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

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No, it is. My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoscellary. No Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. I'm gonna hop straight into the guest because I have so many questions I would like to ask. My guest today is Jonathan Haidt, spelled H A I D T. You can find him on Twitter at JohnHight. He is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. Jonathan received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and the New York Times bestseller's The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Lukyanov. He has given four TED Talks, and in 2019 he was inducted into the American of Arts and Sciences. Since twenty eighteen, Jonathan has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. He is currently writing two books Kids in Space, Why Teen Mental Health is Collapsing, and Life After Babbel, great title also. Life After Babbel Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share. You can find him at Jonathan Height dot com and on Twitter once again at John Hight.

John. Nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Oh my pleasure, Tim. Very nice to meet you. So I thought we would begin. With

Influences. How your Personality, how you were Thinking. has taken shape and I wanted to begin

with the name Richard Schwader. Could you please Explain. Who Richard is? And how he factors into your life story.

I have many mentors and sometimes I do w what I call the gratitude parade in in my head and people flash past and there's a string of mentors, but Rick Schwad is the biggest on who I am and And what I've written. Rick Schwader is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago. And when I wrote my dissertation at Penn

I wrote it on a debate that he was having with some other people who study morality. Who were saying that morality is always about harm rights and justice. Schwader said. Well, you know, yeah, where you live, in Cambridge, Massachusetts it is, but around the world the moral domain is much broader and there's the ethics of community, ethics of divinity. So I plan to study to hit the two theories against each other and in and I did a study in Brazil and the US across social classes. And Schweder's predictions really came out beautifully.

I found big cultural variation, especially social class variation in morality. And in part because of that, I was able to get a postdoc doing research with him. So for two years after my PhD I spent at the University of Chicago and during that time I got a fellowship to go to India. for three months, where Schweider worked in Ubaneshwar in in the state of Orissa or Odisha, India.

And that period, that year, nineteen ninety three, that I hope that's a year that we'll come back to a couple of times during this conversation,'cause that is the pivotal year in my life when my mind was blown in many ways. One of which was that I was reading Buddhism and Hinduism and then I I spent three months in India and it really was like Welcome to my world and my way of thinking because Schweder is the most Brilliant.

Iconoclastic thinking for himself. Perverse in the most wonderful way intellectual I've ever met. So that's the beginning of who Rick Schwader is. Perverse intellectuals. That might be the the headline of this episode. We are gonna come back to nineteen ninety three. We're definitely gonna come back to Bhuvaneshwar. I was wondering how to pronounce that, so I'm glad you gave me the layup in advance. I'd like to visit A motto.

I believe. believe everything you read on the internet, but hopefully the Atlantic is reliable in this respect. A motto of Ricks. That I'd like to unpack. Which is if someone asserts it, try denying it and see if it makes sense. If someone denies it, try asserting it and see if that makes sense.

Could you explain what this means and maybe give an example of how He used it or would encourage students to use it. It comes from I think a brother in law of Rick's who is a dermatologist. And The dermatologist once said to him, Oh dermatology is easy.

Just follow this rule. If it's dry, make it wet. If it's wet, make it dry. And Rick being again this perversity. He takes that rule and that was sort of the way he ran his intellectual life. So when I went to Chicago, it's like the most intense intellectual square mile in the country. And you'd be in these seminars with all these like, you know

Nobel Prize winning economists and people, and someone would say something. And Rick would like turn it around and say like Is the opposite and then he would ask well you know isn't Also the opposite of what you're saying true? Then you'd have to think that Wait.

Actually, yeah, that is too sometimes. And so What I take from it. Is We have such pressures. To fall into line with our team.

to go with what the dominant view is. And if you do that, you're gonna end up being a kind of a a hack. You're gonna end up Being like everyone else. But If you just automatically question things

Not to be a jerk. Now you could do it and be a jerk, but if you just question it, just with pure intellectual curiosity, is it true if we turn it around? And usually it's not, but often it is. And that's how you get new insights. This is definitely good advice for anyone in a creative industry or or in the in the academic world. Try turning things around.

So how Would Just as as an example, Rick potentially use this in anthropology.

then that might have been a broader guiding tenet of his thinking that applied to much more outside of His declared field of expertise. But Is there An example you might give for how that

would fit into Anthropology th or the type of research that you were doing. At the time. So one pops to mind, but it's so offensive that I have to start with something else. Otherwise you'll I'll lose your listeners. You have to warm up the uh the right the listening hamstrings. Yeah. So just one example is he was in a discussion with some psychologists'cause you know, he's an anthropologist

But he's in cultural psychology. I'm a psychologist. So he's in a discussion with some psychologists, and they were saying, Well, you know, I mean, we have experimental evidence on this, and that's just so much more reliable than ethnography. I mean, ethnography, you know, an anthropologist goes someplace and they take notes and they report, but that's just one person's view. Experimental evidence is just much more Reliable. And he turns around and he says. Oh really?

Well let's see. And then you look at experiments that often don't replicate. And then you look at anthropological accounts where often multiple anthropologists will go someplace and They will find the same thing.

So the point is just you automatically assume well of course experiments with numbers and careful procedures are better. But he just sort of turns it around and says, Well, actually, maybe not. Okay, that's the easy one. I hope listeners are with me on that. Here's the harder one. Just about the most offensive Cultural practice in the world.

For anthropologists and enlightened people. is called F G M. Now that stands for female genital Mutilation. And anthropologists and progressives are so tolerant So

quick to say, let's not condemn other cultures, let's look at it from their point of view, but on this issue they don't. And what Rick was doing was saying in the societies where they do this Let's try to understand what they're doing. And he's totally open to the fact that sometimes it really is a horrible

operation that Deprives the woman of sexuality and I mean so there are such a range of practices. But if you simply say Any modification. On a female. Should be punishable by time in jail.

then what happens is you have a variety of African and Islamic immigrant groups in the in the US and Canada Where the mothers are put in jail. And Rick says well Let's question this. And once you see what they're doing, and sometimes it's much more equivalent to male circumcision, which is common around the world. So anyway, I'm you know, I may have actually no, uh your listeners probably aren't gonna bolt just because of that, but I might get I might get in trouble in other parts of the academic world. If they bolt just because of that, then honestly this is calling of the herd because let me

Before you continue, please hold your place. Bookmark. Folks, part of the reason I want to have John on the And I respect the work that he does is that

I believe using this type of examination and self examination, you become more anti fragile. And you can also th see through the veil of your own conditioning. in a more effective way. And you can examine your thinking

And your assumptions vis vis the language you use. the language you've absorbed, the labels that are your default, et cetera. And I think this makes you a better, more effective, and hopefully ultimately happier person who's a better contributor to society. So there's my sales pitch. Wow, perfect. We're done here. You said it. That's exactly that is exactly right. That's why I'm so grateful 'Cause if you develop this as a habit.

you become more intellectually anti fragile, which we'll get we'll get to, I hope. It helps you step out of out of your team. It helps you think independently. And you can see that your team does a lot of stupid things. Every team does. So yes, what y what you said. What I said.

All right. Let's then We flash back. To nineteen ninety three.

And I would love to revisit. I'm gonna write this down. sort of moral relativism and how we might think about that and how we Either embrace that Or develop an awareness around it so we don't You know what? Let's

Postpone nineteen ninety three and actually just tackle this right now. So there are A number of books I read a long time ago when I was part of something called the Henry Crown Fellowship at the Astman Institute. And One I am I wanna say it was I wanna say H G wells, but I don't think that is right.

Who wrote an essay called Shooting the Elephant or something along these lines, you may actually be able to track back the proper author of this, but It spoke of sort of social pressures and during British colonialism. this series of events that led to someone feeling like he needed to shoot an elephant that was causing all this ruckus in a village, even though he didn't want to. That was Describing social pressures and how those can lead to actions that we find immoral or reprehensible ourselves. But putting that aside, that's just an example.

We also read a lot about morality not in a structured way I think that would maybe stand toe to toe with the type of research you do in any way, but reading various accounts of people succumbing to moral relativism, where everything is okay because it's in a different culture, it's in a different time.

How would you suggest people think about that? Because on one hand I think that's dangerous. On the other hand, there's so much Intolerance, masquerading is tolerance, and there's so many issues that I'm sure we'll get into, but Just with the

Subject of moral relativism. How do you think about That's This is a a great topic to tackle in a in a longer discussion'cause it it's It's one of the oldest questions in philosophy. It's an important one and it it takes a little a little doing.

