me, one or two others, went the second year. And wherever I would appear with Sam, or wherever we would clash in writing, Sam would always use this rhetorical technique of basically saying, so John Haidt would say that human sacrifice among the Aztecs is a good thing because it binds people. So he would always accuse me of supporting

Starting point is 00:46:42 atrocities. And by the third or fourth time he'd done this okay i i said before i don't get angry i was kind of pissed and so i did i did kind of like a dirty dirty lowdown trick yeah yeah there must be some decorum there must be some decorum yes so i did something i'm a little embarrassed by it it was kind of it was clever but a little embarrassed now i did a kind of a an academic trick which is one thing that bothered me about sam you you know, he has a PhD, but he wasn't really socialized as an academic. He was writing more as a rhetorician, you know, a public arguer. And he would use very strong language, like always this and never this and certainly this. And so, I said, you know what? Let me take all of Sam's writings and feed them through this, what's it called? Oh, shoot. There's a program that analyzes word use by Jamie Pennebaker. Anyway, you feed it through and it counts like certainly, always, never. And so, there's a text of Sam's books through, and you get a number, how certain is Sam,

Starting point is 00:47:45 and a couple things like that. And then I fed in the other new atheists, and then I fed in, you know, like all of those, you know, who are all those right-wing people, you know, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and I put a whole bunch of them in. And then I put in me and David Sloan Wilson, who was also with me arguing that religion is nuanced effects. And it turned out that Sam was higher on certainty words than, you know, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and all those people. So, I just wrote this up in a blog post and I showed graphically that Sam is actually more certain of himself than these people that

Starting point is 00:48:20 he's always lambasting. So, it was kind of a dirty trick but it was you know it was funny and the closing of the first round ends with a one-two combination yeah so oh and then and then i think i offered like i called it the the moral psychology prize or the sam harris prize or something that oh yeah oh yes no no that's okay i forgot i forgot a crucial thing sam wrote his book the moral landscape saying you, morality is a fact. And he offered money, I think it was money, to whoever could persuade him otherwise. And then I wrote my essay, I bet that no one will be able to persuade Sam otherwise, and here's why. And then I went, then I showed that how certain he is. So, I just kind of put him in a bind. Anyway, I can't remember exactly all the details. Anyways, that's how it started. So, then we kind of put him in a bind. Anyway, I can't remember exactly all the details.

Starting point is 00:49:05 Anyways, that's how it started. So, then we kind of had like a little cold, we just kind of ignored each other for a while. My recollection of how it ended was, you know, Sam, you know, Sam is incredibly courageous and is not a partisan. And he thinks for himself and he does things that make people hate him on both sides. And I really do respect, I always respected him for that. And it was something, I think it was, you know, he was being, he said something about Islam and he was being lambasted. And I can't remember whether I, you know, retweeted something or said something.

Starting point is 00:49:31 I put up some like little tiny show of support for him. I think that's how it went. And then Sam Acknowledgement thanked me for it. And what happened was, because our feud was in 2014, and that was back before everything went insane. And around 2014, 2015, everything went insane. And there was this incredible, you know, explosion of illiberalism on campus and in the academic world, the intellectual world. And Sam and I were then actually both on the same side, which is we believe in being reasonable and using evidence.

Starting point is 00:50:01 We ultimately were sort of natural allies. And whoever first gave a little show of support for the other was like, okay, yeah, you know what? I like you. And that's why I've been on his podcast twice. And I have just great admiration for him. He's a very, very smart cookie. I'm also a very big fan of Sam. And Flashboil, 2014, 2015, what the hell happened? What contributed to things suddenly hockey-sticking in insanity? Could it have been predicted? No, no, I don't think so. Because I find these big ideas that really help me think,

Starting point is 00:50:38 and so I'm going to put another one out there, which is a complex dynamical system. And is this something you've talked about on your show before? So complex dynamical system. And is this something you've talked about on your show before? So complex dynamical systems. So the human mind is really good at thinking about mechanical systems, machines, things moving in space. We have sort of two brains. We have sort of two minds.

Starting point is 00:50:56 We have a mind that's really good at thinking about objects moving in space. And so there's popular mechanics for people like doing that. And we're really good at thinking about people moving in social space and forming alliances and betrayals and soap operas and all that. And so there's People Magazine for people like doing that. Those two things we're really good at. But there are a lot of things in our world that are nothing like that, like the weather, the economy. There are complex dynamical systems where you can't even in principle predict what it's going to do because it's a chaotic, complex system. And you can change parameters, and you can kind of predict which way things are going to go, but you can't really know.

Starting point is 00:51:30 And when you change parameters, you can suddenly get a phase change. And so mechanical systems are easy to understand. Complex dynamical systems are very hard, but we live within them. And so what happened, I believe, is that we hit a phase change. It actually began in 2014, but it blew up in the academic world in 2015. And so this is what I've called metaphorically the fall of the Tower of Babel. So if you simply wire people up, if you just connect people more and more, you think that's good, right? And we always thought that. And, you know, from the Roman roads and the first telegram cables or the Pony Express, I mean, it's good to have more communication. That's generally a good thing. But it could have some

Starting point is 00:52:07 problems. And it might be that you just get to a point where everyone's so connected that everyone is yelling or everyone's mad at everyone. So it might just be that there's more and more connection, but I think it's something else. What I've come to believe in trying to understand what the hell happened is it's the nature of the connection changed after 2009. So once we used to call social network sites, they connected people. So you could use Facebook to communicate with your friends from high school. That was great. There's no problem there. But in 2009, Facebook introduced the like button, Twitter introduced the retweet button, Facebook copied it with the share button. So social media isn't just connecting people anymore. And we stopped talking about them as social networking sites. We start using the word social media platform. Now it becomes about performance. And it becomes much

Starting point is 00:52:56 more viral, much more explosive. It's not about me talking with you. It's about me talking at you in the hopes that my slam on you will get picked up by others, and that will make me famous. That will get me prestige. And once everyone's motivated to do that, or I should say once 10% of people are motivated to do that, the system develops new properties that were not there in 2008. And most of us, most of your listeners, if they're old enough, can remember, you know, it used to be an amazing place.

Starting point is 00:53:21 The internet was amazing. Social media was amazing. Twitter was playful and fun. It's still that in part, but it just became much nastier. One of the key innovations, I believe, was what Facebook called threaded comments. It used to be, if Barack Obama puts up a tweet in his first term, he puts it up and people can respond. That's it. They just respond. That's it. You can say you're stupid or you're terrible. That's it, they just respond. And that's it, you can say, you know, you can say you're stupid, or you're terrible. And that's it, you say that. But in 2014, Facebook said, how about to increase engagement? How about we let everyone fight with everyone everywhere?

Starting point is 00:53:54 So if Barack Obama puts up a Facebook post in his second term, or after 2014, someone can, you know, say, you know, go back to Kenya. And then someone else can say to that commenter, no, you are a fascist. And then before you know it, you've got people fighting in the comments. So it's like those scenes in a barroom brawl. You've got two people having a face-off, and suddenly everyone's breaking bottles in everyone's heads. That, I believe, is what happened in 2014, 2015. And democracy is unsustainable.

Starting point is 00:54:21 Institutions are collapsing. Universities are going crazy. So we're now in the post-Babel world where we can't have any shared understandings of truth. We can't have any shared stories. And hence the title of my forthcoming book, Life After Babel, Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share. Do you have thoughts on what we can do from a proactive incentive perspective to, I don't want to say reverse some of these trends, but to redirect the currents slightly in different directions. And you mentioned Chicago. One thing that really jumped out to me, this is quite a few years ago now, I want to say, but when the

Starting point is 00:54:59 sort of woke supremacy virus started spreading throughout academia and fragility was being reinforced and tripled down upon, I want to say it was the University of Chicago put out a letter to say, we are actually going to go in the opposite direction. And it was notable to me because a number of friends of mine who are alumni from UChicago said, this is the first time in 10 years that I've given money to the university. So there are, I guess, a number of friends of mine who are alumni from UChicago said, this is the first time in 10 years that I've given money to the university. So there are, I guess, a number of questions in this word salad that I'm throwing at you. The first is, why do you think UChicago was able to do that then or willing to do it? And would they be willing to do it again now? Just to understand the incentives, because I've seen so many people lose their posts. It doesn't really seem to matter how high up you are.

