Jonathan Haidt

00:01and four three two one hello hello Jeff thanks for doing this man I really appreciate it oh this is exciting I don't think I've ever had a conversation as long as we're about to have I've been listening to the happiness hypothesis over the last few days and I really really enjoy it I'm really enjoying it it's really fascinating stuff man but one thing I wanted to talk about because we're talking about it right before we got started was what's happening with Peter Bogosian at Portland State University yeah for folks who don't know the story he and I forget his two colleagues challenged lemon rose and James Lindsay yeah they released these fake papers on like homoeroticism and rape culture in dog parks and just really proprietors papers that almost like an article from the onion and some of them not only did they get peer reviewed and accepted into these journals but they got loud it as

00:58being these amazing was one did one guy yeah yeah and now he's getting in trouble that's right yeah and we were just talking about it and I just would love to know your thoughts as a professor like what oh sure yeah so you know for those who don't know I guess most your listeners probably do but you know it was called the grievance studies hoax yeah because and and this is one of the big issues going on in the Academy I hope I'll talk about is you know what does it take to have good scholarship and and the argument is that in some fields as long as you hate the right things and use the right words you'll get published and that's not scholarship that's activism and so these three these three people who did this hoax they were trying to show that that's the case and so they wrote these papers one of them was actually a section of mine Kumpf yes and they just substituted in something

01:47about feminism for Nazism something like that and I don't remember that one actually got I think it's it at any rate the point is they were trying to show that this is some of these fields in the academy are not really about scholarship they're just about showing that you hate the right things their activism and so there's no way to break in within those closed world so they did a time-honored thing they did a hoax they published they'd submitted these papers they made up fake names and and of them got accepted and now what's happening is that the universe at Portland State University which is only one of the three is that it is a professor he's assistant professor so he's not tenured you know of course the he has a lot of enemies and of course I don't know what's going on behind the scenes but it looks like some of them wanted him investigated for violating

02:34the IRB the internal review board because the claim is they fabricated data because one of the paper says I inspected the genitals of ten thousand dogs in the dog park you know it's like obviously absurd yeah and he said you know in 63 percent of the of the attempted hump it because the thing the thing of the article was that the idea that you know you go to a dog park and you see dogs humping each other and they were interpreting this as rape as doggy rape and so he's got all these enough you know fake numbers in there so is that fraud isn't that data fraud and if you read so I'm writing a letter for a lot of us are not writing letters in support of of billion thank you for doing that but if you read the you know they at his university committee was impaneled and they looked at the literal definition of data fabrication and it's possible that he does fall under that

03:22but the point of this whole thing is so it's not like I can't weigh in on whether or not technically but but these rules are put in place to prevent the corruption of the scientific record and what he was doing was not going to corrupt the scientific record it was done to correct it we were doing it to show that there's a huge problem and then they were going to unveil it so the question is is the university going to interpret it this in the worst possible in a narrows possible way and thereby make fools of themselves look like laughing stocks or are they going to use some common sense and recognize this for what it was it wasn't data fabrication it wasn't a fraud it was an expose that's right yeah and I hope that they come to their senses and they do have a point if I'm going to be completely objective about data fabrication I mean technically I mean maybe they could have

04:15written that paper without saying that they actually tested ten thousand genitals of you but what's really important I think is that they recognize that regular people are paying attend to this now people that aren't involved in this very insulated world and they're going this is crazy like imagine if your children are going there and your children children are being taught at this school that's willing to accept this kind of nonsense like this what what happened at Evergreen State University is another example of that it's right it's incredibly damaging to them as a university I mean their their enrollment is significant on it that's right their funding is in real big trouble and it's a real bad situation for them and if you talk to Brett Weinstein it was a wonderful place just a few years ago when he was teaching there that's right and it's gotten

05:08crazier and crazier on these campuses to the point where nonsense is never being is not being questioned at all it's just being accepted as just some some is it's almost like some religious dogma that you have to follow that's right so the wait I think the way to make sense of all of this is you have to always look at what game is being played so human beings evolved in small-scale societies we have all kinds of abilities to function in those small-scale societies one of those is religious worship we're very good at making something sacred and circling around it another is war we're very good at forming teams to fight the other side and we love that so much we create sports and you know video game battles with team vs. team so there's all these different games you can play and the truth-seeking game is a was a really special one in a weird one and we're not

05:57very good at it as individuals and in my view the genius of university is that it takes people and puts them together in ways where each person each like scientists aren't these super rational creatures that are you know looking to disconfirm their own ideas no we're not looking we want to prove our ideas we love our ideas but a university puts us together in a way in which you are really motivated to disprove my ideas and I'm motivated to disprove yours you put us together we cancel out each other's confirmation biases so the truth-seeking game is a very special game that can only be played in a very special institution with special norms okay so we're doing this for you know my whole time in academia I started at school in 1987 at the University of Pennsylvania and then just in the last few years it's like some people are playing this really different game and

06:48it's like if you know if I'm playing tennis and I hit the ball to you like we're in a seminar class mm-hmm I give you a question I challenge you you come back and we go back and forth and in the process we learned so that's like kind of like playing tennis so I'm doing this and then suddenly like someone tackles me like what that you don't do that in tennis no no but they're playing football you see and in football it's a much rougher game and you're trying to destroy the others I'm not really in football but I'm saying yes you know it's a and so as norms of combat come in and what I mean by it is political combat as some people within universities see that what we're doing here is not seeking truth we're trying to fight fascism or we're trying to defeat conservatism or we're trying to fight racism or whatever some sort of political goal and these games are

07:36completely incompatible and so that's why this madness has erupted where you see professors saying something maybe it's a little provocative I'm going back to Socrates that was kind of the point was to provoke and you see these bizarre reactions emotional reactions groups organized to demand that a professor be fired because we're playing different games yeah how did this start how did it start because it seems like there there has to be an event or something or yeah a trend well so so the you know the book that the book that I just put out in September with Greg Luciana off the coddling of the American mind yeah I read the first chapter that as well okay well thank you for admitting that it was only one chapter usually driven to that one because the unfortunately I was reading that and then I got on a flight and I just wanted to zone out so I listened to this one on tape

08:31okay well I'll tell you all about it but the key thing is that that book that calling the American mind was something that we wrote because Greg began observing this weird stuff happening on universities in 2014 it all starts in 2014 most of your listeners have heard about safe spaces microaggressions bias response teams trigger warnings all that stuff that stuff didn't exist before 2014 it just begins creeping in then and then it kind of blows up in 2015 and so our whole book is an exploration of why why did this happen and so to your question about was there an event our answer is there are six different causal threads there's like all these social trends I'm going back to the 80s and 90s that came together around 2014 so that students are a little different and then there are certain forces acting on them that are different and so you get this weird

09:23new game you get this explosive mix you get some students who are actually very drawn to grievin studies and so very briefly like the it's things like rising political polarization so left and right never particularly liked each other but in the 70s and 80s if you look at surveys done of how much you hate people on the other side it's not that intense it begins going up in the in the 80s and then especially after 2000 it's going up very steeply at the same time university faculty who have always leaned left throughout the 20th century but was only a lean and in the 90s it begins shifting much further left so that now Faculty's especially in the social sciences and Humanities are pretty purified they're overwhelmingly on the left so you have a more left-leaning university at a time when left-right hostility is getting more and more intense and so any question that has a political valence

10:19now there's a lot more people who want to do the football game not the truth-seeking game and then we got to defeat the other side don't give me nuance don't give me data we know what we believe and damn it we're gonna you know so you got this changing political situation and then you've got a couple of threads about what we've done to kids so and they've got this is a whole nother area conversation for us but we basically took away free play and gave them social media the same basically kids were born in 1995 and after Gen Z they had really different childhoods and they're not as prepared for conflict and college we'll get into that later but you put all these things together you get kids who are much more anxious and fragile much more depressed coming onto campus at a time a much gray political activism and now these grievin studies ideas about America's a matrix

11:10of oppression and look at the world in terms of good versus evil it's more appealing to them and it's that minority of students they're the ones who are initiating a lot of the movements it's such a strange time to be on the outside and watch this because a person like myself is always counted on intellectuals and professors and people like yourself to sort of make sense of things and to reinforce the idea that freedom of speech and freedom to knowledge and one of the things that's most disturbing when you see in schools is people that are even marginally right-leaning or centrist being called Nazis and being silenced and they're pulling fire alarms when they're speaking even people like christina hoff sommers who's a feminist gets shouted down and people yelling at her in car in are fascism it's just very strange it's very strange to watch from the outside

12:06and it's also very strange to not see any pushback by the professors so sitting here and seeing this happen and thinking with these poor kids they're they're gonna have to go into the workplace they're gonna have to right now they're in this very insulated environment they're gonna escape that environment when they graduate and then they're either gonna push this ideology into the workforce which you do see now that's it especially telling the lab that yeah that's right no that's right I know it's strange to look at it from the outside and believe me it's stranger from the inside hmm but one thing I can say that it might be helpful here is that from the outside what you see is the news reports and the news reports are going to be very selective and so especially what happens is because you know universities that have always leaned left and so the right leaning media have always been

12:53suspicious so the right leaning media has huge coverage of every little thing and sometimes it's it's exaggerated sometimes it's misinterpreted but the most time there was something there left-leaning media tends to ignore it and so I go around the country and you know people on the right expect that oh my god it's chaos and mob violence on campus which isn't true that's an exaggeration and the left is like problem what problem there's nothing changing mmm and so I think the key thing keep in mind here is that there's about 4,500 institutions of higher education in this country most of them are not selective schools they'll take anyone who comes and in those schools not much is happening but if you go to the elite liberal arts colleges in the North East and the West Coast then usually something is happening and so that heterodox Academy it's a group that I

13:42co-founded of professors that are pushing back it's bipartisan we have as many people on the room the left is on the right we created a map of where all the shout downs have taken place and they're all right in the Northeast or along the Pacific coast like from you know evergreen you know down to you know Berkeley and all that and then a couple in Chicago so from in most of the country this stuff is not happening most schools the culture hasn't really changed much but at the top schools in general it has so that's one thing to just keep in mind there is a moral panic on the right about this which doesn't mean that there's not something real there really is a huge problem but it's not as pervasive as is sometimes made out to be so is it akin to looking at violence in the news media like you when you read about violence in terms of robberies and murders in

14:27general you're not going to encounter much in your life the world is a large place yeah but we concentrate on these really bad moments yeah it's a little bit like that except that you know one of the reasons that we took child we took free play away from kids is that we were afraid that they'd be abducted and that almost no that was so rare and but we got a lot of coverage of that in the 80s and 90s and we changed our behavior because of that and that was a gross overreaction the situation on campus is is not like that is it's your odds of being nailed are much higher than that and so you know I hear every day or at least every week I get an email from a professor who says you know I I used a metaphor in class and somebody reported me and like you know you know and so it once this happens to you you you pull back you change your teaching style what we're seeing on campus is a spectacular

15:18collapse of trust between students and professors and when we don't trust each other we can't we can't do our job we can't we can't risk provoking being provocative raising light is raising uncomfortable ideas we have to play it safe and then everybody suffers is social media partially to blame because it's huge yeah social means a huge part of this problem so in a couple ways so one is the generational thing that we have kids born after 1995 got this in middle school it had a variety of effects on them so kids coming in are more conversant with call out culture and that's a big part of this the other thing though is that we used to have what you would call a reasonable person standard so you know so you know for professor what's one oh so a professor just wrote to me recently he said he you know he got frustrated while trying to explain something he said shoot me now