There are a lot of intellectual puzzles where We just sort of naturally think about it on like a single dimension or as a binary. And if you kinda break it up into multiple dimensions, then you see solutions. So the typical way of thinking about this is Is morality real? Like is it a real thing? Like

The laws of physics. such that if people are behaving contrary to it, they're wrong, even if they don't know it. Or is morality just You know Herodotus and and ancient Greeks they you know, they saw this like Well, in this country, you know, they they kill their parents when they get old and in this country they eat

pigs and they they could see that practices differed and so well maybe You know, it's just like language. It's just like whatever you know, whatever happens in your culture. Well that's what what's grammatical. But what I learned in part from Schweder and also reading a lot of philosophy, some of which he guided me to, was I'll put out So the first Is

Moral monism versus moral pluralism. So The question isn't that Is there moral truth or not? It's Is there one moral truth or multiple?

And once you do that, now you've loosened things up. Because a hallmark of my work, and this is where I departed from Rick a a bit, is I've always been very influenced by evolutionary psychology. As well as anthropology. So we are evolved creatures. We are Homo sapiens, and we are all Homo sapiens, and we are primates, and we are have a lot in common with chimpanzees and bonobos. So that's the evolutionary site. And then there's also the anthropology. We vary.

And so when you look around the world, you don't find infinite variation. you find a few major patterns. A wonderful book. Dancing in the streets A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich. She says when the European explorers went out in the sixteenth, seventeenth century

They found wherever they went People danced around campfires, had rituals that bonded the group together, they often used psychedelic substances, they had beat heavy music, so this is human nature. But feudal systems are also pretty common. There are a few major patterns. And so One possibility is

There's not just one way of doing things. But it's not anything goes. It's that there are several different sort of grammatical human forms. And this actually became the basis of my major work in psychology, which is moral foundations theory, which is My effort to say

What are the taste buds of the moral sense? Because cuisine varies around the world. You wouldn't say that the French are wrong if they don't cook like the Vietnamese. But I think you could say that the French and the Vietnamese are both much better cooks than the English. Or at least you know they were historically. So there is some truth, you know, it's not that anything goes, there is some truth.

But Here's where we bring in the second kind of abstract but really powerful concept. Which is anthropocentric truth. So That means

Something can be true relative to To humans. To who we are. So if intelligent aliens come to our solar system, they will find that the earth is the third planet from the sun, and that was true before we existed, and it'll be true long after we're gone. And they would find that gold is a better conductor of electricity than is aluminum. That was true before we were here, it'll be true, you know, so Those are non-anthropocentric truths.

And many people have ha been on a quest to find one of the You know, what are the moral truths like and so Sam Harris Um, who for a brief time was my intellectual enemy. We kinda had like a feud for a few years. Now we're friends. We actually like each other quite a lot. But we had kind of a feud over this because he has a whole book. Uh the landscape of morality, arguing that moral truths are like the truths of chemistry. And I say no, they are anthropocentric truths is from a philosopher David Wiggins.

There are things that are true because of the creatures we are. So There are things that are beautiful because of our senses. There are things that you know, so Shakespeare is a better writer than Kurt Vonnegut. Now I love reading Kurt Vonnegut. I probably enjoy it more than Shakespeare.

But man, I can see, and almost everyone can. Shakespeare is a complete genius at crafting words. Now it's a fact. If aliens come here from another planet, they're not gonna agree.'Cause it it doesn't make sense. It wouldn't fit with their nature. Anyway, so Putting this all together I think what we can say

Is There are moral truths and moral orders that are emergent. I am not a relativist, I am not a monist. I'm a moral pluralist, there are multiple moral truths. And these truths are emergent from human nature interacting as people interact in large soci in societies. Hm. Okay. Wow. I think I just did it.

Oh it was great. And I want to Tag on a follow up, which is how do you personally and we're gonna come back to the from feud to friends story because I think that could be an instructive case study, plus I'm just curious because I'm friends with Sam also. who uh is a great he's a he's a very formidable sparring partner. Yes.

When you look at Global events. Mm-hmm. How do you think about personally? human rights violations

What to accept What to oppose Yourself. As a pluralist. And I'm not saying that because I'm viewing myself as the opposite of a pluralist. I'm just curious how you personally

Think about what you are proactively going to push back. Against. Doesn't need to be outside the US. Because I'm an emergentist, that is, I believe that morals emerge as we interact.

I don't think that fifty thousand years ago. Societies were wrong. in dividing labor between male and female. It's not like they were wrong and they shoulda fixed it. They shoulda had perfect gay like no. As we now have modern societies with labor saving devices and you don't have to divide labor between male and female and there are other ways to live. So now any society that was to

say, Well, you know, women can't do certain things, only men can Like well you know, well that would be wrong. In a modern Western society that would be unethical. That would that would be a violation of civil rights. Now when we look at things like countries in which the secret police grab people in the night and take them away and torture and kill them. You don't have to be a very advanced society to realize th this is horrific, this is wrong, this is brutality, this is not justified by m appeals to morals. So I once developed a kind of a three part test, let me see if I can remember it. Because what we want to do is we wanna separate things like veiling.

Or things where they might be broadly accepted in a culture, but we're offended by them. from things like chattel slavery. Where some people accept it, but the victims of it didn't accept it. So I think we can point to things. It's often tricky, but we can point to things where we can say We can criticize that practice and that culture, and in extreme cases we might even say we should try to undermine it or try to stop it.

So we'd have to go case by case, uh, you know, widow burning in India and things like that. Yeah, which I think will clearly fall on one side. But that's how I would Generally do it in the abstract. Now I think you asked me a slightly different question though, which was more like Me personally, not like philosophically, right? Yeah.

So a funny thing happened to me as I've studied morality. Which is That I almost never get angry anymore. So before nineteen ninety three, I was a normal person. Who got angry a lot.

Yeah, I'm pretty even tempered, so it wasn't like I had anger problems. I'm just saying I'd be the newspaper, I'd be you know, angry at the goddamn you know, Ronald Reagan or whatever. And you know, or someone cuts me off or something slow. I've been sort of you know quasi type A

Pushy smart Alex, son of a bitch Jewish kid is what uh my neighbor once called once called me. So I used to be like that and then in nineteen ninety three I changed. The key thing there was actually taking LSD for the first time while I was Studying to

go to India and reading the Bhagavad Gita and reading, you know, Hinduism and Hindu philosophy and I was uh twenty nine years old. And So here I am studying moral psychology and all these things. And In that year I kind of stepped out of the matrix. I kind of stepped out of

the world that that I had been living in. And that is what allowed me that year to allowed me to do the work I've done with the rest of my life, which is saying You know what, let's try to understand progressives and conservatives in their own terms. Before then I was just a standard straight issue, you know, Ivy League liberal

progressive type person. But A roundabout way of answering your question is I don't get mad I look at systems and I always think how can we make them better? And systems that are

Producing terrible results. For human beings. should be changed. So actually I'll share so one thing this was actually this was before my turning point. In nineteen eighty seven, Just before grad school. I travelled alone across eastern Europe.

That's why I went to Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. And when I was in Romania, where Chaoscu was the dictator, the people were literally cold and dirty. Like they literally did not have soap to clean their clothes. They did not have heat in the winter, but They were kept like animals and they behaved like animals in some sense. Like you know, we try to get on a bus. Like there's so few buses, people push and shove.

And You know, it didn't make me angry. It's like, Oh my God, like Actually did make me angry. All of my feelings were against Chochesco and I thought If I could kill this man with my bare hands right now.

I would do it and I would love it. It was so horrific to see. what this man had done to the society, him and his half million secret policemen. And so when he was shot in the mud in a courtyard in nineteen eighty nine, I was thrilled. So I guess that's more of a direct answer to your question. If I see someone Oppressing a whole society or acting in that monstrous way.

Not for any moral morally legitimate reason. Yeah, I think we need to take action. Could you tell Me more about your LSD experience. Why was that

Such a Seemingly crucial. Ingredient. In that. turning point or that period for you.

I know you've had a fair amount of psychedelic coverage on this podcast and I'm sure your listeners will gen many will be experienced or familiar with it. So the turning point for me it was june eleventh, nineteen ninety three. Like many other Such experiences one feels reborn and you feel like you remember the day, you remember exactly when it happened. I was in I was a postdoc in Chicago working with Schwader and I went back to Philadelphia. where I'd been a grad student and where my ex girlfriend we were still good friends.

was there and our a lot of our friends and she got some acid and we all all did it. It was my first time doing it at the age of twenty nine. And the metaphor the metaphor that I use and making sense of it afterwards was it felt to me as though I'd spent all my life Living in this amazing mansion with thousands of rooms. And I loved exploring this mansion and there and I loved to travel. And there were all these rooms to explore.

