Jonathan Haidt - Coddling the American Mind

Full transcript: Jonathan Haidt on London Real

3:48 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jonathan Haidt, the American social psychologist, author and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Your main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions, and you’re the author of more than 90 academic articles and three books, including The Happiness Hypothesis. You recently named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers, and your latest work, The Coddling of the American Mind, is a New York Times best seller which explains how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.

4:19 Jonathan, welcome to London Real. Thank you, Brian. Great having you here. First of all, what are your impressions of London? What does the city feel like when you come or come back here?

4:28 Oh, it’s it’s beautiful, it’s polished. I think like most Americans, or so the Americans of, you know, from the 20th century, I I look to I look to this country as the source of many of the best things about America. And you know, you see the street names or the neighborhood, you think, oh, that’s where that comes from. And you know, British institutions I think made America great, and Spanish institutions didn’t do so much for Latin America. So I really feel like this is the mother country, the country that we’re very grateful to.

5:00 Yeah, no, I love it very much and it feels like a part of me somehow, and maybe because it is part of America, and you see reflections of it. You know, I think it was yesterday when I was going deeper into your work, I just suddenly realized that I had read The Happiness Hypothesis back in ’07, ’08, and if people know the story of London Real, when I was in banking back then, I later took a class in meditation and then I later left banking and started this show. So in some weird way, Jonathan, you might be responsible for this whole thing, it is London Real.

5:31 So, you know, I want to thank you. It’s really interesting stuff. My wife actually remembered me reading that book. I mentioned it last night because it’s got a very good cover, a very memorable cover. I’d love to talk a bit about that, and also, you know, I was thinking recently, based on your recent book, The Coddling of the American Mind, what my childhood was like and how different that is from, say, my 15-year-old stepdaughter, and a few things that come to mind, and then I would love to get your thoughts on all this, is that first of all, I was kind of a latchkey child when I was 9 and 10 years old, so I would walk to a bus stop that was, say, 20 minutes away.

6:02 I took a bus an hour down into Southeast San Diego to a magnet school where I was kind of one of the few white kids there. Then I took a bus back home and opened my home up for four hours, and my mom came home at night. When I was in high school there were only a few things that were important to me: getting a car so I could have my independence, finding someone to buy alcohol for me, oh yeah, having sex for the first time, and then somehow I kept my mind on my studies because I really wanted to get into a good university.

6:31 It sounds like a healthy balance of motivations to me. Okay, but like those were definitely high on my list. When I look at kids these days, and even my own stepdaughter, I don’t see any of those behaviors per se. And when I was reading your book it became really obvious, and I noticed even a little while ago, that you know, the car doesn’t wreck, doesn’t represent what it used to. That’s, you know, much to my surprise, that you know my stepdaughter wasn’t looking to do all those crazy things I was, and I was like, okay, that’s good.

6:59 But now that I read your book, I want to maybe look at it through a different lens. So not sure where to start, but those are just some ways of me observing your thoughts. And sure, you know, I don’t know what we could be sure. No, that’s a very good place to start. So we’re probably going to say some things that might sound critical of the young generation, so it’s always good to start by saying every generation thinks that the one behind it is soft and has lost all the virtues, and there are quotes, I wish I had them with me, there are quotes from Socrates’ time about this.

7:28 That’s a universal process, and we can’t just say like, oh, because they’re not like us they’re worse. There’s change from generation to generation, and as you say, there’s less drinking, premarital, well, there’s less premarital sex, like fewer car accidents. So Gen Z, we’re talking about that, is kids born 1996 and later. They’re safer, they’re more responsible, but that’s all good. Okay, but the the statistics on how Gen Z differs from the Millennials are not good.

7:55 Okay, Millennials are born after, demographers generally say, in 1982 to 1995 or ’96, the the exact cutoff is still being negotiated. Okay, so the Millennials grew up with the, well, the later ones grew up, or the over, sorry, the oldest ones grew up with the internet. The other way around, the oldest ones were like in college when the internet and then social media came out, whereas the youngest ones grew up with the internet. But the cutoff seems to be that Gen Z, if you were born in 1996 or ’97, you might have gotten social media from the time you were in middle school.

8:29 The Millennials didn’t get it till college or later, and it’s if you imagine, you imagine kids growing up and there’s all kinds of inputs coming into them, and then suddenly around 2009 to 2011, in that period, we switch the inputs. Upset, now everyone is hyper-connected to their peers, massively sharing information among their peers and evaluating each other always, you know, clicking likes and evaluating things. This is a really rapid transformation in the fundamental fabric of socialization, and that Greg Lukianoff and I, my co-author, that’s what we think causes the relatively big shift between Gen Z and Millennials, and the shift it shows up clearest not just in those kinds of changes you mentioned but in very high rates of anxiety, too, pression, self-harm and suicide.

9:18 So my point is this isn’t just, hey, they’re different from us and I don’t like it, it’s, hey, they’re different from us and they’re having problems that they themselves say, wow, we’re having problems. Hmm, and we’re really noticing this big spike in a lot of those issues with depression and suicide and self-harming, like statistically, it’s really an anomaly. That’s right. So so if if viewers go to TheCoddling.com, which is the website for the new book, and then you click on Solutions, Better Mental Health, Greg and I and Jean Twenge have a couple of Google documents where we’re collecting all the data we can find.

9:55 We also are doing it for Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and what we find across countries is that there is a there is a big rise, especially for girls. The boys are doing worse too, but the girls, the increases for girls are much bigger. It tends to start around 2012-2013. It’s a little later in Australia, New Zealand, I think they were a little delayed in a lot of these social trends, but we have a lot of data. It this is not just changing diagnostic standards, it’s not just, oh, you know, Gen Z is so comfortable talking about it that the reported rates go up.

10:29 It’s not that, because it’s also how many kids are admitted to a hospital every year because they cut themselves, and it’s also suicide, so we know that this is a real trend and it’s a very alarming trend. Wow. Why are boys different than girls when it comes to this? They’re a bunch of reasons. So there’s a lot of research on how boys and girls’ social lives are different, and that’s been known for a long time.

10:51 So one of the clearest things is that boys and girls are actually equally aggressive. It’s not that boys are aggressive and girls are nice, like no, not at all. They’re equally aggressive, but boys are kind of socially clueless and physically aggressive, their aggression is what we think of as bullying and physical bullying, but girls’ aggression is relational. Girls are much more socially sophisticated, they have clear representations in their minds of everybody’s relationships and how to manipulate them, so girls’ aggression is social.

11:20 When social media comes in, or rather when everyone has an iPhone or, you know, smartphone, what do the boys do? They stop punching each other and they join small teams to roam around virtual worlds killing other teams, which is actually fun, it’s not particularly harmful. My son does it with his friends. It can get addictive, so you’ve got to put limits on it, but video games aren’t nearly as harmful as we thought, and it’s debatable how how harmful they are.

11:44 That’s one piece though that affects the boys, but It doesn’t make them depressed, and if you think about it, after you do a video game you go away and you’re not replaying it. Your mother, oh God, if only, if only I had shot him in the head, like you don’t think like that, you can put it away. But social media is very, very different. So the girls spend a lot more time on social media, they they can use it, it can hyper-charge their aggression, it can make them, it gives them the ability to damage other girls’ relationships, to spread gossip or rumors or fake photographs, to do it anonymously with full deniability.

12:19 So now girls can’t escape bullying even on the weekends when they’re out of school. So it really changes aggression. Also, girls are more sensitive to being left out or excluded. Everyone hates that, but social media lets you know who’s where and with whom, and look, they’re all having so much fun and I’m not there. So fear of missing out, fear of being left out, hits girls harder.

12:40 So for a variety of reasons, we think the fact that that the girls’ rate really begins to shoot up around 2012-2013 it’s consistent with the fact that American teenagers and British teenagers really moved online between 2009 and about 2011, 2012, and then right after that the rates go up. Wow. And I think I heard you saying before that a lot of times with girls it’ll be a validation tool, so it’s like, let me post something in like, I gotta wait for the likes now and then, am I gonna get them?

13:08 And that’s not necessarily a male behavior, but that can also lead to a lot of destructive habits. Exactly. So, you know, I’m very concerned about what social media is doing to political discourse, and places like Twitter are really nasty. I mean, it’s a dumpster fire, which is kind of fun to watch sometimes, but I think it’s it’s really nasty. It’s the nastiest of the social medias, right, well, of the mainstream ones.

13:29 Obviously there’s like hñ and there are other things, but of the main ones that people use, I think Twitter is the most destructive in that way. My wife is on Instagram and she tells me, no, but Instagram is really nice, like there’s not a lot of that on Instagram. And it turned so that for girls that actually can be the problem. I’m sorry, not that more nastiness would be better, but what I mean is, if Instagram isn’t about like you’re an idiot, you’re a [expletive], if Instagram is look at my beautiful life, look at my perfect, you know, my perfect selfie, in my hair, in my body, well, you know, girls have always been more sensitive to social comparison, especially adolescent girls going through puberty, very sensitive to whether they measure up, how people are judging them.

14:09 And so to be deluged with photos in which your friends look better than you, your friends look better than they do in real life, that puts a lot of pressure, that’s very difficult, especially for preteen and young teen girls. So in many ways social media’s harder on girls than it is on boys. Wow. So even a place that’s technically happier and safer can be more destructive. It looks like this weird paradise and then which you don’t measure up, your life isn’t as good.

14:34 Right. You think, I think everyone’s felt that on Instagram quite a bit. I mean, I guess the Silicon Valley company has never saw this company, and then we never saw this coming, right? Well, yeah. So, you know, they eat the eath, there’s a okay, so we can go back to Prometheus here.

14:50 You know the story, Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, I think there was, and giving it as a gift to mankind. And obviously fire has done amazing things for us, thank God we have fire, but you know, it also burns down a lot of things. And I recently just read read an article, really just an article, saying that the current age shouldn’t be called the Anthropocene, where humans are changing the world, it should be called the Pyrocene, where fire has physically changed the world.

15:18 Climate change, forest fires, anyway, that’s a that’s a little that’s a sidetrack, but the point is that the founders of social media, the ethos of the tech of the tech geniuses was really just, let’s just, you know, here’s an idea, here’s a possibility, here’s an interesting thing we can do, let’s put it out there, we’ll iterate, we’ll just do rounds, and there wasn’t a lot of thinking about where it would go wrong, what, you know, what harm it would do. It was also based, there’s this interesting interesting way to look at this, there’s a it was a professor at Stanford, let me try his name, who ran the Persuasive Technology Lab, and and there’s writing from him in the early days about how of course these technologies could be misused, but because we think human nature is good, we believe that, you know, this will give people more possibilities and if we just connect everyone it’ll be great.