16:17and a student was offended by this because are you making fun of people committing suicide and okay you know I had she come to him and said you know professor I know you didn't mean anything but that was kind of insensitive okay that would have been great like that's the way to handle it but for this generation raised with callout culture and social media you almost never hear of a student coming to someone else in private because you don't get credit for that yeah so you only get credible home out publicly and so that's why we're all walking on eggshells because most of our students are great most of them are fine but if I have a class of 300 students a lecture class I know that some of them subscribe to this new call out culture safety is immorality and so if I say one thing it's not a reasonable person standard it's a most sensitive person standard I

17:02have to teach to the most sensitive person in the class it's also that person has the opportunity to score right they have exactly throw up that virtue flag like I've got one on the board here look what I did I nailed the professor on saying shoot me now and now I'm a hero and I was made this a safer space for everybody else that's right and so and so that's really what is messing us up at so many levels of society and the fact that a lot of these problems the the difficulties of democracy the rise of authoritarian populism there are a lot of weird trends that are happening in multiple countries and I think it's the rise of devices and social media is the main way we can explain why it's so similar across countries do you think that this is is this some sort of a trend that will eventually correct itself when these kids get out into the real world and

17:52then go through a whole generation of that and then people realize the error of their ways and the disastrous results of having these unprepared or emotionally unprepared kids no I'm not really confident that it will not correct itself I think that once we understand it I think there are ayat II things we can do to change it but I think here's the way to understand and why it's not gonna change itself so so I'm a I'm a social psychologist is my main my main area but I love all of the social sciences I love thinking about complex systems and systems composed of people are really different from systems composed of stars or neutrons or anything else and so if you have a complex system composed of people these people are primarily working to increase their prestige so I mean once we have our needs for you know food and things like that are set we're always interacting in ways to make

18:44ourselves look good and to protect ourselves from being nailed you know or accused of something so we're always doing reputation management now think about in any group what gives you prestige and so if you look in a group of teenagers you might have a group in which it's athletics and so if that's how you get prestige then all the kids are going to be working out and training and practicing and that doesn't hurt anybody that doesn't impose an external cost on anyone else but you can have some really sick prestige economies and so there's a there's an ethnography about a an indigenous population in the Philippines by Shelley rosaldo is the anthropologist I think it's called knowledge and passion about the Elan good which is a name for a tribe in the Philippines and in this tribe it's a headhunting tribe they find people and cut off their heads not just for fun for

19:39prestige so in a lot of societies you have a lot of male initiation boys have to do something to become a man and if the thing you have to do to become a man is you have to cut off someone's head okay so that imposes rather a heavy cost on outsiders all right so this is a Sikh culture this is not one where we can say oh well that's just the way they do things okay this has to stop and ideally they would cut off a stranger's head like they'd find someone for another tribe or someone you know from you know government agency that just cut off his head but if necessary fight or if there's somebody within their larger community that can also get you points so this is a really sick culture now head now call out culture is not quite that bad but it's the same logic okay so if you have a group of teenagers or college students who are all struggling for prestige as

20:30we all are and if you get a subculture in which the way you get prestige is by calling someone out showing that their racist sexist homophobic transphobic Islamophobic whatever it is if you can catch them you get the points what you're doing here is you're imposing external cost on others and that's what makes you so insufferable because you are playing your game but I'm paying the cost of your game and so that I think it's hard people aren't going to break out of that themselves but once we understand what's happening I think in a sense we can all come together and call out call out culture and say stop stop imposing these costs on us how but how are we gonna reach those kids if professors are so terrified to speak out and to cause controversy in class and no one wants to criticize them because if you do you risk your job you risk them organizing against you and how does this

21:22shift so that so I'm hopeful that we can shift it because most people hate it so even the people who do it recognize that they're always on eggshells they can be next there's the tendency of people in this culture to you know as we say they eat their own they eventually turn on each other and the mental health costs of it I mean there are a number of essays that have been written by people who sort of left that and it sounds miserable to be inside it you're always you know you there's no humor there's no fun it's always you know hyper serious angry and so so I think that I think if we can if we can raise kids or encourage them to see the games that social media makes them do and give them a vocabulary I don't know we should come up with some catchy terms for it but give them a vocabulary so that they can they cannot like oh you're you know you're a calling

22:15outer I don't that's monkey we can help them label this behavior mess it market exactly that's yeah there's patterns that you see in people that from a distance like if I look at it when I look at them objectively there's like these these patterns I go oh that's one of those magog eyes he's one of those you know he's got an American flag with an eagle in his avatar on Twitter and if you go through his page it's all like talking great about POTUS and criticizing anyone who talks about about trumpets it's strange it's like these patterns of behavior these predetermines Hatter's like there are stereotypes not just stereotypes like they've fallen into a well-oiled slick groove that's very easy to predict if you are one of those people it's it's super easy to predict that you're going to be pro Second Amendment it's super easy to predict that you're probably gonna be

23:09skeptical about climate change there's all these different things that go along with these patterns of behavior and you see them on the right you see them on the left and it's it's weird to watch it's weird to watch on the outside it's like well this is such a an easy pattern to slip into yeah well that's right so there's data from the Pew survey as they've been measuring attitudes of Americans since the 80s or 90s but they've been publishing this series on polarization in which they show that in the 90s if you knew somebody's attitude on say gun control that would only predict their attitude on abortion a certain percent and a lot of people on the left let's say would hold six of the ten leftist attitudes and same on the right but gradually by the time you get to around twenty ten it's like if you know one attitude you know them all and that's important just because if you

23:59turn up the volume so we evolved to do us versus them and the more we see you know if it's us America versus them communist Russia or Nazi Germany well then you know then we all come together and that's great for social cohesion and Trust but as that fades away and as us-versus-them became increasingly left versus right and as we lost the liberal Republicans and the conservative Democrats those used to exist until the 80s or 90s as we lost them once it becomes us versus them as left versus right now if you only hold your team's position on six out of ten items you're a traitor and so you better get with the program and so the pressures for conformity the pressures to agree with your team on everything have been steadily rising and that means there's no nuance and we can't do higher education without nuance we can't do college without free thinking and the ability to say well you

24:53know what we'd a second maybe they do have a point on this on this thing and that's one of the reasons why it looks so weird from the outside and why it's getting so unpleasant from the inside when you're teaching classes and a subject comes up that may be controversial do you do you have like this overwhelming feeling that you're treading on dangerous ground yes yeah so I second one-on-one at the University of Virginia and I would do all I would take them into you know sex differences the origin of sex sexual orientation I would even do race differences and you know because there was a reasonable person standard and I trusted my students and they trusted me and we had a great time and we covered a lot a lot of stuff but now and then I moved to New York University in 2011 when my last but previus book the righteous mind came out and it's not it's not about UVA versus

25:49NYU is just about the changing time now as I said I have to teach to the most sensitive students so I teach a course on business ethics on professional responsibilities and we have a section on on discrimination and employment law it's important to cover we have to cover it you know MBA students have to know where the lines are what the law is and yeah I'm kind of scared when I teach that because you know I'd like to get into all sorts of things I'd like to get into well you know what - numerical disparities mean if there's a gender difference in you know in the percentage of tech but not in the percentage of non tech employees in Silicon Valley what does that mean I would like to talk about that but if a single student thinks that I am denying the existence of sexism they could be offended by that and in every bathroom at NYU there's a sign telling how to report me anonymously and they

26:43put these up in 2016 in response to student requests and that means that all professors are on notice that they can be reported and honestly at any moment by children well these are well I'm not gonna call them children I mean my students are MBA students but but the undergrads here 17 17 to 21 year olds for the undergrads yes that's right barely not children anymore that's right and there's an incentive to this this what we're talking about before those Misenum attention they get prestige they get value from it and this that this culture encourages these things that's right and this is a terrible lesson to teach them so you know the subtitle of our book it's called the coddling the American mind how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure and so these microaggression reporting system that's basically what it is a microaggression reporting system

27:37it has a good intention behind it there are cases of professors who make ethnic jokes okay they should stop doing that I mean maybe that was okay 30 years ago you know there are there there are legitimate complaints and faculty do there should be some accountability some responsibility so there's a good intention behind it but it's usually based on no empirical evidence and because it's based on pressure applied to a bureaucracy not by a committee thinking hmm how can we improve the climate for everyone no no it's like we make these demands and we demand 10 things in the administration says okay we'll give you five of them there's not thought put into what would happen if we give the students an East German style anonymous reporting system and so everybody's on notice that they can be report at any point what might happen to the social dynamics like nobody thought that through mmm

28:26so the net the net effect again is the spectacular collapse of trust on campus to be in the middle of that it's gotta be so bizarre having taught for so many years before that and to watch almost like this virus overtake the institutions that's what it felt like and that's why so you know Greg lukianov came to me in 2014 so Greg I'll just uh briefly tell this story of the book Greg is the president of the foundation for individual rights in education he fired and they defend free speech rates on campus and they were always pushing back against administrators who would say oh you know we need a free speech zone and they're always afraid of liability and so but suddenly in 2014 Gregg starts seeing students pushing back on speech rights saying we want you know ban that speaker you know we need a you know a safe space if a debate is going to be held new stuff weird stuff

29:22and Greg who is prone to depression he had a suicidal depression in 2007 he's hospitalized when he gets out of the hospital he learns CBT cognitive behavioral therapy and in that you learn these like 15 or so cognitive distortions like catastrophizing over generalizing black and white thinking so Greg learns to not do those himself and then he goes back to work at fire and then in 2014 he sees students saying oh if you know if Christina Hoff Sommers comes to campus you know people will die or they'll be you know people will be harmed injured and so there's this this new way of thinking and Greg thinks wow how are students learning to do this like are we teaching them on campus to think in these distorted ways and if we are isn't that going to make them depressed so Greg comes to talk to me in May of 2014 to tell me this idea and I think it's really brilliant I think it's

30:19a great idea because I'd begun to see this you know the safe spaces that microaggressions the trigger warning requests so we we wrote up our RSA submitted to the Atlantic it came out in August of 2015 and it was like we've just seen the first outbreaks of a virus and then in the fall of 2015 it's it becomes an epidemic and so many of your listeners will have heard of or seeing the videos of what happened to Yale in in November 2015 when Erica Christakis wrote an email saying that wait a second Yale is telling you how to do your Halloween costumes maybe we should think this through ourselves maybe you're old enough to make your own decisions some students get very upset they protest they bring demands to the president they're screaming at her husband so it was then when that protest was successful when the president of Yale basically said you know we're wrong you're right

31:13we validate your narrative we'll give you as much as we can of your demands when when that happened then the protest went national and so throughout 2016 you have you have groups of students making these demands demanding microaggression reporting systems so that's when NYU put in its systems its microaggression reporting systems so that Yale event wasn't just an isolated incident it really was the spark I think so yeah yeah so there's all these trip threads coming together didn't come out of nowhere all these things are happening it's almost like the you know the whole the whole room is like almost at combustion temperature and then Yale was the spark that sent to national what's crazy about Yale is anybody that's objective that's watching from the outside is like these students are out of control they're screaming at this professor like this is supposed to be a

