The Coddling of the American Mind： Haidt⧸Lukianoff (eqCNTopdBBs)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eqCNTopdBBs

So, I’m here today with author Greg Lukianov and Jonathan Haidt. Greg is president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Jonathan Haidt is an eminent social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. They have co-authored a new book called The Coddling of the American Mind, which is an elaborated version of a famous Atlantic Monthly essay they published a while back. And so today we’re here to talk about their new book and about the state of the universities and I suppose society at large. So thanks guys very much for joining me today. So I thought maybe we’d start talking about the book. So do you guys want to provide some background? Maybe you could talk about the Atlantic Monthly essay and what led up to the book and then we’ll get into the details. Sure. Well, that’s over to Greg. Well, so it all started in 2007 when I was lucky enough to have a full on medical level depression. Really bad. I talk about it in some sort of detail in the book. I realize it’s actually at a level at which I don’t even, I realize I wrote about it with details that my wife doesn’t know, my family doesn’t. There’s that weird privacy thing that sometimes happens when you’re talking, you know, dictating into a computer that you kind of like, this is just between me and the computer. Now I realize it’s probably the most public thing I’ll ever write. But the thing that saved me, the thing that ultimately helped me deal with my depressions in general was cognitive behavioral therapy. In a sense, it’s sort of like applied stoicism. You just look at your own thoughts, you talk back to the really exaggerated ones, you label them as cognitive distortions. These include things like generalization, catastrophizing, binary thinking, thinking everything has to be, they’re all good or all bad. I’m actually particularly guilty of these. And amazingly, if you just actually learn what these distortions are and practice every day to sort of talk back to sort of the more anxious or depressed voices in your own head, it’s an incredibly effective treatment for depression and anxiety. And it changed, absolutely changed my life. Meanwhile, as this is changing my life, I’m still the president of FIRE, which means I defend free speech and due process and academic freedom on campus. And I was what, and while I was learning all of these intellectual habits, all these ways to sort of talk yourself down, I was looking around at what administrators were doing and ask and saying to myself, wow, it’s actually kind of like the administrators are saying, oh, by the way, do engage in cognitive distortions, do engage in binary thinking, do overgeneralize and most of all catastrophize all the time. And I remember thinking to be something to the effect of, well, thank goodness the students don’t seem to really be buying it. And that’s what changed in 2013, 2014. Prior to 2013, 2014, since I started in 2001, the worst constituency for free speech on campus was actually administrators. The best, most reliable fans of free speech you could run into on campus were generally the students themselves. And then sometime around 2013, 2014, we saw, you know, suddenly they were demanding, you know, everything from trigger warnings to microaggression policies to disinvitations for even people, but both on the left and the right on the spectrum. And it seemed that, like we said, it seemed to happen almost overnight. And this, and when I went to talk to John about it, we’d become friends through a mutual friend and I said, it’s almost, I talked about my whole theory that we’re teaching a generation the habits of anxious and depressed people from cognitive behavioral therapy. John got really excited about the idea and asked if I wanted to write about it. And I was already a fan of John’s work. So I was like, absolutely. Yeah. So I thought that his insight into what had changed was absolutely brilliant. I had just begun to notice this in my own teaching. I’d been teaching since 1995 at the University of Virginia originally. And it was seemingly overnight, right around 2014, these new ideas. You know, students, of course, are political, they protest, they object to things, but what was new, Greg put his finger on it, what was new was the idea that these words are going to harm me, not just offend me, not just be unjust, harm me. We have to protect. It was this idea that students are fragile and need protection and the protection should come from administrators, from adults. That’s what was new and disturbing. And when you guys talked in the book about concept creep, you know, and the overgeneralization of the idea of trauma. And you know, one of the things that’s really struck me as interesting about the safe space movements and the microaggression policies and all of that is that it does run so contrary to what every clinician worth his or her salt knows about treating anxiety or depression. And it’s one of so that’s kind of a remarkable phenomenon in itself is that what we know clinically has been absolutely inverted by people who are hypothetically agitating on the part of students mental health. And it’s not as if the mental health community has stood up on mass and denounced this. So and I also don’t I don’t understand that. I also don’t understand how we got here. You guys talk in the book a little bit about your little bit of you hypothesize a little bit about the internet generation. Right. And those are kids born after 1995. You don’t put the finger on the millennials. But let’s talk a little bit about why you think things changed in 2013 and 2014. Yeah, sure. Let me just first say your point about about how this is not this whole stuff. These new ideas are not clinically supported. Something that we suggest in the book. We don’t know. We don’t know if there’s a way to which this is going on. To what extent is this a sincere desire for protection and a sincere belief that students are fragile? And to what extent is it the pursuing of a political agenda and making political points and using mental health as a cover? I think both are operative. And so it may depend on the context. Why do you think the first one is operative? Because this runs so contrary to everything that’s known about the actual protection of mental health, I’m very skeptical about attributing positive motivation to it. It seems to me that it’s fundamentally driven by resentment. Well, so you’re actually right that the psychological community does not support this, but yet has not stood up very vocally to condemn it. So we are hopeful that psychologists and psychiatrists, everyone we spoke to, agreed that the worst thing to do for someone who suffers from PTSD is to sweep clean their daily life of reminders, thereby denying them the chance to habituate, to de-condition the power of these quote triggers in the real world. It’s worse in some sense too, because one of the things you do when you expose people who have anxiety disorders to the things they’re anxious about is not make them less anxious, but make them more courageous. And that’s why it generalizes, because the psychoanalysts thought that exposure would just mean the fears would pop up somewhere else, but they don’t. And it’s because people learn that there’s more to them than they thought. And then when you protect them, not only do you not expose them, which is a big problem, but you also teach them to generalize the idea of their weakness, which is a really terrible thing to do to people. So you couldn’t invent a more counterproductive mental health movement and institute it on campuses if you set out to design it. And that’s something that we always try to emphasize, and one of the things that made it so interesting for us to look at was the one thing, because there are anti-free speech movements coming from students in the relatively recent past, the late 80s and early 90s for But the thing that was so striking was that they were medicalizing all of these claims. And I was like, you know, of course, I’m sitting there going like, that doesn’t sound right. I talked to John, he was like, that doesn’t sound right. And we interviewed for the original article, maybe seven different clinical psychologists, CBT experts, you know, for example. And the thing I keep on explaining it is, it’s as if we’re turning up what could be a minor aversion into something more like a phobia, because we’re giving it so much more power. And the worst thing of all that we’re doing so much of on campus is we’re turning it into a schema. We’re turning the idea that I’m fragile and that I’m broken into a permanent sort of self-definition. So that’s why I do think that there’s sort of a mixed motive thing going on here. I think that we have a self-fulfilling prophecy going on to some degree, because I do think that some of this kind of hopeless ideology is actually genuinely harming students, actually making them more anxious and depressed. And of course, it’s really incompatible with how you have a free and open academic. You also cite statistics to that end. So one of the things you guys concentrate on in the book is statistics indicating that there has in fact been, there is evidence of a decline in mental health over the last, what is it, about the last decade? Since around 2009 to 2012 is when things, that’s the elbow, that’s where things begin to arc up. And then they go steadily up to about 2015, 2016. We don’t know if they’re still going up or if they’re plateauing. But this is worth going into a little bit of detail because it was just an article in the New York Times, Richard Friedman, psychiatrist, wrote an article, something about how the idea of a wave of an increased anxiety is a myth, he said. He said it’s just based on one or two, you know, there’ve been a couple of self-report studies in which students say that they’re more anxious. And he dismissed that and said, don’t worry, America, you kids aren’t becoming more anxious. So we thought, we dug into this in detail. We did not want to catastrophize. We did not want to foment a moral panic. So we didn’t want to say, you know, oh my God, the sky is falling. Kids are depressed and anxious. So we looked into this in great detail. And we were looking for this data in our Atlantic article and it wasn’t there. That is, there were anecdotes everywhere. People were saying the mental health centers are swamped. So there were plenty of reports from mental health centers. But isn’t this just because kids these days are more comfortable seeking treatment? That’s why the mental health centers are swamped. Maybe there’s no real increase. So in our Atlantic article, we could not make a strong case. We left it very speculative. But just two years later, when Jean Twagee’s book came out, IGEN, and she brought in data from four national, nationally representative surveys showing that it really is an increase. Now, again, those were almost all self-report. What convinced us that it’s real is that there was a major study done, published in Journal of American Mental Health Association, looking at hospital admission data. So they broke it down by gender. You always have to look male, female, separate. They broke it down by sex and by age group within teenagers. And for all of the age groups of the girls, teenage girls, hospital admissions for self-harm, for cutting yourself, taking poison, this is non-fatal. Flat, flat, flat, and then right around 2011, 2012, 2013, it starts going up and up and up. And of course, the rate is lowest for 11 to 13-year-old girls. They’re less likely to do this. But the increase was the largest. And Twagee says that social media, all the social comparison seems to be hardest on the youngest girls. So the self-harm data confirms this is behavioral data. This is not self-report. And then the real kicker, unfortunately, is suicide. If you look at the suicide statistics, they show the same pattern as the self-report of depression data, which is if you look at the first decade of the century, so 2001 to 2010, take the average number of kids who kill themselves, successfully commit suicide. The rate for boys from that decade through 2015, 2016, those two years of data, it goes up and up and up, up 25%, which is gigantic. There’s been an enormous increase in boys’ suicide. The increase for girls is 70%, seven zero. So boys, the rate is higher for boys because girls make many more attempts, but boys use more methods. So the increase is actually fairly parallel. But as a percentage, it’s much higher for girls. Social media, at least this is Twangee’s argument, and we think there’s some validity to it. Twangee’s argument is that the spread of iPhones and social media has brought boys in to play video games. They play a lot of video games, but those aren’t actually that harmful. It’s the social comparison sites. It’s Instagram