And I thought I was doing I was like ex you know, seeing all this stuff. And then that night it was like God punched a hole in the roof, reached in, picked me up, took me out of the mansion. And took me around the whole world and said, You thought that was the world? No. This is the world.

And it's you know beyond anything you can imagine. And then be puts me back in the mansion. Seals up the roof. And says, Go on. And I don't mean literally God. I'm you know I'm a Jewish atheist. I don't believe literally in God, but

These experiences have really helped me understand. The way we evolve for religion is The way almost all societies have a way Of using psychedelic plants. You interviewed Michael Pollard, so it's you know what he said. So that experience certainly changed me as a psychologist thinking about the human mind and consciousness and sh self transcendence and all that. But it changed me as a human being

Because Afterwards it was like Small things just don't Matter of the It changes your

Perspective. That's trite to say. But it also just helped me You know what it did? Okay. What it did was here at the same time I was reading The Bhagavad Gita. In the Bhagavad Gita, there is a specific scene. I talked about this in the in the righteous mind, uh or the happiness hypothesis. There's a specific scene where Krishna gives Arjuna a third eye. to see the world as it really is. And he's like gasping for breath. He's like he he can't process it.

But he comes back and he wants to serve Krishna. Now, I didn't come back like I want to serve my fellow men, but I felt like All my old pettiness. All of that just sort of burned off. And I just

I don't know. I just had a kind of an independence. Like I'm not on a team. I'm just I just want to understand what's happening. Mm. And did that

Then Provide the fertile ground That's allowed you to learn and I'm once again quoting from the Atlantic article, the power of rituals and viewing a commitment to religious a way to knit communities together. In other words

without that experience, without being plucked out of the mansion, do you think you would have come to those conclusions on your own in India? Or were they mutually dependent in a way. I think they were mutually dependent, yes. I don't think I could've I I could have done it. It would have been just more of a

standard intellectual experience like hmm this is interesting. Let me write this down in my notebook. Let me try to make sense of this. Cause the other piece we want to bring in here is that in grad school, I read Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist. And really comes out in the righteous mind. Like Rick Schwader and Emile Durkheim and Charles Darwin. Like those are the three heroes of book. Those three men, their ideas just transformed my thinking. And so you put those all together. In a twenty nine year old brain. who's having a tremendously good time at the University of Chicago and then going to India.

And then as you're shaking it up, you put in just a tiny little bit of LSD and like boom it comes out into a totally new configuration. So that's kind of what happened to me in nineteen ninety three. It was like the the the MSG of spiritual Multi dimensionalism. Just a little little bit of pixie dust of LSD. Pixie dust, yes. Yeah. Well, you know, if you think about your frontal cortex, it kinda like locks down between thirteen and sort of mid to late twenties, it's kinda locking down. Yeah, you know, it's very open to change in your teen years, but it kinda, you know, settles in by your late twenties. And so as it's kinda setting, you know, that period of change. You know, had it been five or ten years later, it might not have had that much effect.

Yeah. It would strike me as a sort of critical formative window. Right, so if you are able to slow the setting of the concrete. Or something along those lines metaphorically, then interesting things can happen. I will say not to

Spend too much time on on the psychedelic component of this, but The loosening of self identity. even at advanced ages, let's just say in terminal cancer patients who are suffering from end of life anxiety. the ability and there's some evidence to suggest although I think it's

simplistic that the down regulation of the default mode network Helps to inhibit. Self. referential thinking and that type of executive function and therefore people

experience this ego dissolution or ego death, but even in a less extreme. Instance of that. It frees you from the constructs that have been the lenses you've always worn, but not realized you've been wearing. And to that extent, I do think it allows you to see something like, for instance, these

behaviors and beliefs in India. With a very different Set of uh Eyes. Than would otherwise be possible. Nineteen ninety three, I must say, just as as coincidence

Nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety three was also the year that probably most dramatically changed my life. So we were we were having transformative experiences in the same twelve month period of time. It was my first time Overseas. And I landed in Japan as an exchange student, going to a Japanese school. living with Japanese families for a year and that

broke open my mind in such an incredibly That points difficult ways, but in such a Beautifully. Because it forced me to question

what it meant to do things the right way. It was my first time being in a country where people drove on the opposite side of the street. It's my first time being anywhere Where The entire family shared the bath, didn't change the water and you had to clean yourself beforehand. And the example's just where they cool their food by slurping it in with great noise as opposed to blowing on it with exhales. And so it was it was like this Alice in Wonderland.

Topsy turvy upside down world for me. And I realized, oh wow, all these things that I have assumed are just the way Things are done. Up. I don't wanna say arbitrary, but they're social conventions. I mean these are Cultural.

emergent Patterns. They're not laws of physics. And so during that same year I also really, I think, unlocked my ability to start to ask at least questions about my assumptions. Like is that really true? Do we really have to do that? Yeah. Is this really how it works? Even the structure of thought is mirrored in language. I mean, Japanese is very, very different instead of being

Subject verb object, you know, I eat the apple, it's I the apple eat, I to school, go, that type of thing. And it was a very productive Year. I wanna come to A passing cut. I think you had your experience at a sort of a more opportune age than mine. I mean mine worked out great, but it's not you were in college at the time, right? You were a student Princeton. This was before Princeton. This would have been uh high school. So I was this was fifteen, uh age fifteen to sixteen.

Okay. Right. So the you know, there's research on how we create stories about ourselves and our stories are wide open. From about fourteen or fifteen is when it kinda opens up through the mid to late twenties. That's like the key period. And so you had yours right at the beginning of that. And listening to you. 'Cause I think so much about left right differences. There's research that foreign travel makes people more progressive, more liberal because you see how things can be different.

Did it have that effect on you? Were you progressive or liberal at the time and did it change your politics at all? I am grateful Very, very grateful. Uh I don't wanna throw my parents under the bus, but my dad Was very vocal. about various political stuff.

And I completely turned off. that listening function. So I did not This is gonna be embarrassing, perhaps, to admit, but I effectively paid little to no attention to politics until perhaps ten years ago. And so I didn't identify

Politically at all. I was really Issue by issue if they came up. If it was something that affected me or that I thought I might want to change, that was the extent of my radar pickup.

I will say that In retrospect. Looking at my experience probably also given the way that Japanese society is structured and the availability of healthcare and this, that, and the other thing, that many of those issues would probably be associated. With a

sort of left leaning. Progressive. Mindset. I suppose. I I would have to imagine that to be the case. I I don't see how it would go the other way because I wasn't even though in Japan there is some pretty crazy nationalism and Super hardcore.

I suppose. Right extreme stuff. I was not exposed to that.'Cause the the thought the the idea that I was just developing as from what you were saying was this. I've you know, I've long thought since I wrote The Righteous Mind and since I really tried to understand conservatism and libertarians and really got sort of the wisdom from those traditions as well as the progressive or liberal tradition. And I've really come to see that a a functioning society needs a sort of progressive wing pushing for change and it needs a conservative wing saying slow down, tapping on the brakes, you know, William F Buckley, you know, stand thwart history yelling stop. You need both in a healthy society. We don't have that now. Our left is not liberal, our right is not conservative, we're a mess.

But Societies need those two impulses. And just from when you were saying, it didn't occur to me, it's like actually I wonder if in a person's development you kinda need both of those. That is, early on, you kinda need to like open up. And travel and see the world and question things. But if you stay that way the rest of your life, you might kind of be kinda dysfunctional because there's interesting research showing that It's not AIDS that makes people become more conservative.

It's having children or starting a business or taking on responsibility. Once you take on some responsibility, you realize you know what? We actually need some rules here. We need some you know, there has to be some authority or some hierarchy, uh, you know, there have to be punishments for cheating. So in the course of a human life, maybe there's like Like the opening up travel period and then the like, Okay, you got all this stuff in your head. Now you have to have to apply it. You have to kind of focus and you have to be conscientious. All right, just a thought. Keep going.

I like that idea, and I I've never thought of it that way. I would also say Japan Deeply Resonated with me. on a lot of levels that my experience in the United States did not.

The Cleanliness the Obsessive compulsive Focus on detail just the level of meticulous

Attention to the most minute of details, which can be crippling. It's not all upside, but That's so deeply to me felt like a warm bath for maybe my predispositions or my neuroses that it was

It was a uh It felt like a rebirth of sorts. But I mean I would have friends who would say like They'd be like they would just be like you're not American. I don't get it. Like you look You're white and you look like Yeah.