31:56safe place and you know you this up and they're they're being incredibly hostile and aggressive towards him and surrounding him and when when you watch that from the outside you think well obviously they've got to punish these students I mean they did the opposite yeah that's right a chance that's well it doesn't make sense from the outside but again you have to look at different games being played so so I went to Yale I graduated from there in 1985 I loved it I was in Davenport colleges one of the 12 residential colleges and there were a lot of intellectual events that would happen in the colleges like the master of the college or the Dean of the college would bring in all kinds of people to speak so they were intellectual spaces as well as sort of home-like or not exactly home-like like transitional places where they were there were places that you lived so the

32:47Yale that I knew was a place that taught me to think in lots of different ways and it just was constantly blowing my mind like when I took my first economics course it was like wow here's a new pair of spectacles that I can put on and suddenly I see all these you know prices and supply and like I never I never learned to think that way where I learned about Freud in psychology or sociology so a good education is one that lets you look at our complicated world through multiple perspectives and that makes you smart that's what a liberal arts education should do but what I see increasingly happening especially at elite schools is the dominance of a single story and that single story is life is a battle between good people and evil people or rather good groups and evil groups and it's a zero-sum game and so if the bad groups have more it's because they took it from

33:42the good groups and so the point of everything is to fight the bad groups bring them down create equality and this is a terrible way to think in a free society I mean that might have worked you know in biblical days when you got the Moabites killing the Jebusites or whatever but you know we we live in an era in which we've discovered that that the pie can be grown a million fold and so to teach students to see society as a zero-sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive now in your book you you actually identify the moment where these micro aggressions sort of made their appearance and they were initially a racist thing so yeah so the idea of a micro aggression it goes back to I forget the Scots and african-american sociologists in the 70s first coined the term but it really becomes popular in a 2007 article by Derald wing sue at Teachers College and

34:43so he talks about this concept of microaggressions and there are two things that are good about the concert that are useful and so one is as racism as explicit racism has clearly gone down by any measure explicit racism is plummeted in American across the West but you know there could still be subtle or veiled a racist claim so perfect legitimate how do you define the difference between explicit racism well explicit racism is you know calling someone a racial slur I hate you because X and they are identified because of they've been reported as crimes or well I would just say that if you're a member of a culture you can tell when someone is saying something to insult to put down her to express hostility right and that's something that judgment we can make right and as that's become socially unacceptable in most circles so explicit racism is way way down right

35:37but how I'm sorry but the my only question is how are they measuring is that well how do you measure microaggression well how do you measure even explicit racism yeah oh you say it's down certainly attitude measures so there are so surveys done in private how would you feel if if a black family moved in next door if a Filipino family moved now so how would you feel if your child married you know a Jew a Muslim hmm so explicit surveys show it certainly I mean if when you do surveys of people's experience right people of race of every race when they report how often this happens to me every year the numbers are actually fairly low so there are ways of measuring experiences of racism right um how accurate these cause like first of all I used to have a joke about this but the idea is that the problem surveys is your only getting information people from people so stupid

36:33they take surveys who's taking surveys so some surveys are subject to that but you know in general if you if you approach a question from multiple perspectives and say in one condition you pay them for an accurate answer or not when one condition they're anonymous or they're not so you can get a sense of how much the answer moves around depending on external conditions and so anyway the point I just want to make is that the acceptability of using the n-word or other things you know if a bunch of white people are talking the acceptability using the n-word I think has gone way down in general would you agree with that yes yes and tremendously I mean III agree with the the sentiment and I agree with the the trend that there is absolutely a trend away from racism but I was just curious says how they measured it yeah I'm not an expert in that area so I'm assuming it's survey

37:25is an analysis of discourse it's ultimately for everyone's sake I mean even for the sake of the people that are in embroiled in all this controversy and chaos it would be fantastic across the board if there was no more sexism there was no more racism there was no more any of these things yeah me it would be wonderful then we could just start treating pew Mons as just human like this is just who you are you're just a person no one cares that would be what a wonderful world we would live in if this was no longer an issue at all beautifully put how does that get how does that ever get through so we were getting there okay that's what the twenty no I mean that's what the twentieth century was about so you and I are shaped by Unruh how old you are I'm 51 okay I'm 55 we were shaped by the late 20th century and the late 20th century was a time in America in which you know

38:18earlier on there was all kinds of prejudice I mean when I was so when I was born just right before you were born it was legal to say you can't eat here because you're black and so you know that change in 1964-65 but it used to be that we had legal differentiations by race and then those were knocked down but we still had social and it used to be that if you were gay there was something humiliating it had to be hidden and you you know I mean so if you look at where we were in 1960 or 63 when I was born and then you look at where we got by 2000 I mean the progress is fantastic on every front so that's all I mean when I say we were moving in that direction and to your point about you know wouldn't be great if there was none of this we just treated people like people okay yeah that was the 20th century idea is let's let's get past these tribal identifications and what is

39:08so alarming to me now is that on campus it began on campus but it's spreading elsewhere there and against not everywhere on campus it's mostly in the grievant Studies departments um they're teaching students the opposite they're teaching students don't treat everyone like a person people are their identities and you can tell somebody identities by looking at people and so you know if they're good or bad this I think is the opposite of progress well it's it's also the differences between us are really fascinating the difference is between men and women I think are some of the more interesting explanations for human behavior and not meaning that people must be defined by their gender but defined by their sex and but it is interesting when you look at these gigantic groups like why certain people tend to gravitate towards certain patience or certain types of behavior or

40:03certain hobbies it is really fascinating yeah that's right and if we were playing the truth-seeking game if all we cared about is trying to understand things we would do the research and we'd figure out what do people like you know and do left-handers versus right-handers have different preferences probably not as far as I know do boys and girls have different preferences yeah they're really big do men and women have different do they enjoy different things yeah so we could take that we could say our goal is to create a free society this is this is what the word liberal traditionally meant a society which people are free to construct a life that they want to live yeah and so if you're born one race or another that should not in any way be a limitation and in the 20th century we made a lot of progress towards that ideal same thing but you keep saying we did meaning that you

40:48you're implying that it ended at the progress hit a wall um yeah I shouldn't imply that because overall I think the trends are unstoppable right so I don't want to say that things are reverse yeah I agree but you feel like there's a slowdown or not which yeah I think that so so in chapter 3 of the coddling Greg and I look at identity politics and one thing we really try to do is there's all these loaded terms and you know see if somebody says social justice warrior okay you know a lot about them if they said that like they're gonna come at it and say oh those sjw's and and we don't do any of that we we say there are people on campus who are very focused on identity issues and on injustice is based on identity and that's great and there's a lot to be concerned about and their right to do that now how do they do it and there's two different ways you can either do what we call common enemy

41:42identity politics which is where you say life is a battle between good groups and evil groups let's divide people by you know by race so it's basically this you know straight versus everyone else men versus all the other genders and white versus everybody else and so you look at you know the straight white men they're the problem all the other groups must unite to fight the straight white man so that's that one of the core ideas of intersectionality and so what we say in the book is that leads to eternal conflict much better is to is an identity politics based on common human so we don't say oh you know to help with identity politics we say you have to have identity politics until you have perfect justice and equality you have to have a way for groups to organize to push back on things to demand just that's fine but if you do it by first emphasizing common humanity that's what

42:31Martin Luther King did that's what Pauli Murray did that's what Nelson Mandela did this so this wonderful woman Paula Murray she was like the gay black possibly trans civil rights leader in beginning the 40s she says when my you know when my opponents draw a small circle to exclude me I shall draw a larger circle to include them I shall shout for the rights of all mankind and this is again when Martin Luther King did he's relentlessly appealing to our white brothers and sisters he's using the language of America of Christianity start by saying what we have in common and then people's hearts are open we're within a community now we can talk about our difficulties so it's the rise of common enemy identity politics on campus in the grievant Studies departments especially that I think is an alarming trend another thing that's alarming to me is the redefining of terms like

43:24sexism and racism or sexism against men is impossible racism against white people is impossible there's redefining as these prejudices only exist if you're coming from a position of power that's really weird and it also it opens up the door to treating people as an other literally the people that are the victims of racism are now using racism against other people and feeling justified because of it and in having a bunch of people that will agree with them that this is in fact not racism and this is pushing back on white privilege and saying all these different weird things that you know and they feel really comfortable in saying these open racist generalizing things about white people or about white men or about you know fill in the blank but whatever group that you're you're attacking and it's it's really strange it's really strange to see but again it makes sense

44:22if you look at the different games yeah so if you're on a university and you think you're playing the truth game and philosophers are great at this they're always unpacking terms and so you might try to define racism or any sort of ism and you a common-sense view would be an expression of hostility or resentment or limitation on a group based on their identity but that's if you're playing the truth-seeking game if you're playing the the politics game or the warfare game you want to define the terms to give your side maximum advantage so there's a wonderful social psychologist named Phil tetlock at Penn at Wharton and and he talks about these different mindsets we get into and one of them he calls the intuitive prosecutor so if if I'm if my goal as a scholar is to prosecute my enemies and maximally convict them and I am always trying to defend you know seven

45:13different identity groups against the straight white men they're the the they're the accused I want to define my terms to make it maximally easy to convict and so I'm going to say racism and microaggressions it doesn't matter what the intent was all that matters is the impact all that matters of what the person felt that way as long as someone's offended I get to charge you with a crime mmm so and also on racism you can say as you know a lot of kids are learning in high school that these days racism is prejudice plus power so by definition a black person or a gay person or whatever any you know cannot be racist or whatever other term because they don't have power regardless of their social class it's actually being taught yeah yes so the professors are this is kind of their mouth well just saying so this is taught in a number of high schools my nephews went to Andover there's an

46:11offensive thing yes it would be teaching children it's not just that it's offensive and obviously hypocritical it's that it's crippling yes I mean can you imagine can you sew it look you've got you've got kids but you have two daughters and three okay see have three daughters can you imagine giving your daughters a cloak of invulnerability yeah where you say you put this on now you get to attack others but no one can touch you right like this is gonna warp their development power corrupts and even moral a rhetorical power it's as well how is this being taught though I mean houses because about houses except as a part of a curriculum so because the goal is not truth the goal is victory over racism let's say and so if that's the case you're gonna focus on educating kids about their white privilege and making and so that's what a lot of these privilege exercises

47:02are you know you line kids up by their privilege and you and your goal is to make the straight white boys feel bad about their privilege and therefore talk less take up less space their privilege this is what we're talking about earlier about the goal is no racism the privilege only exists if there's racism like instead of concentrating on the privilege it only exists if people do preferentially treat certain with the preferential treatment towards certain races if that doesn't exist at all then white privilege doesn't exist why I'm not sure I'm not sure I'd agree view on that so we also well so we had a funny episode last night and so my wife and I were out in LA we were invited to the Golden Globes by by a friend and so we're here in LA so we we go to bed in the hotel room and at 2:00 in the morning the guys pounding on the door saying come on let me in it's me it's me

47:55and I wake up and I go to the door and I and I say wrong room and he can't hear me so I opened the door a crack and to show him you know like look I don't know I don't know who you are right and you know some drunk some drunk guy and I said you know you've got the wrong room and I went back to bed and then it breakfast this morning my wife says why did you open the door like how could you have done that I said you know we're in a nice hotel I mean what's you know what's gonna happen and she made it clear like a woman would never have done that like she said you as a man you have the ability to go out in the world and engage with in a certain way that I don't have is well yes and that's a great example so there is a male privilege sure exists even if there's no sexism yeah that's an interesting that's an interesting example that's a that's a sexism one but that's also a physical