and other things where girls are comparing their lives to other girls and feeling left out. That, we think, we don’t know for sure, but that we think is the most powerful reason why the girls’ rates have increased so much. And John’s been very clear on the data too, because even since 2007, if you just pick 2007, we’re talking about a doubling in terms of suicide for girls. Yeah, but 2007, that was the lowest year. So that’s why it’s best to not take 2007. It’s best to just take the average. It just bounces around. There’s no trend in the first decade. Okay, so we could hypothesize, perhaps, that there’s something approximating a positive feedback loop going on here. So imagine, because I’m trying to figure out why things have got out of control, say, since 2013. It’s like there’s been a tipping point. And so I’m going to offer a few ideas and you guys can tell me what you think. Okay, so let’s think of four or five reasons. So I think there’s an increase in perceived political polarization and maybe real political polarization, because the mainstream media is dying. And as it dies, it gets more attracted to clickbait journalism and exaggerates the degree of extremism on both sides. And that’s a consequence of a technological revolution. The threat that they’re under from internet media sources. So that’s one. The next one would be the unopposed rise of the postmodern Marxist doctrines that characterize disciplines, particularly like women’s studies. Now, you guys talked about a woman who generated intersectionality theory, Kimberly Crenshaw. And I’ve been looking into Kate Millett, who established patriarchy theory, or one of the people who established it. And she was a radical lesbian for political reasons and had an alcoholic and abusive father. So I think that’s quite interesting. And I think that these theories, Crenshaw and Millett’s theories, were basically ignored by serious scholars in the academic world. And they’re combined with a kind of Marxist viewpoint that divides the world into victimizer and victim. And then maybe we have the, what you just added. Go ahead. You’ve already given us two big theories. Let’s talk about those. It’s on the political polarization, absolutely. We have a whole chapter on that. The way to think about this is universities are complicated institutions nested within a broader society. They’re changing and the broader society is changing. And so we document how the rise in political polarization. And here the thing to focus on is not polarization of attitudes about abortion or things like that. It’s how much do you hate the other side? That has been going up steadily since the 1990s. And so if you have a left-right battle that’s getting more and more intense, at the same time as the professori is going from leaning left to being much further on the left. So we document this in the book that the overall left-right ratio for a variety of reasons went from a two to one overall, including everybody, two to one in the early 90s to five to one left-right ratio by 2010. So if you have a more politically purified institution at a time when the electromagnetic forces of cross-partisan hatred are ginning up, then yes, you have a more politicized institution. So there’s a lot going on there. It’s not unique to the left. It just so happens that universities have been polarizing left, other institutions polarized right. If you believe in diversity, if you believe that diversity makes people think better because it challenges thoughts, then a loss of political diversity is harmful and it’s a contributor. And it’s not just the echo chambers that we create on the internet, although social media does pat you on the back for having to think of an echo chamber as possible. I’m definitely a big proponent of the big-sort hypothesis that certainly lived this experience that we increasingly live in more politically homogeneous communities. Now, big-sort, of course, talks about us living in more politically homogeneous counties, but Charles Murray and others have done research about how we actually live in even more politically homogeneous city blocks that actually we are sort of self-sorting. Tyler Cowen talks about this too. And of course, if you have sort of a social circle where you practically never run into anybody who disagrees with you, all the different sort of like tribalism experiments, the polarization experiments they’ve done over the years, shows that you tend to sort of spiral off into the distance. So that’s one of the reasons why I think of this as what we call in the book a problem of progress. That if you think about the idea that we can live in communities that reflect our values, going back to, you know, Ronald Langlehart was saying it’s the 1970s, that sounds lovely. That sounds great. Great. I can live in communities that reflect my values. But if you’ve ever lived in a community that reflects just one political point of view and virtually none of the other, it does have a tendency to become a virtue signaling contest more than an actual place where you discuss ideas. Okay. So now let’s move on to the postmodernism, Marxism. So I think you and I both agree that postmodernism, Marxism, that these are lenses that tend to amplify conflict. These are somehow involved. I think you and I may disagree a bit on the dynamics here and the extent of it. So I’ll just lay out the way that I think about it. These ideas, this way of looking at things, even these ideas of trigger warnings, matrices of oppression, those ideas existed in feminist circles going all the way back to the 90s. As a professor at NYU and previously at UVA, I have not seen that postmodernism or Marxism are in any way spreading across the disciplines. They’ve always been there in a few disciplines. There’s a lot of Marxist analysis and sociology. I have not noticed that spreading at all among the professoriate or across disciplines. I think what has happened is that social media and the internet, especially social media, has knocked down the compartments. A good society needs a lot of compartments, needs a lot of walls where different norms and different practices flourish that you can do different jobs. I think social media has knocked down the walls so that certain ideas that maybe some students get from their gender studies or anthropology or sociology classes, those ideas can spread among the students. They’re often not even really the accurate ideas. It’s a sort of a bastardized version modified in ways that I don’t really even understand that can spread around. This is how you can get bad psychological ideas, bad political ideas spreading around among the students. That’s what’s been most striking to us is that the change is really student led. It’s a generational thing. You can blame faculty in certain departments for, you can certainly disagree with their ideas, but it’s not that there’s this conspiracy as far as we can tell, a conspiracy among the professors to take over. Maybe you’ll disagree with that. We see it, or I see it as more student led. I did want to add one point here though. It’s something I talk a lot about and John and I talk a lot about, but it didn’t actually quite make it into the book. What we’ve dubbed it is the perfect rhetorical fortress. What we mean by that is if you look at the ways, I went to Stanford for law school, I worked for the ACLU of Northern California, and I saw this happening even in the early 90s, that one of the things that some of these postmodernist theories, particularly privilege theory allow is a way, a manner of arguing in which you never ever have to get to the substance of the argument. So even in the late 90s, this rhetorical fortress had a lot of levels of protection. You didn’t have to listen to anybody if they were conservative, which was almost taken for granted, which I am now deeply ashamed of. You didn’t have to, and now if you add to it, you don’t have to listen to anybody if they have privilege. And by the way, what 100% of people actually do, that means you can choose to listen to whomever the hell you want, because it’s only optional. You have an option to either dismiss Marx as being a white privilege male or you can listen to him, but any time you run into someone who disagrees with you, you have several sort of tools at your disposal. There are variations that happen in arguments. The major response to the Atlantic article was that we’re white males defending our privilege. Almost nobody engaged with the substance of the argument. Yes, well, if all arguments boil down to the power claims of competing identity groups, then there is no such thing as substance. I think that actually fits quite nicely with certain strains of postmodern thinking that have a tendency to deny any knowledge of any real world and to presume that everything is not only interpretation, but interpretation based on power claims for competing groups. And the intersectionality theory, you know, I just finished writing the preface to the new version of the 50th anniversary version of the Gulag Archipelago. Oh wow. Yes, it was quite something. And I was trying to synthesize Solzhenitsyn’s arguments about why the Russian Revolution went so badly south immediately after it began. It’s very interesting to think about it from this intersectionality perspective, because as you guys just pointed out, it’s not an unreasonable proposition that people have multiple group identities. Now perhaps there’s some use in considering that, because you can think of the ways that people have different advantages and disadvantages. But one of the real pernicious side effects of that kind of thinking, especially when it’s conjoined with a viewpoint that divides the world into victim and victimizer, is that you can take any one person and maybe generate 20 group identities for them, and you can find at least one identity along which they’re privileged. And that means that not only can you ignore them as a consequence of them speaking only on behalf of their power, but you have a valid reason for persecuting them. And that’s exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. As long as I could find one dimension along which you were an oppressor, then you were done. Wow. Great grandson of kulaks. Right. Right. Well, they were the best example of that. We were peasants who made good, and in any other country we were serfs. And that’s where my family comes from. And in any other country, my family’s story would have been, because we went from being serfs to being lawyers and judges within a single generation. My grandfather was in Kiev Polytechnic studying to be a professor when World War I broke out. And of course, people like me, success stories in any other country, we were shot in the back of the head by the millions. Right. Right. Well, and you were actually the working class success stories, because when was serfdom eradicated in Russia? 1861. Right. Right. So people were basically slaves up to that point. And some people made very rapid leaps in status within a single generation or two. And those were the kulaks that were eradicated by the Soviets after World War I. Then of course, that’s what led to the huge starvation and massive starvations of the late 1920s and early 1930s. So it was a complete catastrophe. So all right. So you put together a bunch of symptoms. You said, well, microaggression theory. I’m no admirer of Darrold. Is Darrold Wing Sue? Yes, I think that that I read his book, I thought it was absolutely appalling in all possible manners. There’s the kind of oppression theory and intersectionality, the idea that we’re in a patriarchal tyranny. And then one of the things that you pointed out at the beginning of this interview was the unknown effect of social comparison with these new social technologies, social media technologies, right? Because we’re really at a, we’re really laid vulnerable to these new technologies because we have no idea what effect they have on adults, let alone young people. And so do you think that is actually making young people feel that the world is a more dangerous place and requiring them to seek protection? Oh, yes, we think that’s a big part of it. The objective facts about mortality, crime, physical safety are that life gets safer and safer, death rates go down. So Steve Pinker and many others have chronicled the decline of violence. But we react to the world not as it is, we react to the world as we perceive it through the filters that we’re given. And if you remember the movie from the 1980s or 90s it was, the Bowling for Columbine, no, boy, I must have been late on that, but Michael Moore’s movie Bowling for Columbine, he traces out why Americans are so paranoid compared to Canadians, let’s say. And he blames it all on cable TV, putting stories of crime in our face. All right. So I think there’s a lot of truth to that. Now imagine social media channeling not just stories of crime, but whichever side you’re on