#1221 - Jonathan Haidt

January 7, 2019

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

Episode Sponsors

Help improve this transcript!

Hello friends welcome to the fucking show this episode of the podcast is brought you by Kettle & Fire bone broth I'm a big fan of bone broth and a big fan of this company first of all the stuff it's delicious and you don't have to it's not frozen it comes conveniently packaged in vacuum sealed cartons that are sent right to your door of course but they can sit in your pantry unopened for up to two years and because it's not frozen you don't have to pay a fortune for shipping delicious and really good for you they have 10000 + 5 Star reviews from lawyer loyal customer customer to drink bone broth like myself everyday these fresh organic ingredients hundred percent grass-fed and finished bones no bulshit additives no bulshit preservatives hormones antibiotics excetera all their products are certified gluten-free and really delicious

they have beef chicken chicken and mushroom mushroom meaning lion's mane superfood mushroom which is it supports cognitive health and it's a big mushroom that our friend Paul stamets who's a Mycologist a mushroom expert is a gigantic fan of the lion's mane mushroom kugel that have a line of bone broth and fuse soup that tastes delicious butternut squash miso tomato Thai curry they also just released their 100% grass-fed beef chili which is made with bone broth perfect for a quick and healthy meal, giant fan of the stuff and you can get a special offer listeners this podcast can go to Kettle & Fire. Com Rogan and use the code Rogan for 15% off your order free shipping when you order six cards are more that's KettleandFire.Com

kettleandfire.Com/Rogan and use the code Rogan for 15% off we are also brought to you by the motherfuking cash app giant fan of the cash app send a voice that come from the catch up with the number one finance app in the app store for a very good reason and it's the most powerful debit car in the world the cash card comes with the cash app because the cash card at something called boosts buser it's a money-saving feature that you can't get anywhere else because the cash app invented it you just select a boost from the cash app swipe the cash card you can save 10% or more at Whole Foods shakeshaft boat lay Taco Bell Chick-fil-A coffee shops coffee shop when is awesome get a buck off every time you go and get coffee you want to go organic without paying for it you can save 10% on every bag of groceries with Whole Food

boots that's a beautiful thing hopefuls it's very hard not spend 50 bucks right well it's very easy to say $5 if you do the coffee shop boost every time you buy a cup of coffee or just coffee. You get a dollar off Dunkin Starbucks by 200 cups year you save two hundred bucks very simple download the cash app for the App Store or the Google Play Market for free and order the cash card today and you know that when you download the cash at the end of the referral code Joe Rogan all one word five dollars will go to you and $5 will also go to support my good friend Justin Brands fight for the Forgotten charity which is helping to build Wells for the pygmies in the Congo I'm also pleased to say the cash app will be continuing to support UFC fighter Ray Bourque Son by donating an additional $5 to help cover his medical bills at least until raise able to get

back into the Octagon so cash app use the promo code Joe Rogan don't fuck around and last but not least we're brought to you by Squarespace Squarespace is the host of Joe Rogan. Calm and it's a fantastic way for you to create your own website a lot of people think man you going to hire company there's no way you can do it yourself listen to me a dummy like myself can make a beautiful website with Squarespace you can do it too if you can do normal things like move around files on your desktop or attach a photo to an email you can build a beautiful website that you can use to start a business because every Squarespace website comes to the free online store you can promote what you are physical or online business there you can sell products and services of any kind and you have the ability to look to change rather to look feel and settings and products and more with just a few simple clicks everything is optimized for mobile right out of the box and you have

free and secure hosting with nothing to patch or upgrade ever in 24/7 award-winning customer support their beautiful templates that are created by world-class designer I'm telling you can make a fucking gorgeous website and here's the best part you can try it for free if you go to squarespace.com go for a free trial then when you're ready to launch use the offer code Joe to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain

hi my guest today is Jonathan hate he is a brilliant man he is a professor and author he is a social psychologist and I'm in the middle of reading well sort of in the middle of reading to is books I put one of them Assad but the happiness hypothesis which is the one that I'm into right now is fantastic and he's got a new one out it's called that's it right there that shouldn't talk to get used to his voice it's of the coddling of the American mind with Greg's name he says it in the podcast but forget the pronunciation Greg lukianoff think that's it and it's how good intentions in bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure very interesting subject the the happiness hypothesis is really fantastic to I'm in the middle of that

that we talked about both books and just a really really fascinating guy and I really enjoy talking to him so please welcome Jonathan hate

The Joe Rogan Experience

hello jaunt you doing this man really appreciate it. 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's really fascinating stuff man but one thing I want 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 her folks don't know the story and I forgot his two colleagues telling these fake papers like homoeroticism and rape culture in dog parks in just really Preposterous 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 is De penes amazing when we were just talking about it

would love to know your thoughts as a professor like with yeah so for those who don't know I guess mostly listens probably do but it was called the grievance studies hoax because at any of this is one of the big issues going on the Cannabis help will talk about is in what does it take to have good scholarship and and the argument is that in some field as long as you hate the right things and use the right words you get published and that's not scholarship that's activism and so these three of these three people did this hoax they were trying to show that that's the case I'm so they wrote these papers one of them was actually a section of mine comp yesterday and they just substituted in something about feminism for an Autism something like that and I don't know that this is somebody's field Macadam you're not really about scholarship there just about showing that you hate the right things are active it and so there's no way those clothes world so they did a timer

they did a hoax they publish the date submitted these papers they made a fake names and and a lot of them got accepted and now it's happening is that the University of Portland State University which is one of the three is that a is a is a professor's assistant professor wanted him investigated for violating the IRB the internal review board because the claim is they fabricated data because one of the paper says I inspected the genitals of 10,000 dogs and the dog park dogs humping each other and they were interpreting this has rape as doggy rape and so he's got all these fake numbers in that is that is that data fraud and if I'm writing a letter for a lot of

writing letters in support of Pelosi and thank you for doing this but if you read the day date at his university committee and it looked at the literal definition of data fabrication and it's possible that he does fall under that but the point of of of this whole thing I just I can't weigh in on whether or not technically but these rules are put in place to prevent the corruption of the scientific record and what he was doing was not going to corrupt the scientific record was done to correct it. There's a huge problem and then they were going to unveil it so the question is is the University going to interpret it that is in the worst possible in the narrowest 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 a fabrication it wasn't a fraud

it was an Expose and I hope that they come to their senses and they do have a point and if I'm going to be completely objective about data fabrication that mean technically mean maybe they could have written a paper without saying that they actually tested 10,000 genitals of different. But what's really important I think is that they recognize that regular people are paying attention to this now people that aren't involved in this very insulated world and they're going this is crazy like imagine if your children are going there and your children children are being taught at the school that's willing to accept this kind of nonsense like this what would happen if Evergreen State University's another example of that and it's incredibly damaging to them as University their enrollment is significant their funding is big trouble

if you talked 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 crazier and crazier on these campuses to the point where nonsense is never been is not in question at all it's just being accepted as just some some it's almost like some religious Dogma that you have to follow all of this is you have to always look at what game is being played so human beings evolved in small-scale societies that we have all kinds of abilities to function the small-scale societies one of those religious worship were very good at making something sacred and circling around it another is war were very good at forming teams to fight the other side and we love that so much we create Sports and you know video game battle the team versus Team games you can play and the truth-seeking game is it was a really special one in a weird one or not very good at it as individuals and in my view

Genius of the university is that it takes people put some together in ways where each person each that scientists aren't these super rational creatures that are you looking to just confirm their own I just know we're not looking we want to prove our ideas we love her ideas but University puts us together in a way in which you are really motivated to disprove my ideas and you put us together we cancel out each other's confirmation bias he's so the truth-seeking games a very special came to can only be played in a very special institution with special Norms okay so we're doing this for my whole time in Academia started grad school in 1987 at University Pennsylvania last few years it's like some people playing tennis I hit the ball to you like like we're in a seminar class I give you a question I challenge 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 Summit Ackles me like what you don't do that in Tennessee football UC football it's a much rougher game and you're trying to destroy the others I'm not really and so as Norms of Kombat come in and what I mean that is political Compass as some people in universities see that what we're doing here is not seeking truth we're trying to fight fascism we're trying to defeat conservatism or we're trying to fight racism or whatever some sort of political goal and these games are completely incompatible and so that's why this madness has erupted where you see Professor 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 seems like there has to be an event or something or Trend in September with Greg lukianoff the coddling of the American mind that I read the first chapter that was well I was I was reading that and then I got on a flight and I just wanted his own outside listen to this one on tape I'll tell you all about it but the key thing is that something that we wrote Because Greg began observing this weird stuff happening at University in 2014 it all starts in 2014 most of your listeners have heard about safe spaces microaggressions bias Response Team trigger warnings all that stuff that stuff didn't exist before 2014 and so our whole book is an explanation of why

why did this happen and so to your question about was there an event or answer is there are six different causal thread there's like all these social trends I'm going back to the eighties and nineties the team together around 2014 so that students are little different and then there are certain forces acting on them that are different and so you get this weird new game you get this explosive mix you get some students who are actually very drawn to grievance studies and so very briefly like that it's things like Rising political polarization so left and right never particularly liked each other but in the seventies and eighties if you look at surveys done of how much you hate people in the other side it's not that intense it begins doing up in the in the eighties and it especially after 2000 it's going up very steeply at the same time University faculty who always lean black throughout the 20th century it was only a lien and then