48:42danger one yeah that's there's a there is a difference between just the way women have to go out into the world being vulnerable and also being the target of just a male sexual attention it's a very different thing it's an aggressive person dangerous thing yeah but I think you could say the same thing about race in this way so because there's racism though well okay okay you're right if if there was absolute zero racism right anywhere but we're never gonna get to that but but the thing that we're worried about is the racism so like if you worried about us if someone's if you say you have white privilege well that only exists if you're being dealt with in a racist manner so if you're a black person and there is racism that's being directed towards you and it's not being directed towards me then you can say well I have white privilege but if there's no racism directed towards

49:36anybody that doesn't exist anymore relation is racism yes right okay but so look I think it's it's helpful to always try to look at it from the other person's point of view sure to listen to their arguments and so for example when you and I go into any social encounter it never occurs to me that something you know something's gonna come up and someone's gonna call me a let's say right yeah because I'm Jewish and it's just it just it never crosses my mind that someone's gonna humiliate me because I'm Jewish but if you're black even if you're in a very tolerant society at some point someone is going to make an assumption it might happen it might be so all I'm saying is you and I don't there are certain things we don't have to think about and that at whereas if we were black or other identities or visibly gay or you know there would be the risk of spoiling of a social

50:24interaction so I'm totally comfortable saying we should be telling our kids about this but what follows from it what follows from it should we therefore be telling kids okay so you know you know it judge people based on their appearance be suspicious of people based on their race and gender that's where that's where I get off the but the bus that's where I say now we're really hurting kids we should be turning down the moralism and we're turning it up right but what I'm getting at is pointing at someone and saying you have white privilege if they are not racist you're you're you're you're giving this person you're putting these this person in a category that really only exists in the face of racism or the real problem is racism yes with the male/female thing is a very different male priviledge I think is way more slippery and wait because it's biologically based there's a creepiness

51:18to men and there is and as much as a nice guy as I'm sure you are and I try very hard to be a nice guy but every woman's encounter creaks yes it's it's inevitable because it's there's a game being played this pursuing of sexual pleasure or of sexual encounters this doesn't exist or shouldn't exist with races yeah the just the real problem in my eyes is racism and if we could figure out a way to just complete obviously it's not gonna look people are flawed they're they're going to be until there's some sort of new way that we interface with each other that eliminates lies and deception and allows each other to completely understand each other's feelings and appreciate them which may happen someday probably technologically-driven until that happens there's going to be a certain amount of it but the real enemy is racism it's not white people just getting lucky yeah okay but I would say

52:14not that we shouldn't acknowledge yeah yeah so you said earlier about how definitions change so we are evolving as a society we're getting less sexist and racist and so our threshold for what counts as sexist noises going down that's a good thing that should happen right but I think what we need to call attention to is that when you if you lower the threshold faster than the reality changes then you make progress but yet people feel worse and worse and so and so I think that's part of what's happening on campus that makes sounds the the the progress so the the loudest protest tend to happen at the most progressive schools it's places like Middlebury and Yale and Berkeley and you know so I think that we are we are if you bring in a diverse student body and we're all trying to diversify we're all in every school I know of is trying very hard to create a very diverse student

53:04body so if we do that and we bring people in and we give them a common humanity approach it's going to work great diversity if you handle it well you it can confirm many benefits but if you handle it wrong if you try to make people see race and other groups more and you attach moral valence as to it and you give them a lot of the stuff that they get in the grievance studies of course they're gonna be angry and of course they're gonna feel that people hate them it's a terrible thing to bring people into a university and to teach them you know what this institution is white supremacist people have implicit bias against you wherever you go people are gonna hate you like no this is a really bad thing to do to create an open trusting inclusive diverse environment right the right thing to do would be to emphasize how foolish racism really is and about how damaging it is not just to

53:50our culture but to you as an individual to look at people in that way and not open your heart in your mind to all these different races and I think one of the worst examples of modern racism that's gone unchecked is what's going on at Harvard with Asian students where Asian students are instead of instead of being completely neutral in terms of how they approach all these races Asian students actually have to try harder to get into Harvard and there because there's so many of them and they're doing so well yeah they're being punished for excelling which is really racist I mean you're it's it's racist against the people that are doing the best which is really crazy and they're a minority which is even more crazy and because of their culture because they're so hardworking and they're not in general then the not the type to be really loud and protest these things

54:42right it's gone on z target well it to the point where now they've had to have a class-action lawsuit that's right that's right so you know my hope again I'm a 20th century person my hope is that as time goes on we'll get past all this you have to be a 21st century version no no I think that you have to well okay but you know what the there are okay wait moral cultures evolved and they don't always evolve in a positive way right and so I think the evolution late 20th century was incredibly positive and I think we are I think young people are losing touch with some of the hard-won lessons of the past so I'm not gonna say oh we have to just accept whatever morality is here I still am ultimately liberal in the sense that what I dream of is a society in which people are free to create lives that they want to live and they're not forced to do things they're not change there's a minimum of

55:33conflict and we make room for each other if we're gonna have a diverse society we've really got to be tolerant and make room for each other that's my dream and I think in the last five or ten years we've gotten really far from that I mean the you know my first book the happiness hypothesis was about ten ancient ideas and you know one is that we're too judgmental you know judge not lest ye be judged but I think the new version of that if there was a 21st century Jesus he'd say judge a lot more judge all the time judge harshly don't give anyone with the benefit the doubt and don't let anyone judge you like that is not gonna be a recipe for a functioning society so no I do not accept this aspect of 21st century morality well you're you're obviously much more entrenched in it than I am my hope and this might be naive is that what these far left and far like that

56:21the really extreme what it represents is the the the extreme poles of this shifting thing so that the whole thing is going to move closer to a better place and you're always going to have really extreme but your was gonna have white supremacy and you always gonna have extreme social justice people you're suggesting it's a pendulum yes some things are pendulums some are not yeah okay so there are problems of progress there are some things that are kind of one way so you know so I'm often pessimistic about certain social trends but I'm very influenced by Steve Pinker who I know you had on the show and Matt Ridley and others who say look the arc of progress is amazingly ravenous all good and you know Nick Kristof just had a column that last year was the best year in human history if you look at overall human welfare so that's all true but there are certain things that happen

57:15with progress that lead to certain countervailing trends that are not like pendulum and so for example okay here's one kids it's it seems pretty clear that that human beings need a certain amount of hardship stress and challenge in order to develop basic human abilities kids who are neglected and abused are are damaged I mean if it goes beyond certain limits you you have chronic stress you can have brain damage so we as as we've gotten rid of a lot of the worst things that's great but as we're making life better and better and easier and easier for kids as we're protecting them from more and more we're we're preventing them from basically expanding their abilities and so it's possible that as we as we get wealthier and safer and more humane and more caring and as we have smaller and smaller families as we get richer all over the world so that you have two parents spending all this

58:17time with one kid it's possible that we are interfering with kids development to the point where we might have an epidemic of anxiety and depression that could happen oh wait a second it has so you know I think that there are certain problems of progress that are not pendulum they change things and those changes have some negative repercussions that we're gonna have to actively fix it's not gonna swing back by itself what concerns me when you're talking about all these ideas is that there's a restriction on how you are able to communicate to children or to students I should say to young people how their minds work and how they're there how these patterns can form and how you know this this pattern can be ultimately damaging to them but yet it feels rewarding in the act of doing it and that their own patterns that they're involved in right now might be

59:15incredibly problematic for them in the future but if you bring it up you're criticizing who they ant of who they are as a human you're disregarding your white privilege you're doing all these different things you can't really do you you're doing all these things that could run into these problems with this sort of new paradigm and what what how do you how do you mitigate that when you're teaching kids like how do you how do you talk to them about the way the mind works when it's involving these critical things that are like incredibly sensitive to discuss today mm-hmm okay so let's you might be talking about like issues like race and sex yeah raised in size okay but okay let's go back to the beginning let's start with child development okay let's let's let's start with what should we be doing with kids to make them tougher so that you know as they live in the world is

60:03safer and safer cars are safer the death rate for kids has been plummeting for all all causes other than suicide which is going up so as kids live in a safer and safer world they also have the Internet which is going to expose them to virtual insults forever and ever so how we're gonna raise kids to be maximally effective in this new 21st century world which it's physically very safe but virtually unsafe ok how are we gonna do that and I think the key idea that we need to put on the table here that I think everybody who works with kids needs to keep in mind every day is antifragility I know you've talked about that on the show before yeah but I'll just I should I can just give a very brief you know explanation of because it's such an important concept so antifragility a lot of listeners when there was a word coined by Nassim Taleb the guy who wrote

60:54the Black Swan because there are certain systems and he was I think he was motivated by the collapse of the banking system so he had predicted the collapse because he said the banking system is really convoluted and it's never been tested a system needs to be tested challenged shocked in order to then develop defenses against it and our system has not been tested so if anything goes wrong it's all going down all right you reference him quite a few times yes that's right really concept events are fragile that's right it's a key idea in our book and it I find as I talk about this around the country once you explain this to people who work with kids like everybody gets it right away all right so so tell em says there's no word for this property he says we know that some things are fragile and so if you have a glass you have a wine glass on the table you knock it over

61:39it breaks okay it doesn't get better in any way and so you know you don't give kids a wine glass you give them a plastic sippy cup because plastic is resilient but if a kid knocks over a sippy cup it doesn't get better in any way until that wanted to know what's the word for things that do get better when you knock them over and the classic example is the immune system so the immune system is an incomplete system it's a miracle of evolution that we have this system for making you know handy bodies but it doesn't know exactly what to be reactive to that has to be set by childhood experience and so if you keep your kids in a bubble and you use bacterial wipes and you don't let them be exposed to bacteria you're crippling the system the system has to get knocked over it has to get challenged threatened it has to have has to learn how to it expand its abilities

62:28and so so this is why peanut allergies are going up yeah that was a really shocking part of your book that's right it's stunning how fast this happened please explain that to people the whole peanut allergy thing yeah so peanut allergies used to be really rare and most of us you know older folk we brought peanut butter sandwiches to school and when my son Max started preschool in 2008 you know they went on and on about no nuts nothing that touched and not nothing that looks like a nut nothing that has the word naughty I mean it was crazy how defensive they were about nuts and as we write in the book I thought back on that and I said wait a second like why you know we're freaking out about nuts and the more we freaked out about it the higher the allergy rate goes and it turns out there was a study done in published in 2015 where the researchers noticed that the allergy to nuts is only

63:17going up in countries that tell pregnant women to avoid nuts and they thought well maybe that's why and so they did a controlled experiment they got about 600 women who had given birth recently and and whose kids were at higher risk of analogy because they had eczema or some other you know immune system sort of issue so about 300 of them are told standard advice your kids at risk the peanut allergy so you should not eat peanuts while you're lactating and keep peanuts away from your kid and the other half we're told here is an Israeli snack food it's a puffed corn with a peanut peanut powder dusting on the outside give it to your kids starting at you know three or four months whenever they're ready to eat and so and they monitor them they made sure that they weren't you know failed reactions or sewer or strong reactions and then at the age of five they gave them all a