Starting point is 00:55:46 If you can be removed by the trustees, you are vulnerable or whatever mechanism exists for replacing the top brass. And then separately, let's focus on the academic side first, and then we can look at the technological side and maybe the business side. So in the academic world, why do you think it was possible for UChicago to do it then? Could they do it now? And is it possible to create some type of counterbalance or change incentives such that this doesn't continue to go in the direction it's going? I can't answer that question until I explain the dynamics that have made

Starting point is 00:56:22 leaders cave throughout the intellectual world, throughout the, let's call it, we have democratic institutions and we have epistemic institutions, epistemic meaning in search of knowledge. So that's preeminently the universities and journalism, museums, other things like that. Why have they all fallen in the same way? So let me start with that and then we'll get to Chicago. So I've been trying to figure this out, like every day, I've been obsessed with this since it started in 2014. That's when Greg Lukianoff came to me. Greg is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. And he said, John, weird stuff is happening on campus. Students are

Starting point is 00:56:58 suddenly asking for protections from books, words, speakers, ideas. Before then, it was always administrators. And so Greg said, like, you know, what's going on? The students seem to be explaining these things using the same cognitive distortions that I learned to not do when I was treated for depression. Greg suffers from depression, and he learned cognitive behavioral therapy. So I thought Greg's idea was brilliant. Somehow, universes are teaching students to think, to catastrophize, overgeneralize, mind reading, all these distortions. So that starts in 2014. And then it's really the fall of 2015, especially after the Halloween incident at Yale, where

Starting point is 00:57:33 the students demand that Nicholas Christakis apologize for a thoughtful, caring letter that his wife had written to the students of Silliman College. And then the president of Yale, Peter Salovey, never backed up the Christokases. They demanded that they be fired. And the president just gave the students everything they demanded that he could. He couldn't give them everything, but he really made a big show of saying, yes, I will, you know, I will, you're right. And that launched a wave of protests around the country. It always goes the same way, which is a charge from a student that something that was said was insensitive

Starting point is 00:58:05 about race, gender, LGBTQ. And then there's never a finding of information. It blows up on Twitter or other channels, and then within a day or two, the person's fired. No due process. This keeps going. It happened at the New York Times. It just happened at the Association for Psychological Science here. An editor may have made a mistake. It looks like he probably didn't follow a good process. But again, there's a mob, and then the leadership gives in. So that's what's been happening. Why are they all caving? I'm just trying to think of the incentives, because it doesn't happen everywhere, right? There are some counter examples. Yeah. So it happens when you get moral homogeneity. So you get an institution where the great majority,

Starting point is 00:58:45 almost everybody's on one side. And so in epistemic institutions, it's always going to be the left. Now, you can have a craziness on an all right-wing institution, but there aren't any institutions on the right that are as high, that have so little diversity as those on the left. On the left, it's often the case that there's not a single person on the right. I rarely encounter a conservative in the academic world. There are very, very few. Whereas when I've spoken at, you know, military installations or, you know, if you have a right-leaning thing, there's still going to be some liberals there.

Starting point is 00:59:14 Anyway, so you have moral homogeneity, which is a crucial background variable. Moral homogeneity. You have students. So usually it's members of, oh, you have Gen Z. So the charges are usually from Gen Z or late millennials, making a charge that the leadership is vulnerable to, because the leadership is usually older white liberals, and it's backed up with a barrage of darts. So a dart is anything that someone can do to hurt someone else. You can launch a dart on Twitter,

Starting point is 00:59:42 you can make an accusation, you have no liability for it. So what you see is these leaders, suddenly they're in morally homogeneous, politically homogeneous institutions. They are attacked with darts, they cave instantly, it's very painful. They cave instantly, that just encourages the darters to go further. So I call this, in a recent Atlantic article, I call this structural stupidity. That is, you can have very smart people, but you only get smart when bad ideas will be challenged. And if a bad idea, so for example, at universities, we all have biased response teams. So if I say anything, and a student objects, they can report me in three ways. And that number is posted in the bathrooms. It's on the back of all the ID cards, like here's 911, here's campus safety, here's the

Starting point is 01:00:23 biased response line. If you're offended, call this number. This is a really, really bad idea. Or at least there's no evidence that it's a good idea. But it's done everywhere. It's done everywhere because no one dares oppose it. Like nobody in the faculty senate will say, well, wait a second, we really want to do this. Everyone's just like, oh, yeah, let's, you know, let's do this. This will be anti-racist. So you get structurally stupid communities, and they all fold in exactly the same way. This is what happened at the New York Times with the firing of James Bennett. It's the same thing everywhere. Why was Chicago different? Two reasons. So every institution has its own moral resources. Every institution has a sense of identity. And Chicago is unique in having this really intense intellectual, like really high

Starting point is 01:01:02 intellectual identity. And when I was there, students wore t-shirts, University of Chicago, where fun goes to die. And they were ranked, Playboy magazine ranked them the worst party school in America, you know, 300th out of 300, don't go to Chicago. And they were proud of it. So, they begin with this intellectually intense identity, the background, and then the other crucial element was leadership. They had Robert Zimmer. That's it. Robert Zimmer personally was calling bullshit on all this stuff. Like, this is not who we are, the caving, the demands, the outrage mobs. Like, no, you know, we're going to talk about ideas here. So, Robert Zimmer single-handedly sort of said, like, no. And that letter that you referred to was not from him. It was by a dean of students who sent a letter to prospective students who are coming to Chicago.

Starting point is 01:01:48 And he said, you know, at Chicago, we don't do safe spaces. Now, he misspoke, or that was a mistake. Because if, you know, if the gay students or LGBT students want to have a club where they have certain discourse rules, great, free association, let them. What the dean meant to say was our classrooms are not safe spaces. In our classrooms, people can criticize what you say. And if you have that, then you don't have structural stupidity. So if we're looking at structural stupidity, I start to think about structural dynamics and the ways in which people are vulnerable or less vulnerable to losing their posts. Let's just say you are Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, and the company is doing well,

Starting point is 01:02:36 and you want to remove, and I don't want to speak for him, but this has been very well covered, you want to put out a letter that effectively says, this is our mission. If you're aligned with this mission, great, but we cannot be responsible for every cause or world event that pulls our direction and feel like it should be done at work. Go elsewhere. We're going to give you a fantastic severance package. Part of the reason he can do that, aside from, I think, being very courageous, thinking for himself and being willing to take a lot of flack in the short term, in the long-term best interest of the company, putting that aside, he's also, I think, in doing that, unlikely to get fired, right? It would take the board of directors to remove him. And then there's the question of, well, who would we replace him with,

Starting point is 01:03:30 who would actually be a good enough operator to do a better job, going to be very tough. I suppose what I'm wondering is within academics, do you think there's anything that can be done to provide protections or safety nets such that more people can actually take a counter position? Yes. So let's start by understanding the complex dynamical system of a company in a capitalist economy. So all the stuff that started on campus in 2015, you know, Greg and I wrote about it in The Coddling of the American Mind. We were going to have a chapter on The Coddling Goes to Work, but there weren't enough stories in 2017 when we were finishing the writing.