begin shifting much further that so that now faculties especially in the social sciences and Humanities are pretty purified they're overwhelmingly left so you have a more left-leaning University at a time I left right hostility is getting more and more intense and so any question that has a political valence now there's a lot more people want to do the football game not the truth-seeking it but then we got to defeat the other side don't give me new on don't give me data we know what we believe in kids so we took away free play and gave them social media the same visit the kids were born in 1995 and after gen Z they had really different childhoods and they are not as prepared for conflict in and college look into that later but you put all these things together you get kids who are

much more anxious and fragile much more depressed I'm coming onto campus at a time at much greater political activism and now he's grieving studies ideas about America's Matrix of Oppression Good vs 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 movement's it's such a strange time to be on the outside and watch this because the person like myself is always counted on intellectuals and professors and people like yourself to the sort of makes sense of things and to reinforce the idea that freedom of speech and freedom bait are critical aspects to knowledge and one things it's most disturbing would you see in schools is people that are even marginally right-leaning Centrist being called Nazis and being silenced and they're pulling fire alarms when they're speaking even people that Christina Hoff Sommers who's a feminist gets shouted down in

and people yelling at her and calling her fashion it just very strange it's very strange to watch me outside and it's also very strange to not see any pushback by the professors so sitting here and seeing this happen and thinking but these poor kids there they're going to have to go into the workplace they're going to have to do it the right now during this very insulated environment they're going to escape that environment when they graduate and then they're either going to push this ideology into the workforce which you do see now that's it especially that might be helpful here is that from the outside what you see is the news reports and the news reports are going to be very selective and so especially what happened to because you know University that have always leans left and so the right-leaning media have always been suspicious so the right-leaning media has huge cartridge of every little thing and sometimes it's it's exaggerated sometimes it misinterpret it

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 expected on my God it's true that's an exaggeration and the leftist like problem what problem does nothing changing and so 1500 institutions of higher education in this country most of them are not selected School he'll take anyone who comes 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 co-founded of professors that are pushing that bipartisan we have many people on the on the left is on the right we created a map where all the shout-outs have taken place and they're all right in the northeast or along the Pacific coast like from you ever green tomato it down to a new Berkeley and all that I am in a couple in Chicago so most of the country

this stuff is not happening most schools a culture hasn't really changed much but at the top schools in general it has just keep in mind there is a moral Panic on the right about this doesn't mean that there's not something really really is a huge problem but it's not as pervasive is it sometimes made out to be so is it a kin to looking at violence in the news media like you when you read about violence in terms of robberies and murders in general you're not going to encounter much in your life that the world is a large place yet but we concentrate on these really bad moments yeah it's a little bit like that accept that you know the reason that we took child we took FreePlay away from kids is that we were afraid that they'd be abducted and that almost was so rare but we got a lot of coverage of that me 80s and 90s that we change our Behavior because of that and that was a gross overreaction of the situation I campuses is not like that it's a it's your odds of being nailed

more than that and so email from Professor in class and once this happens to you you you pull back to change your teaching style what we're seeing on campus is a spectacular collapse of trust between students and professors and when we don't trust each other we can't do our job we can't we can't risk provoking being provocative raising new ideas reason uncomfortable is social media partially to blame because I liked you so so so 1 is the generational thing that we have kids born after 1995 got this in middle school that had a variety of effects on them so kids coming in are more conversant with call out culture 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 Professor what's one of the professors wrote to me recently he said he got frustrated while trying to explain something you said I shoot me now and soon was offended by this because are you making fun of people committing suicide to him and said I know you didn't mean anything but that was kind of insensitive that would have been great like that's the way to handle it but for this generation raised with call out culture and social media you almost never hear of a student coming to someone else in private because you don't get credit for that so you only get pregnant while not publicly and so that's why we're all walking on eggshell cuz most of our students are great but if I have the class of 300 students Electra 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 have to teach to the most sensitive person in the class it's also that person has the opportunity to score by Debs out Lathrop that virtue flag like I've got one on the board here look what I did I nail the professor on saying shoot me now and now I'm hero and I'll say this a safe from space for everybody else that 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 that the difficulties of democracy the rise of authoritarian populism that there a lot of weird trends that are happening in multiple countries and I think it's the right type 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 us is this some sort of a trend that will eventually correct itself when these kids get out into the real world and then go through a whole generation of that and then people realize the error of their ways and the disastrous results of having these unprepared or emotionally unprepared kids

no I'm not confident that it will not correct itself I think that once we understand it I think they're right I think we can do to change it but here's way to understand why it's not going to change itself so so I'm a I'm a social psychologist is my name my main area but I I love all of the social sciences I love thinking about complex systems and system composed of people are really different from system composed of stars are or neutrons making out 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 no food and things like that or said we're always interacting and ways to make ourselves look good and to protect yourself from being nailed you know rock used of something so we're always do 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

it's Athletics and so if that's how you get prestige then all the kids are going to be working out in training and practicing and it doesn't hurt anybody that doesn't impose an external cost on anyone else but you got some really sick Prestige economies and so there's a there's an ethnography about a an indigenous population in the Philippines by Shelly rosaldo is the Anthropologist that thing called knowledge and passion about the alarm good witch is the name for the tribe in the Philippines and in this tribe it's a headhunting tribe

find people who cut off their head not just for fun for Prestige so in a lot of societies you have a lot of male initiation boys have to do something to become a man and if the thing you have to do to become a man if you have to cut off someone's head okay so that imposes rather heavy cost on Outsiders book culture this is not what you think this has to stop and ideally they would cut off a stranger's head like they find someone from other driver someone you know from you no government agency that cut off his head but it is necessary is a fight or there's somebody within their larger community that can also get you points so this is a really sick culture now headed out call out culture is not quite that bad but it's the same logic okay so if you have a group of teenagers for college students who are all struggling for Prestige as we all are and if you get some culture in which the way you get prestige is by

calling someone out showing at the racist sexist homophobic transphobic islamophobic whatever it is if you can catch them you get the points what you're doing here is your 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 it's hard to people are going to break out of that sounds but wants me to stand what's happening I think innocence we can all come together and call out call out culture and safest stop stop composing these costs on us How would how we going to reach those kids if professors are so terrified to speak out into caused controversy in class and no one wants to criticize him because if you do you risk your job erase them organizing against you and how does this shift so that so I'm hopeful that we can shift it because most people hated so even the people who do it recognize that they're always on eggshells they can be next there's a

sea of people in this culture till he knows we say they eat their own the vision turn on each other and the mental health costs of it I'm either number of essays that have been written by people who left that sounds miserable to be inside of your old ways you're in no humour there's no fun it's always no hyper serious angry and so so I think that I think if we can if we can raise kids are encouraged and to see the games that social media makes them do and give them a vocabulary I don't know if we should come up with some catchy terms for it but give them so they can sneaking out it was like oh you're you know you're a calling out her I must concur C&M people that

from a distance like I if I look at it when I look at them objectively there's like these these patents are all that's one of those Maga guys he's one of those again always got an American flag with an eagle and his avatar on Twitter that if you go through his page it's all like talking great about POTUS and criticizing anybody talks about about trumpets it's a strange it's like these patterns of behavior these predetermined patterns are stereotypes stereotypes like they'd fallen into a well-oiled slick Groove that's very easy to predict if you were one of those people it's it's super easy to predict that you're going to be pro-second Amendment and super easy to predict that you're probably going to be skeptical about climate change there's all these different things that go along with these patterns of behavior and you see him in the right you seem on the left and it's it's weird to watch it's weird to watch on the outside like what this is such a good and easy pattern to slip in

let's write so there's data from the Pew survey says they've been measuring attitudes of Americans since the 80s or 90s publishing the series on polarization 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 the certain percent and a lot of people on the left that's a would hold 6 to the 10 left its attitudes and Sam on the right but gradually by the time he gets around 2010 it's like if you know when a tattoo you know them all and that's just because the volume so we evolved to do US versus them and the more we see you know if it's US America versus dim communist Russia or Nazi Germany what that we all come together and that's great for social cohesion and I'm glad that Fades away and it's us vs damn became increasingly left vs right and as we lost the Liberal Republicans and the conservative Democrats those used to exist

as we lost that once it becomes a specific name is left vs right now if you only hold your team's position on six out of ten items or a traitor as he got to get with the program and so the pressures for Conformity the pressures to agree with your team on everything I've been steadily rising and that means there's no nuance and we can't do I reach acacian without Nuance we can't do college without free thinking and the ability to say what can I want me to Second maybe they do have a point on this on this thing and that's one of the reasons why I look so weird from the outside and why it's getting so unpleasant from the inside when you're teaching classes in a subject comes out that may be controversial do you do have like this overwhelming feeling that you're treading on Dangerous Ground

sex differences origin of sex sexual orientation I would even do race differences and standard and I trusted my students and they trusted may 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 I got the changing time now cuz I said I have to teach to the most sensitive students so I teach a course on business ethics and professional responsibility vivisection on on discrimination in employment law what's the important to cover we have to cover it with MBA students have to know where the lines are with the lies and yeah I'm kind of scared when I teach that I'd like to get into all sorts of things I'd like to get into what two numerical disparity difference in you know in the percentage of tech but not in the percentage of non Tech employees and sell it