You're f more Japanese than I am. And they would they would make these jokes. Because it came so Easily to me culturally in a way. Hm. To whatever extent that makes any sense. There was that.

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That's wealthfront.com slash Tim. This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront. I did want to ask you About your comment.

The label you used of Jewish atheist. So I am a Jewish atheist. And I wanna Provide some context for this, which is Paul Graham, who's famous for co founding Y Combinator. I had a tweet, I think it was actually

In one of his essays also. Along the lines of the more labels you apply to yourself, the stupider you become. Something like that. I'm paraphrasing it, but be careful with the labels that you use. I'm not forcing that on you, but I'm curious to know The thinking behind Jewish atheist and I'm friends with

A writer named AJ Jacobs who's who says Oh yeah, I love AJ. Yeah. Raiders and round. Yeah, he's hilarious. We said uh something like I am to Jewish what Olive Garden is to Italian or something like that was was his explanation when he when when he wrote the book The Year of Living Biblically, which is a fantastic, fantastic book. How do you think about Being Jewish.

What does that mean to you? So first, you know, if we're we're having this discussion in the context of a Christian background culture Yeah, Christianity is somewhat unusual, uh although Islam is similar. In Making it's all about your relationship with God and faith.

And Judaism is a more ancient religion and It's very much about uh story about a tribe, a group. that has these ups and downs in history and we're bound together. And of course God is a very, very important part of the story.

But as Jews have lived in different cultures around the world, well that shapes your identity. And you can be Jewish and not believe in God, just like you can be Italian and And not be Catholic. So as an ethnic group, as an i identity, as a culture I'm Jewish.

And I recognize the influence of just the norms, you know, the the argumentativeness, the you know, and here we're talking Ashkenazi Jewish. I should always be clear that, you know, Sephardic Jews are different, they're they're different kinds of Jews. But the American Jewish experience is sort of dominated by the Ashkenazi, the Eastern European immigrants. All four of my grandparents came here from Russia and Poland and Belarus. Around nineteen oh seven, when they were teenagers roughly. It's part of my

So I was about to say it's part of my identity, I guess it is, but I'm playing these days with the idea that actually I'm an anti identitarian. I think part of what's wrong with the country is that America of all countries needs to be a melting pot. We need to have a generally assimilationist Ethos and that worked so well for the Jews, the Irish, the Italians, you know, all the groups that came through Ellis Island. into an assimilationist twentieth century America worked out fantastically well. So anyway, that's just We can follow that down in a moment, the identitarianism. But

You can be Jewish by identity and not believe in God. In fact, I'd like to do this formally. I was Think if you ask a Christian, do you believe in God? usually if they've identified as a Christian, you know, they're usually gonna say yes. Okay, try asking that with ten Jews. Maybe one of them will say yes.

And maybe two or three will say no. And the rest will say, Well, it depends. I mean, do you mean this, do you mean that? Like, well, you know, sort of, maybe. So being Jewish is different religiously than being Christian or Muslim. Mm-hmm. That makes sense? That makes sense to me. Do you as an atheist Build in any

Rituals. Or Traditions From the Jew lineage, let's say. Okay, so this helps me clarify.

Atheist is not part of my identity. I said I'm a Jewish atheist, but Atheist is not part of my identity. I'm just a Jew who doesn't believe in God. And that maybe was part of my clash with Sam Harris because that was this was during the time of the you know the new atheists and there was a combative movement and I didn't want to be part of that. You know, I thought there was a lot to respect about religion. And so I would do the Schweder thing. You know, which is okay, you're making these claims about religion. Well let's see, you know, is that

You know, turn that around. Is that really true? So but back to your question. So no, I don't incorporate any rituals that are related to my being an atheist, but I do Yeah, I do have some rituals. This actually almost more comes from like stoic traditions, just that

You know the stoics. advise doing a morning routine, an evening routine, a kind of a meditations on philosophy in the morning and then a kind of a taking stock at night. So I I usually try to do that just as an individual

set my priorities and reflect on on my day and And what I'm doing. And you know, minimally Jewish in the sense of like So my wife is Korean American, but she was very happy to have us raise our kids with some Jewish identity. My son had a bar mitzvah. And so, you know, we go to synagogue on the high holy days, we light Shabbat candles and have a family meal on Friday. Uh so fairly minimal, but it is it it is important. It is it does uh I do have a feeling that something was passed down to the generations to me.

And I don't want to break the chain. It's a very valuable thing that was passed down to me and I want my children to have a sense that they're part of that chain. What's Talk about from feud to friends. Okay. And I know you described it. It in passing, but

What was the feud? And then The more interesting part of that is I shouldn't say interesting, but the part that I I want to focus on is how did you go from that? to them friends. Because that

Is Feuds are worth things. Start and end. A lot of the time these days. And maybe forever, given human nature, but certainly online. People get rewarded probably more for feuding than they do for being friendly.

So Could you just describe that experience, please? Back when you know, when Sam really burst onto the scene. Yeah, he's an great writer and a beautiful writer, and he was so persuasive, I mean, writing those first two atheist uh new atheist books. And so we would

We would be invited to a lot of the same conferences.'Cause I was beginning to write about how religion You know, I'm a naturalist. I don't, you know, I believe we evolved to be rel you know, th I don't believe it's God who made us religious. But you know, religion does all these good things, I was saying. And so we'd be invited to conferences together. There was like the Beyond Belief conference. Sam and you know, all the other new atheists went the first year, and then Sam and me, one or two others went the second year. And wherever I would appear with Sam, Or wherever we would clash in writing, Sam would always use this rhetorical technique of basically saying So John Hight would say that human sacrifice among the Aztecs is a good thing because it binds people that you know, so he would always accuse me of like supporting atrocities. And by the third or fourth time he'd done this. Okay. I I I said before I don't get angry. I was kind of pissed. And so I did I did kind of a a dirty lowdown trick. Yeah, yeah. There must be some decorum. There must be some decorum, yes. So I did something I'm a little embarrassed by it. It was kinda it was clever, but a little embarrassed now. I did a kind of a

An academic trick. Which is One thing that bothered me about Sam You know he has a PhD. But he wasn't really socialized as an academic. He was writing more as a rhetorician, a you know, a a public arguer. And he would use very strong language, always this, and never this, and certainly this.

And so I said, You know what? Let me Take All of Sam's writings

And feed them through This um what's it called? Oh shoot um There's a program that analyses word use by Jamie Panabaker. Anyway, it's you feed it through and it g it counts like Certainly, always, never. And so there's a category called certainty. And so I fed

Text of Sam's books through And you get a number. Wha how certain is Sam? And the couple of things like that. And then I fed in the other new atheists. And then I fed in you know, like all of those, you know, who were the all those right wing uh right wing people, you know, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and I put a whole bunch of them in. And then I put in me and David Sloan Wilson, who was also with me arguing that religion is is nuanced effects. And it turned out that Sam was higher on certainty words. than you know Glenn Beck and Rush Limp and all those people. So I just wrote this up in a blog post and I showed graphically that Sam is actually more certain of himself Then these people that he's always lambased. So it was a kind of a dirty trip. But it was fun it was funny. And the closing of the first round ends with a one-two competition.

And then I think I offered like I called it the the Moral Psychology Prize or the Sam Harris Prize or something. That Oh yeah, oh yes. No that no that's okay, I forgot. I forgot a crucial thing. Sam wrote his book The moral landscape Say you know, morality is a fact. And he offered money, I think it was money,

To whoever could persuade him otherwise. Mm. And then I wrote my essay. I bet that no one will be able to persuade Sam otherwise, and here's why. And then I went then I showed that how certainly so I kinda put him in a bind. Anyway, I can't remember exactly all the details. Anyways, that's how it started. So then we kinda had like a little cold we just kind of ignored each other for for a while. My recollection of how it ended was you know Sam you know Sam is incredibly courageous and

is not a partisan, and he thinks for himself, and he does things that make people hate him on both sides. And I really do respect I always respect him for that. And it was something I think it was you know, he was being a he said something about Islam and he was being lambasted and I can't remember whether I you know, retweeted something or said something I I put up some like little tiny show of support. For him. I think that's how it went. And then Sam acknowledged and thanked me for it. And what happened was

Because our feud was in two thousand fourteen. And that was back before everything went insane. And around twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, everything went insane. And there was this incredible you know, explosion of illiberalism on campus and in the academic world, the intellectual world.