politically, you now get filtered through of all of the stupid things that any person says in our country of 330 million people. Every day someone on the left says something incredibly stupid and offensive, and every day someone on the right says something, you know, and there’s a video. And so if you’re being, so if you’re rewarded for forwarding outrage, things that outrage your side, you’re rewarded for forwarding them, and we’re all forwarding it, we’re all drowning in outrage stories. And one of the things that sells or that sells in terms of getting retweets is stories of aggression or violence or racism or whatever it is, people trampling on your side sacred values. So if you’re exposed constantly to stories of, you know, if you’re on the left, you’re exposed to stories of Nazis and you think that half the country is Nazi, this is going to have a big effect on your perceptions, even if the reality is social progress, even if the reality is increasing safety. So we do think that the reason why so many things are going haywire, not just in America, but in many countries, is the internet and social media all hitting us at the same time. Globalization is the other factor a little more distant, but I think they’re intersecting, interacting in all kinds of interesting ways that we don’t yet understand. We talked about polarization on the right and on the left. And one of the things that struck me, and maybe I’m wrong about this, is that I’ve been particularly concerned about the rise of the radical left, and that’s probably because I’ve been immersed in a university milieu. And as you already pointed out, the left is overrepresented, at least among the social scientists and the humanities, and I suspect as well the administration in the universities. And then I see as well people being concerned about the rise of the radical right, but I certainly don’t see the radical right as posing a threat in the universities. And I can’t see what sort of threat the radical right is posing, because I can’t get numbers. So there are lots of stories about alt-right types and about neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but there was a white supremacist rally in Washington about a month and a half ago, and I think they got 16 people on a bus on the white supremacist side and several thousand counter protesters. And so I’m wondering to what degree the radical right is a… I don’t know where they are exactly. So do you have thoughts about that? Yeah, definitely. In my work, I talk about this as being the most recent trend, and we talk about this in the book, and it’s not necessarily the radical right, but we’ve seen some of the… What I talk about is kind of like we have this sort of echo chamber on the left at universities. And there is sort of an echo chamber on the right as well, and those two have been sort of colliding with each other. So we’ve definitely seen an uptick in fire of liberal professors getting in trouble for what they say on the internet, what they say on Twitter or Facebook, or going on Fox News, for example. And we talk about a couple examples of that in the book. Now, this is so recent that we’re not going to have real data on it, but it definitely is a noticeable change for those of us who work on the front lines. So it’s important to look at the timing here, because we hear this a lot too. Whenever we talk about something, people will point out, well, what about the alt right and what about the Nazis? When we started this, when Greg first noticed what was going on in 2013, 2014, and then our article came out in 2015, the right had nothing to do with it. Nobody had heard of the alt right practically. They weren’t trolling on campus. So whatever the origins of the problem on campus, it is not a reaction to the right. Now in 2016, the alt right got a lot more attention and they got much more sophisticated at trolling. And as I read a little bit about trolling and the New York Times began to cover it, it became really clear. All you need is a few people with a kind of a perverse sense of humor and a few anonymous internet accounts, and they can provoke a gigantic reaction from the group that they want to provoke. And so I think in 2016, we saw the right, and into 2017, that’s when we start actually seeing the cases of right-wing movements to get professors fired. There’s some really nasty stuff coming out of various sites on the right, flooding people’s inboxes with rape threats and death threats and racist rants. So there’s a lot of nasty stuff coming from the right towards professors in 2017, and since then, it wasn’t happening as far as we, it wasn’t anything new. It wasn’t really part of the story early on. So we covered this in chapter six, the polarization cycle. The problem we believe is not originally from the right, although now they are part of the polarization cycle. Right. So you can conjure a specter out of the darkness in that manner. One of the things I’ve seen on YouTube and the other commentary sources that I’ve been monitoring is a real increase in anti-Semitic comments. And it’s hard to tell, of course, it’s hard to quantify that, but they’re appallingly common on YouTube and on Twitter as well. And some of them are coded. I think it’s commonplace now to put your comment in three brackets, which indicates an anti-Semitic origin or emphasis. And so that’s very pernicious. But again, we have no idea how many people are actually engaging in this. And it’s a very difficult thing to come to terms with, because when I look at the United States, I think, and more power to you, that your political dialogue is actually quite balanced. There’s a fair bit of power on the left and there’s a fair bit of power on the right. The radical left seems to be overrepresented in universities, and that’s something that’s unique. I can’t get a handle on the white supremacist and Nazi types. I think Nazis are vanishingly rare. I really believe that. The white supremacist types as well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not growing and isn’t being cultivated in some sense. That’s right. But then the question is, how much should we react to it? I’m Jewish. My mother told me when I was growing up that America is the promised land for the Jews. It’s not Israel. We always talk about Israel as the promised land. I was raised to believe that America is the promised land for the Jews. Sure there was some anti-Semitism. My parents, they moved to Scarsdale, New York, and they could not join certain country clubs. Big deal. There were Jewish clubs, there were WASP clubs. That’s the way things were. It wasn’t perfect, but compared to what? Compared to the rest of the world. God, my grandparents got off the boat in New York and didn’t go on to Buenos Aires or any place else that was settled originally by the Spanish. So America is not an anti-Semitic country. Now what do we make of the fact that now we’re seeing all this anti-Semitic stuff? What I make of it is that there are a few assholes who are organizing and doing this. And am I triggered by it? No. Because I grew up where occasionally you’d come across a swastika, like scratched into the bathroom stall, you’d find the F word, you’d find obscenities, you’d find a drawing of a penis, and you’d see a swastika. And my reaction was, yuck or bad, and then I would go on with my day. It wasn’t a trigger. But if we teach kids now, if you find something on the internet, be triggered, and of course you will always find something on the internet. I will say that and this is just anecdotal, but I speak a lot of times in California and some of the anti-Israel bleeding into anti-Semitism is something that I’ve seen in really dramatic format. It’s almost as if it’s become stylish to be so anti-Israeli or almost anti-Semitic, at least certain circles. And I spoke at the- Like the British Labour Party, for example. For example, yeah. So I spoke at the 50th anniversary of the start of the free speech movement, way back in 2014. I spoke at Berkeley. And I’ll be damned if my speech was not in a room with a lot of anti-Semites in it. And there was even a guy who was trying to address this saying, like, oh, and people want to call us anti-Semitic. And that’s so wrong. And then he finished that sentence saying, but it’s undeniable that the poison hand of Zionism destroys everything it touches. And I was like, okay, okay, that’s, I think I can understand why they’re calling you that. So I definitely, I don’t think it’s in people’s heads that this uptick is real, but I’ve noticed pronounced for some reason in California. Okay, so here’s a idea too. So you know, one of the things that happened in Germany in the 1920s was a polarization process, right? Obviously, much more severe than the one that we’re going through. But I wonder if when the political spectrum polarizes that ethnocentrism of a certain sort rises and drives something like anti-Semitism. So maybe, because maybe when the left and the right are relatively close together, people aren’t so obsessed with their group identities or the extreme types are. But then when the polarization process starts, everybody locks harder into the group identities. And then anyone who’s, I don’t know if it’s anyone who’s an outsider is viewed with excess suspicion, but see, because the situation with Jewish people is complicated too, because they’re often successful. So I don’t know if it’s some perverse interaction between ethnocentrism and resentment for the successful that drives anti-Semitism during polarization processes. I’m trying to get a finger or trying to put my finger on it. I think what you’re reaching for here is this phenomena that you suddenly see these bursts of intolerance, what triggers them. And here I turn to Karen Stenner, a political scientist, did her work at Princeton, now she lives in Australia. She wrote this brilliant book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, published in 2005. And what she says in there is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It’s a dynamic in which some people, about 20 or 30% of the population, when they perceive that society is coming apart, that is, you know, I study morality, we need a sense of shared moral order. There are times when we feel that the moral order is secure, violations are punished, everything’s fine. There are other times when we feel things are coming apart, it’s chaos, it’s babble. When that’s happening, people who have this predisposition to authoritarianism, it’s like there’s a button on their head that gets pushed, and they then become intolerant against all outsiders. And so she does experiments where she gives a story about, you know, maybe it’s Mexican immigration, but it turns that that then makes, you know, if you present it in a threatening way as Donald Trump does, that doesn’t just turn people against Mexicans, it turns them against LGBT, against Americans. So it’s a general dynamic of stamp out dissent, stamp out the outsiders, get back to the purity of our group. So when we have times of increasing prosperity, when we have peace, when there’s a sense of progress, the pie is growing, there is some sense that we are, we have something in common, then things get much calmer. But a number of events, you know, financial crisis may have contributed, the sense that there is not a growing pie. But I think, again, social media has made it so that if you are prone to this, and then you sign up to any group that is concerned about immigration or anything else, you will now be, you will become flooding into you really powerful videos designed to press that button over and over and over again. And before you know it, America goes from having, you know, 50 Nazis to having 500, maybe even 5000. It’s not five million. I really don’t think there are five, you know, whatever. It’s not like two or three percent of the country are Nazis. So we’ve got to somehow learn to get used to the fact that we’ve got to somehow get back to judging by sort of the average or the overall rather than the individual extremes, because now we will be faced with the individual extremes forever. Yeah. And also, while we’re recommending books, Amy Chua’s Political Tribes talks a lot about this too, and it’s really, really an interesting, stimulating read. Well partly what I’ve been trying to do in my lectures, so I’m traveling around lecturing to people and doing this to some degree on YouTube as well, is to emphasize the existence of the common center. For me, that’s a return to classic liberal and to some degree classic conservative values, some intermingling of those. So some emphasis on traditional, well traditional phenomena like monogamous marriage, but also the idea of the sovereignty of the individual as part of that common landscape that unites us. That seems to be quite useful. Although I would go ahead. Let’s keep going on. I think this is a very important point, that if you go down the identitarian path, there is no