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 time in every bathroom at NYU there's a sign telling them how to report me anonymously and they put these up in 2016 in response to student requests and it means that all professors are on notice that they can be reported anonymously any moment but children well these are barely not children anymore that's why there's an incentive to this this board talking about for the incentive that gives them attention they get Prestige they get value from it and just 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 is 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 that it has a good intention behind it there are cases of professors who make ethnic jokes are there are there are there are legitimate complaints and faculty do there should be some accountability some responsibility so there's a good intentions but it's usually based on no empirical evidence because it's based on pressure applied to a bureaucracy not by a committee how can we improve the climate for everyone don't know it's like 10 things and they give you five of them there's not put into what would happen if we give the students in East German style Anonymous reporting system and so everybody is on notice that they can be reported any point what might happen to the social dynamics like nobody thought that through

so with the Netflix the fact again is the spectacular collapse of Trust on campus to be in the middle of that it's going to be so bizarre that 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 I so love came to me in 2014 so Greg Greg is the president of the foundation for individual rights in education he fired and they defend Free Speech rights on campus and they were always pushing back against administrator who would say oh you know we need a free speech Zone and there was afraid of liability and so suddenly in 2014 Greg start seeing students pushing back on on speaker we want in a band that speaker to know how we need a safe space if a debate is going to be held and Craig 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 gridlines to not do those himself and then goes back to work a fire and then in 2014 BC student saying you know if Christina Hoff Sommers comes to campus you know people will die or they'll be people will be harmed injured and so there's this is how our students learning to do this like art are we teaching them on campus to think of these distorted ways and if we are isn't that going to make them depressed so Greg comes to talk to me in May of 2014 to tell me this idea and I think it's really brilliant I think it's a great idea cuz I'd begun to see this in the safe spaces to microaggressions the trigger warning

so we we wrote up our our essay submitted to the Atlanta that came out in August of 2015 and it was like we were just seen the first outbreaks of a of a virus and then in the fall of 2015 it's an epidemic and so many of your listeners will have heard of or seen the videos of what happened at Yale in August 9th November 2015 when Erika christakis wrote an email saying that way to 2nd Yale is telling you how to do your Halloween costumes maybe we should think this to ourselves maybe you're old enough to make your own decisions they protest Presidente screaming at her husband so it was then when that protest was successful when the president of Yale basically said you know we're wrong you're right we validate your narrative will give you as much as we can of your demands when when that happened and approaches with national and so throughout 2016 you have you have groups of students making music

Lance demanding my program reporting system so that's why you put in its systems is microaggression reporting system so that ye levent wasn't just an isolated incident it really was the spark I think so yeah so there's all these threats threats coming together didn't come out of nowhere all these things are happening it's almost like that you know the whole the whole room is like almost at combustion temperature and then Yale was the spark that sent a national crazy but yeah it was anybody that subjective is watching from the outside is like these students are out of control the screaming at this professor like this is supposed to be a safe place and you fuck this up and they're being incredibly hostile and aggressive towards him and surrounding him and when when you watch that from the outside thing but obviously they're going to punish students I mean did they do the opposite of ants that's what doesn't make sense from the outside but you have to look it up so I loved it

I was in Davenport College is one of the 12 residential colleges like the master of the College of the dean of the college would bring in all kinds of people to speak so they were intellectual space it as well as for the home like or not exactly home like I transitional places where they were they were places that you lived

so with the deal that I knew was a place that want me to think and lots of different ways and it just was constantly blowing my mind like my took my first pick a nomics course was like the new pair of spectacles that I can put on and suddenly I see all these you know prices and supply and a good education is one that lets you look at a complicated world through multiple perspectives and that makes you smart that's what a liberal arts education should do for what I see increasingly happening especially League 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 group single groups and it's a zero-sum game and so if the bad groups have more it's cuz they took it from the the good groups and so the point of every

is to fight the bad groups bring them down create a quality 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 we live in an era in which we discovered that that the pipe can be grown a million-fold and so did teach students to see society as a zero-sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive you actually identify the moment where these microaggressions sort of made their appearance then they were initially a racist thing so so the idea of a microaggression goes back to my forget the skeleton African American sociology in the 70s first coined the term but it really becomes popular in a 2007 article by derald Wing sue a teacher's college and so he talks

this concept microaggressions are two things that are good about the comforter 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 erase it claims that racism is Sino calling someone a racial slur I hate you because I identified because of their been reported as crimes or just say that if you are a member of a culture you can tell when someone is saying something to insult to put down at Express hostility and that's something that we can make become socially unacceptable in circles so explicit racism is way way down

that wealth how do you measure microaggression how do you measure even explicit racism private how would you feel if a black family moved in next door if a Filipino family would you feel if your child married to a Muslim so explicit surveys show it certainly do surveys of people's experience of every race when they report how often this happens every year the numbers are actually fairly low so there are ways of measuring experiences of racism you're only getting information from people so stupid they take surveys at who's taking surveys

multiple perspectives and say in one condition you pay them for an accurate answer or not when when conditions are Anonymous or they're not I'm so you can get a sense of how much the answer depending on external conditions and so ended up the funniest want to make is that the acceptability of using the n-word or other things you have a bunch of white people are talking the acceptable using the n-word I think that's gone way down in general yes and tremendously I agree with the sentiment and I agree with the the trend that there is absolutely a trend away from racism but I'll just curious as how they measured it at area so I'm assuming it's survey is ultimately for everyone's sake I mean even for the sake of the people that are in embroiled in all this controversy in chaos it would be fantastic across-the-board if there was no more sexism there was no more racism there was no more any

it would be wonderful

then we can just start treating peumansend is just humans like this is just who you are you're just a person no one cares they'll be What a Wonderful World we would live in if this was no longer an issue at all beautifully play how does it get how does ever get through okay I'm 55 we were shaped by the late 20th century and the late twentieth century was a Time in America in which you know earlier on it was all kinds of prejudice when I was born just right before you were born it was legal to say you can't eat here cuz you're black and sewing that change 1964-65 but used to be that we had legal differentiation 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 and had to be hidden

63 when I was born and then you look at where we got by 2000 I mean the progress is fantastic honour every front and to your point about you know what it'd be great if it was none of this we just treat people like people but yeah that was the 20th century idea is let's go let's get past these tribal identification and what is so alarming to me now is that on campus if you can on campus but it's spreading elsewhere there and they got snot everywhere on campus it's mostly in the grievance studies departments they're teaching students the opposite they're teaching students don't treat everyone like a person people are their identities and you can tell somebody didn't by looking at people so you know if they're good or bad this I think is the opposite of progress It's it's also the differences between us are really fascinating the differences between men and women I think are some of the more interesting

explanations for human behavior and it is not meaning that people must be defined by their gender the define butter sex in the but it is interesting when you look at these gigantic groups like why certain people tend to gravitate towards certain occupations are certain types of behavior or certain Hobbies is really fascinating that's playing the truth-seeking came for all we care about is trying to understand things we would do the research and we'd figure out what the people like in what hand do left-handers vs. right-handers have different preferences probably not as far as I know do boys and girls have different preferences yeah they're really big I do men and women have different did enjoy different things yeah so we could take that we can say our goal is to create a free Society this is this is what the word liberal tradition by side with people are free to construct a life that they want to live and so if you're born one reason or another that should not in any way be limitation and in the 20th century

a progress report that ideal same frame for but you keep saying we did meaning that you you're implying that it ended at the progress hit a wall yeah I shouldn't imply that because overall I think the trans are unstoppable so I don't want to say the things are reversed yeah I agree but you feel like there is a slow down or never a glitch yet I think that's a nice look at identity politics and we really try to do is there's all these loaded terms and do you know safe if somebody says social justice Warrior you know a lot about them if they said that like they're going to come at I didn't say all those sjw's we we say there are people on campus who are very focused on identity issues and on Injustice is identity and that's great and there's a lot to be concerned about in and their right to do that now how did he do it and there's two different ways you can either do what we call common enemy identity politics

which is where you say life is a battle between good and evil groups let's divide people buy peanut butter and a white vs everybody else and so you look at me with a straight white men they're the problem all the other groups must unite to fight the straight white man so that's the mother quietism intersectionality and so we say in the book is that leads to Eternal conflict much better is to is an identity politics based on common Humanity so we don't say oh 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 as fine but if you do it bite first emphasizing common Humanity that's what Martin Luther King did that for polyamory did Nelson Mandela did this so it was a black civil rights leader

the 40s she says when my when my opponents draw a small circle to exclude me I shall draw a larger Circle to include them I shop for the rights of all mankind and this isn't that he's relentlessly appealing to our white brothers and sisters he's using the language of America Christianity start by saying what we have in common and then people's hearts are open but within a community now we can talk about our difficulties so if it's the cut the rise of common enemy identity Politics on campus in the grievance studies departments especially that I think it's an alarming Trend another thing of salami to me is the redefining of terms like sexism and racism or sexism against men is impossible racism against white people's impossible is 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 in other literally the people that are the victims of racism are now using racism against other people and feeling Justified because of it and it 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 fill in the blank of whatever group that you're attacking and it's it's really strange it's really strange to say but again it make sense if you look at the different games yeah so if you're on University and you think you're playing the truth game and philosophers are great unpacking terms and so you might try to Define racism Evergreen sort of ism and Common Sense Media it would be an expression of hostility or limitation on a group based on their identity