16:15 Well, you know, it’s not correct to say human nature is good or evil. Human nature is really complicated, and if you put these tool, you hyper-connect people with the ability to spread lies and gossip, a lot of bad stuff happens. So I think there was very little thought about what they were doing, at least when the, you know, in the original scientists with the atom and created nuclear weapons, they were they were aware of what they were doing and they were they were careful about it.

16:42 This self-harming thing for women, do you know why that happens? I guess it’s something that’s been around before, but now we’re just seeing higher incidents. Yeah, I don’t, yeah, I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I’m not a clinical psychologist. It is related, what little I know is that it is related to anxiety disorders. So so people have a genetic vulnerability to anxiety disorders or not, and in women who are prone to anxiety I think it’s more common, and for some reason by it mechanism I don’t understand, cutting themselves actually it leads to a feeling of release, it leads, it feels good.

17:22 That’s as much as I know, I’m not an expert in the self-harm per se, but what’s stunning about the statistics, and it’s the same in in the US and Britain, is that the is that it’s a it’s a teen girl thing primarily. Kids don’t do it before the age of 10 and it drops way off in your 20s. It’s a teen girl thing primarily, and especially in America there’s very clear data that the older teen girls are up around 60 or 70 percent, which is gigantic, but the preteen girls, who had very low rates ten years ago, are up a hundred and is a hundred and eighty-nine percent in one published study.

17:59 That’s really tripled. Okay, so this is really magnifying the whole process. All right, the first thing I’m gonna ask, maybe a lot of people watching are, as a parent, what do I do? But when I read your book I realized that as parents we seem to be doing too much, and you have some really interesting terms. We’ve heard the term helicopter parent in it, you use the term bulldozer parent.

18:19 How has parenting changed, say, in the last thirty years? So, you know, when you and I were growing up, and as we were talking about before, there’s probably started shooting, and as you talked about in the opening, you were a latchkey kid, you went out on your own, and this was at a time when America had a crime wave. I mean, there was a lot of crime in America in the 70s and 80s, and we let kids out to play, we expected them to learn how to do things themselves, and what’s changed over the years is that the world has gotten a lot physically safer.

18:48 Kids are safer than they’ve ever been in history. Very little crime, cars are safer, foods are safer, consumer products are safer, but yet we become far more paranoid and because the changes in the media, because we’re now more likely to have only one child or two at most, you know, if you have six children you can’t overprotect them, you’ve got to kind of just, you know, get out of here, go play in the backyard. So so the key to understanding why we’ve gone wrong and the key to understanding what’s happening to Gen Z, I believe, is the concept of antifragility.

19:21 This is this is the most important idea. I just love this. Idea comes from the seem to lead the the guy who wrote The Black Swan and other books, he has a wonderful book, Antifragile. And so the key idea, and it’s so easy to explain once people get it, like you said, oh my god, why am I treating my kids this way, it’s that a lot of things in the world are fragile, and so, you know, glass is fragile, and if you drop it, it breaks, and it doesn’t make it better.

19:45 So we don’t give glass to kids, we give them plastic. Plastic is resilient. We say if the kid drops it, grab Cup, it doesn’t break, but it doesn’t get better. And tell em wanted to know what’s the word for systems or things that get better when you drop them, when when you when you challenge them, you expose them to disorder and threats and chaos, they get stronger. And the immune system is the perfect example.

20:08 Your immune system has to have threats and challenges and bacteria and dirt and and even parasitic worms, turns out, helps it develop. And if you deprive your kid of that you’re not helping them, you’re weak so once you see that kids Randy fragile, now you can see how our overprotection is so misguided. Kids learn best from experience, not from parental lectures, and the whole the whole attachment system is supposed to work where the parent provides a secure home base that the kid can come back to if there’s danger, but the point of that secure home base is that the kid goes out and explores the world and develops his or her capacities.

20:46 All mammals play, all mammals do that. When there’s a threat they come back to mom, but when there’s not a threat, they’re out playing and practicing skills for adulthood. And we used to do that in America up until the 1990s, and then just as our crime rate was plummeting, we began to freak out about child abduction. If your mother, if a mother today raised you the way you were raised, she’d be arrested, she’d be arrested for child neglect. I know, and I still remember the milk cartons with the missing children on the back.

21:13 I mean, was this one of the reasons? It is, that’s right. So so there was a one particular abduction a few blocks south of me in New York City, Etan Patz in 1979. A six-year-old boy convinces his parents that he can walk around the block to the bus stop, and he was never found. Yeah, it was scary on this day.

21:31 Right, they think they know the building that he was lured into where he was murdered and his body was thrown out, so they think they know what might have happened to him, but the parents, I started, I still remember them on the evening news pleading for anybody who had information, because at the time nobody could conceive of why somebody would kill a kid, it just didn’t even make any sense. Now, there was a lot of crime, but why would someone kill a child? And so that one got a lot of publicity, but that was before cable news and cable TV really.

22:00 And then there was Adam Walsh in 1981, and and that one got a lot more news coverage, a few other abductions got a lot of news coverage, so gradually through the 80s, when we had without the milk cartons and the the sense that children are being abducted everywhere. So by the 90s we’ve stopped letting kids out, we’ve kept them indoors, and that’s when things really begin to change. That, I believe, is why Gen Z is different, sorry, they the overprotection plus the too early exposure to social media.

22:27 Okay. You probably heard a lot of talk about these male rites of passage that we met don’t necessarily have in the West, and we still do in places in Africa. There’s circumcision ceremonies and these rituals where the man has to kind of prove himself and evolve. How do you feel about things like that? Yes, so so so I’m a social psychologist who studies culture and evolution, you know, where we’re an evolved species, our brains were made by a long evolutionary process, but but we express ourselves in different ways culturally, and whenever I find a pattern repeated across cultures, I like on to like, wow, that’s really cool, this really tells us something important.

23:08 And initiation rites is one of those. And so the fact that most, I think most cultures, the in their much earlier states at least, had some sort of initiation rites. So they have them for males and often for females. Cultures that have both, they’re always more intense for the male, and some have it for male but not for female, because many cultures believe girls will turn into women automatically, they will start to menstruate, their bodies will change, and then they’re ready to have babies.

23:36 You don’t have to do anything to make that happen. Right, but boys start off small and weak and and in the world of Girt women, they start off being raised by their mothers and then the men are off doing male stuff and many cultures believe that unless you do something, a boy doesn’t become a man. And so many cultures will cut off the foreskin to mark the body, they’ll do rituals that are terrifying, that that Dec sort of killed the child and then the man comes out of it.

24:08 My son had his Bar Mitzvah a couple of weeks ago, it’s rather different, but at least it is a, you have to have a public coming out, it was a big challenge, he was very nervous about it, he did a lot of work, and afterwards we really did all look at him as much more adult, and we really do give him more independence now. So the fact that so many cultures do it, and the fact that fraternities at universities reinvent almost the same rituals, the fear, the disgust, the humiliation, the physical pain, even occasionally risks to the point where even some died. Now, it’s horrible that so many go wrong, but it does speak to a deep need in male psychology for something like this.

24:53 Yeah, so I was at a fraternity at MIT, and it was, I don’t if you can talk about it, but was there initiation whether there was, so for me was 1989, I move from San Diego to Boston, it’s like it’s the furthest city away possible, six-hour plane flight, and at MIT was very strange at the time, fraternities made up about 60 or 70 percent of male housing there, so there was a three-day rush process and you moved into the fraternity as a freshman three days after you got there. That’s a bad idea. So it was crazy, and for 48 hours there was actually a computer system that tracked you everywhere, very MIT.

25:30 It’s being affected. And then when you moved in you were a pledge and you got a pin and you were kind of the low man on the totem pole, and you lived in the house, fifty guys in the house, average age twenty, maximum age 22. It was like a little Lord of the Flies. That’s right. A pressure cooker.

25:45 Pressure cooker. But also there was something beautiful about it, Jonathan, like I Ivan really understood how to behave as a man amongst men at that fraternity house, and it served me later in life. You know, you don’t do this, you don’t say someone behind someone’s back, you confront them, and I learned those hard lessons there. Also I was humiliated, made to do push-ups, made to memorize things, done lineups, and then we had a whole initiation process called Hell Week, which was hell.

26:12 Sleep deprivation, I talked a little bit about it, we had to play a song over and over and over again for five days straight, a lot of, you know, social hazing. We we never did alcohol hazing at him, I don’t see, they were really really good about that, so they never made us drink right away. That would cut out most of the death. Right, that would, and I mean, and that was always good, but the rest of it was there, but then when we made it I was really proud to be a brother.

26:35 So tell me, what you used the word beautiful, you said there’s something beautiful about it, and you did give the example of learning male virtues like you confront things straight on, you work out problems directly. Why don’t use the word beautiful? I felt like I belong to something that’s really, you know, I felt that real like pack, tribe, wolf pack, you know, which you don’t really get many other places. In business maybe, on a sports team maybe, but I don’t know.

27:04 There was just something great. It was also our own world and we got to create it, and we had parties and we had our rooms and it was culture and it was something I really treasured. You know, okay, perfect. So this is actually a perfect segue into you know, an idea what I’m one of the ideas I find most exciting, which there’s a chapter in The Happiness Hypothesis which is, I call hive psychology, and the idea is we evolved as ultra-social creatures. So in the same way that bees and wasps and ants and termites, naked mole-rats live in these gigantic communities in which actually the community is really the organism, the beehive is really the organism, the bee doesn’t reproduce, it’s it’s the queen is the ovary, and and so they’re all just really like cells in a larger body.

27:54 Hmm. Humans are also ultra-social. I mean, we cooperate, I mean, look at the number of people working together here too for us to have this conversation, we work together effortlessly, we are ultra-social, but we don’t do it by this genetic mechanism in which we’re all children of a single queen. We we have this ability to either live totally separately or to form a cohesive unit in which we merge into it, and the examples you gave her exactly those. So sports teams, choruses, when you sing in a chorus many people describe that loss of self when you’re all literally in sync, you kind of lose yourself and it’s thrilling, it’s beautiful.

28:33 And so so again, when you see this pattern over and over again across cultures, across eras, you start to think, wow, it’s almost as though there’s a switch in the human mind, like a button you can press that shuts off yourself and opens you up to merging with something larger, and that feeling is very often described as beautiful, that word. That’s why I thought maybe that’s what you’re going for, what you were responding to. So I think this is crucial for understanding how you socialize kids into how you in how you bring people into any organization, be it a business or a military unit or a church congregation.