64:09very thorough immunological tests and of the ones who followed the standard advice 17% had a peanut allergy they would have to watch out for peanuts for the rest of their lives that's such a high number because these were because these were it's we're already predisposed yeah and but the half that were predisposed but given peanut powder three percent just 3% had a peanut allergy at age 5 in other words we could almost wipe out peanut allergies by giving peanut powder to kids and site it just a few months ago at science the front page article was on doing that and so again good intentions and bad ideas we're trying to protect our kids so Oh keep them away from peanuts but that's exactly the wrong advice because kids are anti fragile and so we're doing the same thing well sync them the real issue is the people that have an actual severe allergy that's your child yeah yes but

64:58that's what this science article was about was that exposure therapies are being tested and they are the most effective so even with people with yes extremes just have to start slow so you'd so give him a very very special yeah because I was on a plane once and they informed us that they didn't want us to even eat peanuts on the plane because there was someone on the plane that was so allergic that if you eat peanuts and you chew it and it's in the air it could adversely affect that person yeah and that could well be true so I have no objection to that but the reason we got to that point is because we started banning peanuts long ago so this is one of these well I'm not sure if it's a problem of progress but as we know it's not necessarily but but it's an example of antifragility okay so now let's bring this to the playground alright so you know when you and I were

65:43kids you know boys and girls have different social interactions but boys tease each other right and salt each other you throw around insults right yeah and that's part of developing to be a boy now if it turns into bullying like a bunch of kids or one you know after one kid day after day okay that's terrible we have to do something about that I'm not saying bullying is okay but as we've cracked down on bullying and as we've gotten more and more sensitive about harm in general we're cracking down on any kind of teasing cruelty exclusion so my kids go to New York City public schools which are generally pretty good but on the playground you know there's a monitor and the playground monitor look you know if there's conflict he comes and checks it out if a kid is crying he checks it out you know seems like a good thing to do but it's like treating kids like they're

66:32allergic to peanuts kids have to have thousands and thousands of conflicts they have to be exposed to insults an exclusion and teasing and if you can imagine if you could keep your daughter in a protective tank when nobody would tease her or insult or hurt her feelings for 18 years would you do it absolutely not you know it's um it's it's important that they do experience some they just have to know but you know on the flip side there are certain people that are damaged for the rest their life by bullies and some like I have a friend and his brother used to beat him up when when they lived together and it still with him to this day and he's in his 50s yeah like I think he has a certain level of depression that's directly correlated that's right yeah I mean I can't say about your friend but the research shows the research does show that bullying can leave permanent

67:21scars yeah so there are a couple things we have to keep our eye on kids are anti fragile yes but but two things one is they need challenges that are graded to their level of ability hmm so if they're overwhelmed and if the suffering goes on day after day so if kids are bade if their brain is bathed in cortisol so cortisol is a normal stress hormone you have to experience stress you have to have cortisol and then it drops goes up and down up and down but kids who are raised either you an environment they're bullied or they're abused at home they don't have a secure attachment relationship then they get brain damage then you you're hurting kids if it's chronic so I am in no way saying bullying is okay you got to keep that you got to keep the line right but but again you have to look at each institution so each school is not thinking hmm how can we carefully draw

68:13the line between bullying and valuable sorts of conflict no they're thinking if we do this well we get sued right and if we're not really careful at bullying we're gonna get sued and so let's overreact let's go this way yeah that's unfortunate really but how do you decide how much bullying is accept like it's like venom like giving them a little bit so they develop a tolerance yeah but so there's um we said we did some research on bullying we didn't put it in the book because while we suspect that anti-bullying policies that that go too far and that band conflict what we suspect that those are harmful we couldn't prove that so we didn't put this in the book but the the traditional definitions of bullying are actually pretty reasonable I'm membered exactly it's like there's a there's like a power differential and it's chronic you know goes on for it you know multiple multiple days and

69:07originally there was a actually a threat of violence it had at least a threat of violence I think that was the original definition and then that was expanded gradually so that doesn't have to be necessarily threat of violence but it has expanded so far that like my kids use the term if if one kid is mean to another they'll call that bullying and that's too far so I think you have to keep your eye on the key features too far of a kid is mean yeah so so like on the on the playground for my daughter the girls would form these clubs and so my daughter was in the kitty cat club like that's what three girls called themselves and they'd be in a corner and they'd say oh you can't you know you can't join us you're not in the kitty cat club that's mean that's exclusion right we can't have that right so the so you'd have to like allow everyone in your group because you don't want to be a bully

70:03I don't know that yeah I don't know they called that bullying but her teacher had a conversation with them now she didn't I don't think she exactly ordered them never exclude so it'd be okay if you use it as a grounds for discussion but increased but some schools have even tried to discourage the existence of best friends because if you have best friends you're excluding others that's Larry it is hilarious but again it's if you fail to understand that kids are anti fragile yeah you think oh my you know there's a rise of anxiety and depression and girls are cutting themselves at such high rates you know we've got it we've got to relieve them of stress like no that's that's not the right way to go about it and there really is an epidemic of kids that grew up in that era of participation trophies where everyone won and there's a lot of parents that don't want to see their

70:49children lose yeah but that's a giant learning opportunities exactly if you think the goal is to cultivate self-esteem directly yeah you're crippling the kid giving your kid self-esteem is not beneficial in fact if kids have high self esteem but it's unstable they're actually more likely to be violent to have more problems you don't want to build self-esteem what you want to build is capacities you want to give them abilities and skills that they do things that then indirectly give them self-esteem and compassion right I mean how do you how do you teach that how do you teach it well there's lots and lots more of the biggest things that is happening in schools whose efforts to teach compassion I don't know I've not surveyed the research I don't know if they work I don't know so look in general kids learn from experience but adults want to teach them directly and so there's all these

71:42efforts to teach compassion I have no idea if they work but I would think that doing things together and this is a point made by Peter gray and expert on play who co-founded let grow Oracle wonderful organization that I hope we can talk about one way that kids learn compassion is by playing with each other when there's no adults who can step in where they have to look out for each other to keep the game going but when there are adults present who are supervising then if there's a conflict the skills that kids need to learn are how do you make your case to get the adult to come in on your side and this is called moral dependence so one of the best ways that kids learn compassion cooperation tolerance teamwork leadership is free play unsupervised free play and that's what kids did from time immemorial certainly throughout the 20th century up until the 1990s mmm like

72:43when you so ask you how old would you grow up first of all well all over the place honestly I was born in New Jersey lived there tall 7 San Francisco from 7 to 11 ok that's to keep here it's 7 to keep here ok when you lived in San Francisco were you allowed outside were you allowed to go to a friend's house could you and your friends go places yeah I was a latchkey kid okay yeah my parents were gone all day and so now they would be arrested if they did them yeah when I was 8 years old I did a magic show on Fisherman's Wharf by myself fantastic no way would have dodged a bunch of bullets I almost got molested there's some guy tried to some some some guy tried to abduct me waitwait literally tried to obtain yeah was in a library some guy tried to get me to go out to his car with him to check out some books and some lady librarian saved me she screamed out

73:35Joseph you get away from that man he just got out of jail why I ran off yeah he was super creepy but you know I was eight I didn't understand what was going on I just thought he had some good books yeah okay okay good no right so so this is a nice example of how we made progress yeah so so you know a lot what I'm saying we're saying the book is we have to let kids out now yes there it there are dangers out there and so kids have to learn you actually can talk to strangers it's not problem to talk to strangers just never ever go off with them never under any circumstances you know but Eve really the problem with talking to strangers is when you're eight you don't understand manipulation you understand you think of adults as being someone who's got you can count on okay so so back then we were negligent in that we just we sent our kids out and we didn't think about the dangers now

74:22the dangerous are actually extremely low release the danger of abduction the number of kids who are abducted in America each year is on the order of a hundred now many more are abducted by the non-custodial parent right but what you're talking about as a stranger now there's they're creeps out there there are guys who masturbate I mean there's all kinds of creeps out there but abductions is extraordinarily rare so yes we have to deal with we have to teach kids but what happened was there was a crime wave when you and I were growing up there was actually a lot of crime in this country in the 70s and 80s there was a lot of crime and then the crime wave begins to end rapidly in the 1990s and just as its ending we changed our norms to say if a kid is outside and there's no adult watching him that kid is likely to be abducted and therefore the parents are responsible the parents

75:10can be arrested or at least Child Protective Services should pay them a visit so just as the crime rate was ending and rates of all kinds of crazy violence were plummeting we locked our kids up and we said you're not going to be able to have the kind of experience that you most need in order to become an independent functioning adult yeah and so we don't know why depression anxiety and suicide are skyrocketing for teenagers especially teenage girls but the combination of overprotection and then social media seems to be the main part of the example so I totally sympathize with the fact that yeah you know there are there are risks out there but the risk of our protection is it kills a lot more kids there was a story that I read about I want to say the kids were 8 and 10 and they were walking home in New York City and the police officer stopped them and talked to him and then eventually

75:58interviewed their parents and said why your children walking home he's like because I taught him how to walk home yeah yeah I showed him how to get home like this is a this is a valuable thing to give them the independence to leave school together they look out for each other and then they go home together and you know the cops were making it like these people were negligent and criminal and they were saying no I'm trying to prepare my child for the world so it's a it's sort of a debate about the philosophy of raising human beings and exposing them to a certain amount of independence and a certain amount of personal sovereignty that's right and so this is this is I think the most important lesson that Greg and I hope will come from our book is that if you see the world as dangerous and threatening and you raise your kids accordingly you're gonna raise

76:43emotionally stunted kids who are at much higher risk of depression anxiety and suicide so stop doing that we got to stop doing that unfortunately it's hard to stop doing that because if we let our kids outside we can be arrested now that's happens very rarely but it does happen more more concerning your kids can be harmed that's extremely rare but it can happen and for the people that does happen to the idea that it's extremely rare is not comforting well that's right so we think about probabilities in very ineffective ways actually do we have those graphs I sent in some graphs of depression anxiety rates so if we think that kids are at risk of harm from letting them out but we don't see that they're at risk of harm from keeping them in the wrong decision right so there's a silent secret sort of invisible harm of coddling them exactly and then there's

77:34the small percentage of possible harm that you could get if you go out into the world right so okay so you're raising your kids here what's your policy on letting them out man slippery how the hell is your oldest well I have a grown one who's 22 and then I have a ten and eight okay and it's hard man because I don't even like when they go over on sleepovers over my friend's house because that's scary whose problem is that it's everybody's problem you know it's a boat I mean the parents I mean we're pretty selective about the parents but there's a lot of parents don't pay attention their kids at all meaning they just tune out and they get on the phone the kids are sticking Forks into the outlets and you know there's there's a lot of weirdness when it comes to the styles of that people have been raising their children what is this this graph he just pulled up yeah so you know so

78:26depressive episodes yeah so I guess I'll just narrate it for people who are listening that watch video you know so you said before it's like a virus came out of nowhere and that is sort of what it's been like so what's happening in America and I know it's happening the same in Britain and Canada I haven't looked at other other places yet haven't dug into those stats what's happening is that rates of depression and anxiety were fairly stable from the you know 90s through the early 2000s and what you see here and this is a graph that's in our book is that the the percentage of kids aged 12 to 17 in America who met the criteria for having a major depressive episode that is they're given a symptom checklist with nine symptoms and if you say yes to five of them you know feeling hopeless and couldn't get out of bed if you say yes to five or more you're you're considered to have had a major