Starting point is 01:04:10 So we closed down the book. And then in 2018, it all starts blowing up, all this stuff, you know, because Gen Z graduates, they move into the corporate world, and they do the same stuff there that they were doing on campus. You know, the accusations that someone wore a hat that offended me, you have to punish them. You know, this is an HR issue. So all that stuff starts around 2018, 2019. And then, of course, in the summer of George Floyd, the political activism intensifies, you know, for again,

Starting point is 01:04:34 understandable reasons. But in that summer, almost all businesses, it seems, put out a statement on Black Lives Matter. Now, that was an exceptional summer, exceptional event. But that then led to pressures that then led to a reorientation of much of corporate America, at least in progressively oriented, progressively in companies, much like what happened to us in the academy in 2015, 2016. So it was very, very similar. But the difference is that companies actually have to make money, they actually have to be tied to the real world. So if they do things that backfire, that cost a lot of money without any benefit, like mandatory diversity training, it takes a lot of money. There's not really any evidence it makes anything better.

Starting point is 01:05:14 At some point, reality hits companies. Universities are different. They're not like that. There is no reality. The leading ones have gigantic endowments yeah no matter how bad the service is parents all over the world want their kids to go to the top 10 or 15 american universities and it doesn't matter what happens you know the product can suck but the demand for it is infinite so universities are not tied to reality in the way that a business is that's the first thing second thing is that most businesses are not as uniform as universities so armstrong i presume he's right of center or libertarian you know i don't want to speak for him i'm not conservative yeah i'm not i don't have no idea but in any case yeah but you know i don't think he's progressive i think he was you know so my point is that a number of right-leaning ceos did that he was the

Starting point is 01:06:00 first big one and it's called the mission focus movement that you know what our company is is not here to fix everything in the world, we're here to provide a great service for our customers. So mission focus, and a few right leaning companies did that. And the one that really changed things then was when Netflix did it, because Netflix is a very progressive company, hugely important culturally. And when the Netflix CEO said something similar, which was, if your values mean that you can't work on certain projects, maybe you shouldn't be working at Netflix. And I speak to a lot of managers and CEOs and leaders and like, they were so thrilled because almost all leaders hate this woke stuff. Almost all university presidents hate it makes their lives hell. So in the business world, they're able to push back. And they have been. So the pendulum is swinging back in business.

Starting point is 01:06:45 I don't yet see a sign on campus of a pendulum swinging back. I think it will happen eventually. The complex dynamical system is much more conducive to a kind of a crazy ideological thing divorced from reality on campus. But the way it's going to break, I believe, is things get sort of tense enough, unpleasant enough, wasteful enough, and then some school is going to break, I believe, is things get sort of tense enough, unpleasant enough, wasteful enough, and then some school is going to break. And I originally thought Chicago was the school and lots of schools would follow, and they didn't. Nobody followed Chicago. I mean, Mitch Daniels

Starting point is 01:07:15 at Purdue, but that's a different story. He's a conservative. So I'm on the advisory board of the University of Austin. Are you involved with it at all? It's in your hometown there. I'm not involved, but I have some passing familiarity. For people who don't have any familiarity, could you just explain what it is? So it's a university founded on the idea of we're going to rethink what a university should be. And Pano Kanelos is the president. He was the president of St. John's College in Maryland. And so it's going to be focused on, it's not going to have all the administrators, all the bells and whistles, it's going to really be focused on sort of a classics education at the beginning, but then practical as you move on. So a lot of not just take a course,

Starting point is 01:07:56 get a credit for sitting in a seat, but do things as part of a team to solve a problem. So it's going to be given that higher ed now is so so expensive and is not as good as it used to be, the product is just not as good. It's not as much fun. It's not as rigorous. So given that the product is declining while the price goes up, Austin is developing a model where the price is much, much lower. The product is a model for a lot of other universities to either change or be founded because I think we do need disruption and innovation. We need alternatives. We can't just have the one sort of Ivy League model of top universities and they're all making the same mistakes at the same time. I have a number of questions that float to the surface and I apologize for what is going to be a very inelegant way of posing them, but I'm going to give you a menu of options and I'd love for you to choose whichever is of the greatest interest. So something that came to mind was how you have preserved your ability or

Starting point is 01:08:58 ensured your ability to speak very openly about these things by maybe diversifying your identity and professional career. So not just teaching, but also books and so on, speaking, I assume. So you have a number of backup parachutes, I would say, perhaps in a sense. So maybe that's something to talk about. But what I wanted to ask you specifically related to University of Austin, because I did do a bit of reading related to it in prep for the Neil Ferguson conversation. It seems like, and I don't know if this coverage is accurate, but that some people have been start to finish strong supporters. There are and have been a number of very notable names involved. So I encourage people to check it out. It seems like there have also been people who agreed to be on advisory boards and so on who have folded or broken rank with public criticism.

Starting point is 01:09:53 How would you describe the reception and some of those dynamics, if what I'm reading is accurate? We're in a space that is heavily politicized. There's a lot of attacks, almost all on Twitter and social media. Most professors are reasonable. Most professors are left, center left. They believe in free speech. They believe that in class we should talk about ideas. So wherever you go, most people are reasonable. But the dynamics are such that if you stick your neck out, the small fringe of academic Twitter is going to call you racist, sexist, transphobe, whatever. And for a while, that was really scary. And I think now it's kind of like, it's kind of like the boy who cried wolf 10 million times, you know, once everyone's accused of racism, sexism,

Starting point is 01:10:39 transphobia, Islamophobia. I think now people are just so exhausted that I think now it's a little easier to stand that, you know, that fringe on Twitter. When the University of Austin was announced, I think there was a mistake in that some of the, you know, some of the original material was a little bit pugnacious, like, and it sounded sort of like this is going to be an anti-woke university. You know, once any particle is labeled like anti-woke, like now suddenly it's like, oh, you know, now it's, you know. So I think there was a little brouhaha. I think that was one fumble that the people running it made in what was otherwise, I think, a very good launch. I mean, I think they really explained well what it's going to be about. So I wish they hadn't done that because what I've learned from studying

Starting point is 01:11:16 morality is in a polarization spiral or a culture war, the harder you hit your enemy, the stronger they get. And so you don't win by punching them really hard. You can never destroy them. In a real war, you can literally kill them and take their land. But in a culture war, you can't do that. And so I think it's really important. This is what we've done at Heterodox Academy. So I founded an organization called Heterodox Academy. It's now run by John Tomasi as our president. And our attitude is, we're not here to fight the culture war. We're here to build great things. We're here to help people remember why they love universities, why universities are so

Starting point is 01:11:49 important. And I think Austin is doing that. So I think early on, you know, it was a new thing and it wasn't clear what it was. And there were one or two people who left the advisory board at that early stage. But I think now it's settled in. It's being successful. It doesn't yet have a full year of students. It had a summer program. And I think we need variation, we need innovation. And so I'm actually very excited about it.

Starting point is 01:12:11 Yeah, I agree. I'm excited to watch it. Could you say a bit more about Heterodox Academy? So I gave a talk in 2011, I was invited by the president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology to be part of a panel at our annual conference on the future of social psychology. And, you know, we talked about my stepping out in 1993. I'm not on a team. I was still very much a Democrat. I voted for Democrats. But by the time I was writing The Righteous Mind, I began to really take seriously that you need viewpoint diversity. You need conservatives and libertarians. You can't just have a bunch of progressives studying psychology. You get bad results. And so I gave a talk on how, you know, this is a problem. This is a problem. We don't have any conservatives. And I went through all kinds of methods of finding a conservative social

Starting point is 01:12:52 psychologist, and I couldn't find any, and I finally found one. So I gave a talk on this, and I wasn't kicked out of the field. People actually said, oh, you know, you're right. Like, actually, this would help us if we had some political diversity. So that was 2011. And this was just a problem about the faculty. And some other professors who were there liked what I said. They said, yeah, we think this is a problem too. So we wrote a paper together on laying out more formally, I think the title was Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science. So this is a straight academic faculty project. And then it turns out, actually, the same problem was happening in law schools and sociology and a lot of fields.

Starting point is 01:13:29 Their research was not reliable because of orthodoxy, political orthodoxy. So we all got together and said, hey, let's put up a website. And Nick Rosencrantz, a law professor at Georgetown, came up with the name Heterodox Academy. It's the opposite of Orthodox Academy. Orthodox means straight one. There's only one way of thinking. Heterodox means there should be a variety of ways of thinking. We need that in order to be successful. So we put up the website. We started it as a blog around like September 12th of 2015. And very, right after that, Yale blew up, the universities blew up, and suddenly it was like, wait a second, we thought this was just a faculty thing. But now it turns out, like, the campuses are going insane, the students are behaving in this strange way, they're saying everything is violence, everything is danger, everything's a threat.