29:12 So yeah, I think this is what’s it’s one of my favorite topics because it truly is mystical, in the sense that mysticism is, I think is usually understood as as being about ways of merging with the universe. And yet we’re not necessarily allowed to do this stuff anymore, like I went and visited my fraternity in Cambridge and they just think they’re barely there, you know, they had a violation and now they can’t do this and now freshmen I can’t do this and it’s basically dissolved. That’s right, because they’re competing forces in society, and an American society in particular, we have way too many lawyers.

29:50 People are afraid to take risks, leaders in particular, if you leave an organization, the fear of lawsuits is so pressing that they’re not really able to balance law on the one hand, we want them to be safer, on the other hand we want them to have these experiences. On the one hand, you know, we are legitimately concerned about their safety, and not just from a lawsuit point of view, and on the other hand we want to give them independence to practice adulthood. Okay, if you’re leading MIT or an elementary school or a company, ideally you could do that, you could balance those trade-offs, but when the threat of lawsuits is so severe, they’ve pretty much always go one way, at least in the United States: if anyone is hurt.

30:30 There are cases on campus where somebody got hurt in a snowball fight, so they banned snowball fights for college students, for adults. You’re not allowed to have a snowball fight. Super Soakers are banned at some schools, you know, water pistol fights. So this again, it’s this paranoid mindset, which again, the subtitle of our book is How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. It may have been a good intention to shut down fraternity initiations, and there are real harms, I don’t want to minimize those, but if you don’t understand a psychology of development, especially male developments, I think you’re gonna, you’re gonna produce some unintended consequences, and we’re gonna pay for this later, ten years down the road, twenty years down the road.

31:11 Well, I think we are paying for it now in the sense of greater fragility. One of the things you learn, so both in your story about growing up, you had to come home, open up the house, you had to do things for yourself, college students in a fraternity have to be a self-governing society. When you get rid of all that, and so kids are not self-governing until they get to college, and then they’re not self-governing in college, and then they go, they go into employment.

31:37 What I’m finding when I talk to business leaders, and I would urge listeners to do this, if you know people who run businesses where they hire jamesy, they hire young people, ask them how it’s working. I was just in Madrid yesterday and I talked to a business, I was talking, and a business person said to me, yeah, you know, I mean my my recent hires, it’s like they don’t know how to change a lightbulb, like they can’t do anything for themselves. And so we are paying for it in that we have deprived Gen Z of millions of learning opportunities, and then we’re surprised that they don’t know how to function as we expect them to.

32:11 And you notice this at NYU when you started seeing this whole reaction and these trigger warnings and all the stuff that happened a few years ago which you’ve never seen before, can you describe kind of what you saw on the ground? Yeah. And where are we at these days when it comes to universities, because that wasn’t there when I, I know that’s right. So so I teach at New York University’s Stern School of Business and I teach only MBA students, so I’m teaching more still teaching Millennials, Gen Z will be coming in in the next year or two, but beginning in 2014 weird stuff started happening.

32:44 I saw some of it in my students at NYU, but a lot more was hearing stories from friends and and my friend Greg Lukianoff came to me in May of 2014 and said, John, weird stuff is happening on campuses around the country. Greg is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, FIRE it’s called, and he, his organization stands up for students’ free speech rights, almost always against administrators and deans who say we need a speech code, oh you can’t tell jokes, oh you know, you can do free speech in that little corner over there but not elsewhere. So Greg was always pushing back against administrators, and beginning in 2014 Greg began to see college students at some schools asking for protection from books, words, speakers and ideas.

33:35 So if a book is going to be signed that has difficult content or offensive content, you can’t just assign it, you have to warn us that we can brace for it and decide if we want to expose ourselves to it. And so that was that was what was called a trigger warning. Now, these are not common, but they were popping up in many schools, requests for trigger warnings, many more moves to ban speakers because they were ideologically dislikable, as opposed to saying, okay, you know, a conservative speaker or wispy or even a progressive speaker who’s a Christine Lagarde who was implicated in something, I suppose, I don’t know.

34:10 At any rate, when when some students decided we don’t want to hear this, we want to no-platform this person, they would often get their way and invitations were rescinded. So lots of stuff started happening in 2014. Greg comes to me and says, John, the students are actually justifying this using the exact same cognitive distortions that I learned to stop doing when I learned CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy for depression. So because I wrote The Happiness Hypothesis I talked about CBT, Greg came to talk to me as, oh my god, Greg, this is brilliant, your, wow, this explains it, because I’d begun to see a little bit of this in my students.

34:49 Now these are later Millennials, not Gen Z, but this idea that if if something is emotionally difficult in a book, it’s gonna be bad for the students who read it, like, why, what do you mean? And I was reported to, as reported to the Dean twice for things that I said in my lectures that are just normal social psychology, like about the Milgram experiment and and, you know, trying to explain how the Nazis did what they did, and there’s just this greater sensitivity. Is reported to the Dean for justifying the Nazis or something like.

35:18 Really, what year was it? That was 2014. Okay, and you know, so it was just, there’s this new sensitivity, quickness to take offense, and especially linking it to a sense of fragility, that it’s not just this is outrageous, it’s this is dangerous. That’s what was new. So we wrote up this article in late 2014 and early 2015, it came out in The Atlantic in August of 2015 titled The Coddling of the American Mind, and a lot of people said, oh, you’re overreacting.

35:46 Okay, yeah, you know, there’s like seven anecdotes you’re reporting, this is not a thing. Well, that was August 24, 2015. Then comes Halloween, and at Halloween 2015, beginning at Yale, they don’t wanna tell the whole story, but there were protests over not over offensive costumes, because nobody wore one as far as I know, but over an email about offensive costumes and and here’s what you should wear, here’s what you shouldn’t, enjoy. So it blew up at Yale, it then spread to many other campuses.

36:16 So no, it’s so basically October to January 20, October 2015 to January, February 2016 is the period of enormous unrest on campuses in which now a lot of norms are changed, a lot more requests for trigger warnings, safe spaces, bias response teams, that is, we need a way to report anyone who does a speech crime, and this has really chilled, chilled this. I don’t talk about freedom of speech, what I want to talk about is how comfortable you feel talking openly and honestly versus feeling that you have to walk on eggshells and think about every word, will I be reported for this word? And did that continue, and is that the current state on campuses now around the world or in America?

36:59 So yeah, so it continued for two, you growing for a while, that is from Halloween 2015 through 20 into 2016. This spread very, very quickly, not to most universities, in that America has 4,300 institutions of higher ed, most of them are not selective, not even residential, a lot of them, and it’s not happening there, but at the elite schools, especially in the Northeast and the West Coast, from what I can tell when I travel around and what we can, it is happening at most of those schools. It’s happened in the UK and Canada and very similar forms.

37:37 It’s not happening as much on the continent of Europe, there are hints of it, but it’s not as much there. So it is spreading, it’s spreading very quickly, especially in the English-speaking countries. And let’s see, and then when 2016 is the election year in the United States and when Donald Trump is elected, now passions are so high, the culture war in America, the polarization, of mutual hatred of left, right, is a piece of the back story here, and that really ramps up after Trump is elected.

38:08 So in the spring of 2017 is when most of the violence occurs, that is, thank God there’s been hardly any real violence and nobody’s been killed in these protests yet, but what violence there was at Berkeley, at Middlebury, at Evergreen State College, all of that happens in the few months after Trump is inaugurated. Since then there’s the there’s been less spectacular stuff, but at the same time I would say the norms have changed, so that now we were all adjusting to the fact that there’s a lot of things we can’t talk about, and when we talk we have to be very, very careful because things could blow up very quickly. Hmm.

38:44 And so how does this affect democracy? So it’s so first let’s do how it affects teaching. So I think it’s important to focus institution by institution rather than just talking about society. So at universities, so now that we have bias response teams, there’s a way to anonymously report me if I say something that a student finds offensive, there’s a poster in every bathroom telling them how to, who to call. I’ve called the bias response team at NYU to try to find out, do I have a record, have I been reported?

39:17 They, I’ve called twice, they haven’t returned my calls, emailed them, so I have no idea what’s going on. And so a lot of us across the country make a similar calculation: I could teach something that’s controversial that some students might object to, but what will happen, I don’t know. And now that many of us know people who’ve been prosecuted or brought up on charges for for this sort of stuff, a lot of people make the decision it’s just not worth it.

39:44 And I was talking to some cognitive psychologists a few months ago at a at a major university in the Midwest who said we just don’t teach intelligence anymore. They, you know, in the basic introduction of cognitive psychology where intelligence is almost always, you know, a day or a week in the curriculum, it’s a major area of research, they just cut it because if we teach about intelligence some students might report us. Why intelligence? Because because of the findings about heritability, because like almost every trait is is partly heritable and and then it’s so sensitive I can’t even really talk about it.

40:24 Wow. Wow. So we’re making people more fragile, in a sense we’re making we’re we’re we had with less educated, I would say that in normal human life a lot of good things happen, a lot of bad things happen, and if you feel a flash of negative emotion, that’s just part of life. But I think we’ve taught many students that if you feel negative emotions from something someone said, it’s not your issue to deal with, it’s somebody else’s problem, somebody might, there might be a, there’s a way to report that person.

40:58 And so so, you know, one of the principles in our book, one of the really bad ideas, is always trust your feelings. And if you feeling is a reliable guide to what has happened, and the administration sort of validates that and says if you feel insulted, offended, marginalized, then then an offense has taken place and there would be a bureaucratic solution for it. So so I think this is the change that’s happened in universities, and then because that’s universities, then we can talk about what effect does it have on businesses, and we can talk about what effect does this have in democracy in general.

41:40 Yeah, which may do, which way you want to go? Well, I mean, obviously people graduate from universities and mostly go into business, right, and like you said, a lot of these, you know, new companies and tech startups are now getting some of this Gen Z in there, so yeah, I’m really curious how this turns out, but I have a funny feeling I know how, because this this group slowly starts going into the workforce, and in the workforce it’s all about competition, and then potentially you’re competing globally with citizens, and some of these citizens, sorry, Russia came to mind, all right, and I’ve only been once, but I get the feeling there’s not a lot of coddling going on there. Now, maybe that’s good, maybe that’s bad, but it doesn’t feel like maybe, you know, they’re fragile, so I’m wondering what happens then.