79:13depressive episode and what you see is that the rate for boys is around five percent and then around 2011 it starts going up and now it's around seven percent which is actually a somewhat substantial increase but as you can see in the graph the line for girls starts off higher because girls have more mood disorders more exciting depression boys have more antisocial behavior alcoholism crime and violence but girls turn it's called an internalizing disordered girls basically make themselves miserable boys make other people miserable the girls rate is higher but it was stable from you know 2000 or these math graph from 2005 through 2010 and then right around 2011 2012 starts going up and it goes way up to the point where it goes up from about 12% to now about 20% of American teenage girls had a major depressive episode in the last year one in five so this is huge

80:01okay next slide now let's look just at college students so this is more selective these are kids who've made it into college and what we see is that in twenty ten and twenty and twenty twelve when college students were all Millennials the rates were pretty low this is do you have a psychological disorder and they didn't specify that or they said such as depression and so we see about two to three percent of the boys the college men and about five percent of five to six percent of college women say yes to that question that's when it was Millennials but beginning in 2013 gen Z begins arriving that's kids born in 1995 gen z begins arriving and so by 2016 colleges are almost all Gen Z and the rates shoot up way up yeah we're looking at these charts right now and folks who are just listening the it's like it's a like a jump ramp for a BMX racer I mean it

80:56really is crazy for women out of nowhere and it hits a 2012 it goes on a very sharp upward angle right it goes from six less than 6% to almost 15% in the space of four years that's crazy it's crazy you can't say that that's um I can't say crazy what can I say nuts no because some people might have in that allergy it's preposterous really frightening and so this has huge ramifications lied there you bring up the next one okay so some people say oh come on you guys are catastrophizing the increase isn't real it's just that you know this generation they're really comfortable talking about mental illness and so the fact that they say they're depressed just means they're comfortable it doesn't mean that there's an epidemic I've heard this argument there's just an argument of recognition rather than of perfectly reasonable criteria change perfectly reasonable argument is it true

82:01well let's look at behavior so what this graph shows is the number of boys out of a hundred thousand who were admitted to a hospital every year because they cut they deliberately harmed themselves it had to be hospitalized and what you see here is that there's no change over time so boys these graphs from 2001 to 2015 the lines are flat for all the different age groups and just notice at the highest rates are around 280 out of a hundred thousand per year that's the situation for boys next graph bang the situation for girls is really really different so the averages are higher so self-harm has always been more of a girl thing than a boy thing but you know boys are except for suicide okay that's but that exactly we'll get to that that's right that's next so if we look at self-harm what you see here is that the rates were fairly stable up until 2009 and then bang just as in the

82:53last latest same thing the rates for girls go shooting up so the rate for 15 to 19 year old girls is up 62 percent since 2009 now notice the rate for the Millennials that is the rate for the oldest girls aged 20 to 24 that's when we have 17 percent so whatever it happened it's not affecting the Millennials it's affecting Gen Z I think wait is there one hit the advanced key because I think there's one number missing there okay I'll just go forward okay the number oh there it is there it is the rate for the youngest girls check that out now the youngest court these are 10 to 14 year old girls these are preteens okay they didn't used to cut themselves they used to have very low rates but bang beginning in 2010 it shoots up it's up 189 percent it is nearly tripled in the last five or six years what's the wrong we don't know for sure but the reason why so because of the huge sex

83:48difference the leading candidate and the timing look at that timing is social media so if you look at what happened in this country and all around the world Facebook opens up to the world in 2006 you know you don't have to be a college student but very few teenagers have a Facebook account 2006 2007 the iPhone comes out but it's very expensive and very few teenagers have one by 2010 2011 around half of American teenagers have an iPhone or Samsung they have a smartphone and they have access to social media in middle school because even though for Facebook and Instagram I think mage is and was 13 you know I mean my son is 12 a lot of his friends have Instagram you just lie so middle school kids are now getting on social media by 2010 2011 you've got a lot of them and that's what I think is the main cause of this because social media does not really affect boys very much but man

84:42does it affect girls why is a so if you look at so a couple of reasons first look at the nature of aggression within the sexes boys bullying is physical okay boys are physically dominating and then the risk is that they're going to get punched okay so you give everybody an iPhone what do they do with it games and porn they don't use it to hurt each other boys your toys that's right it doesn't affect their bullying but girls aggression the girls are actually as aggressive his boys research from the 80s and 90s on this if you include relational aggression girls don't bully each other by threatening to punch each other in the face girls bully each other by damaging the other girls social relationships spreading rumors spreading lies spreading a doctored photograph saying bad things excluding them it's relational aggression and so it's always been really hard to be a middle school

85:33student it's always been harder to be a middle school girl than a middle school boy okay so beginning around 2010-2011 we throw in this brand new thing into the mix okay girls here's this beautiful thing in your hand and here's all these programs where you can damage anyone's social relationships any time of the day or night with deniability from an anonymous account go at it girls and so the nature of girls bullying is hyper charged by social media and smartphones that's one mechanism the other two mechanisms are the social comparison because it's always been hard to be a teen girl emerging with Beauty standards and impossible beauty standards and when we were kids you had impossible beauty standards that these models were all doctored up and then Photoshop okay so you've got these impossible beauty standards out there but beginning with social media in especially in recent

86:26years your own friends can put on a filter and Instagram to make their lips bigger their skin cleaner their eyes bigger so your own friends are more beautiful than they are in real life you feel uglier so that's the social comparison of beauty and then probably the biggest single one is the fear of missing out the fear of being left out so all kids are subject to this everyone's concerned about whether they're included or whether they're they're excluded but girls are much more sensitive and so suddenly when everybody is tracking each other's who was invited who's there and especially any program in which a girl puts something out and then waits to see what other people say about it that is what's really damaging I think we again let me stress we don't know for sure there are some experiments on this but it's mostly correlational stuff we're talking about here correlational data

87:14but the overall experience of being a girl who was born in 1995 or later and got this stuff in middle school is different from being a girl born in 1990 let's say we didn't get this stuff till college are you concerned that this is a trend that as technology becomes more and more invasive it and with these new technologies as they emerge that this is gonna be worse yes yes but it doesn't have to be the soap so I think in the last two years we're really waking up to this the founders of this technology it's really interesting so first of all it's important to note as many people have read the a lot of the creators of this technology do not let their kids have it so they know that these things were made to be addictive they're made to grab eyeballs and not let go so that's one thing we all should keep that in mind that the makers of this are wary of it second they've gotten more and

88:04more addictive as they've gotten better and better as they've evolved so they're getting more and more and for tonight is an example of you know extremely addictive game and it does but so even when you if you've ever been to a a casino and you've seen kids you've seen people sitting at those machines like zombies just you know hour after hour pulling that crank because there were psychologists working out the variable reinforcement schedule for the gambling companies psychologists they're helping companies manipulate users and that's happening to our kids too they're they're manipulated to stay on the device so once we're beginning to realize this the nature of these technologies the fact that what is good for adults may be terrible for 12 year olds 10 year olds and once we realize that these things are so attractive that they crowd out all that other healthy activities

89:00like playing outside playing with groups of friends once we realize that I think and I hope we'll get some reasonable norms and what I'd like to propose this is fantastic to be able to talk to so many people I'd like to propose is if you have kids especially if you have kids under about 16 please do what you can to talk with other parents and especially with the principal of any school as you know and say we need some sensible norms because we can't solve this problem by ourselves so I want to keep my kids off social media but my son says well most of my friends are have Instagram accounts now if it was every friend and he was the only one who was excluded he would be really hard for me to stick to my guns I would do it would be really hard whereas if it was only a few of his friends and most of them weren't it would be so easy and I heard this from parents over and over I don't

89:48want my kid on social media but I don't want her to be left out yeah and so if the principal would just say parents please this is getting this is getting out of hand this is harming kids look at the data look at the suicide rates look at the look at the self-harm rates we've got to do something what do you do a couple of things that's I think it's pretty pretty a couple of pretty simple norms one all devices out of the bedroom buy a set time at least half an hour before bed there is no reason why kids should have an iPhone or a computer or screen in their bedroom because so many kids are attracted to it they'll check their status overnight and it interrupts their sleep we can't be having teenagers who have interrupted sleep that there's no benefit from that gave my daughter a Fitbit my ten-year-old too you know monitor all sorts of different thing she

90:33was interested in it so we got her one for Christmas and she slept five and a half hours the first night she had it on because we could check like what are you doing she's checking the 15 what's what's going on him like this is not good like you can't wear this now and she's like trying to make all these arguments to keep but I'm like listen she's it's not distracting me I go if it's not distracting you then you shouldn't care if you don't have it on right because then it's not gonna mean anything yeah and then there's like this like a like she got checkmated these things are so addictive addictive I had one of those goddamn watches those Apple watches I had it on for one day and whilst doing the podcast it kept vibrating huh I'm like oh my god I'm getting text messages on my wrist my wrist so wait and your brain is all developed yeah well okay okay but

91:20imagine if you're a 10 or 11 years I've seen it yeah you put something out there and you want to know did you know did bill like it yet you know why did why did Mary like bills but not my like yeah so so that's the rule number one you gotta get devices out of the bedroom give them an old-fashioned alarm clock let him wake up an alarm cuts one to no social media till high school there is no reason why kids in middle school or elementary school should have Instagram Facebook snapchat any of those I agree they can text each other like when we were kids he'd call each other on the phone that's fine they can text each other but there should be no social media till high school because it's a it's a social dilemma it that we can't solve alone we can only solve it if there's an agreement among parents and guidance from the principal please parents don't give your kid Instagram

92:01account my only concern is that they're not going to learn how to mitigate it or how to navigate it rather if we say nothing till high school and then when they get in high school then they they're confronted with it I would like them to have some skills or at least some understanding of what's going on now wait a sec so so I'm not saying don't let them have access to these machines I'm not saying don't let them know I know exactly what you're saying you're saying those how social media yeah and how about this the bullying that takes place in middle school is primitive and destructive and the bullying that takes place in late high school is a lot less and is not really a way why do you think that is well Mills like middle school kids are just coming into this there's some research sown gene twangy has a book called ijen and she has some data in there that suggests

92:49that when you get social media in college it doesn't seem to harm you but when you got it in your preteen years it does hmm and so and she thinks that it's in part the nature of the bullying is such so you know sure we want them to know how to deal with this but you know they can learn it pretty quickly when they're 15 it's not like they need a running start from 11 to 15 right so I just see no good whatsoever coming from social media in middle school and I see a lot of harm if you want your look I go around the country I talk about this they're almost the rule now is when someone in someone says oh my daughter's in high school and you know she's had it and I say how is she doing does she have anxiety problems the answer is almost always yes mm-hmm and if it's not her then her friends are all crippled by or suffering from anxiety so I think we have to you know you have to wake cost