but that's what you're playing the truth-seeking game if you're playing the the politics game or the Warfare game

you wanted to find the term to give your side maximum Advantage so there is a wonderful social psychologist named Phil tetlock at Penn at Wharton and and he talks about these different mindsets we can you call the intuitive prosecutor so if if I'm if my goal as a scholar is to prosecute my enemies and Max Macon Vape them and I am always trying to defend seven different identity groups against the straight white man there are there the accused I want you to find my term to make it Max Lee easy to convect and so I'm going to say racism microaggressions it doesn't matter what the intent was all that matters is the impact all that matters as long as I get to charge you with a crime so you can say as s in 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 and if you cannot be racist or whatever other term because they don't have power but Carlos other social class professors are this is coming out of their mouth so this is taught in the number of high schools in my nephew's went to Andover children it's not just that it's offencive and obviously hypocritical it's that it's crippling yes I mean can you imagine can you imagine getting your daughter is a cloak of invulnerability where you say you put this on now you get to attack others but no one can touch you like this is going to work their development power corrupts and even more of the rhetorical power corrupts as well how is this being taught that mean

old is not truth the goal is victory over racism let's say and so if that's the case you're going to focus on educating kids about their white privilege and making and so that's what a lot of privilege exercises are in a q line kids up by their privilege and you and your your goal is to make the the straight white boys feel bad about their privilege and therefore talk less take up less space the privilege this is what we talked about earlier about the goal is no racism the privilege only exists if there's racism like instead of concentrating on the privilege they'd only exist if people do preferentially treat certain of it with it preferential treatment towards certain races if that doesn't exist at all then White Privilege doesn't exist funny episode last night and so my wife and I were out Nelly we were invited to the Golden Globes by by a friend and so it here in La so we we we go to bed

and at 2 in the morning the guy pounding on the door saying it's me it's me and I wake up I go to the door and I and I say wrong room and it just show him you know the like look I don't know I don't know who you are and yes I'm drunk some drunk guy and you've got the wrong room and I went back to bed and my wife says why did you open the door like how could you have done that have the ability to go out in the world and engage with no sir, that I don't have is an example of male privilege sure that's an interesting example that's a that's a sexism one but that's also a physical danger one that said there's a there is a difference between just the way women have to go out into the world being

being the target of a

just a male sexual attention to very different thing it's an aggressive person dangerous thing yeah but I think you could say the same thing so well okay okay you're right if if there was absolute zero racism or anywhere but we never going to get to that but the thing that were worried about is the racism so would like if you worried about a save someone's if you say you have white privilege will it only exists if you are 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 anybody that doesn't exist anymore

yes but I think it's it's it's helpful to always try to look at it from the other person point of view Shore listen to their arguments over example when you and I going to any social encounter it never occurs to me that something you know something's going to come up and someone's going to call me a kike let's say cuz I'm Jewish and it just never crossed my mind but if you're black even if you're in a very tolerant Society at some point someone is going to make an assumption and that at where is if we were black or other identities were visibly Georg you know there would be the risk of spoiling of a social interaction so I'm totally comfortable saying we should be telling the kids about 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 parents be suspicious of

based on their race and gender that's where that's where I get off the bus the bus that's what 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 exist in the face racism where the real problem is racism with the male-female thing is a very different I don't male privilege I think is way more slippery and wait cuz it's biologically based there's a creepiness Two Men and there is any was much as a nice guys I'm sure you are and I try very hard to be a nice guy. And yes it's it's inevitable because it's there's a game being played it is pursuing of sexual pleasure or of elves of sexual encounters this it doesn't exist or shouldn't exist with races

the just the third the real problem in my eyes is racism and if we could figure out a way to just complete obviously not going to let people are flawed they're they're going to be in until there's some sort of new way do we interface with each other that eliminates lies and deception and allows each other to completely understand each other's feelings and and appreciate them which may happen someday probably technologically driven till 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 so you said earlier about how definitions change so we are evolving as a society we getting less sexist and racist and so are threshold for what counts as sex is Maurice's going down that's a good thing that should happen right, but I think 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

I think that's what's happening on campus that makes sense 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 were all in every school I know it was trying very hard to create a very diverse student body so if we do that we bring people in and we give them a common Humanity approach to diversity if you handle it well it can confirm any benefits but if you handle it wrong if you try to make people see race and other groups more and you attach mortal valances to it and you give them a lot of the stuff that they can agree in studies of course they're going to be angry of course they're going to feel that people hate them just 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 pee

did you to create an open trust inclusive diverse environment right the right thing to do would be to emphasize how foolish racism really is in about how a damaging it is not restore culture but he was an individual to look at people in that way and not open your heart and your mind to all these different races and I think one of the worst examples of modern racism that's gone unchecked is what's going on at Harvard with Asian students wear 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 they're being punished for excelling which is really racism and it's it's racist against the people that are doing the best which is really crazy and they were minority which is even more crazy and because of their culture because they're so hard-working and they're not in general than the not the type to be really loud and protests these things it's gone on the point with now they've had to have a class action lawsuit that's right that's right so I hope it again I'm a twentieth-century person My Hope Is that as time goes I will get past all this you have to be a twenty-first-century person you have to okay but you know what there are moral cultures evolve and they don't always evolving a positive way and so I think the evolution late twentieth century was incredibly

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 going to say oh we have to accept whatever morality is here I still am ultimate a liberal in the sense that what I dream of is a society in which people are free to create lives that they want to live and they're not forced to do things are not ashamed there's a minimum of conflict we make room for each other for going to have a diverse Society we've really got to be tolerant to make one 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 you know a microscope happiness hypothesis was about 10 inch and ideas judge not lest ye be judged but I think the new version of bad if there's a 21st century Jesus he'd say judge a lot more judge all the time judge harshly don't give anyone the benefit of the doubt and don't let anyone judge you like that is not cookie recipe for a functioning Society

I do not accept this aspect of 21st century morality with your 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-right looked at the real extreme what it represents is the the the extreme polls 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 real extreme what year was going to have white supremacy and you always going to have extreme social justice people it's just a summer not yeah okay so there are problems of progress there are some things that are kind of one way so you know so pessimistic about certain social by Steve pink or white iPad show Matt Ridley and others who say look The Arc of progress is amazingly wrapping is all good and you don't Nick Kristof just had a call on that last year was the best year in human history if you

overall human welfare so that's all true but there are certain things that happened with progress that lead to certain countervailing trends that are not like pendulum and so for example okay here's one kids is it 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 that's if it goes beyond certain limits you have chronic stress you can have brain damage so as we got rid of a lot of the worst things that's great but as for making life better and better as an 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 family said we get richer all over the world so that you have two parents spinning all the time with one kid it's possible that we are interfering with kids development to the point where we might have an epidemic of anxiety and depression that could happen oh wait a second it has so I think that there are certain problems of progress that are not Angela

they change things and those changes have some negative repercussions that we're going to have to actively fix and I can swing back by itself what concerns me when you talk about all these idea is that there's a restriction on how you are able to communicate to children or two students I should say to young people how their minds work and how they're their how these patterns can form and how you know this

this pattern could be ultimately damaging to them but yet it feels rewarding in the act of doing it and that their own patterns that they're involved in right now might be incredibly problematic for them in the future but if you bring it up your criticizing who they are who they are the human you're disregarding your white privilege of doing all these different things you can't really do you eat you're doing all these things that could run into these problems with this sort of new paradigm and what how do you how do you mitigate that when you 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 are like incredibly sensitive to discuss today okay so let's get let's start with child development and let's let's let's start with what should we be doing with kids to make them suffer so that you know as they live in in the world safer and safer

cars are safer the death rate for kids is as 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 am I going to raise kids to be maximally effective in this new 21st century world most physically very safe but virtually unsafe okay how we can do that and I think the key idea that we need to put on the table I think everybody who works the kids needs to keep in mind everyday is antifragility I know you talk like that on the show before but I'll just because it's such an important concept so antifragility allow listeners when they always a word coined by Nassim taleb the guy who wrote The 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 convolute

it's never been tested a system needs to be tested challenge shocked in order to then develop defenses against it and our system is not been tested so if anything goes wrong it's all gone down quite a few yes that's right there really koncept events are fragile that's right it's a key idea and in our book cuz I talked about this round the country once you explain this to people work with kids all right so so tell app says

there's no word for this property he says we tweet me know that some things are fragile and so if you have a glass cleaner that wine glass on the table and I'll get over it breaks okay it doesn't get better in anyway and so you don't get kids a wine glass you give them a plastic sippy cup has plastic is resilient but if a kid knocks over sippy cup it doesn't get better in any way until that wanted to know it will what's the word for things to get better when you're not come 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 your antibodies but it doesn't know exactly what to be reacted 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 bacterial cure crippling the system the system has to get knocked over it has to get challenge threatened it has to have to learn how to expand its abilities and so so this is why