42:22 So when Greg and I were writing the book in 2016-2017 we thought about putting the chapter on what happens, what happens when students leave college, but at the time Gen Z was still basically in college, and it was I began to hear a few stories, because it’s not a super sharp cutoff and the late Millennials, some of them are like this too. So first let me be crystal clear here, the great majority of Gen Z students are nice kids, hard-working, they want to learn, they want to be exposed to different things. This is not a story about the typical or average Gen Z student, this is a story about a change in dynamics where a much larger number of them are fragile, depressed, anxious and prone to taking offense, which is something that they they got practice on in a callout culture on the internet.

43:16 So so, you know, I think employers shouldn’t be not saying, oh, you know, don’t hire members of Gen Z, of course not, value that, that’s the the coming generation, it’s our it’s our kids. But but if you hire, you know, 10 or 20 members of Gen Z, there’s a good chance that a couple of them will have this pattern of fragility linked to outrage. Now you said the business is all about competition, but what I’ve learned from moving to a business school is that that’s not true, business is all about cooperation, and you cooperate best when there’s competition between larger groups.

43:49 So this is basic tribal psychology, humans are incredibly good at cooperating when there’s an external conflict, we come together best in order to compete. And you want to ask my students, what percentage of your day do you spend cooperating, what percent is been competing, is it’s almost all cooperation. So if you want to hire someone who’s gonna add value to your organization, what you need is someone who’s really, really good at cooperating. But if you have some people whose attitude is not what can I do for the organization, go team, I’m a team member, but rather I’m, oh, you know, I I don’t like that, and so I’m gonna go report you to HR, if as one business person told me a few months ago, some my new hires, it’s like they come in looking for conflict.

44:39 And if that’s what you’ve learned on social media, to always call people out to get prestige by pointing out something that you think is insensitive, then that makes you not very good at cooperation. Yeah, yeah, and I know what you meant there and I agree, I think inside a business the cooperation is king, but the reason you cooperate is for the outside competition. That’s talk to me about this call-out culture and cancel culture, which seem to really happen on Twitter and social media, and it’s it’s had massive consequences for a lot of people’s careers, and sometimes if sometimes it feels like you can’t swim against the current, so it might seem ludicrous and ridiculous, yet they’re still cancelled.

45:17 Yeah, because sometimes the organization has to pull what’s going on and now they’re out. I mean, I’m thinking about Kevin Hart hosting the Academy Awards, and they’re like, they found a ten-year-old tweet of his and then they said he couldn’t, and then he went on Ellen and everyone was like, let him on, and then he wasn’t, and I’m sure there’s better examples, but it’s it’s like a thing to do. This, no, that’s right. So the way the way that I think about it is there’s a kind of a social fabric or a field on which everything plays out, and if you change certain parameters of the social fabric, then the game plays out very differently.

45:50 So, you know, if you imagine people playing soccer and then suddenly you make the field really contorted with huge hills and invisible, you know, lakes or, you know, ponds, the weird stuff would happen, and that I think is what’s happening to us. And then also take a game it was played in the World Cup in 1964 and now stick it on the new field. Yeah, and watch how it’s a mess. That’s kind of what happens when you dig up the old things, or like you said, you prosecute some parents for child abuse based on what they did 30 years ago.

46:16 Yeah, sounds right. Good. Yeah, so you know so we so a really key thing to keep in mind about our moral psychology is that, you know, we do care about what’s right, but we care much more about what people think about us and whether they think that we’re doing something right or wrong, and where a lot of what we do is designed to manipulate public perception. And so if you’re in an environment, suppose you’re an environment that really values and rewards forgiveness, love, compassion, you know, well, you’re gonna be more forgiving and loving and compassionate.

46:54 But suppose instead you’re in an environment in which do you get points and there’s a meter and you see exactly how many credits you get, you get points for criticizing someone else, for calling out someone else, for standing up for victims, you’re gonna be incredibly quicker than me scanning the environment, how can I find somebody saying something that I can interpret as an attack on a victim group. And so you get this self-righteous display, and this is what call-out culture is. So let me again, I was, you know, I have to be careful not to, you know, in a time of culture war, and it’s easy to exaggerate and do black and white thinking.

47:34 I know always remember there’s a reason for everything, and part of what’s going on is that Gen Z in particular, the survey research shows they don’t put a lower value on a free speech, they don’t say no, I don’t value free speech, they still value free speech in the abstract, but they’re beginning to hyper-value diversity and inclusion. That’s the way that they’ve been raised, those are good values, and so they are really sensitive for any kind of language or behavior that could be taken to be marginalizing or racist. And interestingly, it’s just I think it’s especially, you know, white kids who who don’t have victim points, white kids who can’t claim to be part of a marginalized group, for them the the best way or one way to get points is to prosecute others publicly.

48:23 And so a lot of call-out culture is caused by, I hear this from newsrooms and other places, so the young, you know, young recent graduates from elite liberal arts schools have this this culture of getting points by calling out others. And so now that we have access to everything everyone has ever written, or at least on, you know, Facebook, Twitter, things like that, there are people who literally will go, you know, oh, I don’t like him, let me let me convict them, and they go back and they, if they can find something, they prosecute them. Wow.

48:55 All right, did we get into the democracy in there? We’re working up to it. Okay, because if our basic and pokey Batson answers for me, Jonathan, because I’ve started really worried, but yeah, you seem like an optimistic guy. No, well, yeah, I am. I’m an optimistic guy who’s very pessimistic about the future of democracy.

49:11 Okay, so democracy means rule of the people, oligarchy means rule of the few, and the Greeks, you know, the Athenians developed a democracy, but it was very prone to demagoguery and and passions, and you know, they knew this. Plato had a very negative view of democracy because he said it inevitably decays into tyranny, because the people are easily swayed by a demagogue who comes in, promises to solve all their problems. So democracy has generally been very unstable in human history.

49:46 It’s emerged at various points around the world, but it tends to be fairly unstable compared to many other forms. And the Founding Fathers of the United States knew this, and Madison, James Madison in particular, was really, really concerned about faction, that is, groups of people who are united by a passion or an interest and who are easily inflamed to turn against other groups or minorities, minority groups, and to act in ways that are bad for the whole but good for that group. And so Federalist 10, the 10th essay of the Federalist Papers, it’s a brilliant meditation on how faction spreads, how anger and group spreads and destroys democracy, but if we set up a well governed, a well set up republic, we can contain the fires, we can we can dampen them down.

50:39 And he said one advantage of having a really big country is that the fire is not going to spread, like, you know, you can have an eruption over here, but it’s not gonna, you know, trigger outrage a thousand miles away, it’ll take so long for the news to get there. So the Constitution, the the Founding Fathers created a system that could deal with the human tendency to faction, and it was assuming vast size, slow distance, you know, slow transformation, slope transmission, information, and a variety of political innovations to cool things off, delay, slow things down, slow things down, big distances, things can cool, the fire doesn’t spread well. Social media changes all of that.

51:25 Now the fire could spread instantly from here to there, it’s every weekend spread everywhere, and things happen so fast. So I think a lot of the founders’ assumptions about society as they were crafting this elaborate mechanism to deal with human nature as it is, they were based on assumptions that are now invalidate ‘add by our hyper connection. And it’s not just the hyper connection, it’s the hyper connection with constant moral grandstanding, with displaying to others.

51:53 So, you know, the best scenario is that the problems of democracy now are just the normal growing pains. Every transformative technology does good things, does bad things, it’s used by bad actors. So, you know, it’s quite possible that we’ll all figure out how to handle this, and this was a period which democracies seem to be too are declining in quality, and maybe we’ll come out of it, but it’s also possible that we’ll see a lot of democracies fail, including that of the United States.

52:23 And that comes with the behavior of the political candidates themselves and also the way they interact with voters and then their own reactions therefore and then the votes. That’s right. So one thing I’ve learned from meeting members of Congress and talking to people in Washington is that most of them are really good people. They are smart, they’re public-spirited, they came to Washington not to light fires but to make the country better, to solve problems.

52:51 So this is something true throughout our discussion here, is that most people are most people are basically well-intentioned. We don’t get very far if we demonize people and say it’s the bad people are causing the problem against the good people. It’s it’s it’s citizens who have complicated natures are put in new situations with new forces that are leading to really weird and bad outcomes. So I was speaking with some congressmen last March and one thing that they told me is that if they, because I was asking a lot about how much do you talk to people in the other party, how much do you work with them at, because by all reports that’s declined a lot since the 1990s, and they said, well, now if you do anything that departs from the party line, if you reach out, if you break ranks, you’re going to be crucified on social media, which has big effects for your funding, your your donor base, and there are a lot of organizations that are policing this on the right, on the left, so if you deviate they’ll publicize your treason.

53:54 So social media, so democracy is predicated on a somewhat informed citizenry, which now information is moving us into separate worlds that don’t share facts. A somewhat informed citizenry that can pass judgment on its representatives because our democracy is not a direct democracy, that people don’t make the laws, but they get to say no, they get to throw people out if they don’t like it. So it’s predicated on a somewhat educated citizenry with some understanding of what their representatives are doing, and the representatives have to be able to compromise and work things out, and the congressmen I’ve met are generally really socially skilled, that’s how they got to be successful politicians.

54:38 We’re paying them in part to use their social skills to do the logrolling and compromise that it takes to make democracy work, and then since the 90s and especially since social media we’re saying no more of that interpersonal stuff, don’t meet each other, don’t live in Washington, while the Republicans started that in the 1990s, don’t even move to Washington. So we’re depriving our legislators of the opportunities to use their skills to make the country work, and that’s why so little gets done in Washington, it’s one of the reasons why so little gets done in Washington in recent decades, except when one party has complete control of everything for a brief time. Yeah, and now we see a lot of politicians they go straight to social media, which is fascinating, so it’s like they bypass the other politicians, they bypass traditional media, and they go straight to you.

55:25 So, you know, recently Trump on his Instagram is like saying this is a witch-hunt, like straight, and I just thought that was fascinating, and that you’re coming to me, you’re not going through the judicial or going to those people, it’s like you’re coming straight, and it’s almost, I guess, it is one big popularity contest now, running for office. Yeah, and it’s a weird way that it’s working. I read a New York Times article a few weeks ago about how Nancy Pelosi was never gonna do impeachment and she wasn’t strong enough, and then a week later she’s doing it, so it’s like, well, the facts changed.