clear end point. Nobody can point to where this will end in a good way. So what’s so interesting, and here’s one of the most encouraging signs, is that just in 2018 we are seeing an explosion of books written by people who are not straight white males who are saying, identity politics practiced in this way is a dead end. We need to really emphasize what we have in common. So I’ll just read you. I just started collecting a file. I’ll put this online someplace soon. Here are some of the books. Here are some of the really interesting things coming out just recently. Amy Chua’s book, Political Tribes, as Greg mentioned. Francis Fukuyama has a new book, Identity, the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, just came out last week. Anthony Appiah has been writing brilliantly about identity politics. Jonathan Rauch, I guess he’s conservative, but he’s been writing again about Amy Chua and about other reasons why identity politics is a dead end. John McWhorter has been writing brilliantly about how anti-racism has become a religion, how we need to stop focusing on that in that way. In Britain there are a number of people of Caribbean origin who have been writing about this. I just had dinner last week with Irshad Manji. There’s a book coming up, Don’t Label Me. So this is wonderful that we’re seeing all of these people, just about all of them identify as being on the left. None of them are straight white males. And they’re all saying we need to rethink this. So we’re thrilled because in our book, in chapter three, we distinguish between common humanity identity politics, which is what Martin Luther King did and many of the civil rights leaders, which yes, you need to demand rights for groups that don’t have them, but you do it by appealing to our common humanity versus common enemy identity politics, which is what intersectionality tends to devolve into. It doesn’t have to be, but it often is bastardized into let’s all unite against them. Yeah, well, you know, in Canada, we’ve been pursuing a multicultural policy and our prime minister was famous for saying that Canada has no identity, which I think is an absolute catastrophe of an idea. I mean, if you think about the multicultural landscape of the planet, it certainly produces wars along with diversity. So the question is, how do you bring people from different communities into a universal community and maintain peace? And it seems to me that you do that essentially by concentrating on the sovereignty of the individual as the fundamental marker for human identity rather than the group. I was thinking about intersectionality, which I think, by the way, is a painfully obvious idea, you know, the idea that you can be classified among many group dimensions and that there’s social status consequences to all of those and that they interact. But I think intersectionality is actually the discovery of the fatal flaw of identity politics, because if you fragment people down, if you allow their group identities to multiply and interact, then you get to the point where each individual is a unique nexus of group identities. And I actually think that that’s what Western culture discovered over the last several thousand years, that the logical endpoint is the individual. And if you take everyone’s advantages and disadvantages into account optimally, then what you do is you treat them as individuals, like there isn’t anyone else like them in some sense, except in terms of their common, say, divine value, something approximating that. That’s right. If you followed it to its logical conclusion, then the worst aspects of identitarianism would vanish, because as you say, everybody ultimately becomes a group of one. Unfortunately, of the 20 or 30 dimensions on which one could categorize people, it’s really only three that matter. It’s straight white males. That’s really where it’s at. So that’s worth digging into, you know, because that’s actually illustrative, I would say, to some degree of the actual motivations. It’s like there is all these identities and hypothetically, there’s nothing to distinguish them in terms of primacy, even in terms of their effect, say, on socioeconomic outcome. So then it seems to me to be a victim victimizer narrative that’s driving the idea that it’s straight white males that in some sense have the phenomenal upper hand, which is another thing I don’t really buy. I mean, most of the dangerous jobs are done by men. In terms of who has power and wealth, straight white men, I mean, I think we can plead guilty to that, that the world is not perfectly equal across all categories. We certainly can’t dispute that. But I think what we’re seeing now in very sharp relief since the Sarah Jong controversy in The New York Times recently is this. I think it was Brett Weinstein said a year or two ago, there are some people who see inequality and want to end it. There are other people who see inequality and want to reverse it. At the time, I thought, well, that’s interesting. I wonder if that’s true. But I think the Sarah Jong controversy where The New York Times hired a young Korean American person to join the op-ed, the editorial page, and it was discovered that she had all these nasty anti-white tweets. And the fact that there was a discussion and debate, like many people would say, oh, by definition, there’s no such thing as anti-white racism. It’s OK to say terrible things about white people. It’s OK. Here’s the key thing. It’s OK to look at someone and based on the way they look, dislike them and treat them badly. And if you think that’s OK, then this is the problem. This is common enemy identity politics. Yes. That’s horrible. We shouldn’t be judging people based on their race. Then that’s your probably support of common humanity identity politics as we are. I actually would like to slightly push back against the idea that it’s just straight white men anymore. I felt like I always feel like, unfortunately, sort of like the Stanford Palo Alto slash San Francisco Bay Area is unfortunately way ahead on these trends. And I think one of the reasons why you are seeing pushback from a lot of members of minority members as well is partially because for a long time, at least among the friends I know who really believe in this in almost like a religious kind of way, they’re extremely guilty about simply being cisgendered as in non-transgendered. That you’ll see sort of this call out culture applied to straight black men, for example. So I do think that we’ve been falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole where people are realizing, wow, so this is just a permanent situation of guilt and shame about an identity that I have no control over that can’t possibly be right. Well, the other thing we should point out, too, is that even if you do make allowances for the fact that, let’s say, on average, straight white men are doing or have done relatively well economically, it’s also very much worth pointing out that it’s a tiny minority of straight white men who have been doing spectacularly well. So you have a preto distribution problem within each ethnic identity group. And so to say that because on average, the socioeconomic status of a given group is higher than the status of another group, all the people who are members of that group are disproportionately benefiting is actually a rather in, I would say, a rather motivated and resentful analysis, because it is always a tiny proportion of people in a group that are doing spectacularly well. And then then you have to do something else, which is you have to look at that proportion that are doing spectacularly well and you have to decide about how many of them are doing well because they actually deserve it and how many of them are doing well because they’re inappropriate rent seekers. And I would say because our culture is pretty damn functional and because we do generate a lot of wealth along with the inequality, that there’s a fair number of people who are doing disproportionately well who are doing that by benefiting everyone else. And we’re not very careful about making those sorts of distinctions, and they’re actually crucial. That’s right. So that’s what we do. So in Chapter 11, we go into social justice and many people have claimed social justice is a meaningless term. It’s thrown around in certain ways. People can’t define it. But digging into it, we decided that it actually is meaningful, but we have to we have to break it down into its component parts. And so we go into what is the psychology of justice? And if you focus on distributive justice, are people getting what they deserve based on their inputs? Everybody recognizes when people are being cheated that they’re like in America now, a lot of low wage workers, the companies have found ways to skimp on benefits and pay. So that is a violation of distributive fairness. People recognize that that is wrong. If that is disproportionately affecting one race or if people are being cheated because they are members of any identity group, that is a violation, I would say, of social justice or of justice applied to identity groups. That we think is a very important concept. Similarly, procedural justice. If the criminal justice system ends up, for whatever reason, giving better representation to some groups than others or treating people differently at any point, that is a violation of justice, which can plausibly call the violation of social justice. What we push back against is the shift in recent years to this obsessive emphasis on outcomes. It’s what most of the social justice argument seems to be on campus. As you just say, look, men are overrepresented among coders. Well, they’re not overrepresented among all other functions at Google and Apple. If you look at everyone else in the company, it’s 50-50 or very close. It’s only in certain job classifications where there’s a disparity. And so people take that as ipso facto proof of systemic sexism. And what we really push back hard on is saying that’s lazy, that’s unfair, that’s inaccurate. Those disparities are an invitation to look closer. And if you see that the pipeline is 50-50, but the outcome isn’t, well, then you’ve got a strong case. But if the pipeline from grad programs and computer science is exactly the same as the representation among coders at Google and Apple, well, you have to do something to show that people are being treated differently. So we think there’s a lot of bad thinking done in the service of prosecuting one’s political agenda within the culture war and that a lot of people don’t know how to stand up to it. And one thing that I find interesting that this should become a blasphemous argument is personal preference, particularly when people talk about genders. I mean, if you’ve ever actually read, for example, the speech that got Larry Summers in so much trouble, his final conclusion is it’s probably mostly that these are not a lot of these jobs are not our jobs. A lot of the theoretical, physical things, they don’t have a lot of appeal to women. He basically he comes down on preference for some reason saying that there might actually be a reason why veterinary science is overwhelmingly women. And some of these, you know, mathematical fields are overwhelmingly men. It might have something to do with that. Some small difference in what people actually like doing. Somehow that’s the funny thing, too, is so the biggest London Times just did an article this week on two papers that came out. Of course, quite an interesting article because one of the papers came out showing once again that the personality differences between men and women are largest in the most egalitarian societies. And they actually get quite large by psychological standards in countries like Holland and in the Netherlands and also in the Scandinavian countries, which are the most egalitarian countries. But the biggest difference between men and women and also one that grows in more egalitarian countries is an interest. And that that difference is more than a standard deviation. It’s like one and a half standard deviations. And so it’s more than enough to account for the disparity between male engineers and and are sorry, female engineers and male nurses. And the fact that it grows as societies become more egalitarian is actually a death blow to social constructionist theory. That’s right. So let’s go into this in a bit of detail, because I think this is this is a really helpful area where I think we have a good idea what’s going on and we can see why it’s so hard to find the truth here. So when I taught at UVA, I had a lecture on sex and gender and I went into sex differences. And the clear finding for many decades is that if you look at differences in ability between men and women, they’re very few and far between. Men are better at spatial rotation. Women on some measures are a little better at social skills and at language. So there are some differences, but they’re few and