yeah that was a really shocking part of your book that's right stunning how fast is happened to please explain that to people that the older folk we brought peanut butter sandwiches to school and when my son Max started preschool in 2008 what they went on and on about no not not nothing but has to work was crazy how defensive they were about nuts as we write in the book I thought back on that and I said wait a second like why you never freaking out about nuts and the more we freaked out about it higher the algebraic goes and it turns out there's a study done published in 2015 where the researchers noticed that the allergy to nuts is only going up in countries that tell pregnant women to avoid nuts

and they thought well maybe that's why and so they did a controlled experiment they got about six hundred women who have given birth recently

and whose kids were at higher risk of an allergy cuz he has eczema or some other immune system sort of issue so about three hundred of them are told and advise your kids are risk the peanut allergy so you should not eat peanuts while you're lactating and keep penis with your kid and the other half were told here is an Israeli snack food it's a popcorn with a peanut powder dusting on the outside give it to your kids starting at 4 months whenever they're ready to eat and so any monitor them to make sure they weren't you don't fail reactions or silver or strong reactions and then at the age of 5 they gave them all a very thorough immunological test of the ones who follow the same advice 17% had a peanut allergy they would have to watch out for PS4 the rest of their lives in such a high number because these work because these were already predisposed and but the half that were predisposed but giving peanut powder 3%

3% had a peanut allergy at age 5 almost wiped out peanut allergies by giving peanut powder to kids and it just a few months ago and science the front page article was on doing that and so again good intentions and bad ideas were trying to protect our kids soap and so we're doing the same thing is really she was the people that have an actual severe allergy if that's your child yes but that's what the science article about exposure therapies are being tested and they are the most effective people was at 6 and they informed us that they didn't want us to even eat peanuts on the plane cuz it was someone on the plane it was so allergic me that if you eat peanuts and you chew it and it's in the air it could adversely affect a person

peanuts long ago so this is one of these but as we know it's not necessarily but but it's an example of antifragility all right so you know when you and I were kids and your boys and girls have different social interaction but boys tease each other right insult each other if it turns into bullying like a bunch of kids or wanting to start car 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 crack down on full yet and as we've gotten more and more sensitive about harm in general were cracking down on any kind of teasing cruelty exclusion so my kids go to New York City Public Schools Virginia pretty good but on the playground is a monitor and a playground monitor let me not to the conflict he comes and checks it out if a kid is crying checks it out

nothing to do but it's like it's like they're allergic to peanuts can kids have to have thousands and thousands of conflict they have to be supposed to insult an explosion and teasing and if you can imagine if you could keep your daughter in a protective tank when nobody would tease her and sell her hurt her feelings for 18 years would you do it absolutely not you know it's not it's it's important that they do experience some assholes they just they just have to know but they are on the flip side there are certain people that are damaged for the rest of our life but bullies and something like I have a friend and his brother used to beat him up when when they live together and it's still Fox of them to this day he needs in his 50s like I eat I think he has a certain level of depression is directly correlated trying to show that bullying can leave permanent scars yes but

they need challenges that are graded to their level of ability so if they're overwhelmed and if the suffering goes on day after day so if kids are bad if their brain and 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 were raised either they're bullied or they're abusive home I don't have a secure attachment relationship then they get brain damage then you're hurting kids if it's chronic so I'm in no way saying I can't get to look at each institution so each school is not thinking how come we carefully draw the line between bullying and valuable source of conflict know they're thinking if we do this when we get sued and if we're not really good and so let's overreact let's go this way

yeah that's unfortunate really but how do you decide how much bullying is except like it's almost like snake venom by giving them a little bit so they develop a tolerance we did some research on bullying we didn't put in the book because while we suspect that anti-bullying policies that go too far and IT band conflict what we suspect that those are harmful we couldn't prove that we can put this in the book but the traditional definition of bullying are actually pretty reasonable it's like there's a power differential and its Chronic Tacos on for if your multiple multiple days there was a threat of violence threat of violence I think it was the original definition that was expanded gradually so it doesn't have to be violence but it is it has expanded so far that like my kids use the term if if one kid is mean

don't call that bullying and that's too far so I think it to keep your eye on that the key features too far as a kid is mean yeah on the pain the playground for my daughter the girls would form these clubs and so my daughter was in the Kitty Cat Klub. That's what three girls call themselves and they be in a corner and they tell you can't you can't join us you're not in the Kitty Cat Klub that's mean that explosion we can't have that so the so you have to allow everyone in your group because you don't want to be a teacher had a conversation with them know she didn't I don't think she exactly ordered them never exclude so it may be okay if you use it as a discussion but increase put some schools have even try to discourage the existence of best friends because if you have best friends are excluding others that's hilarious hilarious

yeah you think oh my you know there's a rise in anxiety and depression and girls are cutting themselves at such high rates you know we've got it you 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 of kids that grew up in that error of participation trophies where everyone one and there's a lot of parents that don't want to see the children lose but that's a giant learning opportunity if you think the goal is to cultivate self-esteem directly your crippling the kid giving your kids self-esteem is not beneficial in fact is kids have high self-esteem but it's unstable then they're actually more likely to be violent have more problem you don't want to build self-esteem when she want to build his capacities give them a bilities 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

antichat mother lots and lots of the biggest things that is happening in schools is efforts to teach compassion I don't know I'm not serving the research I don't know if they work I don't know it's a general kids learn from experience but adults want to teach them directly and so does all these efforts to teach compassion I've no idea if they work but I would think that doing things together and disappoint me by Peter gray an expert on play who co-founded let grow. Org that I hope we can talk about one way the 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 those present who are supervising

then if there's a conflict the skills that kids need to learn Ark 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 operation tolerance teamwork leadership is free play unsupervised free play and that's what kids did from time immemorial certainly try the 20th century up until the 1990s ask you how old are you well I was born in New Jersey live there till 7 San Francisco from 7 to 11 in San Francisco will you allowed outside will you allowed to go to a friend's house could you and your friends go places latchkey kid yeah my parents were gone all day and if so when I was 8 years old I did a magic show on Fisherman's Wharf by myself

what is a bunch of bullets some guy tried to abduct me some guy tried to get me to go out to his car with them to check out some books and some lady library and save me she screamed out Joseph you get away from that man you just got out of jail super creepy but you know I was 8 I didn't understand what was going on I study had some good books yeah because we have to let kids out now yes there is there are dangers out there and so kids have to learn you actually can talk to strangers strangers just never ever go off with him but you know believe the really the problem with talking to strangers is when your eight you don't understand manipulation you nursed and 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 didn't think about that are actually extremely low the number of kids were abducted in America each year is on the order of a hundred now many more are abducted by the non-custodial parent to masturbate and there's all kinds of Queen out there but abductions extraordinary we're so yeah we have to deal with it 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 and the 70s and 80s through a lot of crime and then the crime with begins to end rapidly in the 1990s and just isn't sending we changed our Norms to say if a kid is outside and there's no adult watching that kid is likely to be abducted and therefore the parents are responsible to parents can be arrested or at least Child Protective Services should pay them a visit

so just as a crime rate with Indian traits of all kinds of crazy fonts for 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 and so we don't know why depression anxiety and suicide are skyrocketing for teenagers especially teenage girls but the combination of over protection and then social media seems to be the main part of the examples I totally sympathize with the fact that yet you know there are there are risks out there but the risk of our protection is kills a lot more kids there's a store that I read about want to see the kids were eight and 10 and they were walking home in New York City and the police officer stop them and talk to him and then eventually interview their parents and said why your children walk he's like cuz I taught him how to walk home 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 are never the Gent 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 in a certain amount of personal sovereignty that's right and so this is this is the most important lesson that I hope will come from our book is that if you see the world is dangerous and threatening you raise your kids accordingly you're going to raise emotionally stunted kids were at much higher risk of depression anxiety and suicide so stop doing that we got to stop doing that fortunately it's hard to stop doing that because if we let our kids outside we can be arrested now that happens very rarely but it does happen for more concerning your kids can be harmed if that's extremely rare can happen and to the people that does happen to the idea that it's extremely rare is not comforting well that's right so we think of that probabilities in very ineffective ways I should we have those graphs

types 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 there a risk of harm from keeping them in their going the wrong decision right so there's a silent secret sort of invisible harm of coddling them exactly and then there's the small percentage of possible harm that you could get if you go out to the world that you're raising your kids hear what what's your policy on letting about Mane slippery grown one who's 22 and then I have a 10 in 1/8 okay and it's hard man because