55:54 Yeah, the facts did change, definitely, but it’s like you you have who you are and then who people think you are and who the voters think you are and then the funding, and it’s all this weird thing. That’s right. It’s so it feels as though, it feels as though, like, you know, God reached in and just changed some basic parameters of the universe, and like, you know, things are floating away or coming apart. Like, imagine, to go back to the soccer game analogy, imagine that there’s a long tradition of there’s a soccer tournaments going on for many years and suddenly, you know, one team or both teams, they they just come onto the field and they don’t care about the referee, they totally ignore the referee, all they’re doing is performing for the stands.

56:31 So imagine how eco here it would be if one team is doing that, the other team is not, like it just it wouldn’t work. And so I’m not saying that only one team is doing it, but certainly Donald Trump has mastered the art of doing that, of ignoring convention, ignoring law, I would say, and going direct to the demos. So in many ways, you know, this is Plato’s fear, this is Madison’s fear, we are living it now. How does this play out, Jonathan, in the next twenty years?

56:59 Yeah, uh, how does it play out? So I’ll give you two scenarios. Let me start with the optimistic one, Abbey, and I have to always keep this in mind. So I’m friends with Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist at Harvard. Books, yeah, you should, as you said, we should all have Steve Pinker’s books in mind here, sighs.

57:15 It’s good. Okay, so you know, Steve brought these amazing books, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, and he shows how, you know, measure after measure, life is getting better, and yet people often don’t think so. So there’s a good chance that he’s right about this, and you know, as I said, it could be because, you know, he certainly admits there’s backsliding. I mean, the 20th century happened, which, you know, from beginning to end was incredible, but there were some problems in the middle, you know, so he doesn’t deny that horrible things can happen.

57:44 So you know, a hundred years from now material progress will be vast, rights and quality of life will probably be better around the world, a lot of things are likely to keep improving. As he says, democracy, I don’t know about that, that’s one place where I am much more pessimistic, and countries can fail, countries can stop being democracies. And so I think we just don’t know. What I can say with some confidence is two things. One, if current trends continue, then well, if current trends continue, I think the United States is likely to fail as a democracy.

58:24 But number two, current trends are not going to just continue linearly, so it’s very difficult to predict the future. I can’t say how we’re going to adapt to this. Right now the trends are very negative, I think, and I see very few positive trends on the horizon, but we’ve been through terrible times before. More and more people are focusing on this in the last two years, enormous numbers of foundations, donors, researchers, professors, so we’re a tenth, we’re looking at these problems now like never before, and maybe we’ll come up with something.

58:56 I’m not moving my family out of America, I’m not buying land in New Zealand, but I am concerned. And as a parent, you know, is there anything I can do? Because the knee-jerk reaction would be, okay, they’re not going on social media, they’re 18, but are there things I can do? Can I make them anti-fragile? Can I bring back the old school, or what can I do?

59:16 Sure, so so so here’s here’s two very general points about child development. One is that kids need a lot of play, especially unsupervised, to play where if there’s a conflict there’s no playground monitor to come in. So kids need a lot of unsupervised play, and we’ve deprived them of that since the 1990s. So principle number one, give your kids a lot more unsupervised time. You know, begin slow with little bits, and then as they earn it you give them more and more, and I recommend, to any parents listening, if you’ve got kids in the in the six to ten year old age range, get the Gizmo Watch.

59:54 It’s a watch that allows your kid to make phone calls, three numbers, no texting, and you can also track it on your map. Once you have that, you’ll feel more comfortable sending your kid out to go to the store, to go out to play with friends in a park. I got that for my daughter, for my nine-year-old. daughter for a ninth birthday and right away then she wanted to go out and we felt comfortable sending her out in New York City, she’d go a few blocks away and get bagels, she can go to the park with her friends.

1:00:21 So that gave us the peace of mind to let her be self-supervising so that she can learn, and now she feels very comfortable crossing streets, going into stores, talking with people, those are essential skills. So that’s big. Nine years old in New York City, that’s that’s a smart move. Well, but you know, my parents grew up in New York City, they were taking the subway before then, they were going, they were much more mobile, and it was more probably more crime in there, danger in the 1930s than there is now.

1:00:49 So that’s one, is you kids have to get a lot more free playtime, unsupervised time, and it’s gonna be scary, but you know that happened to me and my wife, like the first time we let her out, like our hearts were in our mouths, like, will she come back? But an amazing thing happens as with all phobias, the way you get over a phobia is by gradual exposure, and when nothing happens, your foe your fear subsides, and so now we’re very comfortable letting her out and we can see her growing, we can see her becoming more independent. So that’s one principle.

1:01:19 The second principle is that social media is not like normal play. Mackay Matt, we thought maybe it is, we thought you know, okay, kids are hyper-connecting with each other, huge amounts of social experience, I remember thinking, wow, for all we know they’ll turn into super super humans, they could, their social skills could be so developed because of this hyperstimulation. So that could have been the case, but it now appears it’s not. So you know, so Greg and I are saying give your kids a lot less supervision, protection in the physical world, but we are saying give them a lot more restriction in the virtual world, and we think this is because the evidence shows huge rise in depression and anxiety, self-harm, it comes in just at the time that social media comes in.

1:02:07 And we have were curating these lit reviews showing that that social media does appear to play a causal role. A lot of correlational studies show heavy users are doing much, the correlation is not causation, five experiments have been done, all five find in effect, so we’re confident in saying that there is some effect. We’re debating with some other researchers how big the effect is, but there is an effect of social media on mental health. When I talk with Gen Z and I asked them, okay, you’re all on social media, you’ve all been on since you were 10 or 11 years old, would you say that being publicly shamed and the sort of stuff that happens on, so what do you say, that’s toughened you, would you say it’s made you stronger, like you don’t care what people think about you now, would you say it’s made you more afraid, that it’s made you more hesitant to express yourself?

1:02:50 And overwhelmingly they say the latter, they say it’s made them more fearful. So send your kids out to play and they will sometimes scrape their legs and that will actually be good for them, but don’t send your 10-year-olds into social media where they’ll get involved in in in outrage mobs and they’ll get shamed and all these things, they’re gonna make them weaker and more depressed. So keep them off until later years, or monitor, keep them entirely off until later years.

1:03:16 So when you and I were kids we talked on the phone with our friends, kids want to talk to each other, that’s fine, that’s direct private communication, and now they text, as far as I know that’s fine. The what’s really bad, especially for girls, is communicating in ways where I don’t actually care about you, I’m talking to the audience and on counting what the audience thinks. That’s really bad for kids. So the official age at which you’re allowed to open an account is 13.

1:03:46 People need to understand that has nothing to do with safety. Congress passed a law in late 1990s when they had a deal with at what age can kids open an account, and the original goal was 16, they thought, but in negotiations and pressure from the platforms they lowered it from 16 to 13. This was just about at what age companies can use the data from a minor, from an under-18 person, and so they comprar day got it pushed down to 13. Has nothing to do with safety.

1:04:15 So the current age is 13, but kids get on it. My daughter’s 9, her friends are beginning to get on Instagram in 4th in 4th grade that started. So there’s no excuse for letting 9, 10, 11, 12-year-olds on, they should simply not be on, and personally I think that the age should be raised, but for now I would be happy if we could just get it out of middle school. That’s my goal, create a norm so that every principal of a middle school can say to the parents, parents, I can’t tell you what to do, but I urge you, don’t let your kid have us have Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, any of those, don’t let them do it.

1:04:51 It puts pressure on all the other parents, because we know what we’re finding is very few parents want their kids on these things, but the kid comes to you and says, mom, everyone else is on, if you don’t let me have an Instagram account I’ll be excluded, and then we thought, oh no, I don’t want you be excluded, okay, you can go on to, you know. And of course many of the kids aren’t even asking, they just lie when they’re ten and get an account. So I think we have to get a handle on underage social media in particular.

1:05:17 So middle school is up to 15, 14, 15 and 14, so eighth grade, United States eighth graders are around 13, 14 years old. Okay, so try to hold off until then. Yeah, because it’s not an individual thing, it’s a group thing, and the middle screen of middle school is the worst time of life, like almost everybody agrees, like sixth, seventh, eighth grade, these are the worst years of life, and it’s so awkward and there’s so but and there is a lot of bullying and social media just intensifies all of that.

1:05:44 So why, why, what’s the benefit to having sixth graders on Instagram? Yeah, you know, you just, I just reminded me of a book by the the hip-hop group The Beastie Boys, who kind of grew up in New York City, and yeah, they just did a whole book about their whole lives, you know, an amazing musical contribution to the world and fascinating stuff, I grew up on their stuff. But when you hear their story, they were 12 years old, 13 years old and their parents let him run the city, they lived in Manhattan, they went on the subways and they went everywhere, and when they were 14, 15 years old they’re hanging out in the East Village and they created this incredible music, and I just kept me thinking that if the parents had made them sit at home until 18 we literally wouldn’t have this this wonderful music.

1:06:27 No, that’s right. Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book Free-Range Kids, she founded an organization called Let Grow. If listeners or viewers go to LetGrow.org, it’s full of ideas for how you can give your kids more more freedom, and she she says when she looks at biographies of inventors and and people who made an enormous contribution to society, it often comes out of exactly that. It was very much like your story, it was, you know, I had a chemistry kit and I was blowing stuff up in the backyard and I, you know, it was people taking risks and having setbacks and failures, we grow from those.

1:07:02 And in Holland, I read an article recently, New York Times, I was talking about how it’s still a rite of passage where they leave kids like in the fields and they have to like come home, that’s something that still happens on the continent. Right, that’s right, the the the attitudes about child-rearing that have gotten so defensive and fearful are are common throughout the Anglo world, not so much in New Zealand, they’re a little tougher, but in America, Canada, Britain, very, very similar, and very different from the Germanic countries. So it’s Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia, they have these forest schools, they think kids should go outside even if it’s raining and snowing outside, they can build things, they have saws and hammers and they play with physical objects, and yeah, they can get hurt, but an amazing thing happens, if you hit your thumb while hammering you learn not to hit your thumb while hammering.

1:07:54 So so I think northern Europe, as far as I can tell, northern Europe is doing much better on this. I’m trying to gather all the statistics that I can find. I was just in Spain and I was really surprised to learn that in Spain they’re doing exactly what we do in America. So I always do a survey of, when I’m speaking to an audience, I say, if you’re born before 1982, at what age were you let out, at what age could you go outside with your friends, no parental supervision?

1:08:19 And in Spain, as in America, was six to eight, it was it was around first, second grade, by third grade everybody’s out. And then I say, if you’re born after 1995 or if you have a kid who’s Jen’s a teenager, at what age were you let out or did you let your kids out? And I was surprised that in Spain it was even older, like, you know, in America 20 to, America it’s 10 to 12, the new norm is around fifth, sixth grade, 10 to 12 is when kids are finally let out.