far between. If you look at the differences in what kids like in what they choose to do when there’s no adult watching, they’re huge. Little boys and girls play radically differently. My my wife and I, we we once gave up my triplet nephews and they were four years old. We gave them a bag of plastic dinosaurs. And the two boys grabbed the dinosaurs and they start battling. They’re bashing them together. And the girl takes two dinosaurs and she says, don’t ever leave me, mommy. I won’t leave you, baby. So right. Right. But the point is, girls and boys play really differently. And if you if they’re supervised by adults, the differences get smaller. Whereas if you let kids play on their own, the differences get bigger. Differences in interest are huge. And that’s a crucial finding. Yeah, that’s right. Jordan, I’d like to ask you, why why is this? Why do you think this is treated so much like a heretical blasphemous thought that must be immediately shot down? There’s merely. Well, I think that I think that you zeroed in on the proper issue before when you talked about the equity doctrine. Now, one of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how we know when the left goes too far. Now, we know when the right goes too far, when they start making ethno nationalist claims of superiority, it’s something like that. And claiming that all the good things should happen to one ethnic or racial group. OK, no, you’re outside the domain of reasonable political discourse at that point. Now, obviously, the same thing can happen on the left. But when it happens is not so obvious. There’s no smoking pistol. But I think emphasis on equity, which is code word for equality of outcome, is actually the smoking pistol. If you had to pick one. No, OK, I would disagree with you on that. That can’t be a smoking pistol. Emphasizing equity can’t be a smoking pistol. What I think we mean by smoking pistol is when someone makes an argument in good faith, trying to understand some phenomenon in the world and they suffer social consequences. That’s the smoking pistol. And that’s why. OK, I think maybe we might be talking about two slightly different things. I’m sure maybe not. I’m trying to figure out where the where the tipping point is in thought on the left that makes things spiral out of control. And you guys talked about the equality of outcome doctrine as as the wrong. First of all, it doesn’t allow for multivariate analysis, right, which is a big problem. So it oversimplifies things radically. If there’s a difference in outcome, then if so, fact, though, there’s a victim victimizer narrative driving it or reality driving it. And I think that. The the the fundamental problem. On the radical left is exactly that, and that’s the reason that they don’t like the literature on gender differences, because you can point to gender differences in outcome and you can use them as proof for the oppressive nature of society. But if you look into it and you find out that that’s actually not proof that some of the differences, even some of the differences in outcome are being driven by things like biological difference in interest, then it radically weakens that central axiomatic claim of fundamental oppression. And so that’s viewed as an existential threat by people for whom that’s the cardinal presupposition. That’s how it looks to me. I think that is correct, because I am struck. I since since writing The Righteous Mind, I always like to analyze things in terms of what’s sacred. What are people? What organized them? They circle around it that binds them together. There are a lot of things that people hold sacred on all sides. But I am struck by the fact that in the Academy, it’s not just questioning sacred values of any sort. It’s specifically questioning diversity policies. That seems to be the most dangerous thing to do. And that does fit with what you said, that it’s like there’s a big project that we’re all engaged in and we’re working hard against the enemy and we’re fighting the fight. And if one of us steps out and says, well, actually, maybe we’re wrong on this point, bang, we’ve got to shoot them. We can’t have them. We’ve got to shoot them. Yeah. And that would be proportionate. That probability would be proportionate to the centrality of the axiom. That’s right. And I think the central axiom here that’s that’s it’s causing all the trouble is the insistence that the best way to well, two insistences. One is that the best way to characterize Western society is as an oppressive patriarchy. The matrix of oppression. That’s right. Yes. And the second is that the best way to characterize people is by their group. And those two things interact. And so the gender data is particularly a horrifying, I would say to people who hold those axioms because you can. Well, for two reasons. One is because the gender differences actually exist and they do account for differences in outcome. But even worse, and this is a catastrophe, I think for the social constructionists is that as you put egalitarian social policies into play, the very differences that you hate get bigger. And that’s, and this needs to be said a thousand times because it really is, it’s, it’s a fatal blow to the social constructionist, egalitarian. And even to the concepts they’re using, because one thing we could also ask is like, well, if it turns out that men and women are as different in egalitarian societies as boys and girls are in their unsupervised play, which I think is a reasonable analog, then we’re going to have differences in outcome that are going to be magnified by the very policies that the egalitarians are putting in place. And then we also might ask too is inner truly in the society that we want to set up, maybe wouldn’t, we want it to be the case that people’s free choice would determine their occupational outcomes. And then we have to put up with a certain degree of inequality of outcome and think in a complex way about it. I wanted to get back just to the point where we were talking about, about sacredness. And, and one of the stories we talk about in the book is one that I know you’re very well familiar with the Rebecca Tubel story. She wrote a paper talking about, you know, an academic paper talking about, well, if we accept transsexuality, what implications does that have for someone like Rachel Dolezal, who actually kind of wants to decide what her race is. She claimed that she was black, but she wasn’t. Is she allowed to do that? Feels black inside. Right. And, and, and, and both John and I are very, we’ve really tried to sort of like be very reasonable as possible, aggressively reasonable. But in that, in this one, we, we, we liken it to, um, our male third kinds of definitions of witch hunts because it really, unfortunately really fit because you not only do you have this kind of like, you know, like normal interesting intellectual exercises of an academic article, making an interesting point. Um, she is treated absolutely like a blastomer and so badly that people are signing letters condemning her while at the same time emailing and saying, Oh, this is really terrible. What happened to you? Um, and it’s just absolutely bizarre. It’s scary. That’s why I said that the smoking gun, what proves that there’s a problem is when there are social consequences to make in good faith. Right. If you’re out in the public square, if you’re in the comments section on YouTube, of course, people are trying to shame you and destroy you. But we’re trying to do in universities is this really unique and important thing, which is create an environment in which people are expected to challenge each other. We’re not supposed to be there to be agreeable. And it’s, it all makes sense. It all, it’s all okay because it’s in the surface, service of finding truth. And as soon as people who are taking part in that process are shamed, punished, excluded, their calls to expel them or punish them. As soon as that happens, now we have more of a sort of like, you know, an East German mindset where people are not thinking about what’s true. They’re thinking about, you know, what will, what will avoid getting me in trouble? What am I allowed to say? And of course it made worse by the fact of what will get me incredible praise for being showing myself as a true believer. Yeah, but a tremendous amount of it though is motivated by the desire to avoid being shunned and, and, and treated as the violator of a taboo because that, and that’s exactly what’s happening is that, that there are, there are new taboos. So then part of the question might be too, why is there such an insistence that the culture we live in is a patriarchal tyranny, which is also a collapse of complexity, right? I mean, obviously our culture has its flaws. It, it, it tends towards, um, rigidity and tyranny like all cultures do, but comparatively speaking, as we’ve talked about before by, by world standards today, or by world standards historically, it’s a pretty damn free and productive culture. But we have this tremendous emphasis on the idea that it’s fundamentally a patriarchal tyranny. And that if you, uh, question that, then you’re treated as a taboo violator. So then the question is, well, what the hell is driving this insistence that it’s a patriarchal tyranny with, with, uh, Kate Millett. I know you see who originated at least in part patriarchy theory. You see that she had a very, she had an alcoholic and abusive father. And so I think that’s quite interesting because I think there are psychological dynamics here at work. I, I wonder to what degree the people who are pushing this theory, um, have had very disturbed interpersonal relationships, gendered relationships, and that that’s, that’s, what would you say driving the, the collapse of their political viewpoint into a single dimension, like a single oversimplified dimension. You see that sort of oversimplified thinking when you look at, at, at, at psychopathological complexes, you know, like with, with, uh, with, with women with eating disorders in particular, well, men too, but that’s rare. Everything collapses to a single, uh, uh, single dimension of evaluation, something like thin equals beautiful or thin equals good. And then that drives everything. And so, and then I also think maybe is, is this also a challenge to, to cultural tradition, an actual intellectual challenge say, well, we think that your, your, your way of, of, of, of operating within the culture is too, too radical. And we’re going to throw everything we can at you in an attempt to make you prove that that’s not true, but I can’t get any farther underneath it than that. Let’s talk about that. So you’re a clinical psychologist. So I think your first impulse is let’s look to the person’s formative experiences. Why do they think this way? I’m a social psychologist. So I think in terms of if there’s some new or some interesting social movement, what are the social forces and pressures on them that led them to think this way? I also read a lot and think a lot about evolution. I like to think, and this is what first grew me to you. You went, when you, when I met in 1994, we both loved Carl Jung and I love Jung’s idea of archetypes interpreted from an evolutionary point of view. Yeah. So like, why do we dream about dragons? Why do so many cultures have dragons? Well, actually, you know, our ancestors, you know, 60 million years ago, actually we’re in a world of dinosaur. Like that’s a pretty cool idea. I don’t know if it’s right anyway. Human beings have a tendency to think in a Manichean style. It’s effortless. It’s default for us to divide the world up into good and evil. And that’s why the third great untruth in our book is the untruth of us versus them. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Yes. It’s very easy. It’s not hard to teach this to people. So, so we think that is innate as a possibility. And then the question is why are some movements now teaching this and why is it making more progress in, in, in some areas of the university now than it was 10 or 20 years ago? So I think that to answer your question, if you were engaged in a radical program, radical means you want to tear things down. You want radical change. You, you need to demonize the country, the structure that you want to tear down. You need to say that America is the worst. America is a paragon of racism and sexism. And of course we have our problems. You know, most of us think that things have been getting steadily better since the 19th century. But you, you’re committed to saying that America is the worst. So there was an interesting study published a few months ago. You’ve probably heard about this. It ranked America as like the, like the 12th worst country on earth for women. It was behind, you know, Eritrea and Sudan and, you know, North Korea, you know, it was the one of the worst places on earth to be a woman. And, you know, just on the smell test, you know, really like, um, you know, I don’t want to go into why that’s so wrong, but the methodology, it was, it was judged by, I can’t remember what it was, but it was by, obviously, it was in the judgment of like human rights activists or something like that. Rights activists are generally many of them in America, just American human rights activists. It was something like that. They are not weighing up statistics on how women fare around the world. They’re being asked, what are the worst countries for women? And if you’re engaged in the project of critiquing America, you’re motivated to say that America is the worst. And that’s the only way you can explain that ranking. Well, at minimum, it justifies your continued activism. And if that’s what you’ve staked your career on, then that’s also necessary. I also think that’s one of the things that’s driving all the things that we’re talking about is that we’ve produced a committed activist class that has been heavily subsidized for 30 years. And they’re always in need of reasons to justify their continued existence. I mean, as, as we all are, of course, but, but this is a situation where that’s become dangerous. The committed activist class. Um, I think this is important also to focus on for a moment. Because in discussions of this, we’re all supposed to praise the students political activity. We’re all supposed to praise activism. And, you know, Pepsi tried that disastrous commercial of just like, you know, random beautiful people being activists. Because if you have a bullhorn, that’s political activity. I think it’s Kylie Jenner. Okay, Kylie Jenner. That’s right. Right, right, right. Yeah. So I think there is an idea among young people, and this is, I think, more true on the left, that to be political is to be protesting. Whereas, just telling me like, why is it that the right, when they’re upset about something, they go and they get people left to the school board and they change the rules. Like the right, I think, is more pragmatic in its politics. The left is more expressive. And I think this is a point that Mark Lilla has been making. Really well, yeah. And so ultimately it ends up backfiring. But I think that the respect that we accord to activism, pure and simple, I think that should be rethought. And I think so. Universities are, might be about to do that. One president of a major university in this region recently said something to the effect that universities are becoming ungovernable. Now, there’s a lot of reasons for that. They face a lot of pressures. But the student activism, the fact that it could be at anything, it’s not like addressed at injustice. It’s addressed at like something in the dining hall, something that a student brought. It’s because there are protests about almost anything. I think many administrators are realizing, what have we done? What kind of Frankenstein monster have we created by incentivizing and praising this kind of activism? Our whole… We’ve been talking to politicians in Canada about the possibility of making a distinction between education and activism and political activism. So, you know, in Canada, if you’re a charitable organization, you can’t engage in political activism. Now, it’s very difficult to distinguish, right, between what might constitute education and what might constitute activism. But the idea that there’s something intrinsically moral and noble about complaining about the evil people in the world is definitely something. You know, literature and the humanities used to be the antidote to that to some degree, because one of the things that characterizes great literature, as opposed to second great literature, is that if the literature is great, the battle between good and evil occurs in the hearts of each protagonist, right? It’s a psychological issue and not a sociological issue. Exactly. I’m turning here to our opening quotes. And we already talked about Solzhenitsyn, so one of our three opening quotes. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. Right, right. And that is what we should be teaching students to complexify situations. To the extent that we teach them, no, it’s simple. If you know the category, you know their moral valence and you know they’re bad. And the extent that we are teaching students to think in this way, we are harming them. We are setting them up for failure. We are ill preparing them for citizenship and a democracy. And we are harming the future of our country. And I probably have a little bit of insight into this as a First Amendment lawyer, as someone who’s spent a lot of time defending the rights of protesters. And I’ve dealt with, you know, very many protesters who are protesting utterly sensible things. That I’m like, absolutely more power to you. But also I’ve talked to other people who I felt like were tilting it. When Mozart or I mean, I one time represented a group that was or helped represent a group that believed that the US should have no Navy. And I remember sort of talking about it. So not that you think we should spend less on military, but that we should literally have no Navy. And that was the argument. And I would ask some of my activist friends in San Francisco. Some of them were doing, I think, you know, absolute Lord Fort, particularly with criminal justice and that kind of stuff, who are the best people I’ve ever met. But in other cases, I’d see sort of activist sort of groups that were, you know, for example, I, you know, I oppose the second Iraq war. But I had friends who also opposed it would immediately going to and 9-11 was a conspiracy to allow for the, and I’m like, why are you moving it to like that next argument where you’re going to lose more people? And the perception was that we have to keep the temperature at boiling point. We have to keep it at 212 or else people will lose interest. And I actually think that Peter Pinker is actually more correct on this is that we’re actually creating partially through some of some of the postmodernist thoughts that you critique. We’re creating a situation in which actually progress is more or less hopeless and all you can really do is shout about it, which actually makes people more cynical and does less to achieve your goals. Whereas as Pinker likes to point out, if we actually look at, well, what did we do that actually works and try to keep doing that? That’s probably a better bet for how you keep actual progress going. Well, the perverse thing there too, is that I believe this to be true. John, you mentioned that there’s been a variety of books coming out. Maybe I could get that list and post them in the description of this YouTube video. That might be useful. But there’s also a whole string of books that’s been published lately, including Stephen Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now, showing that the rate of economic progress around the world, especially with regard to lifting the abjectly poor out of poverty, is increasing at an unparalleled rate. And that might be a secondary benefit to the collapse of communism since 1989. A lot of things are driving it, but certainly some of it is the spread of ideas of individual sovereignty and the use of free market policies by developing countries. Just as we see the landscape for poor around the world to be radically improved, we’re in this process in the West of criticizing our fundamental principles to the point where we’re driving a dangerous level of polarization. And so that’s a very perverse and strange situation and difficult to contend with. So, all right, let’s switch a bit here. Okay, so while we see the problem, the problem is that we’re still sketching it out and trying to articulate it, but it’s something like the rise of a victim victimizer culture that might be driven by young people’s increasing sense of vulnerability as a consequence of the unexamined effects of social media. The polarization driven by tendency for a dying media to concentrate on extremism, the domination of the intellectual discourse in the universities by the left and the radical left, all these things are playing together. And they’re causing a certain amount of trouble like the rise of this excessive safety culture that has negative psychological consequences. All right, that’s all dangerous. What in the world do we do about it? Jonathan, you have the Heterodox Academy. So that’s something you put into practice that was designed to increase viewpoint diversity. Do you think that’s what’s your sense of that? What’s the consequence of that? Yeah, so the problem, as you said, as we say in the book, there’s six different separate contributing factors all coming together. The solution is not easy. Let’s break it down into what do we need to do to get our universities functioning better? What do we need to do to raise kids who are more resilient and more able to deal with difference? Let’s focus on those two. So let’s start with universities. So I co-founded Heterodox Academy, if you go to heterodoxacademy.org with Nick Rosencrantz, a law scholar and Chris Martin, a grad student in sociology and then a bunch of other social psychologists. Because we were concerned that this is just a faculty initiative, that discussions among professors of psychology and research in psychology was showing signs that certain hypotheses wouldn’t be investigated, other interpretations were favored. We were seeing signs, and almost all of us were on the left or center. There are only two conservative social psychologists that I know of. We were concerned about research quality. That’s all it was. And so we ended up putting up this site. It went live on about September 10, 2015. Totally unrelated to that, Greg and I had been writing the Atlantic article, totally separate track. And then all hell broke loose at Halloween in 2015, and it became clear this isn’t just a faculty issue. The problem on campus is a culture issue in which this new form of student activism, this new form of student belief in fragility is affecting how we do our research, how we educate. So all the problems are interrelated. But to focus on the faculty issue, what we’re doing at Heterodox Academy, originally when I was running it, I thought the issue was, well, we have no political diversity. We need to get more. We need to encourage more conservatives and libertarians to get PhDs, and then we need to help them get jobs. That’s what I thought originally. But over time, the problem has morphed, and it’s become clear we do actually have some diversity in every field. Not everybody is on the left. A lot of people are in the center or libertarian or they say, I can’t be put in a box. And what we have to do is encourage those people to feel that they can speak up, they can question dominant ideas, they can be a little subversive. They, we have to make it so they’re not afraid of social consequences for speaking up. So that’s the way that I was thinking about it. Now, in January, last January, I turned over Heterodox Academy. I hired an amazing woman, Deborah Maschek. She’s a professor at Harvey Mudd College. She is leaving that job to run Heterodox Academy full time. Deb studies relationships. She’s a great teacher. She is moving the organization to focus more on helping, helping campuses recreate that climate that we all know and love. I mean, you know, we, I love being a professor. I love universities. Deb is focusing on how do we prepare students? And so we talked a lot about this in the book. What do you do with orientation? What are the norms you make clear about speech and free speech? Of course, we need to do training in diversity and inclusion and sexual violence, all that stuff. But how many schools train for free speech? Yeah, pretty much none of them. And the fact that we don’t mention any of these deep philosophy or concepts, the deep philosophical underpinnings of academic freedom, freedom of speech, there’s just so much we can complain about students not knowing them when nobody’s actually taught them. Yeah, that’s for sure. Well, and it’s been really interesting on this lecture tour to find out how receptive people are to exactly that kind of message, you know, and I’ve been beating the drum, let’s say, for for more conscious understanding of the relationship between meaning and personal responsibility, because one of the things we also teach students is that the proper focus for them is the violation of their intrinsic rights, as if the upholding of those rights is going to provide them with a sustaining meaning in life. But I don’t believe that that’s true. I think that what’s more true is that most people find a sustaining meaning by adopting a fairly heavy burden of personal responsibility, partly for themselves and partly for their family and partly for the broader community. And that that just seems to have dropped out of the public discourse in its entirety. And then also what could be taught to incoming students is this clinical doctrine that we’ve been describing, which is, well, how