And Sam and I were then actually both on the same side. Which is we believe in being reasonable and using evidence. We ultimately we're sort of natural allies and whoever first gave a little show of support for the other was like Okay, yeah, you know what? You know, I like you.

And this might been on his podcast twice, and I I've just great admiration for him. He's a very, very smart cookie. I am I'm also a very big fan of Sam. And Flashboil 2014-2015. What the hell happened?

What contributed Two things suddenly Hockey sticking and insanity. Could it have been predicted?

No, no, I I don't think so because I find these like Big ideas that really help me think. And so I'm going to put another one out there, which is a complex dynamical system. And is this something you've talked about on your show before? So complex dynamical systems. So The human mind is really good at thinking about mechanical systems, machines

Things moving in space. We have sort of two brains. We have sort of two minds. We have a mind that's really good at thinking about objects moving in space. And so there's popular mechanics for people like doing that. And we're really good at thinking about people moving in social space and forming alliances and betrayals and soap operas and all that. And so there's people magazine for people like doing that. Those two things we're really good at. But there are a lot of things in our world that are nothing like that. Like the weather, the economy. There are complex dynamical systems where you can't even in principle

predict what it's gonna do because it's a chaotic complex system. And you can change parameters and you can kind of predict which way things are gonna go, but you can't really know. And When you change parameters, you can suddenly get a phase change. And

So mechanical systems are easy to understand, complex dynamical systems are very hard But we live within them. And so what happened, I believe Is that We hit a phase change. It it actually began in twenty fourteen. But it blew up in the academic world in twenty fifteen, and so this is what I've

called metaphorically the fall of the Tower of Babel. So if you simply wire people up, if you just connect people more and more. You think that's good, right? And we always thought that and you know, from the Roman roads and first telegram cables or the Pony Express. I mean it's good to have more communication. That's generally a good thing.

But it could have some problems. And it might be that you just get to a point where everyone's so connected that everyone is yelling or everyone's mad at everyone. So it might just be that there's more and more connection, but I think it's something else. What I've come to believe in trying to understand what the hell happened. is it's the nature of the connection changed after two thousand nine.

So once w we used to call social network Sights. They connected people. So you could use Facebook to communicate with your friends from high school. That was great. There's no problem there. But in 2009, Facebook introduced the like button. Twitter introduced the retweet button, Facebook copied it with the share button. So social media isn't just connecting people anymore, and we stopped talking about them as social networking sites. We start using the word social media platform.

Now it becomes about performance and it becomes much more viral, much more explosive. It's not about me talking with you, it's about me talking at you. in the hopes that my slam on you will get picked up by others and that will make me famous. That will get me prestige. And once everyone's motivated to do that. Well I should say once ten percent of people are motivated to do that. The system develops new properties that were not there in two thousand eight.

And most of us uh most of you listeners if they're old enough can remember You know, it used to be an amazing place, like the internet was amazing, social media was amazing, Twitter was playful and fun. It's still that in part, but it just became much nastier. One of the key innovations, I believe, was what Facebook called threaded comments. So it used to be, you know, if Barack Obama puts up a tweet in his first term, he puts it up and people can respond. And that's it. They just respond and that's it. You can say, you know, you can say you're stupid or you're terrible and that's it. You say that. But in twenty fourteen

Facebook said, How about to increase engagement? How about we let everyone fight with everyone everywhere? So if Barack Obama puts up a a Facebook post in his second term, or after twenty fourteen, Someone can, you know, say, you know, go back to Kenya. And then someone else can say to that commenter, No You are a fascist.

And then before you know it, you've got people fighting in the comments. So it's like those scenes in a barroom brawl, you got two people having a face off and suddenly everyone's breaking bottles in everyone's heads. That I believe is what happened in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. And democracy is unsustainable, institutions are collapsing, universities are going crazy. So we're now in the post Babel world where we can't have any shared understandings of truth. We can't have any shared stories, and hence the title of my Life after Babel. Adapting to a world we may never again share.

Do you have thoughts on what we can do? From A proactive Incentive perspective. to I don't want to say reverse some of these trends, but to

redirect the currents slightly in different directions. And you mentioned Chicago. One thing that really jumped out to me, this is quite a few years ago now, I wanna say, but when the sort of woke supremacy Virus started spreading throughout academia and fragility was being reinforced and tripled down upon I wanna say it was the University of Chicago put out a letter to say

we are actually going to go in the opposite direction. And it was it was notable to me because a number of friends of mine who are alumni from U Chicago said this is the first time in ten years that I've given money to the university. So there are I guess a number of questions um in this words all that I'm throwing at you. The first is Why do you think U Chicago was able to do that then or willing to do it? And would they we be willing to do it again now? Right, just to understand the incentives because I've I've seen so many people lose their posts. Doesn't really do seem to matter how high up you are. If you can be removed by the trustees, you are vulnerable.

Or Whatever mechanism exists for replacing. The top brass and then separately Let's focus on the academic side first, and then we can look at the Technological side and maybe the business side. So in the academic world

Why do you think it was possible for U Chicago to do it then? Could they do it now? And is it possible to create some type of counterbalance or change incentives such that this doesn't continue to go in the direction it's going. I can't answer that. question until I explain the dynamics that have made leaders cave throughout the intellectual world.

throughout the let's call it we have democratic institutions and we have epistemic institutions. Epistemic meaning in search of knowledge, so that's preeminently the universities and journalism, museums, other things like that. Why have they all fallen in the same way? So let me start with that and then we'll get to Chicago. So I've been trying to figure this out like every day. I've been obsessed with this since it started in twenty fourteen. That's when Greg Lukianov came to me. Greg is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and he said, John, weird stuff is happening on campus. Students are suddenly asking for protections from books, words, speakers, ideas. before then it was always administrators. And so Greg says like you know, what's going on?

The students seem to be Explaining these things. using the same cognitive distortions that I learned to not do when I was treated for depression. Greg suffers from depression and he learned cognitive behavioral therapy. So I thought Greg's idea was brilliant somehow. Universities are teaching students to think to catastrophize, overgeneralize mind reading all these distortions.

So that starts in twenty fourteen, and then it's really the fall of twenty fifteen, especially after the the Halloween incident at Yale. Where the students uh demand that Nikolas Christtakis apologize for a thoughtful, caring letter that his wife had written to the students of Silliman College. And then the president of Yale, Peter Salah, never backed up the Christacases. They demanded that they be fired. The president just gave the students everything they demanded that he could. He couldn't give them everything, but he He really made a big show of

Saying yes, I will, you know, I will you're right. And that launched a wave of protests around the country. It always goes the same way, which is a charge from a student. that something that was said was insensitive about race, gender, LGBTQ. And then there's never a finding of information. It's it blows on Twitter or other channels and then within a day or two the person's fired. No due process.

This keeps going. It happened at the New York Times. It just happened at the Association for Psychological Science, uh here An editor may have made a mistake. It looks like he probably didn't follow good process, but again, there's a mob and then the leadership. So that's what's been happening. Why are they all caving? I'm just trying to think of the incentives because it doesn't happen everywhere.

Right, there are some counter examples. Yeah. So It happens when you get Moral homogeneity. So you get an institution where the great majority or almost everybody's on one side.

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

So you have moral homogeneity, which is a crucial background variable. Moral homogeneity. You have Students? So usually it's uh members of Gen oh you have Gen Z. So the charges are usually from Gen Z or late millennials, making a charge that the leadership is vulnerable to, because the leadership is usually older white liberals. And

It's backed up with a barrage of darts. So a dart is anything that someone can do to hurt someone else You can launch a dart. on Twitter, you can make an accusation, you have no liability for it. So what you see is these leaders Suddenly they're in morally homogeneous, politically homogeneous institutions.

They are attacked with darts, they cave instantly. It's very painful. They cave instantly, that just encourages the darters to go further. So I called this in a recent Atlantic article I call this structural stupidity. That is you can have very smart people But you only get smart when bad ideas will be challenged.

And if a bad idea, so for example, at you know at universities, we all now have bias response teams. So if I say anything, And a student objects, they can report me in three ways. And they that number is post in the bathrooms. It's on the back of all the ID cards, like here's nine one one, here's campus safety, here's the bias response line. If you're offended, call this number. This is a really, really bad idea. Or at least there's no evidence that it's a good idea. But it's done everywhere. It's done everywhere. Because no one dares oppose it. Like nobody in the faculty senate will say, well wait a second, do we really want to do this? Everyone's just like, oh yeah, let's, you know, let's do this. This will be anti-racist. So you get structurally stupid communities and they all fold in exactly the same way. This is what happened in the New York Times with the firing of James Bennett. It's the same thing everywhere. Why was Chicago different? Two reasons.