1:08:48 In Spain it was 10 to 14, and they agreed to the crime rates way down. So in many Western countries crime is down but overprotection is up, and I suspect that that is much less in northern Europe, although I don’t have data on that yet. Hmm. All right, I’m gonna do a quick gear shift here, something that’s that we’ve been talking about this program for a while, and actually it kind of has some basis on what we’re talking about. I had a guest in recently and I had dinner with him afterwards and he said, Brian, I have 17 and 18-year-old boys, and one of the rites of passage that we all did as a family is we went down to Peru and we had an ayahuasca sir, yeah, as a family, age kids, right when they turned 18.

1:09:28 And so they did that because I think that it was a divorce, and so that way I think the mother couldn’t necessarily object, and it was kind of aboveboard, but the boys were they were really into it, they were interested, and it was something they all built up to, they went as a family, then they went up to like the Inca Trail or something like that. I thought that was an interesting ritual. That sure is, you know, eight years ago this show we come on, it’s a lot more than a Bar Mitzvah.

1:09:51 Yeah, right, so curiously think of that, but also the psychedelic experience is something we’ve been talking about here for about eight years, and we’re gonna premiere our latest documentary film in December called Reconnect, and it’s it starts with me going down to Costa Rica last year to have three very powerful ayahuasca ceremonies. The second ceremony was the single most profound experience of my entire life, very difficult, very painful, very emotional, as they always are for me, but also very insightful and life-changing. Curious what you think about the psychedelic world since you’ve been writing about this stuff for so long, and The Happiness Hypothesis goes to a lot of things going on in the brain.

1:10:30 Your thoughts? Yeah. Wow. All right, so let’s leave aside the, let’s leave aside the family that brings the 18-year-olds to do ayahuasca, let’s leave that aside, let’s talk about the psychedelic experience, cuz we can’t judge that situation until we’re clear what the psychedelic experience is. So I’ve never talked about this publicly, I’ve never, I don’t think I’ve ever said publicly that I’ve done psychedelics.

1:10:56 I’ve dropped hints in my first two books about it when I write about hive psychology and transcendent experiences, but especially since Michael Pollan’s book has come out and there’s public discussions of that now, I think I could, it’s it’s not as risky or wouldn’t make me seem as flaky to it, admit that I’ve done psychedelics a lot and that they were very important for the development of my personality and my research and my thinking. And so I guess, I guess I’ll just, I’ll tell my story, how’s that? I’ve never, okay.

1:11:27 So so you know, it was like a typical kid in the seventies, you know, I, you know, smoked marijuana, I grew it myself in the backyard, and it was kind of fun but it was it didn’t contribute to my life, for my development any more than alcohol did, was just fun with friends. But I was always interested, as a psychologist I was interested in, you know, in in altered states of consciousness, and I was also always really into self-improvement. I always have like lists of what I wanted to change about myself.

1:11:57 I wanted to be less judgment, so less petty, you know, more open-minded, you know, there were certain things that I just wanted to change about myself, like I have lists going back to when I was a teenager. And then one day when I was a postdoc at the University of Chicago, I went back to Philadelphia where I had been a graduate student and reconnected with my group of grad school friends and my ex-girlfriend, there was we’re still good friends, and she had gotten acid for all of us, so we each had a tab of acid, and and I had the the most, as he put it, you know, the most profoundly important and spiritually transformative night of my life. As June 12, 1993, as you know, and I understand more why people talk about being reborn, like you have a sense that you’re a different person afterwards.

1:12:50 And beginning on that night a lot of the things I wanted to change about myself were changed, and and so in fact I don’t think I remember noticing six months later, never noticing I had not gotten angry at all in six months, and I’m sort of a Type A hard-driving person, I would often get irritated at things, and I think it changed me permanently, that I’m calmer, I’m more, you know, so it’s another piece of the story is that at the time that I took acid I was preparing to go to India to do research, and I spent three months in Bhubaneswar, India, doing research on morality. So I’ve been reading a lot of Hindu writing, Hindu scriptures, Hindu philosophy, and and I’d also been interested in Buddhism for a long time, and so I kind of knew, you know, the world is the Veil of Maya, and you know, don’t be so judgmental, and be the same in, you know, victory and and failure, and you know, be, you know, have a detached distance from the ups and downs of life, and you know, and it and and Buddha and Hindu scriptures are so clear on being less judgmental and accepting more about the complexity of life just happening.

1:14:09 And so I’ve been reading all that stuff and I kind of knew it, you know, I like I knew it cognitively, but in that night, in that night it all moved into my heart, now for the first time knew it intuitively. And this was way before I came up with a metaphor of the rider and the elephant. Yeah, but you know, it’s normally, and if the rider is your little, you know, conscious reasoning and the elephant is almost everything else, all the intuitive emotional processes, you don’t get changed unless you change the elephant.

1:14:37 So you can’t give someone a class on being more tolerant or or, you know, not smoking or, you know, almost any kind of self-change, you can’t just lecture the rider, you don’t get change until the elephant changes, and the elephant changes gradually, it takes a long time, a lot of work, a lot of feedback to change the elephant, or you can do one night of psychedelic drugs and you know, when I jumped it, you know, after that night I jumped into it like I, you know, here it was a, I’m a psychology PhD studying morality, so I found everything I could read on what do they do biochemically, what research has been done on them back in the 60s when there was research, sixties ins, and and I became very pro-psychedelic. I came to see that if you ask people about all their drug experiences and you say which drugs are you grateful to, you know, how many cocaine users it, oh, thank God for cocaine on it, made me such a better person.

1:15:37 So you know, so you know, alcohol is very mixed, alcohol does horrible things and people have a lot of fun, and we tried banning alcohol and didn’t work out, so alcohol’s in a class by itself, but most other drugs people aren’t profoundly grateful to it’s just as one class of molecules, many people, you, me, and many people who tried, not all, but maybe a majority, are profoundly grateful to them. So okay, that’s my story. That’s my story, really fascinating story, and then you had some experiences then over the years as well.

1:16:08 Okay, so then my with my my girlfriend in Chicago who had a PhD in physical chemistry, very good lab technique, we grew mushrooms, because you know, mushroom spores don’t have psilocybin in them, you can order the mail-order, so we grew mushrooms and I did a lot of mushrooms and the both before I went just Rhett just before I went to India and then when I came back as well, and so those many trips, about three or four acid trips and, you know, 15 or 20 mushroom trips, I think really prepared me for the work that I later did in moral psychology. I think they made it much easier for me to step out of the culture war, because I was always very much on the left, hated Republicans, hated conservatives, and you know, I thought how can I use my research to help the left win, but over time, it didn’t happen right away, I was still very much a partisan in the 90s after the trip, but over time when I started writing The Righteous Mind, I think those drug experiences made it much easier for me to just, okay, just turn off the moralism, stop judge and good and evil, just try to understand, like, what do people think, what are they trying to do, what mechanisms are happening in their minds and in society.

1:17:21 So I do think that psychedelic drugs helped me to be a better social scientist, frankly. Yeah, and it comes out in you and your personality, like you you know, I would have expected maybe someone with all of your research to start, you know, banging the drum and saying these people are wrong, these people right, but you’re like, okay, this is something I noticed, this is something we should be concerned about, and we should be working on solutions. Yeah, that’s right.

1:17:43 I think that, so, oh gosh, where to start, okay, let me just drop in one more, we’re doing like analytical and personal, quick analytical comment there. There’s a real interesting class of problems called called wicked problems, and wicked problems aren’t just big, a gigantic, wicked problems are the problems that can’t be solved because they reach into our brains and warp our brains. And so technical problems, you know, so cholera in the 19th century was a technical problem, it wasn’t heavily moralized, and once we got good plumbing, problem solved.

1:18:19 But in the 20th century and into the 21st, problems like poverty, racism, education, and now global warming, there’s often a technical aspect but there’s a very heavy moral aspect, and so the more people study them, they write white papers supporting their side’s view, in a sense the further we get from a solution. So most of our problems today are wicked problems, and what I’m seeing more and more is if you want to change a system, like we want more diverse and inclusive classrooms we want less racism, if if we’re heavily moralized we see it as a battle of good versus evil and some groups are good, some are evil, we’ve got to change the evil groups. That’s never gonna work, that’s why wicked problems are insoluble, is because we approach it that way.

1:19:05 So my new dictum, a new, where I put it out here, I’m not sure if I said it publicly, the new thing I’m trying to promote is that to address wicked problems we have to demoralize them and empiricism and by demoralize I mean we got a strip out the moralism. You got it. Look, this is a, you know, this is a really complicated problem, generations have failed to solve it because they’re warped by their their morally and political pre-commitments. What would it take for us to just look at what is happening in the social dynamic of a classroom or a school, what’s happening with the environment, what would take to demoralize it, and then in Paris eyes it, it means we don’t do things unless there’s evidence that they work, we test things, we iterate.

1:19:44 Yeah, you have a hypothesis, don’t just put it into law, put it into an experiment, put it to ten experiments, because one experiment is not that reliable, we’re finding. So so yeah, this is my new ad to it, and I guess I don’t think I could have gotten here if I didn’t have those psychedelic experiences to help me sort of rip out the sort of the hyper-moralization module from my brain. Yeah, and we’re seeing this, like you said, with climate change. I was at a big protest about two weeks ago in central London with all the children and everything.

1:20:14 Yeah. You’re like, it’s like the more scientific studies we do, it seems like the more divided we get. We can’t solve this problem scientifically, even though it is a scientific problem. That’s right. And so here’s, so here’s, okay, perfect, here’s a great little example of what we’re just talking about.

1:20:28 So there’s there’s research, oh gosh, what are the author’s name, some social psychologists did did some research, if you google the term solution aversion, I think is what the key term, solution aversion. Okay, and in a study what they did was they they asked, they asked people, including people in the right, in the left, do you, how much do you agree or how much do you believe that global warming is man-made, your temperatures are rising, to what extent are humans responsible? And people on the left, on the right, generally agree that that’s happening, but people on the left are more confident of that.

1:21:07 But if you give people first an essay about how to combat global warming, we’re gonna have to have major regulation of corporations and emissions and what kind of car you drive, and so if you basically say in order to solve this problem we’re gonna have to do all the things that Republicans hate, which is a much bigger state telling people how to run their business, if you do that then suddenly Republicans don’t just oppose the solution, they actually change their belief about the facts, they’re more likely to say, well, it’s not even caused by humans. Whereas if you say to address this we’re going to have to use as part of the package, we’re going to have to use market-based solutions, the only way to get effects at scale is if we incentivize companies to do this, you know, so if you have free market solutions, now suddenly they’re even more likely to say that global warming is human-made.