I don't even like when you go over on sleepovers over my friend's house cuz that's scary it's everybody's problem you know it's the parents meme 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 and the kids are sticking Forks into the fucking outlets and you know that there's a lot of weirdness when it comes to the styles of that people haven't been raising their children what is this this graph he just pulled up depressive episodes you know she said before it's like a virus came out of nowhere and that is what it would have been like so what's happening in America and I know what's happening the same in Britain and Canada haven't looked at other other places yet have dug into those stat what's happening is that rates of depression anxiety were fairly stable from the 90s through the early 2000s

and what you see here instead of rats in her book is that the the percentage of kids age 12 to 17 in America who met the criteria for having a major depressive episode that is they're giving a symptom checklist with nine symptoms if you say yes to five of them you know feeling hopeless and couldn't get out of bed because he has to five or more you're you're considered to have had a major depressive episode and what you see is that the rate for boys is around 5% and then around 2011 it starts going up and now it's around 7% which is actually a substantial increase but as you can see in the graph the line for Girls starts up higher cuz girls have more mood disorders more inside and depression alcoholism miserable boys make other people miserable the growth rate is higher but it was stable from in a 2000 released in 2005 through 2010 and then right around 11 2012

to the point where it goes up from about 12% to know about 20% of American teenage girls have had a major depressive episode in the last year one and five so this is huge okay next light

now it's look just a college students so this is more selective is a kids with Nathan to college and what we see is that in 2010 and 2002 and 2012 when college did thrall Millennials the rates were pretty low this is do you have a psychological disorder they didn't specify they were they said such as depression and so we see about 2 to 3% of the boys college men and about 5% of the five 6% of college women say yes to that question that's when it's Millennials but beginning a 2013 gen Z beacons arriving that's kids 2016 colleges are almost all gen Z and the rates shoot up way up. It's like

it's like a jump ramp for a BMX racer I mean really is crazy for women out of nowhere and it hits a 2012 it goes in a very sharp upward angle because 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 I said that because of you might have been that allergy Ludacris Preposterous and so this is huge ramp the Canelo just make clear I think we have another another slide their 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 that is just an argument of recognition rather than a perfectly agnostic right ear change perfectly reasonable argument is it true well it's like a behavior so at this graph shows is the number of boys out of a hundred thousand who are admitted to a hospital every year because they cut they deliberately harm themselves 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 noticed that the highest rates are around 280 out of a hundred thousand per year that situation the boys next breath

bang the situation for Girls is really really different so the averages are hired so self harm has always been more of a girl thing that a boy thing. You boys are except for suicide look at that that's right. Next so look at self-harm what you see here is that the rates were fairly stable up until 2009 and then bang just sit in the last Light the same thing the rates for girls go shooting up so the rate for 15 to 19 year old girls is up 62% since 2009 now notice the rate for the Millennials that is the rate for the oldest girl takes 24 that's only at 17% so whatever happened not affecting the Millennials it's affecting gen Z and how to spell go forward with the number of the rate for the youngest girls check that out now the youngest these are 10 to 14 year old girl these are preteens okay they didn't use to cut themselves

a very low rate but then beginning in 2010 it shoots up its up 189% 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 difference the leading candidate and the time you 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 2016 that you don't have to be a cop 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

buy 2010-2011 around half of American teenagers have an iPhone or Samsung they have a smartphone and they have access to social media middle school because even though for Facebook Instagram I think the minimum age is in was 13 my son is 12 middle school kids are now getting on social media by 2010-2011 you got a lot of them and that's what I think is the main cause of this because using social media does not really affect boys very much but man does it affect girls why is that so if you look at so a couple reasons first look at the nature of aggression within the Sexes boys bullying is physical okay boys are physically dominating and then the risk is if they're going to get punched OK so you give everybody an iPhone what do they do with it games and porn they don't use it to hurt each other

voice response that's right it doesn't affect their bullying but girls aggression girls are actually as aggressive as boys as we search for up from the eighties nineties on this if you include relational aggression girls don't pull each other by threatened to punch each other in the face girls bully each other by damaging the other girls social relationships spreading rumors spreading lies spreading a doctor photograph saying bad things excluding them it's relational aggression and so it's always been really hard to be a middle schools to it's always been harder to be middle school girl in a middle school boy okay so beginning around 2010-2011 strongest 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 social relationships anytime of the day or night deniability from an anonymous account go out at girls

and so the nature of girls bullying is hyper charged by social media and smartphones that's one mechanism the other two are the social comparison because it's always been hard to be a teen girl and merging with beauty standards in a possible beauty standards and when we were kids he had impossible beauty standards that these models were all doctored up and then Photoshop OKC that is impossible beauty standards out there but beginning with social media specialist recent years your own friends can put on a filter Instagram to make their lips bigger their skin cleaner their eyes bigger do your old friends are more beautiful than they are in real life you feel uglier so that's a social comparison of beauty and then probably the biggest single one is the fear of missing out the fear of being so all kids are subject to this everyone's concerned about whether they're included or whether they're when they're excluded but girls are much more sensitive and so tell me when everybody is tracking each other is

was invited who's there and especially any program in which a girl put something out and then wait to see what other people say about it that is what's really damaged and I think we don't know for sure there are some experiments on this but it's mostly correlational stuff we're talking about here correlational data but the overall experience of being a girl who was born in 1995 or later and got the stuff in middle school is different for being a girl born in nineteen ninety let's say we didn't get the stuff till College are you concerned that this is a trend that has technology becomes more and more invasive and with these new technologies as they emerge that this is going to be worse and worse but it doesn't have to be so I think in the last two years we're really waking up to this the founders of this technology is really interesting so first of all it's important to note as many people have read so they know that these things were made to be addictive they're made to grab

eyeballs cannot let go so that's one thing we always keep that in mind that the makers of this are weary of it second they've gotten more and more addictive as they've gotten better and better they've evolved so they're getting more and more in fortnite is an example of an extremely addictive game and it does but if you've ever been to a casino and you've seen kid you seen people sitting at those machines like zombies just you know hour after hour pulling that crank cuz there was a psychologist working out the variable reinforcement schedule for the gambling companies psychologist there helping companies manipulate users and that's happened to our kids to their they're manipulated to stay on device so once were beginning to realize this the nature of these Technologies the fact that what is good for adults may be terrible for 12 year old 10 year olds and once we realize that

things are so attractive that they crowd out all the other healthy activities like playing outside playing with groups of France once we realized that I think and I hope we'll get some reasonable Norms like to propose this is fantastic that be able to talk to so many people I like to propose 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 at any schools you know and say we need some sensible Norms because we can't solve this problem by ourselves so I want to keep my kids off social media but my son says well most of my friends are dead Instagram account now if it was every friend he was the only one who was excluded you'll be really hard for me to stick to my guns where is it was only a few of his friends and most important you'll be so easy and I heard from parents over and over I don't want my kid on social media but I don't want her to be left out of the principal with just say parents please this is getting this is getting out of hand this is Harmon 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 are you do a couple things that I think it's pretty simple North won all devices out of the bedroom by a set time at least half an hour before bed there is no reason why kids should have an iPhone or a computer screen

in their bedroom because so many kids are attracted to it they all checked their status overnight and it interrupts their sleep we can't be having teenagers who have interrupted sleep that there's just no benefit from a Fitbit my ten-year-old to you know monitor all sorts of different she was interested in it so we got her one for Christmas and she slept 5 and 1/2 hours the first night you had it on cuz we could check like what are you doing she's checking V what's what's going on in like this is not good but you can't wear this now and she's like trying to make all these arguments to keep it up like listen just it's not distracting me if it's not distracting you then you shouldn't care if you don't have it on cuz then it's not going to mean anything and then there's like just like shit like she got checkmated if I had one of those goddamn watches those apple watch as I had it on for one day while doing the podcast to get vibrating my oh my God I'm getting text messages on my wrist my wrist

so what's in your brain is all developed why did Mary like bills but not much like you got to get devices out of the bedroom alarm clock to know social media to high school there is no reason why kids in middle school or elementary school should have Instagram Facebook Snapchat any of those agree they can text each other like when we were kids we call each other each other but there should be no social media to high school cuz 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 account and my only concern is that did not going to learn how to mitigate it or how to navigate it rather and if we say nothing to high school and then when they get in the high school then they are confronted with it I would like them to have some skill

or at least some understanding of what's going on don't let him have access to these machines and how about this The Bullying that takes place in middle school is primitive and destructive and the bullet takes place in Leigh High School is a lot less and is not really feels like the middle school kids are just coming into this there's some research so Jean twenge has a book called I Jen and she has Sunday dinner that suggests that when you get social media in college it doesn't seem to harm you the one you got it and you're preaching years it does and so and she thinks that it's in park the nature of the bullying is such so you know sure we want them to know how to deal with this but you know it's a pretty quickly when there are 15 it's not like they need a running start from 11 to 15 so I just see no good whatsoever coming from social media in middle school and I see a lot of harm if you

it looks like around the country talk about this they're almost the rule now is when someone in Simon says I will my daughter is in high school and you know she's had it and I say how she doing did she have anxiety problems dance with us and if it's not her than her friends are all crippled by or suffering from anxiety so I think we have to have to wait a few years ago we didn't know for sure about the costs now we do you know you're making total science 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 iPhones and Facebook accounts and Instagram account and then 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 ultimate suicide yeah it's so common and its most of the kids in school now and when they get older than 10 they're the number increases like parents hold out for as long as they can but as they get older and the kids want phones man everybody wants a phone