do you make yourself stronger? Well, you expose yourself voluntarily to challenges that are outside of your domain of current competence, and that often involves confronting things that not only that you think are frightening, but that you might also think are disgusting. Because that’s what happens with obsessive-compulsive disorder treatment, you know, and disgust obviously runs, motivates some of this political polarization. That’s right. And somebody alerted me, somebody, a civil rights scholar, told me about how the marchers in the 60s, how they trained. And here they are going in to, you know, staging protests, going in, doing sit-ins, facing real violence. And some of them were actually killed. The way they prepared for it was others would shout racist slurs at them. They would be prepared for it. They would expose themselves to the worst. And then when the worst happened, at least it was less painful than had they not encountered it. So again, over and over again, we see, is your goal to toughen yourself up? Is your goal to become stronger and more able to deal with the world as it is? Or is your goal to demand that somebody make the world other than it is? Which is the more reliable path to success in life? Yeah, and both John and I, as the president of FIRE, and both through Let Grow and through Heterodox, we’re both trying to also figure out ways to get to people well before they set foot on a college campus. Now, certainly, I think it’s kind of unforgivable that most universities don’t teach about some of these deep philosophies and concepts in orientation. But you shouldn’t already be learning about some of these ideas when you’re in high school. So one thing that John did that I’m totally jealous of is they did a graphic novel version of part of chapter two of On Liberty about freedom of speech. As a great way to tell generation students about. And I also just love On Liberty, particularly arguing about freedom of speech as a lawyer. Because I’m like, this guy, man, can this guy argue? Like, being able to defend the decision to defend blasphemy, to go up against blasphemy prohibitions in 1859, but then managed to say, and by the way, you know, you know who suffered under blasphemy laws? Jesus and Socrates. Right, right. And guess who enforced them? Marcus Aurelius, also one of your heroes. It’s like, oh, you just won the case. You are, you’re a world class arguer. So let me suggest that viewers go to Amazon and look up All Minus One, or you can go to heterodoxacademy.org slash mill where you can get a free version of PDF or you can, we have a $3 Kindle version of it as well as the printed art book. Great. Let’s put that in the description as well. Great. So yeah, so high school, any high school that wants to teach about free speech, assign this, it’s extremely readable by high school students. It’s just chapter two, cut by 50% and mills metaphors are illustrated. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, so the free speech issue too. So, I mean, one of the, one of the concepts that I’ve been wrestling with is, you know, we have to produce hierarchies in order to accomplish tasks collectively, and we have to accomplish tasks because they’re suffering to address and real problems to solve. So we’re going to produce hierarchies and hopefully the hierarchies are predicated on merit in relationship to the solution of the problem. And so the right winger types are more inclined to support hierarchical structures because of their psychological predisposition. Yes, I agree with that. And the left wingers are more likely to be concerned about the fact that the hierarchies inevitably dispossessed because they’ll produce unequal distribution of resources. Okay. So then you can imagine that the political landscape is a battleground, a permanent battleground between those who stand for the hierarchies and note that they have their utility, but are perhaps blind to their proclivity to become tyrannical. And those who are more sensitive to the claims of the dispossessed and worried about the proclivity of tyranny of hierarchies to become predicated on nothing but power. Right. Okay. Now, at some points, the hierarchy is going to be weak and need to be strengthened. And other points, there has to be more clamor on the side of the dispossessed. And the reason you have free speech, as far as I’m concerned, is because it’s the mechanism that keeps those two opponent processes balanced. And so it’s the core element of a free society, because it’s actually the process by which the society maintains and improves itself across time. It’s not just another value among many values. Oh, sorry. And there’s just two points that I always feel like I need to make about that. Is one, the founding fathers were really good evolutionary psychologists. And one thing that I love about working in constitutional law is just how both pessimistic and optimistic it was at the same time about human nature. Those very tensions were the tensions that Alexander Hamilton and Madison were so concerned about. How do you balance out this natural human nature? Whereas today, we’re supposed to claim there isn’t any such thing as human nature. The other thing is, I have a slightly different philosophy on freedom of speech. It’s actually much simpler than a lot of the more platonic ideal of truth, which is simply that it’s always valuable to know what people really think. And as simple as that sounds, it does mean that when people say, well, you certainly shouldn’t be listening to conspiracy theorists and what they say about stuff. If it’s a popular conspiracy, shouldn’t you have some clue about what some chunk of the population actually thinks about things? And I think that understanding what people you despise actually think and believe is always of value. Because the project itself is a project of human knowledge, knowing human beings as they actually are, not as we wish they were. It’s even self-protective to use that terminology. It’s like if I want to know what you’re going to do, and I do, especially if I happen to be near you or have to interact with you repeatedly. If I know what you think, then I can understand how you’re going to act. And if I don’t know how you think, partly because you’re not allowed to express it, then you’re an opaque mystery to me. And the probability that we’re going to engage in conflict goes up tremendously. There are multiple reasons for protecting the sanctity, let’s say, of free speech. One of the things that really distresses me about the postmodern, neo-Marxist philosophy is that there isn’t any room in that philosophy for the idea of free speech. This is something I’ve come to understand more deeply over the last two years. When you’re talking to someone from that theoretical perspective, they can’t engage in a discussion about free speech because it doesn’t fit into their worldview. There isn’t sovereign individuals engaging in a discussion about the nature of reality. There’s avatars of their power group unconsciously making claims on behalf of their privilege. And there’s never free speech there because you’re not a free agent. You’re not even a real entity as an individual. And that’s a far more pernicious assault on free speech than mere objection to it as a right wing, as something that’s been hijacked by the right wing to validate their particular privilege. Let’s talk about this because this is one of the main arguments that we get back. Free speech is just a way for the powerful to retain their power. It didn’t help our cause, it’s certainly not Greg’s cause, when the Nazis started having rallies for free speech. That’s really not what you want. So Greg, what’s your response when people say free speech just helps the powerful? It drives me nuts because it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of history and government and political philosophy. I’ve had this argument with Stanley Fish and it seemed like a total shock to him. I’m sure it’s been thought of it before, but you don’t need a special protection of an individual right in a democracy for the majority. First of all, rich people and powerful people under any system of government, well rich people under communism don’t do so well once they take over. But after they take over, like the KGB people can make themselves totally rich, but rich and powerful people are always going to be fine. If you set up a democracy, the majority is always going to be fine. You only need a special protection of freedom of speech for minority points of view. I know, it’s absolutely amazing that that’s not common. Absolutely basic. And John Rausch, it’s really interesting, Rausch has a lot of arguments on this that are so interesting. He says, listen, if you’ve reached the point where there’s enough people who are worried about your well-being that they’re willing to pass a law in a majoritarian country to get you protected, it probably means the real dark days are behind you. One of the things that we’ve talked about, me and Rausch, is that if we passed an anti-hate speech law, say in the late 1960s, it would have frozen in place attitudes about homosexuality, which he as a gay man is very concerned about. I think we would have ended up with a law that looked a lot more like what you see in Russia, that actually ends up being used against gay people, than rather the progressive law that we hope it would be. But time and time again, the idea that you, by the way, I keep on trying to put this out just in a very practical way. So you want laws that define, that allow the government to stop hateful speech, and you want Trump to have those powers? There’s an old military doctrine, which is whatever weapon you design your enemies will have in 15 years. And if you start putting restrictions on something like free speech as benefit to your ideological position, and you don’t imagine that you might be outmaneuvered in their use by your enemies, then you’re not sufficiently awake. So I did a lecture a year and a half ago, which was a left-wing case for free speech, and I just thought that was self-evident for the reasons that you put forward, which is, well, the powerful, and you can use left-wing terminology here, the powerful have an a priori monopoly on speech, obviously. And so you want to put protections in place so that the dispossessed, who you hypothetically champion, get a chance to put their viewpoint forward. And it’s really, it’s quite a mystery that that’s not merely axiomatically obvious now. Yeah, well, you know, if Nazis are calling for free speech, the easy thing to do is say, okay, well, then it must be bad. Yes, well, okay, so tell me, let’s go back to the book. So you said earlier when we talked before the interview that it had been on the New York Times bestseller list, and it seems to be selling well. What are you hoping, what do you see happening as a consequence of your essay in the Atlantic and as a consequence of the book? And what do you hope will happen, let’s say, over the next year? If we’re going to be optimistic about where we’re headed, what’s going to happen? So I have felt for the last two years that we’re kind of in an emperor’s new clothes situation, where most people who are paying attention, most people involved in universities or in education, realize there’s something wrong, but they don’t understand what it is. And nobody wants to appear insensitive. People don’t want to stand up and critique if it seems that you’re pushing back against it, against the historically marginalized groups in particular. So there’s been, so university administrators, we’ve spoken a lot of college presidents, they’re overwhelmingly what I would call liberal left, not illiberal. I don’t know of any college presidents who are illiberal, but they’re often afraid to stand up for, well, I’m sure you did, you met someone. Oh, they got Evergreen State University. Oh, I’m sorry, yes, that’s right. Evergreen. Yeah, that’s right. That’s a pretty good, yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So there’s been a lot of desire to change, a lot of desire to restore some sense of order and community on campus, that we can do our work and do our teaching. And, but what I’m hopeful that our book will do is give everyone a common set of concepts and sort of a look into how this thing plays out, if you don’t do anything to stop it going down this rabbit hole. My hope for the book is that the parenting stuff is new, that is, a lot of people have been following what’s going on on campus, but they don’t realize this is now happening in high schools and earlier. So my hope is that every school principal from elementary school through high school and then every college president will get a copy of the book in the mail or given to them by a donor. And so, okay, Jordan, Jordan’s large audience. I hope that you will buy a copy of the book and give it to the principal of your kids elementary school and certain. Maybe