Starting point is 01:14:25 So Heterodox Academy grew from just this faculty project to really being much more about university culture. To do our jobs, we have to have not just viewpoint diversity, but a sense of grace, a sense of tolerance, a sense of intellectual humility and generosity. We have to be able to think together. We have to have people like Rick Schwader saying, okay, you asserted that? Well, let me try the opposite. And then they don't get fired for doing it. So that's what we're trying to do. Heterodox Academy now has their, we have a couple of big projects. One is we're branching out and having campus communities. We're going to be working directly on campus with our many, we have about 5,000 members. I invite everyone who's listening here, if you are a professor or an administrator, if you're an insider to universities, if you're part of the community that is tasked with preserving these precious institutions,

Starting point is 01:15:04 please go to heterodoxacademy.org and click on About Us and join. You can see our membership. It's free. We have 5,000 professors as members, and we're equally divided left, right, libertarian. We're sort of all over the map. And it's a wonderful community. If you remember when it was fun, when there were jokes and exciting ideas, if you remember when everything wasn't so dangerous, please join us, because that's what we're trying to recall and restore. Who are some of the thinkers who have informed how you think about intellectual heterodoxy? And I will throw one out there, because I think that John Stuart Mill. Oh, yes. one out there because i think okay john stewart mill oh yes is this quote from john stewart mill he who knows his own side of the case knows little of that is that he who knows only his own side of the case only his own side of the case knows little of that exactly that's right so john

Starting point is 01:16:00 stewart mill is the the patron saint of viewpoint diversity. In fact, I would urge, I should have a copy of it here somewhere, one of the greatest works of the liberal tradition is On Liberty. It's a kind of a long book with dense prose, but chapter two is the key chapter on diversity of thought or freedom of thought, liberty of thought, I think it is. So, at Heterodox Academy, we took that chapter, it's 15,000 words, we cut it in half, we edited it down so you have a shortened version, much easier to read. And it's beautifully illustrated by a brilliant artist, Dave Cicerelli. So if you go to heterodoxacademy.org slash mill, it's a free ebook, you can buy it on Amazon for $20. But we put out a free ebook because we want students to read it. And it'll really, I mean, it really just makes the case that you need viewpoint diversity, if you want to to get smart if you want to figure things

Starting point is 01:16:45 out an amazing thing happens is what i've really taken a heart from studying john stewart mill is if you want to improve your thought the world will help you if you ask and if you go to people who disagree with you and say here's what i'm thinking where am i wrong they'll tell you and so when when greg and i wrote the coddling the american mind i paid seven social justice activists to read it, paid them each $700. And they read it, and they gave me their comments and their criticisms. One or two of them were kind of pissed off or annoyed. But the others were actually like, oh, you know, this is interesting. Like, we really engaged with each other, and they made the book better.

Starting point is 01:17:19 So you really need to seek out criticism. You need to seek out people who differ from you. And then actually, you'll get smarter. Have you found other people who have studied morality to defuse or defang their anger in the same way that you experienced it yourself? Is that a pattern that you've observed in other people? What, the ability to defang the anger, to like get past it? Right, well, your description of how you, I wouldn't say ceased to be angry, but lost your anger in the course of studying morality, is that something that you have seen replicated in other people? Oh yes. So first of all, the Buddhists and the Stoics, these are the two most concentrated wisdom traditions on

Starting point is 01:18:03 earth, I believe. My first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was about, I read all the ancient wisdom I could find, took out all the psychological claims. So chapter four of that book is on the ancient idea, you know, why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye when you cannot see the plank in your own? We're all hypocrites. So following certain wisdom traditions, especially Buddhism and Stoicism, but also Christianity, Judaism, you find these injunctions to go past good and evil to be more tolerant. So this is just sort of the progression of wisdom that most great cultures have realized. You also see it in a lot of people. I think as people get older, so at least in men, our testosterone levels, like,

Starting point is 01:18:42 they're really high in the teens, 20s, and then they sort of go down steadily. And that steady drop, I think it also mirrors the drop in violent criminality. And I believe it also mirrors the drop in like aggressive rock music. I used to like always need loud music. And as I get older, I don't. It also, it's a calming. So, you know, young men are more passionate and moralistic, perhaps. And then as you get older, you get kind of calmer. But there are lots of paragons of this. Daryl Davis being perhaps one of the preeminent ones. Daryl Davis, a black musician, blues musician, who was playing in a bar and ended up sitting next to a Ku Klux Klan member. He's conversing with the guy.

Starting point is 01:19:18 And rather than getting upset or angry or running away, he listens to him and listens to him, gets in a conversation with him. And they develop a friendship. And he gets the guy to give up his robe and leave the clan. And he's done this hundreds of times. Wow. How do you spell Daryl's name? D-A-R-Y-L, or is it double R? Daryl Davis is D-A-V-I-S. He's got one or two TED Talks that are great, and he's got a book or two. So, Darrell Davis, what an inspiring example of how, is your goal to impress everyone else with your righteous reaction? Well, if so, then you should

Starting point is 01:19:49 get angry, and you should yell and scream, and you should post things on Twitter. Or is your goal to actually change someone? And if your goal is to change someone, listen to them. Try to understand them. And if you do that, what Darrell says is, listen to them like they've never been listened to before. And then an amazing thing happens. Then they'll listen to you. So that's really the magic. And this is also Dale Carnegie. This is so many wise people that the things we do to show off our morality for others end up isolating us and making us stupid.

Starting point is 01:20:21 And unhappy, oftentimes. And unhappy, yeah. Anger in the brain is actually an approach anger is not a negative emotion anger in the brain it looks more like a positive emotion because a shared anger is thrilling and that's part of what's driving us off a cliff as a country what would you say are some of the conclusions or observations made in the happiness hypothesis that you revisit most often or underscore for yourself? And what is your set point if you have one? So the set point question is easy.

Starting point is 01:20:57 That just refers to the fact that happiness is heritable and identical twins separated at birth will tend to be similarly happy. And my set point is sort of right in the middle. I'm generally optimistic, but I've been depressed at a couple points in my life. I'm not very prone to it, but I've had some. So I'm sort of in the middle. But the level of happiness that you live at is not your set point. Where you live is sort of a range around your set point, depending on a few conditions. Those conditions are basically love and work, as Sigmund Freud said.

Starting point is 01:21:26 If you're doing well in those, you'll be at the top end of your range. So I teach a course at NYU, a graduate seminar called Work, Wisdom, and Happiness. And it's a positive psychology class. But in the last year, I've sort of readjusted the syllabus. I've rewired the course. The title could be Smarter, Stronger, More Sociable. And so we have sections on how do you get smarter? And you do that. It turns out the big thing you do, turn off your notifications, get your attention back, read Johan Harry's book, Stolen Focus.