the cloud so I gave my son so I'm saying two contradictory things one is I'm saying because I let her kids out that's not letting them out at least by age 8 at least to go with her friends to a playground in stores that start at the same time I'm saying that technology has some negative effects OK if you can send your kid out I totally get what you were saying about your the Panic like the first time that we let our son out in the park and he didn't come home right when he said it was real panic and parts of tooth but I didn't realize how to make it at setting LG makes it but that's a gizmo a gizmo Gadget and so it's a simple it's a watch it's a it's a big clunky thing but my daughter loves when it's kind of like a James Bond Dick Tracy think it's a watch you press a button to turn it on you can call 3 phone numbers that's it for now

six blocks in New York City to credibly Safe how old is she she's not so much more independent confident because of it and she said she is a free-range kid she can walk around our neighborhood let me be live in Greenwich Village it's incredibly safe so she can go get bagels and if you know what she has no sense of direction so she's not to marry she gets lost she's presses a button Daddy I don't know where I am if she's come so I can say you know what do you say I said come back this way just walk home and start again

proof

what do you think what's what's that facial expressions as children wandering around on their own ya always happened reacting to this but you or you or your beaming up when you're adding a motion to your voice and you're smiling this as always everything's going to be fine if you're doing this in a sort of you not just reassuring you're selling it you're right I am selling it cuz 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 rate of abduction by strangers if you put your kid in the car and go into a store and you leave the windows open your kids sitting in the parking lot you have to stay in that store for 700,000 years before your kid is likely to be abducted while it's not depend on what neighborhood you live in I suppose so you know but still the point is that there's hardly any actual abduction it's actually a really important of like to say

youth with one of the sticking point here is that were afraid to let her kids out because bad things can happen to us as well it to the kids and so number one concern with your children are you getting in trouble I would hope would be the least of your concerns not the least of them because I am selling something I'm selling the idea that mental illness of teenagers has caused in part because we've overprotected them we have denied them the experience of Independence they need to develop their basic social sense and so I'm selling idea that we totally bought this and we need to undo it and a big piece of that is we need to be removed from the fear of legal prosecution and so Utah the state of Utah past year-and-a-half ago they passed the first rearrange kids bill which says it puts into state law it says it is a parent cannot be considered to be

just by having the kids be unsupervised so if you send your kids out to the park and we have Fusion obviously if there's a pattern that while I'm teaching my kids to go outside I know that they're outside I told him to go outside you can't be arrested for that until we have legal protections it's very hard for anyone to do it because the risk is you could be drawn into months and months of supervision huge kids can have to be taken away from you if you give them Independence in some parts of the country it's interesting that you talked to be so Progressive about yeah I don't know the history behind such a safe place it's one of the reasons why I think that if you don't trust your neighbors then you're you're not going to let them out or not. Your kids out

what are things you talked about in your book about happiness it's really interesting is cognitive therapy Prozac and meditation those those three factors being enormous AIDS in acquiring certain amount of happiness you know that you are you also added in Prozac you had it 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 witch is debatable but the fact that they do do good I have had two close friends that were really really bad places and they got on an SSRI and it cleaned them up and they eventually wean themselves off hitter in and now very productive and very happy but they were in a place in their life

where they put it best he's like my brain is broken and it goes I need you to fix it and I fixed it and then once it was fixed I realized it was fixed and then I wean myself off and turn ya sew-in in Chapter 2 of the happiness hypothesis of the book is based on 10 inch and ideas and one of the ancient ideas is the world is but we'd eat the world is it wasn't what we deem it it's if we do our perceptions we make the world the world is not an objective thing react to the world as an object affect we react to it through filters and one of the major personality traits is sort of positivity negativity or overall happiness some people look at the world to see threats other people look at the world this year and if you take a bunch of kids 4 5 6 your kids can you put some weird toy in front of that makes noise some dick is going to go towards it and say oh what's that

and from that behavior You can predict not with a lot of accuracy but you can do better than chance who's going to go to the high school prom who is going to be successful in my 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 that if the world is incredibly dangerous that might be a dent be 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 can be pretty similar on these traits but you can change your filters and so that chapter 2 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 worked a lot of evidence for all three meditation has only good effects it's wonderful but it's hard I'm that is I decided to my classes and the most undergraduates if they have to do it for a few weeks must and stop a few continuing get benefits

cognitive therapy is easier if it when I decide to do it most have success I have a real hard time with that phrase It's hard that locations hard I really do I don't think it's hard

I dare you to find it easy to sit for 20 minutes but it's not hard coal mine is hard okay then mean we're doing something you hate is hard this is just complicated I don't think it's heart you're right let me choose a different word meditation is such that the non compliance rate ends up being quite high will there's a massive problem with it for a few things one discipline to avoiding discomfort this is a peep as one of the reasons why people don't like an exercise and it's also really just starting exercise cuz the actual exercise itself is Auntie kind of pleasure 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 in some strange way if it's been shown to be beneficial things that have been shown to be beneficial your brain wants to avoid

I do not know why that is but things you get I have a theory that especially when you're growing up that you associate work with school work jobs so anytime you have these thoughts in your head you 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 1 Play fortnite Why do I have to do the work but they're 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 years of conditioning that this is mundane dreary boring horseshit when you could be out playing fun stuff is a great little scene in The Simpsons 4 bar design a video game and he's shooting down state capitals and he's shooting up like something appears I know there's Helena you know there is you know Springfield and then a certain point I'm learning

what it is I mean it's it's kind of amazing that we have done such a shity job teaching kids that we make school out to be this dreary thing that there the day of like a deeper voice is Peter Gracepoint Peter gray this is wonderful developmental psychologist Boston College who thinks that schools are are not designed with kids learning in mind kids learn best from interacting with the world from experience we get experience from feedback and so we make learning painful like how do you learn to climb a tree you know when your kids you climb a tree and then you know that feeling when you go out on a branch in a certain point you just get the sense that it's about to crack your you pull back okay that you had hundred kids to learn how to climb trees by climbing trees take another hundred kids are giving tree climbing class B Neverland climb a tree okay but you bring the world's best experts on tree-climbing and they teach these kids

I know you put them all that you can use to climb in general I would put my money on the kids to actually learn from experience a box here. Bring up on other without even having this hypothesis I find it really helpful to think of the mind is being divided into Parts like a rider on an elephant and the rider is our conscious reasoning at the little guy up on top who has language and it's what we're aware of but the elephant is the other ninety-nine percent of our minds and that's almost all automatic process is its intuitions its emotions at habits phobias all sorts of things and so Child Development can't be just train the rider for 18 years wisdom knowledge skill competence those those have to involve train of the elephant and mother to work together then you get the best results and I think we we just what we've done in America especially as we said we want our kids to be really good at math

so where can I teach the map earlier let's give the math in kindergarten but there's no evidence of that helps if there's no evidence that teaching academic skills earlier will make them Advanced for higher level at the end but they most need when they're young is to play and we taking that away from them we've given them too many after school lessons how much supervision of their play the saddest thing in the world is when my kids come home they really frustrated cuz I have homework now 10 year olds that have hours of homework and you in school all day and I don't know how to address that I need to bring to the teachers and say hey you guys are fucking up even though I've never taught anyone ever in class I'm telling you you're doing it wrong and some of the research in chapters 8 and 9 of the calling the American mind and as far as we can tell the research seems to show that they're essentially no benefits to doing homework in can

Garden first grade maybe a little bit of like will they learn to organize their time but barely any by fifth or sixth grade and there's more evidence that homework is beneficial but in between there really isn't clear what's really clear is that play FreePlay is beneficial so so it's hard for you at this as just one parent to say hey don't do this but I think it's part of a larger program to say our kids are being messed up look at these graphs look at the rate of anxiety and depression and you know when I talk I go I talk about the book all around you talk in that people have come up to me and I feel like I'm a guitar teacher I've been teaching guitar for 20 year and suddenly I just last few years I give the negative feedback and they crack so everyone's being it to notice that our kids are frail and nobody wants is and so I think we're going to find people more open to changing what we're doing

for 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 yours are too catering unless we trying to excite them about astronomy or what whatever it is you're teaching and get it through into their heads and make it seem fun and still teach them yeah and then still set them up with to have a certain amount of discipline if you going to enter into the workforce you're going to have to do things you don't necessarily want to do while you're doing them that's right and if you add to that the decline of authority of teachers and principals the sense of empowerment the parents have to fine-tune or control and be involved with their stories now. Parents who come to the lunch room because they want to see their kid at lunch where is in a principals and teachers wear once the principal or if the teacher gets a bad

the parents would assume that it was deserved I think is more of a tendency to parents who are very competitive to complain so if you have I don't have General these these Trends 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 the paper because they were responsible and you say sorry F no experience GPA that's a good thing though it's been understand the consequences for 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 I've ever learned but as I got older I always thought why didn't I learn this in school a couple of reasons so when