93:34and benefits a few years ago we didn't know for sure about the costs now we do yeah no you're making total sense I'm purely playing devil's advocate and I'm on the same page with you I don't give my kids don't have phones and my ten-year-old it's shocking how many girls in her class have phones right and Facebook accounts and Instagram accounts and they it I'll say it right now her friends are at higher risk than she is of having an anxiety disorder of being hospitalized because they're going to cut themselves and ultimately of suicide yeah it's so common and it's most of the kids in school now and when they get older than 10 the the number increases like parents hold out for as long as they can but as they get older and the kids want phones man everybody wants a phones right so let me put in a plug so I gave my son so I'm saying two contradictory things

94:19one is I'm saying we gotta let our kids out gotta start letting them out at least by age eight at least to go with their friends to playground stores we gotta start doing this and at the same time I'm saying that the technology has some negative effects okay if you're gonna send your kid out I totally get what you were saying about your either panic like the first time that we let our son out in the park and then he didn't come home right when he said like and it was real panic yeah in part so two things one is we have to get used to that because he always does come home but secondly I didn't realize this when I gave him an iPhone my old iPhone there's a great little product the my pattern of Verizon no they don't make it it something LG makes it but it's a gizmo or gizmo gadget and so it's as simple it's a watch it's a it's a big clunky thing but my daughter loves

95:03wearing it because it's kind of like a James Bond Dick Tracy thing it's a watch you press a button you turn it on you can call three phone numbers that's it three four yeah so she can call and so so now I can send her out to get bagels on Sunday morning she walks about six blocks in New York City it's incredibly safe how old is she she is nine so oh yeah so and she is a much more independent confident girl because of it and she is proud of this fact that she is a free-range kid he can walk around our neighborhood I mean we live in Greenwich Village it's incredibly safe so she can go get bagels and it you know look she has no sense of direction so a couple times when she's been out doing there and she gets lost she just presses a button daddy I don't know where I am and if she's calm and I said we've talked it through and I can track her that's the the reassuring

95:47thing I can see on a screen roughly where she is so I can say you know what do you see and I said come back this way and she always knows how she gets in trouble just walk home and start again yeah whew what are you thinking Joe all right what's what's that facial expression nothing is just children wandering around on their own yeah has always happened mm-hmm yeah and as they have to do at some point I know but listen look at how you're even reacting to this what but you're you're you're beaming up and you're adding a motion to your voice and you're smiling yes so it's everything's gonna be fine everything you're doing this and sort of you're not just reassuring you're selling it you're right I am selling it because we as a society bought into a set of beliefs that are based on falsehoods the risk to our kids is miniscule someone calculated at present rates of abduction by strangers

96:37if you put your kid in a car and you go into a store and you leave the windows open your kids sitting there in the parking lot you'd have to stay in that store for 700,000 years before your kid is likely to be abducted well it does not depend on what neighborhood you live in I suppose so yeah but still the point is that there's hardly any actual abduction and so actually this brings up a really important point I'd like to say you one of the sticking points here is that we're afraid to let our kids out because bad things can happen to us mm-hmm as well as to the kids sure and so it hoped that would be the least of your concerns so number one concern would be your children's safety but are you getting in trouble that hope would be the least of your concerns not the least of them because I am selling something I am selling the idea that that they're gigantic rise in mental illness of

97:23teenagers is caused in part because we've all protected them we have denied them the experiences of independence they need to develop their basic social sense and so I am selling idea that we've we've totally botched this and we need to undo it and a big piece of that is we need to be removed from the fear of legal prosecution and so Utah this day Utah passed a year and a half ago a year ago yeah they passed the first free range kids bill which says it puts into state law it says I forget what the exact terms but the gist of it is a parent cannot be considered to be negligent just by having the kids be unsupervised so if you send your kids out to the park you know you have to use judge obviously if there's a pattern of neglect that's a totally different story right but the mere fact that as you just said the story about well I'm teaching my kids to go outside I know that

98:13they're outside I told them to go outside you can't be arrested for that right and until we have legal protections it's gonna be very hard for anyone to do it because they you know the risk is you could be drawn into months and months of supervision your kids can actually be taken away from you if you give them independence in some parts of the country it's interesting that you thought would be so progressive about that um yeah I don't know the history behind it it's such a safe place it's one of the reasons why that could be yeah so a big part of this is we don't trust each other anymore right you know if you don't trust your neighbors then you're you're not gonna let them out you're not let your kids out one of the things you talk about in your book about happiness it's really interesting is cognitive therapy Prozac and meditation those those three factors

99:02being enormous aids in acquiring a certain amount of happiness you know I've found it very refreshing that you you also added in Prozac you added in SSRIs because there's a lot of people that seem to take this approach with antidepressants in particular that they're over prescribed which I think they probably are and that they do more harm than good which is debatable but the fact that they do do good I have had two close friends that were in really bad places and they got on an SSRI and it cleaned them up and they eventually wean themselves off of it and now very productive and very happy but they were in a place in their life where they like my friend Ari put it best he's like my brain was broken and he goes I needed to fix it and I fixed it and then once it was fixed I realized it was fixed and then I weaned myself off that's right yeah so in chapter 2 of the happiness hypothesis so

100:05the book is based on ten ancient ideas and one of the ancient ideas is the world is but we deal the world is the world is what we deem it it with our perceptions we make the world the world is not an objective thing we don't react to the world as an objective fact we are react to it through filters and one of the major personality traits is sort of positivity negativity or overall happiness yeah some people look at the world they see threats other people look at the world is the opportunities and if you take a bunch of kids for five six year old kids and you put some weird toy in front of it makes noise some of the kids are gonna go towards it and say oh what's that some are going to move away like oh this could be threatening and from that behavior you can predict not with a lot of accuracy but you can do better than chance who's gonna go to the high school prom who is going to be

100:56successful in in any sort of social endeavors because some people's brains are set to fear and avoidance when your brain is set to see more threats you have a bias towards interpreting things negatively and if the world is incredibly dangerous well that might be adaptive but if the world's incredibly physically safe as ours is you're losing a lot of opportunities you're going to be less successful and so the point of that chapter was there are ways you can change your filter even though this is highly heritable identical twins reared apart tend to be pretty similar on these traits but you can change your filters and so that chapter two of the happiness hypothesis shows the three main ways of changing your filter so it was a meditation cognitive therapy and SSRIs and all three work there's a lot of evidence for all three meditation has only good effects it's wonderful but

101:51it's hard that is I've assigned it to my classes and most undergraduates if they have to do it for a few weeks most of them stopped a few continue and get benefits cognitive therapy is easier it when I've assigned students to do it most have success I have a real hard time with that phrase it's hard the medications hard I really do I don't think it's hard you find it easy to sit for 20 minutes not easy but it's not hard coal mining is hard okay you know I mean we're doing something you hate is hard yeah this is just complicated I don't think it's hard you're right let me use a different word meditation is such that the non-compliance rate ends up being quite high well there's a massive people have problem with a few things one discipline - avoiding discomfort this is a people is one of the reasons why people don't like exercise and it's also really just

102:46starting exercise because the actual exercise itself is on two different kind of pleasure once you develop a habit it's a letter yes this is I think what you have with meditation it's this procrastination this your brain tries to find ways to avoid whatever difficult especially you know some strange way if it's been shown to be beneficial things that have been shown to be beneficial your brain wants to avoid I do not know why that is but things you get I have a theory that especially when you're growing up that you associate work with school work jobs so anytime you have these thoughts in your head you're like oh it's that thing it's one of those things that I don't want to do I want to go play video games one play for tonight why don't have to do the work but doing the work really it's just a matter of how you interface with it how you how you view it and weird it's many many

103:42years of conditioning that this is mundane dreary boring horseshit when you could be out playing yeah fun stuff no that's right there's a there's a great little scene in The Simpsons where Bart is on a video game and he's shooting down state capitals and he's shooting something appears like oh there's Hellena you know there's a you know Springfield and then at a certain point he says wait I'm learning and he throws it it's really what is what it is I mean it's it's kind of amazing that we have done such a shitty job teaching kids that we make school out to be this everything that you're they have like a deep avoid music well that's right and that's and this is Peter Gray's point Peter gray this wonderful development of psychologist at Boston College who thinks that schools are are not designed with kids learning in mind kids learn best from interacting with

104:39the world from experience we get experience from feedback and so we make learning painful yeah so an example would be you know like how do you learn to climb a tree you know when we were kids you'd climb a tree and you know you know that feeling when you go out on a branch and a certain point you just get the sense that it's about to crack yeah you pull back okay now imagine that you had a hundred kids who learn how to climb trees by climbing trees you take another hundred kids you get in tree climbing class but you never let them climb a tree okay but you you know you bring in the world's best experts on tree climbing and they teach these kids how to climb trees and then you put them all out you get trees to climb you know in general I would put my money on the kids who actually learned from experience oh for sure and so you know the general principle again is that well actually

105:24here I'll bring up one other with idea from happiness hypothesis I find it really helpful to think of the mind as being divided in two parts like a rider on an elephant and the rider is our conscious reasoning it's the little guy up on top who has language and it's what we're aware of but the elephant is the other 99% of our minds and that's almost all automatic processes it's intuitions its emotions its habits phobias all sorts of things and so child development can't be just training the rider for 18 years wisdom knowledge skill competence those those have to involve training the elephant and when the two work together then you get the best results and I think we we've just what we've done in America especially is we've said we want our kids to be really good in math so we're gonna teach the math earlier let's give the math in kindergarten but there's no evidence that that helps if

106:19there's no evidence that teaching academic skills earlier will make them advance to a higher level at the end what they most need when they're young is to play and we've taken that away from them we've given them too many after-school lessons you're in too much supervision of their play yeah that's a saddest thing in the world is when my kids come home and they're really frustrated because they have homework you know 10 year olds that have hours of homework you're at school all day that's right and I don't know how to address that you bring to the teachers and say hey you guys are up even though I've never taught anyone ever in class I'm telling you you're doing it wrong yeah so you know it's a it's a case where you certainly need the research and the research we cover some of the research in chapters 8 & 9 of the coddling the American mind and as far as

107:06we can tell the research seems to show that they're essentially no benefits to doing homework in kindergarten and first grade maybe a little bit of like you know they learn to organize their time but barely any by fifth or sixth grade there's more evidence that homework is beneficial but in between there it really isn't clear what's really clear is that play free play is beneficial so so it's hard for you as just one parent to say hey don't do this but I think as part of a larger program to say our kids are being messed up look at these graphs look at the rates of anxiety and depression and you know when I talk I guys talk about the book all around you're talking at people now come up to me and they'll say like I'm a guitar teacher I've been teaching guitar for 20 years and suddenly like just the last few years I give them negative feedback and they

107:52crack so everyone's beginning to notice that our kids are frail and nobody wants this and so I think we're gonna find people more open to changing what we're doing well I hope so it's also it's got to be so incredibly difficult to cater a lesson where you have you know 30 or 40 kids in the classroom with varying abilities and varying interests and you're sort of catering unless we're trying to excite them about astronomy or whatever it is you're teaching and and get it through into their heads and make it seem fun you know yeah and still teach them yeah yeah and then still set them up would to have a certain amount of discipline if you're going to enter into the workforce you're gonna have to do things you don't necessarily want to do while you're doing them that's right and if we're and now you add to that the decline of authority of tea and principles and you add to that the