Starting point is 01:22:00 So you can make yourself 10 or 15 IQ points smarter if you can regain control of your attention and cut down on the moralism. Those are the two big steps. So how do you get smarter? How do you get stronger? That's the coddling of the American mind, anti-fragility, Nassim Taleb. You get stronger by challenging yourself, by exposing yourself to threats and dangers and within limits that you then surmount. And we have to do this with kids. And how do you get more sociable? Well, it's actually some of the same skills. But the main one is really listen to people. And you can't do that as long as you're always distracted, as long as you're always on

Starting point is 01:22:28 your phone. So there are some really easy things you can do. And then the students learn to do some harder things. But if they can get smarter, stronger, and more sociable, then they will be more successful at work and in relationships. And if they're more successful in work and relationships, then I promised them on the first day, then they will be happier. Because that's how you live at the high end of your set range, is by having your love and your work go well. Is this course in any capacity available online? Or could it be made available online? Any aspect, maybe a reading list, maybe questions? Oh, the syllabus is online. You know what, I should do something like that. So,

Starting point is 01:23:09 right now, so it was just a seminar at Stern with 35 MBA students, two sections a year, and I've just raised it to 55 students and I'll teach more sections. I should put something up. You know what, I'm going to start a sub stack. Oh, this is great. I'm actually going to start a sub stack in January. I can't believe I have that. I didn't think of this. The sub stack people would kill me for not announcing this. It's going to be called After Babel is the name of the sub stack. And I can just put up whatever I want. I used to blog at righteousmind.com, but that was not much. So, I'm going to start blogging. And I thank you for that, Tim. I will put some, whatever I can put easily online or in there, I will put there,

Starting point is 01:23:47 at least the reading list and the syllabus. Amazing. And eventually maybe I could tape the lectures or do something to put it up. Yeah, I'll think about it. Is there a department and number for the class? Something that people could look for online? I'm not sure how that would work

Starting point is 01:24:05 in MBA programs, but I'm just thinking, you know, the class that I used to visit at Princeton was ELE 491, right? High-tech entrepreneurship. So it made it easy to find. Oh, yeah. There's no point in them finding it because it fills up with Stern students, you know, even if you're at NYU but not at Stern, you can't take it. So all my stuff is at jonathanite.com. I will find a way to put it on my site, and then I will, I think our discussion might air before New Year's, but the sub stack is going to be up until late January, probably. I'll do something. Thank you. And it's easy for us to put in the show notes. So once anything is available,

Starting point is 01:24:37 we can add it to the show notes at TimDotBlogs.com and people can find you by just searching H-A-I-D-T. Let's talk about religion and happiness. So I have observed, I'm not the only one, generally speaking, I would say the, say self-described rational materialist left-leaning folks to be pretty unhappy overall and i have found very smart very thoughtful people who identify as religious to, on average, be quite a bit happier. And I know happy can be a slippery term, but if we're looking at work and love, work and relationships, they seem to check a lot of boxes very well. But it seems to me, and I'm just going to speak for a second here, that with religion, you also remove a lot of uncertainty, decision fatigue, paradox of choice that makes life less of a death by a thousand paper cuts. And maybe that also contributes to general sense of well-being, that many of your decisions

Starting point is 01:26:05 are more automated, perhaps the people you spend time with, perhaps your weekly structure, the architecture of your life. How do you think about this? What have you seen in your observations and studies with respect to religion and happiness? And are there ingredients from religion that secular folks can borrow to get some of that upside? So there's a huge amount of research on happiness and who's happy, and the two big things that really come out consistently are religious people are happier and married people are happier. Religion and marriage are the two giant demographic factors or quasi-demographic factors that

Starting point is 01:26:46 seem to go with happiness. And then there's a lot of question as to why. Why does religion make people happy? It might be what you said it makes, you know, you don't have to think about things, you have a sense of meaning, you don't worry about the afterlife, whatever it is. No, it turns out when they look, when you do empirical studies of what elements of religious people's lives correlate with happiness, overwhelmingly, it's nothing about belief. It's participation in a community on a weekly basis, especially a

Starting point is 01:27:12 community that has some sort of moral principles, some sense of uplifting, some sense of self-control, binding, moral responsibility. And so actually, this allows me to go back to Durkheim. I dropped that name in before, but didn't really tell listeners anything about him. So Emile Durkheim is one of the most important sociologists in history. He's writing in France in the 1890s and early 1900s. And one of his early works is this incredible study of suicide. Now, this is when European countries are just beginning to collect statistics. And he goes through all the data he can get on suicide in different countries in Europe. And he's looking for what data he can get on suicide in different countries in Europe. And he's looking for what makes the suicide rate go up and down. And he treats the suicide rate as

Starting point is 01:27:51 a thing in itself. It's a sociological fact. It's an emergent fact about a country. Its rate goes up and down. What makes it go up and down? Well, when you go to war, the suicide rate goes way down. People are bound together. They don't kill themselves. When you look at who in a country kills themselves, it turns out if you're married, you're less likely to. If you're married with children, you're even less likely to. Whereas if you're Protestant, you're more likely to. But if you're Catholic or Jewish, you're less likely to. And over and over, what he finds is the degree to which people are bound into a society, the less likely they are to kill themselves. Now, in East Asian cultures,

Starting point is 01:28:25 in many cultures, you kill yourself because you're too tightly bound in and you're shamed. But in Western cultures, our problem is anomie or normlessness. You have a sense of meaninglessness. You're not connected. That's why Americans and Westerners kill themselves mostly. And so, back to religion, if you're an atheist and you're not part of a community, especially if you're a new atheist and you're angry or whatever, but the protective factor seems to be being bound into relationships and community, and that fits with everything else I know in psychology. The comment on wartime also makes me think about Tribe by Sebastian Junger, which I highly recommend to people. It really underscores the fragility of isolation and also the fragility of fetishizing comfort in a way. I suggest people take a look

Starting point is 01:29:19 at that. Well, Jonathan, we've covered a lot here and I could ask many more questions, but what have I neglected to ask? And I do have a question about heresies of yours in a moment, but is there anything that you would like to bring up that I have not mentioned? We haven't talked about what's happening to Gen Z. We haven't talked about what's happening to kids. You know, I talked about them before in a sort of negative way, like Gen Z shows up on campus, and then all of a sudden, there are all these problems but i don't get angry i'm not moralistic we have to understand what's happening to gen z so i just want to talk if i can just talk a little bit about that and could you also define gen z and then please continue

Starting point is 01:29:56 yeah so millennials are those who were born in 1982 and we used to think that it would go to maybe 2000. But it turns out that kids who were born in 1996 and later are different from those born, say, 1994 and earlier. I mean, it's a surprisingly sharp cut, equivalent to what we find with birth year 1946. You know, the post-war world really was different to grow up in. And I believe, so I'm drawing on work by Jean Twenge, but I've also added, she and I are working together and I've added a lot. What happened is that if you were born in, say, 1990, you didn't get an iPhone until maybe around 2009 is when teenagers started getting it. So if you're born in 1990, you didn't get an iPhone, a smartphone, until you were 20. And you didn't get on social media.

Starting point is 01:30:40 You might have been on Facebook partly, but you don't live on social media until you have your own smartphone. Whereas if you're born in 1997, you are 13 in 2010, when you might get your first smartphone. And you might get on Instagram in 2012, when huge numbers did. So I believe Gen Z is defined by the fact that they got smartphones and social media during early puberty. There's a lot of research pointing to early puberty, around 11 to 13 for girls, 12 to 15 for boys. What's coming into your brain then is really important because your frontal cortex is wiring itself up. So when human beings are raised without much independence, but yes, with a phone, and they spend their childhood just interacting with a screen, and especially social media, I believe it messes up cortical development. The girls in particular, the rates of anxiety and depression are up much more than 100%

Starting point is 01:31:30 since 2010. The rate of self-harm, hospitalizations for self-harm, is nearly tripled for preteen girls. So Gen Z is in big, big trouble. They're hurting, they're fragile, they're not doing well in the workplace, managers are finding them very hard to work with. So we have a generation that's running off the rails. And this is not a moralistic thing like, oh, those kids these days. This is a compassionate thing. Like, these are our children. Like, my kids are 13 and 16.