1:22:00 So my point is that if you want to, if you want to polarize something, you should do exactly what the Democrats are doing with the Green New Deal, that is, say global warming is a catastrophe, it’s a crisis, I I personally agree with that, and to address it we have to have all the things that the left has always wanted that the right has not. We can’t address it without a living wage and ending racism and all these other things. I mean, this is perfectly calculated to polarize it and DMP resizer, that was a matter of ideology, and that means that there will be no action until the Democrats control the entire government, including perhaps the Supreme Court.

1:22:42 Whereas if they could demoralize it and pyrrha sized it, we could actually do some big things that would remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere. Yeah, that’s a super important point, and it doesn’t just apply obviously the warming, applies to other one of these wicked primary with this problem. That’s right. As a man who studied morality your whole life, are there any things that you can tell us about that concept? I mean, I know you have a whole Moral Foundations Theory that was 5 pairs of things and now 6, but anything that maybe you can kind of leave us as far as what we understand about morality, it’s something we’ve always had as humans and now it’s come into kind of a different way because we’ve grown bigger population and social media connectivity.

1:23:19 What can you tell us? Um, I guess I would, I would urge people to think of morality as the, you know, it’s the water that we swim in, it’s the spider net that we move on, and then we don’t really see it for what it is and what it does to us. So, you know, I look at our species and I’m in awe, I’m completely amazed that this primate that came down out of the trees and stood up on the, you know, in the savannas in other parts of Africa, you know, and that became hunter-gatherers, that in the space of just 10,000 years we’ve gone from being hunter-gatherers to living in gigantic, you know, beautiful cities like London and New York with very low rates of violence.

1:24:01 So in one way I’m completely in awe of what we’ve done, and and moral psychology was essential for us doing that, we never could have found ways to work with each other, trust each other, trade with each other, if we didn’t have this moral sense. But at the same time our morality is a tribal morality developed for small hunter-gatherer groups that were frequently in conflict with each other, and so we bring into the modern age this tendency for tribalism. And so I guess what I would urge people is to see that our moral psychology, it allows it well, and see how having to put this in a way which is more of like a lesson or something interesting to say that that well, we’re all moral creatures, in a way we’re also puppets and marionettes and we’re easily manipulated by others.

1:24:51 The research on the Russian hacking showed this, it turns out that the Russians didn’t need bots, the bots weren’t that important, all they had to do was put fake news and sometimes real news into circulation and Americans forwarded them gladly, so we were easily exploitable. And so I guess I would say recognize that we are this miraculous species with this tribal morality that somehow managed to transcend it and create very peaceful, rapidly progressing societies. That’s amazing.

1:25:24 And always remember that when you’re judging someone else you are locked in your moral matrix, you are locked in a set of meanings and understandings that seem totally compelling to you, and someone else is in a different network. And just as you might be actually pretty good at not judging people in other nations, you might be pretty good at being tolerant about people live in different societies and say, well, I don’t know what their life is like, I’m not going to judge their practice, or at least I’ll be a little bit more morally humble, I’ll be a little more more tolerant, you might be good about that, but it turns out in our modern age lots of subgroups within the country, and especially left versus right, are now like different societies. It’s hard to be tolerant because you know those people are far away and these people are competing with us for who controls the Congress or the Parliament.

1:26:15 So it’s hard to be taller, they’re not exactly the same, but I guess I would urge just a little bit more moral humility, slow down, be a little less judgmental, read Buddha, read the Bhagavad Gita, read The Happiness Hypothesis, which goes through the research on all these these ancient ideas. I’ll just be a little bit more forgiving, try to imagine, try to imagine a modern democracy in which now everyone’s pursuing justice. Okay, that’s great, but suppose, suppose you’re pursuing justice but with no forgiveness, no due process, no time to think, just constant trials, public trials, public hangings, over and over and over again.

1:27:01 Is that the kind of world you want to live in? And if not, then you can be part of the solution by stepping out, don’t join those things. And that’s what we’re doing on social media today, exactly, basically that kind of frequency. And in addition to that long list of things, maybe try some psychedelics as well. Yes, I don’t know about age 18, I’m not opposed to it necessarily, and you know, in that particular family if everyone was into it, but at some point in before 30.

1:27:27 Yeah, I think that for most people psychedelics would be a good catalyst for this kind of development. Yes, yeah, just cuz it allows you maybe to get out of your own your own framework, your own brain, and maybe observe things from just a different perspective. Yeah, it’s it’s like traveling. I mean, in fact, that’s what a lot of the metaphors are in fact. Yeah, in the Bhagavad Gita there’s this amazing scene where Krishna, so rju, so the Bhagavad Gita, they’re one of the central scenes, if I remember it, is that Arjuna is the leader of one branch of a royal family and he’s supposed to lead his vast army into battle against another branch of the royal family.

1:28:04 He doesn’t want to do it, he doesn’t want to kill his relatives, and Krishna comes down to explain to him why he must do it, why his Dharma requires him to do it, and and he gives him a lecture on the nature of the universe and our Jonas, you know, that he’s speaking to the rider, and saying, Arjuna says, well, you know, okay, but show me this universe, I don’t, you know, I don’t understand this. And so Krishna gives him a third eye where he can see the universe as it really is, as a God would see it, and what happens to Arjuna next sounds like a massive acid trip, the way he describes it, seeing infinite suns and dimensions in time. And after Arjuna has that experience, that convinces him in a way that a long lecture never could, that well, you might say, well, he grows spiritually now leading an army into war, you can decide what you think about that, but the point is he does his Dharma, he is enlightened.

1:28:58 So yes, I do think that across cultures many cultures use psychedelics at initiation and they relate them to wisdom. So across cultures the common human discovery is that psychedelics are often aides to spiritual and intellectual and moral growth. Yes, yeah, definitely. Tell me a little bit about you, what’s what’s something that for you every day is non-negotiable? Do you have a practice, meditation or physical or anything you try to do every day even though you’re traveling a lot?

1:29:30 Yeah, I I do have some practices. I got I I got kind of anxious in the summer of 2017 in the early days of the Trump administration, when it was clear that the culture was, I mean, people were losing their minds on both sides, and and I began to think, oh my god, like, I don’t understand this world, and and here I’ve been saying let’s understand each other, but people might really want to kill each other now, and am I gonna be caught in the crossfire, am I gonna be, you know, seen as a traitor for, you know, for not joining the army to fight Trump, and and at the same time there was a real risk of nuclear war with North Korea, and I live in Manhattan and I really had to begin thinking, what do I do if, you know, if there’s any, you know, if there’s any sort of missile and the power grid goes out or something hits New York.

1:30:19 And so I actually had a period of some really, in a low-level but true anxiety for several weeks or months, and so then I began meditating in the morning, but that and that helped, but that’s kind of morphed into reading, especially Marcus Aurelius. So Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, most concentrated book of wisdom or insights I know of, and it’s so calming to read Marcus on how to think about this universe, this infinite universe where there’s an infinite before and infinite after, you know, it’s one turn of a corkscrew is our lives. So reading Marcus Aurelius is a is a sub and and now also Buddhism, of the Dhammapada.

1:31:05 So just three to five minutes in the morning before I check email, and I also don’t check Twitter for the first couple hours of the day. Smart. So I try to get off on the right foot with a bit more of a philosophical bent, and so that, yeah, those are my major sort of daily of daily routines, and then also just try and work more exercise into the day, trying to eat less starch and sugar but generally failing. Okay, yeah, Marcus, I can’t believe such wisdom was had and such stoicism from a man in his position, which seems like the most anti-stoic role.

1:31:44 You know, well, as I understand it, he wrote the Meditations not when he was in Rome but he was out on campaign, so you know, I I imagine out when you’re out on campaign a lot of is just sitting around doing nothing for days and days and days, and so you know, I think that’s when he wrote the Meditations as reflection to himself, but he obviously had the sort of mind that this kind of hyper-reflective and philosophical mind that allowed him to step out of the the pettiness and intrigue of palace life and reflect on on the greatest truths of life. Yeah, and it’s super relevant today. Um, if I were to ask five of your best friends, what is Jonathan’s superpower, how was this man able to do everything you do, teach at my you create these books, travel the world, get these messages out there, what would they say is yours?

1:32:33 Well, I mean, you know, for one thing we just, you know, being a professor, having a relatively low teaching load, having a very supportive environment at NYU Stern, having a commute which is three minutes long every day, and you know, so I mean structurally my life is set up to be productive. I think my wife would say that one of the things is that I’m really obsessive and I think about my work all the time, which she says sometimes brings negative energy into into our home, you know, from talking about the latest conflict or the latest outrage or, you know, what’s happening. And it may be that I don’t need a lot of sleep, I sleep about five hours, five hours, and I eat, so if I’m always thinking about this and I’m not sleeping a lot and my life is set up to make me very productive and my wife and family is very supportive as well, so I’m kind of lucky in a lot of ways that I can do this, I can devote myself to this.

1:33:33 And I guess my, I think all of my former girlfriends and all the way up including my wife would say that I love to argue and debate, but I think people also say about me that I’m that I’m also open to changing. So I love to engage with people, and I used to be fairly pigheaded, I used to, you know, be your sort of typical, you know, smart aleck Jewish know-it-all kind of kid, but I think after my acid experiences I still love to debate and argue, but but I think I I’m much more open to being persuaded now, you know, that might be what they’d say. What was the best day of your life and the worst day?

1:34:15 Oh boy. Well, you know, the best days have all either involved psychedelic drugs or love, so there are the, you know, the the days of passionate falling in love. I think my wedding day was was one of the best days, I remember my cheeks hurting so much from smiling so much. So yeah, love and psychedelics, both of which are about connection, or about, mmm, connection at orders of magnitude greater than we were used to. So those would be the best days.

1:34:45 Yeah, I guess we could have a whole theory here just based on connection and disconnection. So the worst days it would be, you know, days that I went when I got the call that my father was was likely to die or at least that he had fallen into a coma and and that this might be the end, days like that, and in 9/11. So so yeah, days when you’re when it’s clear that your life is going to be changed, fundamentally changed, bye-bye loss, and those would be the worst days.