So every institution has its own moral resources. Every institution has a sense of identity. And Chicago is unique. in having this really intense intellectual, like really high intellectual identity. And when I was there Students wore T shirts. University of Chicago, where fun goes to die. And they were ranked Playboy Magazine ranked them. The worst party school in America. You know, three hundredth out of three hundred. Don't go to Chicago. And they were proud of it. So if they begin with this intellectually intense identity

the background. And then the other crucial element was leadership. They had Robert Zimmer. That's it. Robert Zimmer personally was calling bullsh on all this stuff. Like this is not who we are, the caving, the demands, the the outrage mobs. Like, no, you know, we're gonna talk about ideas here. So Robert Zimmer single handedly sort of said like no. And the letter that you referred to was not from him, it was by the dean of students who sent a letter to prospective students who were coming to Chicago.

And he said at you know, at Chicago we don't do safe spaces. Now he misspoke or he that was a mistake. Because if you know, if the gay students or LGBT students want to have a club where they have certain discourse rules, great. Free association, let'em what the dean meant to say. Was our classrooms are not safe spaces in our classrooms. People can criticize what you say. And if you have that, then you don't have structural stupidity.

Hm. So if we're looking at structural stupidity, I start to think about structural dynamics and the Ways in which people are vulnerable or less vulnerable. to losing their posts.

Let's just say You are Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. And the company is doing well. And

you want to remove and I'm I don't want to speak for him, but this has been very well covered. You want to put out a letter that effectively says this is our mission. If you're aligned with this mission, great, but We cannot be responsible for every Cause or world event that pulls our direction at a given velocity.

towards whatever outcome you might want. Therefore If you Would like to discuss these things and feel like it should be done at work. Go elsewhere. We're gonna give you a fantastic severance package. Part of the reason he can do that, aside from I think being very courageous, thinking for himself and being willing to take a lot of flack in the short term in the

long term best interest of The company. Putting that aside. He's also I think in doing that unlikely to get fired. Right. It would take the board of directors to remove him, and then there's the question of, well, who would we replace him with, who would actually be a good enough operator

Two. Do a better job, gonna be very tough. I suppose what I'm wondering is within academics Do you think there's anything that can be done to provide protections or safety nets such that more people can actually take a counter position.

Yes. So let's start by understanding the complex dynamical system of a company in a capitalist economy. So All the stuff that started on campus in twenty fifteen. You know, Greg and I wrote about it in the Coddling The American Mind. We were gonna have a chapter on the Coddling Goes to Work. But there weren't enough stories in twenty seventeen when we were finishing the writing.

So we close down the book and then in twenty eighteen it all starts blowing up all this stuff, you know,'cause Gen Z graduates, they move into the corporate world, and they do the same stuff there that they were doing on campus. You know, the accusations that someone someone wore a hat that offended me, you have to punish them. You know, this is an HR issue. So all that stuff starts around twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. And then of course in the summer of George Floyd, i the political activism intensifies, you know, for again understandable reasons, but In that summer

Almost all businesses, it seems, put out a statement on Black Lives Matter. Now that was an exceptional Some are exceptional event. But that then led to pressures, that then led to a reorientation of much of corporate America, at least progressively oriented. Progressively in companies.

much like what happened to us in the academy in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. So it was very, very similar. But The difference is that companies actually have to make money. They actually have to be tied to the real world. So if they do things that backfire

that cost a lot of money without any benefit, like you know, mandatory diversity training. There you know, it takes a lot of money, there's not really any evidence it makes anything better. At some point reality. Hits companies. Universities are different, they're not like that. There is no reality. The leading ones have gigantic well, they have gigantic endowments. Yeah. No matter how bad the service is.

Parents all over the world want their kids to go to the top ten or fifteen American universities. And it doesn't matter what happens, you know, the product can suck. But the d demand for it is infinite. So universities are not tied to reality in the way that a business is the first thing. Second thing Is that Most businesses are not as uniform as universities, so

Armstrong, I presume he's right of center or libertarian, it you know? I don't want to speak for him. Yeah, I'm not I I honestly have no idea. But in any case, yeah. But I you know, I don't think he's progressive. I think he was you know, so my point is that a number of right leaning CEOs did that. He was the first big one, and it's called the mission focus movement that you know what? Our company

is not here to fix everything in the world. We're here to provide a great service for our customers. So mission focus. And a few right leaning companies did that. And the one that really changed things then was when Netflix did it. Because Netflix is a very progressive company, hugely important culturally. And when the Netflix CEO said something similar, which was if your values mean that you can't work on certain projects, Maybe you shouldn't be working at Netflix. And I've s I speak to a lot of managers and CEOs and leaders and like Oh, they were so thrilled because almost all leaders hate this woke stuff. Almost all university presidents hate it. It makes their lives hell.

So In the business world, they're able to push back. And they have been. So the pendulum is swinging back in business. I don't yet see a sign on campus of a pendulum swinging back. I think it will happen eventually. The complex dynamical system is much more conducive.

to a kind of a crazy ideological thing divorced from reality. On campus. But the way it's gonna break, I believe. Is Things get sort of tense enough, unpleasant enough, wasteful enough.

And then some school is gonna break. And I originally thought Chicago was the school and lots of schools would follow and they didn't. Nobody followed Chicago. I mean, Mitch Daniels at Purdue, but that's a different story. He's a conservative. So I'm on the advisory board of the University of Austin. Are you involved with it at all? It's it's in your hometown there. I'm not involved, but I I have some passing familiarity. For people who don't have any familiarity, could you just explain? What it is.

So it's a university founded on the idea of we're gonna rethink what a university should be. And Pano Canelos is the president. He was the president of St. John's College in Maryland. And so it's gonna be focused on it's not gonna have all the all the administrators, all the bells and whistles, it's gonna really be focused on sort of a classics education at the beginning. But then practical as you move on. So a lot of not just Take a course, get a credit for sitting in a seat.

But do things as part of a team to solve a problem. So it's gonna be given that higher ed now is so expensive. And it's not as good as it used to be. The product is just not as good. It's not as much fun. It's not as rigorous. So given that the product is declining while the price goes up. Austin is developing a model where the price is much, much lower. The product is a hell of a lot of fun. It's very exciting. Now it's just one university.

But the idea is it's gonna be a model for a lot of other universities to either change or be founded. Because I think we do need disruption and innovation. We need alternatives. We can't just have the one sort of Ivy League model.

of top universities w and they're all making the same mistakes at the same time. I have a number of questions that that flo the surface and I apologize for what is gonna be a very inelegant. way of posing them, but I'm gonna give you a menu of options and I'd love for you to choose whichever is of the greatest interest. So something that came to mind was

How you have Preserved. your ability or insured your ability. Two speak very openly about these things by maybe diversifying your identity and professional career. So not just teaching, but also books and so on speaking, I assume. So you have

A number of backup parachutes, I would say, perhaps in in a sense. So maybe that's something to talk about. But What I wanted to ask you specifically related to University of Austin because I did do a bit of reading related to it in prep for the Neil Ferguson conversation. It seems like and I don't know if this coverage is accurate, but that Some people have been start to finish

strong supporters. There are and have been a number of very notable names involved, so I encourage people to check it out. It seems like there have also been people who agreed to be on advisory boards and so on who have folded Or broken rank. With Public criticism. How would you describe the

the reception and some of those dynamics if what I'm reading is accurate. We're in A space That is heavily politicized. There's a lot of attacks almost all on Twitter and social media. Most professors are reasonable.

Most professors are Left, center, left. They believe in free speech, they believe in that in class we should talk about ideas. So wherever you go, most people are reasonable, but the dynamics are such. That if you stick your neck out. The small fringe of academic Twitter is gonna call you racist, sexist, transphobe, whatever.