108:50sense of empowerment that parents have to fine-tune or control and be involved the you know there are stories now about parents who come to the lunchroom because they want to see their kid at lunch where you know we have principals and teachers where once you know if the principal or if the teacher gives a bad grade the parents would assume that it was deserved I think there's more of a tendency in reason and that's decade or two of two parents who are very competitive or concerned about getting to get into college to complain so if you have I don't know how general these these trends are I don't want to overestimate this but if you have a general decline of authority of teachers and principals now they have less leeway to give negative experiences so if someone does if someone fails to turn in a paper because they were responsible and you say sorry F yeah that could be a

109:40good learning experience right it could be but devastating for their GPA and that's right so probably a good thing though it's from the understanding consequences right exactly what about teaching children how to think and why is that not a massive part of the curriculum because I think that's something that I really had to learn on my own and I think it's one of the most valuable things that I ever learned but as I got older I always thought why didn't I learn this in school okay a couple of reasons so when in the 1980s there was a huge emphasis on teaching critical thinking and we don't hear about that anymore because nobody found a way to do it so it's not that easy one of the things I cover in the happiness I pop in that righteous mind is we're all designed for confirmation bias we're all really good at confirming what we already believe and so it's very hard to

110:30train anyone to disconfirm their own hypotheses what we really need to think better is the right system the right community we actually need critics so actually here I brought you a copy of a little book that I co-produced so this is John Stuart Mill wrote one of the most important books in the Western tradition on Liberty chapter two of on Liberty is the best set of arguments ever made for free speech for why it is that we need to let people talk and challenge and criticize even if we think they're wrong we get smarter from having to rebut them whereas if we shut them down if we have blasphemy laws we get Dumber because we never actually face tests of what we believe so this set of arguments in Chapter two of on Liberty is timeless I mean we need like mill anticipated every argument that we hear now about why we need to shut that person down and not let that person talk and so I thought

111:23wow we need to get this book back out because the college students don't read this anymore and it's a little bit difficult the text so I I happen to be friends with with Richard Reeves who was a mill scholar he's at Brookings Institution and and he called he said Jonathan I love what you're doing a heterodox Academy if I can be of help let me know so I said well actually Richard would you co edit this edition of Mills second chapter and he said yes I'd love to so he made the selections we worked together like to reduce it it's only seven thousand words so it's easy to read and then this wonderful artist Dave Ciccarelli stopped by my office he said I love what you're doing Hydrox Academy if I can be of help let me know and I said well actually could you read this text find Mills metaphors because Mill uses a lot of wonderful metaphors and illustrate them and so if you tested

112:10over which is that camera okay so what Dave did was he took he took Mills metaphors and here so you know we've got these like amazing you know graphic cartoon type images of the dynamics of what happens when we shame people mmm because Mill was not concerned about government censorship that wasn't a big deal in London in 1859 it was social censorship just as it is today so you know so Ciccarelli families made these beautiful illustrations of Mills point and so we think that this book if this book was assigned in every high school for seniors or every incoming freshman class we think that people would think a lot better so you want to know how to do critical thinking read this book and then seek out your opponents seek out your critics seek out the people who can do for you what you can't do for yourself which is challenge your ideas are you concerned with this the trend

113:02that we're seeing now with social media of I mean I get removing blatant racism and sexism and in certain really awful types of behavior certain social media sites but at a certain point in time it becomes an ideological battle and people that lean one way or another want that other side to be silenced I'm seeing this way more from the left which is very disturbing to me because growing up my family was very liberal you know and I said my formative years in San Francisco I was always around hippies and I always felt like the people that were on the left with the open-minded educated ones who were concerned with the future of discourse and and humans developing the ability to really flesh out ideas and work their way through them which only happens through 3/4 through real free speech giving people the ability to express themselves and then deciding whether or not you agree with that and

114:02why you disagree or agree and then speaking your mind and then everybody works it out together this this is not necessarily the trend that we're seeing today that's right that's right so first let me just say you can get this book for free at least you can download the PDF if you go to heterodox academy org slash mil or you can get a $3 Kindle if you go to Amazon look this up it's $3 for the Kindle or you can buy the art book they're too awesome so that's so cool that you're doing that and allowed people to download it for free too we want to get the word out we think these are the ideas that are needed so onto your question so in part there's an empirical question here which I don't know the answer to in Europe they ban in most of they ban hate speech so or you know Holocaust denial there's certain things that are illegal it's a crime and in America we don't now it's an

114:50empirical question meaning it's open to actual investigation does banning it push it underground and let the people feel that they are victims of being silenced things come back stronger or is some like the best disinfectant I don't know the answer to that I think in general I think the American system has worked better but I don't know they're scholars who could who could address that as for what is happening to the left is the left more intolerant I agree with you that you would think the left would be more open and in my research on left-right the left is generally higher an openness to experience the idea of dissent dissent is patriotic these or leftist ideas not not greatest idea so the left should be more open problem is any group that any group that loses variety that loses diversity any group in which everybody thinks the same is at risk of turning it into an ideology of

115:47turning to a religion and then you lose the ability to think straight and now if somebody so you know when I was in college yeah you know everybody sort of leaned left but there was there were conservatives there were some conservative professors like I've been exposed to some conservative ideas but now if you're in a college that has essentially no conservatives that will put out ideas and you encounter one now it's much more painful it's much more shocking again it's like it's like you have a peanut allergy to ideas that are not your groups right and we want so we it's terrible if we're putting young people in systems that are basically giving them ideological peanut allergies mmm that's a great way to look at it I definitely agree with that in terms of young people but I'm concerned with grown adults as well III think that the way a my personal opinion the way to con

116:39the way to deal with bad speech is better speech with the way that would the way to deal with shitty ideas is to make those ideas look shitty through debate it's not to silence the person that's talking this is one of the more confusing things about people that are pulling alarms on speakers and and and shouting them down while they're talking you have an opportunity with that person's in front of you to listen to their idea and there should be an opportunity to to debate that idea to form your own opinion and have a really good argument against it and to present that argument and to have people see both sides and this is what learning is supposed to be all about especially recognizing the flaws and ideas recognizing bias recognizing the lack of critical thinking or recognizing critical thinking and applauding it I will agree with you depending on the context what I mean is if you have a

117:38group of people interacting with certain norms or laws that that ban intimidation and violence that make people have some accountability for how they the style that they use to argue sure if you if you if you lie if yes threaten something your reputation something bad will come back to you yes so adding intimidation and violence are probably the most important that's where those are and so within a university I totally agree with you now if you look at the country as a whole or the internet as a whole and you have a culture war going on or you have a sense of us versus them yes and you have all kinds of bad actors like the Russians discovered you know before then that were there was the you know the fake news people who discovered they make fake articles and you know on the left and the right and just turned out that actually the right would click on the

118:29more so they went that way there if there are people who are gaming the system then your idea which is Mills idea there are I think there are conditions in which it wouldn't work I'm not sure about that but I think there are six conditions in which that logic would not work and so one thing that I'm very concerned about I don't see why it is that we can ever let people start an account where there's no verification of who they are not saying you can't have anonymous accounts like you know I understand their reasons why you'd want to be able to post without your real name that's fine right but if you make a death threat or what you know what happens a lot is like you know there's research showing if you post something as a woman versus a man as a woman you're gonna get a lot more rape threats and things like that if you if you post as a black person or white person you

119:10get a lot more racist stuff so at least the platforms should always know that you're a person and that you can your account can be shut down if you if you talk this way because I think that there are so many people saying such nasty stuff that it feeds back and changes people's willingness to speak up right my concern is not necessarily free speech per se it's free speech as a means to an end and that end is that we as individuals are kind of stupid and we only get smart if you put us together in the right way where we can challenge each other that's what university should do and when we have a callout culture we're walking on eggshells we can no longer do that and in the marketplace of ideas I think it's really interesting to see those two things play out the one the benefit of being anonymous that you could talk about things without fear of retribution you could

119:56talk about things without fear of losing your job and controversial ideas especially in this day and age that you know might not really be that controversial to you or at least arguable to you but that you could get shamed for it and get people could take your words out of context and you could get in real trouble so there's a benefit of anonymity but on the other hand when you're looking at slurs attacks threats stalking all that stuff it would be nice if we knew who is behind all this absolutely yeah so that's a case whereby I don't think it's a pendulum I do think that there will be some technological solutions and maybe some social norms so that people who critique in a certain way where it's lers and it's guilt by association those people will in some sense lose points lose credibility be downgraded my big word for 2019 is nuance that most things are complicated

120:50least the things we're talking about are common yeah and anybody who can say you know I think you're right about X but wrong about Y like that should be a hundred bonus points yeah like that is one of the essential skills of of sincerely engaging with people and anybody who uses guilt by association loses a hundred points so like one thing I'm finding because I'm a centrist I only vote for Democrats at never voted for Republican but I consider myself philosophically to be a centrist and now people will say that I'm alt right adjacent you know that's like my favorite one the adjacency that's a that's a wonderful I get that one because I've had people on the podcast that are right-wingers yeah so you should say to them really say on social media is anybody who makes an adjacency argument is McCarthy adjacent that is if you're making a guilt by association argument if you say an adjacency

121:42argument that's guilt by association anybody does guilt by association is like McCarthy therefore their McCarthy adjacent she said that clear but it is a good argument that's a good definition of what you're saying it's it's a screwy thing that people are doing by this alt right adjacent thing well you know and someone wrote a whole chart of like people interacting with people and connecting these people because they've had communication with these B so that somehow or another these things are all related like boy that is a yeah that's a squirrely argument no but but but actually this is the way the human mind works right we have to see is that we evolved to do this kind of religion with witchcraft believes and voodoo yes there's all you know there's all these patterns that recur all around the world and the miracle is that there have been societies such as ours that develop

122:34norms of science norms of discourse norms of civility norms of toleration and free speech where the exceptions and it's precious and it's easily lost I think I fear do you think that it's also this the newfound ability to communicate that we're experiencing because the internet leads us to a lot of this sort of sloppy arguing and categories I categorizing of humans and ideas that it's just we're just not used to these tools yet yes but it's not so so I approach this as a social psychologist so most of the commentary about this comes from cognitive psychologists or people who talk about the information bubbles the filter bubbles as though you know I have my ideas in my head and if I'm exposed only to ideas from here then I'm going to have an incorrect balance of ideas so to look at the information flow obviously these tools have vastly changed the information flow mostly for the better

123:29you can google anything at any time so mostly for the better but we have this problem of unbalanced like you know you eat only sugar something so you have an unbalanced diet okay fine those are problems I'm a social psychologist I think the social dynamics problems are vastly bigger vastly more dangerous and they are that if whatever I say or whether I will agree with you or whether I'll even press the like button I'm thinking what's gonna happen to me who's gonna nail me for it and there are people who go through my Twitter feed and they look at what I liked months or years ago and they'll say well he like this or he followed this but yeah I follow people on the Albright and the far left and communists and fat I mean yeah I study this stuff yeah but the idea that you could be somehow a be you know blamed for having some connection this is what normal human people normal

124:16human beings do with this guilt by association and we have to rise above it we have to call it out when we see it it were and realize you know what we all need critics we all need to engage with a variety of viewpoints that's what John Stuart Mill said that's what common sense will tell you and if we have institutions that don't expose students to a variety of viewpoints it's possible that they are making them less wise when they graduate than they were when they arrived well this is Jonathan we just cranked through two hours and I want to thank you for illuminating these ideas and for your great books and and thank you for coming on the pile what a pleasure you want to do it again so know what's do it again thank you I love thank you so much bye everybody