1:35:26 You were in New York for that? I was in Virginia then, I lived in Charlottesville and my wife and I’d been dating for a year, then we weren’t married yet, and she called me up in the morning, said, John, turn on the TV, and I had a TV in my office. Yeah, I was there that day, it was quite a day. I’ll always remember everything that happened and take it with me, and it’s funny, I’d broken up with a girlfriend and I reconnected with her about 16 years later, and she said that that day changed her and made her get serious about her life and start a relationship and start a family, and infected so many people in so many ways.

1:36:01 Yeah, well, that’s right, and there’s a whole chapter in The Happiness Hypothesis on growth through adversity and how tragedy and setbacks, especially their experience collectively, so it’s if it’s just you they can be separating, but when groups go through tragedies and setbacks it tends to bond them closer together. And so yes, many people, many people as I, you know, I think there was research on how to turn to religion, turn to relationships. It was a horrible day and a really transformative day for the country and for the world.

1:36:34 Oh, and also New York City came together in a way that I’ve never seen before. It was pretty fascinating, very beautiful, yeah, I think I think there was research showing there was less honking for months afterwards, and yeah, yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised. Um, what scares you? What scares me is that certain parameters have changed and we’re now going over a cliff, that there may be no guide for where we’re going, that we may have achieved escape velocity on outrage, declining trust.

1:37:10 So this is the pessimistic story we were talking about earlier, and again I want to emphasize, if current trends keep going, yeah, it looks bad, but we shouldn’t assume current trends will keep going, so I don’t want to, you know, I’d want to be too alarmist here, but yeah, I’m really alarmed about current trends, declining trusts, increasing outrage, shredding of a social fabric, so that, you know, after 9/11 we all came together, but if that happened today, within hours left-wing Twitter would have developed one narrative and right-wing Twitter would develop another, and they might never come together. So I am afraid that we might have passed a point of no return on on some some things that I think a democracy needs. That’s what scares me.

1:37:55 Again, I’m not confident, these these are not exactly predictions, they’re just concerns about current trends. Yeah, no, it’s a good point actually, that’s a good point, because when 9/11 happened the whole country rallied, there wasn’t division, that was like a be really way together, but that happened today. Yeah, I think that is a decent prediction of what would happen. What keeps you awake at night, if anything? Um, what keeps me awake at night, I don’t worry about the world as I’m falling asleep, I really just, you know, worry about what I have to do the next day, but if you mean the question metaphorically, it is a variety of big problems, and I’ve just kind of decided that I can’t, I have to focus, I have to work on on the ones that I can do best.

1:38:42 So I’m extremely concerned about climate change, but I’ve decided I can’t focus on climate change, I have to focus on rising polarization and Democratic dysfunction, which if we can make progress on those, then we can make progress on all other issues. So strano clear weapons, you know, the destruction of the oceans, the gene editing technology, the possibility of there being a superbug that we don’t have any resistance to goes way up when you know, when anybody can just type in sequences of, you know, ATGC and create a new organism, and that’s probably coming at some point in the next few decades. So there are a lot of things to be alarmed about, but then I go back and, you know, think about things my, you know, my mother said or other people from older generations, you know, we had, you know, Hitler and World Wars and and you know, then when I was a kid there we all thought that the earth was gonna be so overpopulated and becoming abital by the year 2000 or to 2020.

1:39:53 So again, reading Marcus Aurelius and and knowing a lot about previous generations and the crises they faced, you kind of just have to, you know, you have to learn how to live in a world that’s perpetually out of balance and perpetually on the verge of going over a cliff, and you know, you do what you can do in the areas where you have have the the good luck to have opportunities, and then you have to just, you know, live your life and recognize that happiness doesn’t come from the state of the world, happiness comes very locally from from your your relationships and the work that you get to do. Yeah, what you covered really well and in that book The Happiness Hypothesis. Jonathan, always ask a few questions at the end, and then I asked you if I could give you a magic phone and you could call up the twenty-year-old Jonathan and give that young man a bit of advice, what Let’s continue with the show.

1:41:13 I’m lucky that I have not had any tragedy. I mean, there are some setbacks and traumas that are disfiguring and awful, and I’ve been lucky to not have have those. So I guess I I wouldn’t really give him any advice, because you know, everything kind of had to happen, everything happened to me contributed to who I am now. Right, made you a hint a fragile. Yeah, I think so, and you know, I had a pretty easy childhood, I mean, you know, upper-middle-class parents and in Scarsdale, New York, you know, I had a an easy, relatively easy childhood.

1:41:49 I suppose I probably could have done with some more challenging hardship when I was younger. That’s a good observation. On that same note, best advice you’ve ever received, could have come from, I don’t know, a professor or a parent or something you’ve heard over the years that moved you. Let’s see, to think about this. Yeah, okay, well maybe even something the psychedelics might have told you.

1:42:16 Well, that’s the best advice I think. Okay, well, I’m sure I’m sure I’ve gotten better advice here and there, but two things are popping into my mind, I don’t know why. One is that my mother’s dictum, which she learned from a child-rearing guru when she when she was raising me and my sisters, was don’t just do something, stand there. And so for child-rearing, you know, don’t jump in, don’t don’t solve the problem, just, you know, if they’re or if there’s a conflict, let them work it out.

1:42:50 So that’s I think generally very good advice for parenting, and and I’ve not been great at adopting that, but it’s not that has helped me to step back and sometimes I let my kids work out problems when I’m tempted to step in. And the other, this, I don’t know why this is popping into my mind, but I was once, like when I traveled in Brazil on the trip that became my dissertation research in 1989, we were on a boat, the boat had engine trouble up the Amazon and a two-day trip turned into four days, and I remember there was a there was an another American couple, was mostly Brazilian labor was going up to Manaus to look for work, and there were there was a couple that were talking with some Brazilians and they didn’t speak any Portuguese themselves, and so they they would translate with a dictionary word by word, and I said, oh my god, that’s like impossible, like you know, how can you possibly have a conversation like that, that would take forever.

1:43:46 And the guy said to me, well, we have time. And you know, to my mind are like, oh, this is so inefficient, like why don’t you know just fine to translate or do select, how can you do this? But we have time, and I didn’t think that way, and and just that advice is especially good for me, just like slow down, take the time to connect, people with people, which I don’t often do that well, but it is the kind of advice that I think I need. Super good advice. Final question I always ask everyone here, but it’s particularly relevant for you, and that’s advice to the 20-year-old that’s watching or listening to us, which means they were born in 1999, which means they’re in the I Jenna Jenna X space, say they’ve watched all this and maybe recognize that they are kind of in the middle of this, and maybe part of them says they’re not, but advice to them if they want to go down the anti-fragile route or if they want to do something.

1:44:38 No, that’s that’s a that’s a great way to end this, because one thing I can report about Gen Z everywhere I’ve gone, including two days ago in Spain, I present the basic story here, I always asked them, is this basically right or wrong? Do you think that this diagnosis of your generation is correct? It’s almost always a hundred percent saying yes, this is correct. They’re not in denial, they know that they have been denied freedom, they know that social media does a lot of things to them, including some bad things.

1:45:05 So Gen Z is is great at at like under at like wanting want. Yeah, and they seek out information on podcasts. What I would say, especially to members of of Gen Z, is there are a lot of forces at work that are making Gen Z and all of us, but especially Gen Z, weaker and less wise, and you have to take action to become stronger and wiser, and the kind of action you take is kind of similar. Once you see that we’re anti-fragile, you have to seek out more experiences, more unsupervised, unprotected experiences, take small risks at first, not saying go do something crazy but take small risks at first and you’ll get better, taking big risks, and work together with other members of your generation to push back against the overprotection.

1:45:55 Often the adults think they’re doing you a favor, but if you go talk to them and say, why are we not allowed to walk to a corner store, how about if we go together in small groups, would that be okay, and usually they’ll say, oh well, okay. So so if you want to get stronger, seek out more unsupervised experiences and try to change the overprotection that is blocking you from it. That’s how to get stronger. If you want to get wiser, read John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, chapter 2.

1:46:31 We have a version of it at Heterodox Academy, if you go to Heterodox Academy.org/mill, get a free edited version with beautiful artwork. And once you understand that we seek out people who confirm our views, we are are locked into into a moral matrix, Mill explained it all beautifully in 1859. And he says, let’s see, what are some of the great quotes, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. And then he goes on to show how you may think you have reasons, you may think you have evidence, but until until you have heard from people who see things differently, who have asked you to articulate your evidence and have shown you their own, you can’t really know anything.

1:47:22 And so social media and political partisanship and filter bubbles all work together to make you absolutely certain that you know things, much of which is simply false, and so you have to take steps to break out of that. So seek out, seek out those who disagree with you. Sica, not the worst writing on the other side, it’s easy to find the worst people on the other side, but seek out the best. And if you go to OpenMindPlatform.org, it’s a program that I and some of my colleagues created, OpenMindPlatform.org, it’s a five-step process of bringing you through a process of coming developing skills to engage with people who think differently from you, and we have a library there with some of the best writings from left, right and libertarian.

1:48:15 So you have to seek out more experience because you’re anti-fragile, you have to seek out more perspectives because we’re prone to just confirming what we already believe, and if you do those two things over the course of five or ten years, you’ll be a lot stronger, a lot smarter, a lot better cooperating, a lot more employable and a lot happier. Super powerful advice. Imagine if everyone just did that, wave a magic wand. Right. Jonathan, thank you so much for being here, I really appreciated.

1:48:42 The book is The Coddling of the American Mind, can’t get this on Amazon, I’m guessing your website, etc. Um, I highly recommend The Happiness Hypothesis. You just jarred my memory with this concept of the rider on the elephant, and I still remember this back when I read it in ’08, and just thinking about me is that whereas the elephant ultimately if he wants to go charging he’s gonna charge, but you can be the rider and if you can just stay calm you can potentially ride that elephant and you can train it over time.

1:49:08 Yeah, yeah, and I mean that’s what I’ve been doing with myself here for the past eight years, this shows, it allowed me to do a lot of that training, and I still have more left. So great thoughts here, I really appreciate that, really appreciate you, and looking forward to your next book and and all of your other things that you’re gonna produce. So well, thank you, Brian, thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about these things, some of which I’ve never talked about in public, but yeah, I think the time is right.

1:49:29 Yeah, and I appreciate you being really open about the psychedelics. So I think it’s so powerful and it’s it’s fascinating to me to know that great ideas and great works and great books, you know, might have been inspired by some of those, and I just think it’s great when everyone’s talking about this and be so free about it, and yeah, I mean, really look forward to seeing what we’re gonna do in the future with research on these things as well. So all the best, come see us again sometime.

1:49:52 Thanks to my car I think stone you.