Starting point is 01:31:55 Everyone either has kids or has nieces and nephews. So this is, I think, the greatest emergency we face, the greatest health emergency. I think for kids, this is much, much bigger than COVID. COVID was a big deal for old people. It wasn't a big deal for children in terms of the risk. But this is a doubling, more than doubling of suicide rates for kids since 2010. So that's what I'm working on now. What decisions have you made in your parenting that you feel have been perhaps most impactful, less typical, or the Venn diagram

Starting point is 01:32:29 of those two overlapping? The terrible mental health of Gen Z is caused by two factors. One is the vast overprotection. Kids need to practice independence, self-governance. From the time they're seven or eight, they need independence, but they don't get it anymore. You and I, when we were growing up, you're younger than me, but I presume you were allowed to roam around your neighborhood when you were eight or nine years old. Oh, I was free-range. Yeah, riding bikes everywhere when I was younger. I was also in a rural environment, but yeah, I was out and about very early. So kids must have free-range childhoods. They must practice independence. And they had that before the 90s. And in the 90s, things got

Starting point is 01:33:06 incredibly safe. We locked up the drunk drivers, we took the perverts off the street, crime plummets, but we freaked out about child abduction unnecessarily. So in the 90s, we stopped letting kids out. And this affects Gen Z and the late millennials. Anyway, but you asked about me. So what my wife and I did, we live in here in New York City, in Greenwich Village, we because we're friends with Lenore Skenazy, who wrote this fantastic book, Free Range Kids, we let our kids out to play in Washington Square Park. We sent them out on errands when they were eight, nine years old. You know, New York City was very safe back then. It's a little more dangerous now, but it was very, very safe in the mid, in the 2010s.

Starting point is 01:33:41 And we sent them out and we had them walk to school way, you know, a year before before anyone else was was doing it so i'm very glad we did that um we also made it clear no social media at least until high school absolutely none in middle school and that's been very good when they start sixth grade my kids tell me everyone's on instagram and we said no you we're not going to let you do it the The one mistake I made was that when my son wanted Fortnite in sixth grade, and we said no, because video games can be addictive. But now that I've dug into the literature a lot more, now I see that, yes, a lot of boys do get in trouble from video games because they're on it so much that they're addicted to it, and it pushes out everything else. But a couple hours a day for boys to be in a group that's battling other boys, it turns out that's actually a good thing. And my son was somewhat cut off in sixth grade.

Starting point is 01:34:29 Quick question. Good in what respects? How is that assessed? Just in terms of acting as a release valve for aggression or social cohesion? Group dynamics. So the release valve idea from Freud does not end up being true. Kids don't need to blow off aggression. It's not like that. It's rather that girls and boys each need to practice their gendered behaviors. This is what play is. Play, for all mammals, is a way you practice in childhood the skills you'll need as an adult. And so boys and girls have very different play. Boys tend to break up into groups to compete with other groups. And multiplayer video games allow them to do that.

Starting point is 01:35:09 So I'm not saying these are great. I'm saying, ideally, the kids should be out having adventures. But given that all the kids are home, they're not allowed out until they're, you know, 11, 12 years old. So at least a multiplayer video game allows them to be part of a group. Now, it's not a very creative group. The rules are all set by the company. So it's not like video games are anywhere near as good as being out on their own. But they're not bad until it gets to be heavy. So that was a small mistake. Once COVID hit, we did let him get Fortnite, and then that was the only way he talked with his friends. So that was okay. The one mistake I think we did make, we tried a few different summer camps. We never quite found one, but I wish we'd found a really good summer camp. And I would urge this for everybody who's a parent of young kids.

Starting point is 01:35:42 From the time your kid is about eight or nine, certainly, I'd say eight, find a sleepaway camp that is pretty unstructured and unsupervised. The kids have to have a lot of independence. You know, some summer camps now are so overprotective, you can't go to the bathroom unless you have an escort. And sometimes you need two escorts, because what if one escort falls down and gets hurt? Like, that's crazy, crazy overprotective everywhere. But if you can find a summer camp that is not crazy overprotective, send your kid there every summer. That, I think, is one of the few chances they really have to develop skills to be out in the woods. So I wish we'd done that. I was fortunate in that respect. I got sent off to summer camps in Wyoming, where we would work on ranches, got kicked by horses. And I mean, I didn't suffer any terrible injuries, but it wasn't free of injuries,

Starting point is 01:36:33 but that was okay. I mean, nothing was cataclysmic. And that I think combined, I mean, if I don't have kids, but if I do, and I hope I do at some point, I also think a year abroad in a critical window similar to mine, because of that forced independence, and there are other reasons, there are other compelling reasons, but I came back a fundamentally different person in terms of my confidence in my abilities to handle uncertainty and to adapt. It was just night and day, complete phase shift. That's right. That's right. That's how kids learn to manage risk for themselves. You learn to be a risk taker. When we overprotect kids, we're not doing them any favors. We're not keeping them safe. We're increasing their odds of anxiety and depression, self-harm and suicide. And we're depriving them of the ability to judge risks for themselves. They're going to be less successful, less likely to start businesses. No, we've really messed up Gen Z.

Starting point is 01:37:31 I feel like one other unexpected blessing in my life was transitioning from a very bad public school on Long Island to a very good boarding school in New Hampshire, which was actually largely my idea, encouraged by teachers, a handful of good teachers at the pretty low quality public school on Long Island who effectively said, you should try to get out of here. So I do owe them thanks. When I went to the boarding school, which was very similar to, let's say, a dead poet society type of setup, but classes six days a week, mandatory sports. And looking back, the mandatory sports, I think, was the force multiplier that allowed everything else to go more smoothly on so many levels. So if I get to the point, and I hope I do

Starting point is 01:38:25 when I'm parenting, I think physical activity in group sports will probably play a compelling role. I don't know if there's any research to support that. Oh, there is. There is. But just two points. I think you're basically right, but just two points of nuance. One is to the extent that it's heavily supervised and there's a coach, it's less nutritious. They're not going to learn as much. The ideal is for kids to be out making up their own games, enforcing the rules, because then you have to keep the game going. You have to learn how to adapt to other kids. Whereas if there's a coach or a referee, then what you learn is how do I get the referee to come in on my side? And that's good preparation college today where if somebody says something how do I get a dean to punish him but that's bad

Starting point is 01:39:09 preparation for life that's the first thing second thing I just came across a finding that participation in individualist sports like gymnastics and especially ballet is bad it actually is conducive to bad mental health I I would never let my daughter do ballet. But team sports, where you're, you know, soccer, basketball, where you're really functioning as a team, over and over again, those have very good effects on mental health and development. So, I would agree with that. Yeah, you know, so my sport was wrestling, which was certainly an individual sport practiced in a team context. you would have wrestling partners and so on. I would have a child do wrestling, I think. Now, I'd have them wear headgear because I don't think cauliflower ears work terribly well for most people. It goes doubly for females, I would say.

Starting point is 01:39:59 And if you haven't seen cauliflower ears on female ears, it is scar tissue that will not go away unless it's surgically removed. I saw a lot of it in Japan in judo players, male and female, lots of cauliflower ears. But I found it to be, for me personally at least, an excellent venue for proving to myself that I could exceed the limitations I thought I had. And in terms of work capacity and pain tolerance also, I will say critical, critical components. So I can't totally with any conviction say that it was wrestling that did this, although I have some belief that it contributed. The coach, John Buxton, changed the lives of almost every athlete he coached.

Starting point is 01:40:47 And to this day, I'm still close to him. And many people in that wrestling team went on to do some pretty outstanding things. And they have all, to my knowledge, just about all of them have mentioned Mr. Buxton. We have a tough time calling him John. I have to ask you a question then. Did he have a tough coaching style, or did he have like a warm nurturing style? He was extremely, extremely tough. And this is what I was going to bring up. He was extremely

Starting point is 01:41:12 tough. He did not suffer fools gladly at all. If people complained about something they could fix themselves or should try to fix themselves, he did not tolerate it. He was a very tough coach. Good. That's what I expected. And he was a very, very, very good performer. So he himself had been an outstanding wrestler and could go toe-to-toe with anyone in the group, including people who went on to become All-Americans. I mean, granted, in their particular corner of the wrestling world. And exceptionally tough. And he would give occasional positive feedback.