1980s there's a huge emphasis on teaching critical thinking and we don't hear anymore because nobody found a way to do it so it's not that easy what are the things that cover in the happiness I bought in the Righteous Mind is where all design for confirmation bias we're all really good at confirming what we already believe and so it's very hard to train anyone to disconfirmed hypotheses what we really need to think better is the right system the right Community we actually need critics so actually that brought you a copy of a of a little book that I co-produced so this is John Stuart Mill wrote on it most important books in the western tradition on Liberty chapter 2 of on Liberty is the best set of argument ever made for free speech or why it is that we need to let people talk and Challenge and criticize even if we think they're wrong when we get smarter from having to reboot them was if we shut him down if we have blasphemy laws we get Dumber

never actually stays test of what we believe so this set of arguments in Chapter 2 on Liberty is timeless I need we need anticipated every argument that we here now about why we need to shut that person. Let a person talk and so I thought we need to get this book back out cuz I was just don't need this anymore and it's a little bit difficult to text so I I happen to be friends with I was Richard Reeves was Mills collar is at Brookings institution and and he called he said Jonathan I love what you're doing it at Rox Academy if I can be of help let me know if it actually Richard would you quit it this edition of Mill second chapter and he said yes I loved him so he made the selection we work together like to reduce it it's only seven thousand words so it's easy to read and then this wonderful artist David ciccarelli stop by my office at I love what you doing the rest Academy if I can be of help let me know I said well actually could you read this text find Mills Netflix releases a lot of wonderful metaphor

it was right there in that camera okay so what Dave did was he took he took Mills metaphors and so Ain't nobody got these like amazing that you know graphic cartoon type images of the Dynamics of what happens when we Shan people because Millwood not concerned about government censorship that wasn't a big deal in London 1859 it was social sensor just as it is today so you don't so ciccarelli made his beautiful illustrations of a male's point and so we think that this book if this book was assigned I in every high school for seniors or every incoming freshman class we think the people would think a lot better so you want to know how to do critical thinking read this book and then seek out your opponent's see that your critics seek out the people can do for you but you can't do for yourself which is Challenger ideas are you concerned with this the trend that we're seeing now with social media of I mean I get removing

blatant racism and sexism and in certain really awful types of behavior from certain social media sites but at a certain point in time it becomes an ideological battle and people that lead 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 when 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 in in humans developing the ability to really flash out ideas and work their way through them which only happens we three through real free speech giving people the ability to express themselves and then deciding whether or not you agree with that and why you disagree or agree and then 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 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 mail or you can get a $3 Kindle to go to Amazon look this up it's $3 for the Kindle or you can buy the art book there to boss us that it's so cool that you're doing that allow people to download it for free to we want to get the word out with that is going to need it so answer your question so in part is an empirical question here which I don't know the answer to in Europe they abandoned most they ban hate speech so are Oregon Holocaust in are there certainly is it illegal to crime in America we don't know it's an empirical question meaning it's open to actual investigation does Banning it push it underground and let the people feel that they are victims of being silencing Sarah come back stronger is some of the best disinfectant I don't know the answer to that I think in general I think the American system

this has worked better but I don't know their Scholars who could feel good address that I asked for what is happening to the left is the left more intolerant agree with you that you would think the latter will be more open and in my research on Left Right the left is generally higher and openness to experience the idea of descent dissent is patriotic these are leftist ideas not not right as 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 into an ideology of turn to her religion and then you lose the ability to think straight now if somebody so you know when I was in college at Yale but there was they were conservatives there was 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

and you encounter one now it's much more painful it's much more shocking again it's like it's like you're the peanut allergy to ideas that are not your groups where I want so it's terrible if we're putting young people in system that are basically giving them ideological peanut allergies that's a great way to look at it I definitely agree with that in terms of young people but I am concerned with grown adults as well and I think that the boy a my personal opinion the way to the way to deal with bad speech is better speech with the way that you would do a deal with the shity ideas is to make those ideas look shity through debate it's not to silence the person that stalking this is one of the more confusing things about people that are pulling alarms on speakers and end in shouting them down while they're talkin you have an opportunity when that person is in front of you to listen to their idea and there should be an opportunity to

to debate the idea to tube to form your own opinion and have a really good argument against it and 2% that argument and to have people see both sides and this is what learning supposed to be all about especially recognizing the flaws and ideas recognizing biased recognizing the lack of critical thinking or recognizing critical thinking and plotting

I will agree with you depending on the context what I mean is if you have a group of people interacting with certain Norms or laws that that ban intimidation and violence that make people have some accountability for how they the style that they used to argue with you if you if you would lie if you threaten something with your reputation something bad will come back to you yes intimidation and violence are probably the most important Hazard University I totally agree with you now if you look at the country as a whole religion as a whole and you have a culture war going on or you have a sense of us versus them and you have all kinds of bad after it's like the Russians discovered before then that were there was stuff that leave the fake news people who discovered they make fake articles and in on the left and the right and just turned out that actually the right would click on them or if they went that way there if there are people who are gaming the sea

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 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 with no verification of who they are not saying you can't have Anonymous accounts like I understand her reasons why you want to build a house without your real name that's fine but if you make a death threat or let me know what you know what happens a lot is like any other research showing if you post something as a woman versus a man as a woman get a lot more rape threats and things like that if a black person a white person get on a racist up so that at least the platform should always know that you're a person and that you can do your company shut down if you if you talk this way because I think that there are so many people think that nasty stuff that it feedback and changes people's willing to speak up my concern is not necessarily Free Speech / say it's free speech as a means to an end and that and is

that we as individuals are kind of stupid and we only get smart if you put us together in the right way but we can challenge each other that's what university should do and when we have a call out culture we're walking on eggshells we can no longer do that 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 can talk about things without fear of Retribution you can talk 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 can you chain for it and people could take your words out of context and you could get in real trouble so there is a benefit of an anonymity but on the other hand when you looking at slurs attacks threats stalking all that stuff it would be nice if we knew who is behind all this absolutely

maybe some social norms so that people who critique in a certain way where it's slurs and it's guilt by association those people in some sense lose points lose credibility be downgraded my pic word for 2019 is Nuance that most things are complicated as the things we talked about it, anybody who can say you know I think you're right about ex but wrong about why like I should be a hundred bonus points essential skills of sincerely engaging with people and anybody who uses guilt by association loses honor points so I went down fighting because I'm a Centrist I only vote for Democrats I never go to Republican but I consider myself philosophically to be a century since now people will say that I'm alt-right adjacent you know that's a that's a wonderful I get that one because I've had people on the podcast of the right-wingers

the argument is McCarthy adjacent that is if you're making it a guilt by association argument if you if you say no Jason C argument that's guilt by association anybody does guilt by association is like McCarthy there for their McCarthy adjacent we are clear but it is a good argument good definition of what you're saying it's a it's a screwy thing that people are doing by this alright a Jason thing you know someone wrote on hold chart of like people interacting with people and connecting these people because they had communication with these people and so that somehow or another these things are all related like a boy that is a that's a squirrel the argument actually this is the way the human mind works is that we evolved to do this kind of religion with witchcraft believes in voodoo

that develop Norms of science Norms of discourse comes of Sevilla Drums of Toleration and Free Speech are the exceptions and it's precious and it's easily lost I think I fear do you think that it's also this newfound ability to communicate that we're experiencing Because the Internet and leads us to a lot of this sort of sloppy arguing and categories of categorizing of humans and ideas that it's just we're just not used to these tools yet so most of the commentary about this comes from cognitive psychologist or people who talk about the information bubbles to filter Bubbles as though you know I have my ideas in my head and if I'm exposed only two ideas from then I'm going to have a incorrect ounce of ideas so to look at the information flow obviously is this was a vastly change the information flow mostly for the better

mostly for the better but we have this problem of unbalanced like you know you need only sugar or something so you have an unbalanced diet okay find those are problem I'm a social psychologist I think the social dynamics problems are vastly bigger and more dangerous and they are that if whatever I say or whether I will agree with you or whether I'll even press the like button I'm thinking what's going to happen to me who's going to nail me for people to go through my Twitter feed and they look at what I liked months or years ago and I'll say what he like this or he followed his far left and communist and fathom the idea that you could be somehow if you know blamed for having some connection this is what normal human people normal human beings do this guilt by association and we have to rise above it we have to call it out when we see it as it were and we let 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 Cummins

I'll 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 crank through two hours and I want to thank you for Illuminating these ideas and pretty great books and and thank you for coming on the pile what if I Think I Love You So Much by Buddy

thank you friends thank you for tuning to the show and thanking Squarespace for hosting Joe Rogan. Com go to squarespace.com go for a free trial then when you're ready to launch use the offer code Joe to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain thank you also to the cash app the number one app and finance for a fucking good reason and you can download the cash app in the app store or the Google Play Market for free and order your cash card today and when you download the cash app into the referral code Joe Rogan $5 will go to you $5 would go to Justin Brands fight for the Forgotten charity building Wells for the pygmies in the Congo and also she's also the cash I will be continuing its support of UFC fighter Ray Bourque Son by donating an additional $5 to help cover his medical bills at least until Ray is able to get back into the octagon

okay okay that's it thank you everyone for tune out now don't care and fire bone broth damn so I started my day off with two and I forgot like I said I put hot sauce in it but you don't have to it is delicious 100% grass-fed and finished bones and no bulshit attitudes preservatives hormones antibiotics xcetera you there's a special offer for you listeners this podcast can go to Kettle & Fire. Com Rogan and use the code Rogan for 15% off your order free shipping when you order six cartons were more that's k e t t l e a n d f i r e Kettle & Fire. Com Rogan and use the code Rogan for 15% off hahaha all right we did it thank you so much thanks to you then appreciate you much love to you all

Help improve this transcript!

Episode Sponsors