And for a while that was really scary. And I think now it's kind of like It's kinda like the boy who cried wolf ten million times, you know, once everyone's accused of racism, sexism, transphobia, islamophobia. I think now people are just so exhausted that I think now it's a little easier to to stand that you know, that that fringe on Twitter. When the University of Austin was

Announced. I think there was a mistake in that some of the you know, some of the original material was a little bit pugnacious, like and it sounded sort of like this is gonna be an anti woke university. You know, once any particle is labeled like anti woke. Like now suddenly it's like oh, you know, now it's So I think there was a little brouhaha uh that was a I think that was a one fumble. that the the people running it made in what was otherwise I think a very good launch. I mean I think they really explained well what it's gonna be about. So I wish they hadn't done that, because what I've learned from study morality is

In a polarization spiral or a culture war. The harder you hit your enemy, the stronger they get. And so you don't win by punching them really hard. You can never destroy them. In a real world, you can literally kill them and take their land. In a culture where you can't do that.

And so I think it's really important. This is what we've done at Heterdox Academy. So I founded an organization called Heterodox Academy. It's now run by John Tomassi as our president. And our attitude is we're not here to fight the culture war. We're here to build great things. We're here to help people remember why they love universities, why universities are so important. And I think Austin is doing that. So I think early on, you know, it was a new thing and you know, it wasn't clear what it was, and there were one or two people who left the advisory uh advisory board at that early stage.

But I think now it's settled in, it's being successful, it doesn't yet have a full year of student it had a summer program. And I think we need variation, we need innovation. And so I'm actually very excited about it. Yeah, I agree. I'm excited to to watch it. Could you say a bit more about Heterox Academy? So I gave a talk in twenty eleven. I was invited by the president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology to be part of a panel at our annual conference on the future of social psychology. And, you know, we talked about my stepping out in nineteen ninety three. I'm not on a team. I was still very much a democrat. I voted for democrats, but by the time I was writing The Righteous Mind, I began to really take seriously that you need viewpoint diversity. You need conservatives and libertarians. You can't just have a bunch of progressives.

Studying psychology, you get bad results. And so I gave a talk on how, you know, this is a problem. This is a problem. We don't have any conservatives. And I went through all kinds of methods of finding a conservative social psychologist. I couldn't find any, and I finally found one. So I gave a talk on this. And I wasn't kicked out of the field. People actually said, Oh you know, you're right. Like actually

This would help us if we had some political diversity. So that was twenty eleven. And this was just a problem about the faculty. And some other professors who were there.

liked what I said, they said, Yeah, we think this is a problem too. So we wrote a paper together on laying it out more formally, and I think the title was Political diversity will improve social psychological science. So this is a straight academic faculty project. And then it turns out actually the same problem was happening in law schools and sociology and a lot of fields. Their research was not reliable because Of orthodoxy, political orthodoxy.

So we all got together and said, Hey, let's let's you know put up a website. And Nick Rosencrantz, a law professor at Georgetown, came up with the name Heterox Academy. It's the opposite of orthodox. Academy. Orthodox means straight one. There's only one way of thinking. Heterodox means there should be a variety of ways of thinking. We need that.

In order to be successful. So we put up the website, we started it as a blog around like September twelfth. of twenty fifteen. And very s right after that, Yale blew up, the universities blew up, and suddenly it was like, Wait a second. We thought this was just a faculty thing, but now it turns out, like the campuses are going insane, the students are behaving in this strange way, they're saying everything is violence, everything is danger, everything's a threat. So Heterox Academy

grew from just this faculty project to really being much more about university culture. To do our jobs we have to have not just viewpoint diversity. But a sense of Grace, a sense of tolerance, a sense of intellectual humility and generosity. We have to be able to think together. We have to have people like Rick Schweder

Saying, Okay, you asserted that? Well let me try the opposite. And then they don't get fired for doing it. So that's what we're trying to do. Heterox Academy now has their c we have a couple of big projects. One is we're branching out and having campus communities. We're going to be working directly on campus with our many we have about five thousand members. I invite everyone who's listening here If you are a professor. Or an administrator, if you're an insider

to universities, if you're part of the community that is tasked with preserving these precious institutions please go to Heterodoxacademy. org And click on About Us and join. You can see our membership, it's free. We have five thousand professors. as members and we're equally divided left, right, libertarian. We're sort of all over the map.

And it's a wonderful community. If you if you if you remember when it was fun, when there were jokes and exciting ideas, if you remember when everything wasn't So dangerous. Please join us,'cause that's what we're trying to recall and restore. Who are some of the thinkers who have informed how you think about Intellectual

heterodoxy and I will throw one out there because I I think that John Stuart Mill. Is this quote? From John Stirmill. He who knows his own side of the case knows little of that.

His own side of the case. only his own side of the case knows little of that exactly. That's right. So John Stuart Mill is the patron saint of Viewpoint Diversity. In fact, I would urge I should have a copy of it here somewhere. one of the greatest works of the liberal tradition is on liberty.

It's a kind of a long book with dense prose, but chapter two is the key chapter on diversity of thought or freedom of thought. Liberty of thought, I think it is. So at Headrock's Academy, we took that chapter, it's 15,000 words. We cut it in half, we edit it down, so you have a shortened version, much easier to read, and it's beautifully illustrated by brilliant artist Dave Cicerelli. So if you go to Heteroxacademy.org, Slash mill. It's a free ebook. You can buy it on Amazon for twenty dollars, but we put out a free ebook because we want students to read it. And it'll really, I mean, it really just makes the case. that you need viewpoint diversity if you want to get smart.

If you want to figure things out, an amazing thing happens, is what I've really taken to heart from studying John Stuart Mill, is If you want to improve your thought, the world will help you if you ask. And if you go to people who disagree with you And say Here's what I'm thinking. Where am I wrong? They'll tell you.

And so when when Greg and I wrote the Cardin in the American Mind I paid seven social justice activists to read it, paid them each seven hundred dollars. And they read it and they gave me their comments and their criticisms. One or two of them were you know were kind of Pissed off or annoyed. But the others were actually like Oh, you know, this is interesting. Like we really

We really engage with each other and they made the book better. So you really need to seek out criticism. You need to seek out people who differ from you, and then actually you'll get smarter. Have you found other people who have studied morality to defuse or defang their anger in the same way that you experienced it yourself? Is that a pattern that you've observed in other people?

What, the ability to defang the anger to like get past it? Right, to well well you're your I wouldn't say cease to be angry, but lost your anger. in the course of studying morality, is that something that you have seen replicated? Oh yes.

So first of all, the Buddhists and the Stoics. These are the two most concentrated wisdom traditions on earth, I believe. My first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was about I I read all the ancient wisdom I could find, took out all the psychological claims. So chapter four of that book is on the the ancient idea.

No, why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye? when you cannot see the plank on your own, we're all hypocrites. So following certain wisdom traditions, especially Buddhism and Stoicism, but also Christianity, Judaism you find these injunctions to go past good and evil to be more More tolerant. So this is just sort of the progression of wisdom that

Most great cultures have have realized. You also see it in a lot of people. I think as as people get older, so at least in men, our testosterone levels like They're really high in the teens, twenties, and then they go sort of go down steadily. And that steady drop, I think it also mirrors the drop in violent criminality, and I I believe it also mirrors the drop in like aggressive rock music. I used to like always need loud music and As I get older I I don't.

It also it's a calming. So you know, young men are more passionate and moralistic, perhaps, and then as you get older you get kinda calmer. But there are lots of paragons of this, Darrell Davis being perhaps the pre one of the preeminent ones. Daryl Davis of a black musician, blues musician. who was uh playing in a bar and ended up sitting next to a Ku Klux Klan member and he's conversing with the guy. And rather than getting upset or angry or running away, he listens to him.

Listen to him. Gets in a conversation with him. And they develop. A friendship. And he gets the guy to give up his robe and leave the clan.

And he's done this hundreds of times. Wow, how do you spell Daryl's name? D A R Y L or is it double R Darrell Davis is D A V I S. He's got uh one or two TED Talks that are great and he's got a book or two. So Daryl Davis. What an inspiring example of how Is your goal to impress everyone else with your righteous reaction? Well, if so, then you should get angry and you should yell and scream and you should post things on Twitter. Or is your goal to actually change someone?

And if your goal is to change someone Listen to them. Try to understand them. And if you do that, what Daryl says is You listen to them like they've never been listened to before.

And then an amazing thing happens. Then They'll listen to you. So that's really the magic. And this is also Dale Carnegie. This is so many wise people. That the things we do to show off our morality for others

End up. Isolating us and making us stupid. And unhappy oftentimes. Yeah. Anger in the brain is actually an approach anger's not a negative emotion.

Anger in the brain is looks more like a positive emotion because a shared anger is thrilling. And that's part of what's driving us off a cliff as a country. What Would you say Alright, some of the

Conclusions or observations made in the happiness hypothesis that you revisit most often or Underscore for yourself. And what is your set point if you have one? So the set point question is easy. That just refers to the fact that happiness is heritable.