Starting point is 01:41:54 I don't want to say he was stingy, but you really had to earn it. You really, really had to earn it. That's what I figured. Because wrestling is probably the best anti-fragile sport there is. That is, more than any other sport, wrestling is really going to be about developing your anti-fragility, your strength in the face of adversity, testing your strength. So the sport itself is very conducive to growth in that way. And I kind of knew, given how grateful you were, I kind of knew that he was going to be a tough coach, not a warm, nurturing coach. Because you really need,

Starting point is 01:42:22 to get the full benefit of the growth into strength. You need someone to push you. You need someone with high standards. You need someone to enforce those standards. You need to strive for them. A few years ago, when I gave a talk on the coddling of the American mind, I was sitting next to somebody who'd been, I think, the head of the NCAA or high up in it. And this was like 2018, 2019. He said, the tough coaching style, it's not that it's banned, but it's that coaches are fine and they can't use the tough style anymore. Because the kids will cry, they'll report them, they'll say, no, you know, you need to be nurturing. And so, tough coaching, I think, is going out. Because what if you hurt a kid's feelings? And so, in so many ways, we've accepted,

Starting point is 01:42:59 you know, and that's great untruth number one of the coddling American mind is what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Now, that's wrong. That's a falsehood. But that's what many people now believe. And I think your experience really shows that, no, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That's what Nietzsche said, and that's what the psychology supports. So, you know, I think for the lesson here for parents and teachers is we need to have standards. We need to push kids to meet the standards. Sometimes the kids are not going to be happy.

Starting point is 01:43:23 And as long as we can be reported for pushing the kids, we're not going to push the kids. And the whole generation goes down the tubes. So that's what we're doing. Yeah. And Coach Buxton also, I think, fundamentally believes, I'll speak for myself personally, I don't want to speak for other folks, but he would reinforce the belief that he saw in me the capacity to do more, to perform better. And it was in that context that being a tough coach was the nice thing to do. Does that make sense? In service of realizing that unrealized potential. And I think all of the athletes he coached felt that way, that he saw something in us that we couldn't easily see, and he was pushing us to unlock

Starting point is 01:44:11 that potential. So it was not abusive for the sake of, say, breaking someone down, like perhaps a drill sergeant might serve the function of shared privation and that type of environment. I think there's a purpose to that, and I think it actually can be good for the collective. But in this particular wrestling context, the wellspring of the toughness came from a place of, in some cases, explicitly saying, you can do better, and I know you can do better.

Starting point is 01:44:41 And that was powerful. And that is beautiful. I think what you've just done there is you've stated what the telos of teaching should be. Telos is this Greek word that I'm very fond of nowadays. It means the end or purpose for which something is done. The telos of medicine is health. What is the telos of a university? And I've been focusing on the research aspect where our telos is truth, but we're also teachers. And our telos as teachers is not truth. And I've been saying,

Starting point is 01:45:05 oh, you know, it's the education of our kids, it's learning, teaching. But I think what you said is actually better. The telos of a teacher is doing the service of realizing their untapped potential. That's what we're trying to do. That's what we should be trying to do. And we don't always do it. Yeah, I've been very fortunate in that respect to have had a handful of teachers who were unrelenting in their pushing towards the truth that they saw, which was their students could, in fact, do the hard things. And that was true. I'll give thanks to another teacher, Professor Shimano, who was my first Japanese teacher. And surprise, surprise, when I transferred from Spanish to Japanese, I found Japanese to be extremely difficult. And I almost quit, I want to say twice, once just because of the difficulty with the language grammatically, and the second

Starting point is 01:46:01 time when we started delving into the various writing systems in Japanese. And I was talked off the ledge by Professor Shimano, who was able to just say, give it some time. I think you can do this. And I'm betting that I can help you do this. And good God, if I had not listened to that, if I had pushed back, if I had become offended and walked from that class, my life would not be what it is today in any respect. So I feel very, very grateful. Let's talk just a little bit, if there's anything that you'd care to add about intellectual anti-fragility. Are there other things that people can do, other practices they can experiment with, other resources that you would suggest they look to to develop intellectual anti-fragility?

Starting point is 01:46:59 So I created a resource, an online resource, with Caroline Mell, who was working with me originally at Heterodox Academy, but we branched out. If listeners go to constructivedialogue.org, we've created a program called Perspectives that kind of walks you through some of the moral psychology, like why are we like this? Why are we so tribal? Why do we have confirmation bias? And it teaches you how to open your mind, open your heart, and it teaches you how to open your mind open your heart and it teaches you how to engage with people and how to learn from them how to listen so all the things we've been talking about if you go to constructive dialogue and yes dialogue is d-i-a-l-o-g-u-e dot org we have a program that we created called perspectives it used to be called open mind and if listeners go there it was designed for use in college courses,

Starting point is 01:47:45 like especially orientation, because if everyone in a group has these concepts and they use these tools, you're gonna have great discussions, you're gonna be able to talk about hard things, it works really well in businesses as well. So that's one resource. Another resource, I think,

Starting point is 01:48:00 what I found really helped me when I was writing The Righteous Mind was I just subscribed to the best writing on the other side. So, I was very much on the left when I started the book, and I would read The New Republic and The New York Times were things I read back when The New Republic was a good magazine. But I subscribed to National Review and The Wall Street Journal. And National Review has all these really smart center-right intellectuals, great writing. And I found that and i would read about current events like for you know on the left and the right i just understood things

Starting point is 01:48:29 much better you know it's kind of trite but you literally can't understand something from looking at a single perspective you kind of have to walk around it and look at it from all all sides so you know resources are out there and the internet is such that it will guide you to fantastic resources from each perspective and if you don't seek them out, then what you get, if you're on the left, you do encounter some conservative ideas, but usually you encounter reports of them in their worst form, or reports of them being held up to ridicule. And same thing if you're on the right. So yeah, if you want to be smarter and stronger, you must seek out different perspectives. It's kind of trite, but there it is. So constructivedialogue.org, and we'll link to all of these in the show notes. And I'll also create a URL by the time this comes up, it'll work, which will just be tim.blog slash height, H-A-I-D-T, and that will forward to this episode so people can

Starting point is 01:49:23 find all the links in the show notes really easily. Let me ask you the billboard question. I'm curious what your take on this might be. The billboard question is sometimes a dead end, and I'll take full blame for that if it is. But if you could put a message, a quote, anything at all on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get something out to billions of people, assuming they would all understand it, what might you put on that billboard? So if I could put something up on a billboard, actually I'm going to nominate two, if you'll give me the front and the back of the billboard. I'll give you two. Okay. So the first is a quote from a Zen buddhist philosopher in the eighth century seng son was his name chinese buddhist philosopher i've used this quote in most of my books i'll just

Starting point is 01:50:10 i'll just read i'll read the whole thing he says the perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose do not like do not dislike all will then be clear Make a hairbreadth difference, and heaven and earth are set apart. If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease. So this is what we were talking about before, about getting beyond moralism. When you're moralistic, when you're judging, when you're saying this is good, this is bad, you get stupider. You don't understand the nuance of things. So this quote is about sort of demoralization, not like being demoralized, but like sucking the moralism or the morality out of something and just trying to understand it. So that's the first. And then if I have the back of

Starting point is 01:51:00 the billboard, I would put this quote from Joseph Campbell. So Joseph Campbell was a professor at, I think it was Bryn Mawr, Sarah Lawrence, rather, in the late 20th century. He studied myths, and there was a wonderful PBS series on the, I think, The Hero with a Thousand Faces was one of his books. So this motto, this really calms me, because I'm very alarmed at the way things are going, the way our complex dynamical system is kind of veering into chaos. And I found this quote to be really, really comforting. I sort of have it up on my, you know, my walls, various places. He says the lesson from his studying of heroes' myths, heroes' journey, stories around the world is this, quote, participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows,

Starting point is 01:51:45 but we can choose to live in joy. The warrior's approach is to say yes to life, yes to it all. So that's what I'd put up. Love it. That's a great combination. And you mentioned Buddhism and Stoicism earlier. I don't know if you feel this way, but I have felt over time that there's tremendous overlap. Oh, yeah. In those two, let's just call it I could use a fancy word, of life, the daily flux, all of these tiny and large tragedies that befall everyone at various points. When do you or how do you revisit some of these practical philosophies for yourself? Let's just say that you're going through a period or there's an event where you you start to feel dysregulated consumed by emotions what do you do thank you for that that's what you know earlier you asked me like do i have practices um so beginning you know there was the summer of 2017