we can put that in the description as well. Makes a great gift to the people who are educating your children. Right, I’ll write that down right now. Yeah, and reaching parents, that’s always the first constituency we talk about because, you know, we hear from parents over and over again, and as parents ourselves. There’s this kind of like, there’s a sense that something’s really going wrong in K through 12 education. Certainly, there’s something going wrong in just the process of parenting where most of people feel kind of where it seems like a lot of parents feel sort of helpless because they don’t they have that pluralistic ignorance problem. They don’t know that everybody else, you know, are having the same problems. And as soon as you actually get the conversation started, we can get to parents, we have a real fighting chance. Okay, okay, okay. All right, well, what, and what do you think, like, are you optimistic or pessimistic about where this is going at the moment? Yes. No kidding, that’s exactly it. A little bit of both. Yeah, I’m very pessimistic about the national situation. I think polarization is going to get worse for a while. And so I think we have to think about how do we adapt our institutions to life in an increasingly polarized country. So, you know, if politics is dominating everything, and it’s getting nastier and nastier, it would be great if when you go into a restaurant, you don’t have to think about is this a Democrat restaurant or Republican restaurant. And if when you go into buy a pair of sneakers, you don’t have to think about is this a Democrat pair of sneakers or Republican pair of sneakers. So we may be going to the road to everything is polarized, everything’s political, and that would be terrible. If universities succumb to that, if this is a Democrat university or, you know, public university, that would be terrible. So I think on the national level, I’m very pessimistic. But I think that there is enough recognition that this that we’re all exhausted. This is this is out of control. But I think we will have a look, it’ll be possible to to get a constituency to say our elementary schools, our middle schools, our high schools and universities, they have work to do. We need to reform what we’re doing in ways that are better for the kids. We all love our kids. We all want our kids to be resilient. So I like Greg, I’m very optimistic that that the trend towards overprotective parenting, which has just been continuing on and on. I I’m very optimistic that that will reverse once people see those graphs, once people and you talk to parents of teenagers, even if their kid isn’t depressed, seven of their kids friends are depressed or anxious. Yeah. Well, let’s OK. So let me ask you about that a little bit. And maybe we’ll end with this. I’ve been trying to figure out why this overprotectiveness epidemic has emerged. And so I took the social psychological route of analysis instead of the psychological, because I do know you should look at situational factors before you look at that in personality factors, let’s say, generally speaking. Well, here’s some demographic trends. Fewer kids. So maybe parents don’t make their kids resilient. Maybe siblings do. You know, because there’s a lot of there’s a lot of what would you call status competition between siblings. And if you’re special or unresilient, your siblings are going to have a field day with you. And so, you know, maybe we can’t raise kids that are resilient unless they have three brothers and sisters or something like that. That makes a lot of sense. But my recollection when it was it was it’s so what was it? So the guy wrote Birth Order. What was that book? Yeah. My recollection is that the effects of birth order are actually very small. And so whether you’re first or last, whether you’re an only child or not. So research going back very far, those effects are pretty small. So I would not put this big change on the fact of declining families because you don’t have siblings. Rather, declining families means there just aren’t that many kids in the neighborhood. Right. Well, that’s the other issue. Sure. Sure. Sure. That is more significant. OK. OK. So then next thing next thing might be older parents. You know, we don’t know how optimally stupid you should be when you’re when you’re a parent. And it might be that you might need to be somewhat narcissistically entranced with your own life to ignore your children enough to allow them to develop independent families. You know, and if you’re if now let’s say you don’t have a child till you’re well, let’s say 40, you only have one or two. So they’re pretty damn precious. And you’ve been waiting a long time. And now you’re more conservative because you’re older because you will be and you have endless resources to devote to this extraordinarily valuable individual. And so so if it’s if it’s the consequence of a switch in demographics and the consequences of a switch in demographics, and older parents, then it’s going to be a harder thing to rectify as a consequence of transformation of attitude. Oh, sorry. That Nick Gillespie from Reason, that’s that’s his major major theory on this stuff. And at the same time, you know, you have to say some things that really have changed. And definitely when I was a kid, I grew up first I’m a first generation American, grew up, you know, very, very, pretty poor. The but the the idea that kind of like there’s a sort of like the stratification in the US in terms of income is getting so dramatic. And the way you can get to that life raft is getting into a Princeton or a Stanford or or a Harvard. That that’s not entirely in people’s heads. And so but unfortunately, the way we thought that the best way to do that is to build these sort of rocket ship hyper invested in. You have two kids and you treat them both like heat seeking missiles. Yeah. And you completely eliminate any autonomy they have over their lives. They get up at six and they’re scheduled until they go to bed. It turns out that this is visibly dysfunctional at the same time. It’s why we interviewed Julie Lefkak-Haines who wrote a book called How to Raise an Adult about how freshmen are showing up at Stanford depressed partially because they have no sense of locus of control. They’re not even being charged with their life. So I think there is a lot to be said. Let me add on. Here’s a really stunning statistic that we found in research in the book. It’s no surprise that men, if you compare, if you go back to the 1950s and 60s, look at how men spend their time and compared to today, it’s no surprise that men are spending more time in child care, more time with their kids. That’s great. We all think that’s great. What do you think has happened to women? Women were very rarely working in the 50s and 60s. And so look at the number of hours they spent doing child care, involved their children back then. Do you think it’s gone up or down since the 50s or 60s? Now that most women are working. Answer up. Women spending more time with their kids. And there are very few kids now. So you have mom and dad both spending more time with their one or two kids. We’re over supervising, over investing. There are not a lot of kids out in the neighborhood. And investing poorly. Investing poorly. That’s right. That’s right. Because we’re investing in what Annette Leroux calls concerted cultivation. Right. Yep. The two. Okay. So here’s another conundrum. Mm-hmm. So one of the things that struck me is that a lot of this gender play that you see, gender role play that you see in among adolescents now, older adolescents and young adults in university. So the gender bender and gender fluidity games. And I’m calling them games for a reason. They remind me of pretend play with an insistence by the player that everyone joins the game. And I’ve been thinking, well, maybe we’re seeing a delayed reaction to the eradication of fantasy play in early childhood as a consequence of the introduction of technological devices. Because, you know, the developmental psychologists know very well that children have to engage in a lot of fantasy play. And then if you introduce technology that interferes with that or supersedes it, then the fantasy play doesn’t occur. You’re playing with different roles when you’re engaged in fantasy play. So I’m also wondering, you know, because I noticed even when I had kids, which is now quite a long time ago, often when I took them to the houses of other people with kids, instead of letting the kids go off and cause a bit of trouble and then settle into a spontaneous fantasy play episode, they put on a video. But now that’s like 20 times as bad because all these kids have access to endless electronic devices and we don’t know what that’s doing to their early childhood play. And so, well, so anyways, those are some of the sociological forces that I thought might be at work that are driving this hyperprotectiveness. And it isn’t obvious to see how to reverse them because they’re not happening consciously in some sense, right? It’s not like everybody decided that they were going to hyperprotect their children. Yeah. Yeah. But I think social norms are very powerful. And if everybody else acts like letting your kid walk a dog is dangerous, you’ll be less likely to let your kid walk the dog. It should be possible to reverse that. What we’re hoping will emerge from this book and our discussions of the book is the norm that if you’re not letting your kid out, you’re harming your kid, almost like a vitamin deficiency. Yeah. I’d like to know, you know, it’s like if doctors start, if pediatricians, and actually pediatricians just put out a big report on the importance of play that kids need a lot more play than they’re getting. Yeah. I think about this as vitamin P and how much vitamin P did your kid get today? Parents and vitamin P is not, it doesn’t count if you’re there with them. Did you know that? Yeah. I just think it’s so much more than I wanted to know. So if we start, if pediatricians start asking how much vitamin P did your kid get last week, and only tell me about the unsupervised times. If you know that, it doesn’t count. Of course. So we do that, we’ll get the idea. Because, you know, parents, so your point about the shrinking families is right and that’s irreversible. We’re never going to go back to large families. We have to adapt to that. And if you really want your kid to be successful, you’ll back off. That’s the idea we have to get across. Okay, so we can close by thinking, look, your kid’s going to have to encounter the full tragedy of life as they mature and become adults. And so what you’re trying to do. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t go too far. I gotta go to war. But what you’re trying to do. I mean, there are all sorts of things, you know, so when Nietzsche said, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The principle is true, but it’s not literally true. And the research on adverse childhood experiences, and those are the serious kind of things. And we talk a fair amount about that. We’re not advocating for anything like anything that would count as an ACE. But certainly, for goodness sakes, you know, the ability to get in fights with other kids and resolve them among themselves. We got rid of that and now we have a generation that’s looking upwards in a form of moral dependency. Nietzsche also did say, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. So he certainly knew that something did kill you. Right. So it’s a matter of optimal exposure to challenge, you know, and it’s by challenging your kids, not by protecting them, that you make them resilient. And they need to be resilient because life is actually difficult. And so, you know, one of the things that’s been gratifying to me too, is that during my lectures, I’ve been telling people that the idea that they’re okay the way they are, especially if they’re young, is an appalling idea. What they could be concentrating on is who they could be. And one of the really positive elements to the notion of optimal challenge is that it’s really encouraging for people to know that you’re willing to let them take a risk because you have enough faith in their ability to learn and prevail that that supersedes the risk. Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you guys very much. I appreciated the discussion. We’ll get this up as soon as I get it edited, which shouldn’t be too long. And if you would be so kind as to send me all the URL links you’d like me to post in the description, then I would be more than happy to do that. And good luck with the continued sales of your book and with all your other endeavors as well. And hopefully, good sense will prevail and we can do something to reverse this polarization and also maybe to reduce the safety culture in the education system. That would really be something. Thank you, Jordan. Thank you, Jordan. Okay. Good to see you both.