Starting point is 01:53:17 i think it was when trump was like threatening nuclear war against you know there's a possibility of a nuclear war with north korea and um uh and i really thought like he i think he might actually want to do it i was really thinking like this really could be the end of the world and it was then that i started rereading stoic writings in the morning and my favorite two are marcus aurelius meditations the gregory hayes translation is i think the best one and then also Epictetus, just, you know, his collected works. And what I do, whenever I read, I do all my reading electronically now, because I like to copy out text. So, I copy my favorite lines out into an Evernote file. And so, what I do in the morning is I even have it in my calendar. Let me see, how do I record it in my calendar? Every day,

Starting point is 01:54:01 repeating. There's a couple different things I do, but it's basically either reading Stoicism or Buddhism or reflecting on psychotherapy. I've been in therapy for a while. I have it right here, yeah, Stoic or Buddhist reading, and I have to check it off each morning. And I do that before I check email, before anything else. And you're right, Stoicism and Buddhism, they're very, very similar, except Stoicism is sort of like a Western version, because it is more about action in the world. Now, Buddhism, there are Buddhisms that are very much in the world, there are those that pull you away more. But there is a sort of an Eastern sensibility, like in Taoism, about like, don't do anything, just settle, just let the world arrange itself. And Westerners are not like that,

Starting point is 01:54:39 and Stoics are not like that. But it is like, act in the world, like, okay, you're the emperor of Rome, but you're still getting upset about things things and you have to like, everything's crazy around you. But it's not just for emperors. Epictetus was a slave. And so, it actually works at any level of society. You can never control everything, even if you're the emperor. So, both of them are just incredibly psychologically wise ways of living in a world that you can't control and maintaining not just your equanimity, but even the capacity to be open-hearted and loving. There's some very similar passages about not necessarily loving your enemies, but actually sometimes it is.

Starting point is 01:55:13 And they both use the same technique of saying, and remember, you'll both be dead before long. That's a quote from the Dhammapada. Like, you know, how can you quarrel knowing that you'll both be dead before long? It's all trivial. How long is your document that you review in the morning, that Evernote file? You know, I've got a whole big one for Seneca, who I'm going through. Seneca, there's just so much writing, and it's not as dense in terms of gems. But,

Starting point is 01:55:37 you know, I've got one for Epictetus, one for Aurelius, one for Buddha. And if you go to thecoddling.com, which the the web page for the coddling of the american mind and you go to solutions better mental health i've actually put up at the bottom i've put up a collection of sayings by marcus aurelius that basically are about the three great untruths of the book so here's one today i escaped from anxiety or no i discarded it because it was within me in my own perceptions, not outside. The great untruth that we cover in the book is always trust your feelings. But what the Buddhists and the Stoics and CBT tell us is, no, don't always trust your feelings.

Starting point is 01:56:16 Question them. Sometimes they're legitimate, but sometimes they're gross overreactions to nothing. So anyway, yeah, I those are those are the great wisdom traditions in my opinion how long do you spend in the morning if you check the box of that calendar reminder with that reading oh it's you know about 10 minutes 10 minutes recently i'm doing like a loving kindness meditation like to you know because i'm very cerebral and i actually sort of need to open my heart more it's just the you know i just i make i make a sort of coffee substitute i'm very sensitive to caffeine so i'm experimenting with like these mushroom based things um anyway but i just i make you know a hot beverage and then i sit on a comfortable sofa and and i just about 10 minutes because what i found is that my nba students i

Starting point is 01:57:00 asked how many of you check your phone before you get up to pee, and how many of you wait until you actually have gone into the bathroom? And very few of them wait. It's like right away. It's like, I'm still, okay, what's, you know, turn on the stream, turn on the stream, have it come in. Like, no, don't do that. Yeah. Have a better boot up sequence for your morning and day. Yeah, exactly. That's right. John, I really appreciate all the time. This has been a lot of fun. I have copious notes. There are many things that I'm going to be looking up. And I think the first will be on Liberty Chapter 2. I'm going to check in and give that a read. And then I have many others. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any closing comments?

Starting point is 01:57:40 Any questions? Anything you'd like to point my audience to that we haven't mentioned or that we have mentioned? Any complaints you'd like to lodge? Anything at all? No, I'd just like to say, you know, my mission when I moved to Stern Business School, everyone has a mission statement, so I made a mission statement. And my mission is to use my research and that of others in moral psychology to help important institutions work better. And I've started various organizations. So, if you're concerned about universities, please go to heterodoxacademy.org

Starting point is 01:58:08 and join if you're an academic or support us financially if you can. If you're concerned about people's ability to talk to each other or you need to address conflict in your own organization, please go to constructivedialogue.org. If you are a parent and you have kids born after 1996, you have Gen Z kids,

Starting point is 01:58:25 please go to letgrow.org, a site I started with Lenore Skenazy to encourage free-range parenting. And so all three of those are nonprofit foundations. We really need help. I'm trying hard to raise money for them, so please support us. And all of them, I hope, will help you solve problems in your own lives and in your own organizations and your own families. Perfect. That's the perfect place to wrap up. And for everyone listening, all of these links,

Starting point is 01:58:56 I will gather and put also in the show notes. So they'll be collected in one place and you can click them to take yourself to all these destinations, tim.blog forward slash height h a i d t on twitter be careful it's a full contact sport out there at john height and jonathan height dot com john thank you so much for taking the time and being so game i really appreciate it oh thank you this is rollicking good fun and to everybody out there be just a little kinder than is necessary. Don't believe everything that you think. Ask questions before you make strong statements. And thanks for listening. every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend. Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that

Starting point is 02:00:11 get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday,

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Starting point is 02:01:55 If you decide it's not the best fit, you're welcome to return it for a full refund. Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both GQ and Wired magazines. For you, my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows. Go to helixsleep.com slash Tim. That's helixsleep.com slash Tim. Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com slash Tim. Or click the link in the episode's description, helixsleep.com. With Helix Sleep, better sleep starts now. This episode is brought to you by Viore Clothing, spelled V-U-O-R-I, Viore. I've been wearing Viore at least one item per day for the last few months, and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out. It

Starting point is 02:02:46 can be used for going out to dinner. At least in my case, I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish. And I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete. She is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever used or heard of Viore and this too have lasted. They're stylish enough I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their clementine running shorts for summer and love them. The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out. In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga running loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also. I like the discreet logo.

Starting point is 02:03:46 So that gives you some idea. That was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just her response via text. Viori, again spelled V-U-O-R-I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear it running. You can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case, again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing. Their clothing is so comfortable and looks so good. And it's non-offensive. You don't have a huge brand logo on your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time. And my girlfriend and I have been wearing them for the last few months. Their men's core short, K-O-R-E, the most comfortable lined athletic short is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for

Starting point is 02:04:30 kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it. The Banks short, this is their go to land to sea short, is the ultimate in versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now, which I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there, or at least men out there, is the Ponto Performance Pant. And you'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about. But I'm wearing them right now. They're thin performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice.

Starting point is 02:04:58 So you got to check it out. P-O-N-T-O, Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Viore isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this and so am I. Vioreclothing.com forward slash Tim. That's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com slash Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders

Starting point is 02:05:38 over $75 and free returns. So check it out. Vioreclothing.com slash Tim. That's V-U-O-R-I Clothing.com slash Tim and discover the versatility of Viori Clothing.

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #644: Jonathan Haidt — The Coddling of the American Mind, How to Become Intellectually Antifragile, and How to Lose Anger by Studying Morality

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #644: Jonathan Haidt — The Coddling of the American Mind, How to Become Intellectually Antifragile, and How to Lose Anger by Studying Morality

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.