And identical twins separated at birth will tend to be similarly happy. And my set point's sort of right in the middle. I'm generally optimistic, but I'm I've been depressed at a couple of points in my life. I'm not very prone to it, but I've had I've had some. So I'm sort of in the middle.

But the level of happiness that you live at is not your set point. Where you live is sort of a range around your set point depending on a few conditions. Those conditions are basically love and work, as as Sigmund Freud said. If you're doing well in those, you'll be at the top end of of your range. So I teach a course at NYU.

A graduate. seminar called Work Wisdom and Happiness. And it's a positive psychology class, but in the last year I've sort of readjusted the syllabus. I've rewired the course. The title could be Smarter, stronger, more sociable.

And so we have sections on how do you get smarter. And you do that, it turns out the big thing you do, turn off your notifications, get your attention back. Read Johan Harry's book Stolen Focus. So You can make yourself ten or fifteen IQ points. Smarter.

If you can regain control of your attention. And cut down on the moralism. Those are the two big steps. So how do you get smarter? How do you get stronger? That's the coddling of the American mind, anti fragility, Nasim Taleb.

You get stronger by challenging yourself. By exposing yourself to threats and dangers and within limits that you then surmount. And we have to do this with kids. Um And how do you get more sociable? Well, it's actually some of the same skills.

But the main one is really listen to people. And you can't do that as long as you're always distracted, as long as you're always on your phone. So there are some really easy things you can do, and then the students learn to do some harder things. But if they can get smarter Stronger.

And more sociable. Then they will be more successful. At work and in relationships. And if they're more successful in work and relationships than I promise them on the first day. Then they will be happier.

Because that's how you live at the high end of your set range. is by having your love and your work go well. Is This course in any capacity available online? Or could it be made available online? Any aspect? Maybe maybe a reading list, maybe

Oh the syllabus is online. You know what, I should do something like that. So Right now, so it was just a seminar at Stern. with thirty five MBA students two sections a year. And I've just raised it to fifty five students and I'll teaching more sections I should put something up.

You know what? I'm gonna start a sub stack. Oh, this is great. I'm I'm actually gonna start a sub stack in January. I can't believe I have the I didn't think of this. The sub stack people would kill me for not announcing this. It's gonna be called After Babbel. Is the name of the substaff. And I can just put up whatever I want. I used to blog at RighteousMind.com, but that was not much.

So I'm gonna start blogging and I thank you for that. Tim. Put some el whatever I can put easily online or in there. I will put there at least the reading list in the syllabus. And eventually, maybe uh eventually, maybe I could

You know, tape the lectures or do something to But it uh yeah, I'll think about it. Is there a department and number for the class? Something that people could Look for online. I I'm not sure how that would work in MBA programs, but I'm just thinking, you know, the class that I used to visit at Princeton was ELE four ninety one, right? High tech entrepreneurship. So it made it easy to find.

There's no point in them finding it because it's it fills up with Stern students, you know, even if you're at NYU but not at Stern, you can't take it. So all my stuff is at Jonathanight.com. I will find a way to put it on my site and then I will I think our discussion uh it might air before New Year's, but the sub stack isn't gonna be up until late January probably. I'll do something. Thank you. And it's easy for us to put in the show notes. So once anything is available, we can add it to the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast and people can find you by just searching H A I D T.

Let's talk about Religion. And happiness. So I have observed I'm not the only one. Generally speaking, I would say

The Let's just say self described rational Materialist. left leaning.

Folks. to be pretty unhappy. Overall. And uh I have found very smart Very thoughtful. People who would identify as religious to On average be

Quite a bit. happier. And I know happy can be a a slippery term, but If we're looking at work and love, work and relationships. They seem to check a lot of boxes very well, but it seems to me and I'm just gonna

Speak for a second here. That With religion, you also remove a lot of Uncertainty, decision fatigue, paradox of choice. that makes life less of a death by a thousand paper cuts. And uh maybe that also contributes to general sense of well being that many of your decisions are more automated, perhaps the people you spend time with, perhaps your weekly structure, the architecture of your life.

How do you think about this? What have you seen in your observations and studies With respect to religion and happiness and are there ingredients from religion. that secular folks can borrow.

To get some of that upside. So there's a huge amount of research on happiness and who's happy. And the two big things that really come out consistently are Religious people are happier. And married people are happier.

religion and marriage are uh the two giant demographic factors or quasi demographic factors that uh that seem to go with happiness. And then there's a lot of question as to why. Why does religion make people happy? It might be what you said it makes you know y you don't have to think about things, you have a sense of meaning, you don't worry about the afterlife, whatever it is. No, it turns out When they look when you do empirical studies at what elements of religious people's lives. correlate with happiness.

Overwhelmingly It's nothing about belief. It's participation in a community on a weekly basis. Especially a community that has some sort of moral principle, some sense of uplifting, some sense of self control, binding, moral responsibility. And so actually this allows me to go back to Durkheim. I dropped that name in before, but didn't really tell listeners anything about him. So Emil Durkheim.

is one of the most important sociologists in history. He's writing in France in the eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds, and one of his early works is this incredible study of suicide. Now this is when European countries are just beginning to collect statistics. And he goes through all the data he can get on suicide in different countries in Europe. And he's looking for what makes the suicide rate go up and down.

And he treats the suicide rate as a thing in itself, it's a sociological fact, it's an emergent fact about a country. Its rate goes up and down. What makes it go up and down? Well, when you go to war, the suicide rate Goes way down. People are bound together. They don't kill themselves. When you look at who in a country themselves, it turns out

If you're married, you're less likely to. If you're mad with children, you're even less likely to. Whereas if you're Protestant, you're more likely to, but if you're Catholic or Jewish, you're less likely to. And over and over what he finds is the degree to which people are bound into a society. The less likely they are to kill themselves. Now, in East Asian cultures and many cultures, you kill yourself because you're too tightly bound in and you're shamed. But in Western cultures

Our problem is anom or normlessness. You have a sense of meaninglessness, you're not connected. That's why Americans and Westerners kill themselves mostly. And so Back to religion.

If you're an atheist and you're not part of a community, especially if you're a new atheist and you're angry or whatever, but The protective factor seems to be being bound into relationships and community. And that fits with everything else I know in psychology. Mm. The comment on wartime also makes me think about

Tribe by Sebastian Younger, which uh highly recommend to people. It really Underscores. The fragility of isolation. And also the fragility of Fetishizing comfort in a way.

Take a look. At that. Well Jonathan, we we've covered a lot here. I could ask many more questions, but what have I neglected to ask? And I do have a question about

heresies of yours in a moment. But is there anything that you would like We haven't talked about what's happening to Gen Z. We haven't talked about what's happening to kids. You know, I talked about them before in a sort of negative way, like Gen Z shows up on campus and then all of a sudden

There are all these problems. I don't get angry I'm not moralistic. We have to understand what's happening to Gen Z. So I just want to talk if I can just talk a little bit that. And could you also define Gen Z And then please continue. Yeah, so millennials are those who were born in nineteen eighty two.

And we used to think that it would go to maybe two thousand. But it turns out that Kids were born in nineteen ninety six and later. are different from those born, say, nineteen ninety four and earlier. I mean it's a it's a surprisingly sharp cut. equivalent to what we find with birth year nineteen forty six. You know, the the post war world really was different to grow up in.

And I believe so I'm drawing on work by Jean Twangi, but I've also added uh she and I are working together and I've added a lot. What happened is that If you were born in say nineteen ninety, You didn't get an iPhone until maybe around two thousand nine is when teenager ten is when teenagers started getting it. So if you're born in nineteen ninety, you didn't get an iPhone, a smartphone. Until you're twenty.

And you didn't get on social media, you might have been on Facebook partly, but you don't live on social media until you have your own smartphone. Whereas if you're born in nineteen ninety seven You are thirteen. In twenty ten, when you might get your first smartphone.

And you might get on Instagram in twenty twelve when huge numbers did. So I believe Gen Z is defined by the fact that they got smartphones and social media During early puberty. There's a lot of research pointing to early puberty, around around eleven to thirteen for girls, twelve to fifteen for boys. What's coming into your brain then is really important'cause your your frontal cortex is is wiring itself up.

So when human beings are raised without much independent, but yes with a phone and they spend their childhood just interacting with the screen and especially social media. I believe it it messes up. Cortical development. The girls in particular, the rates of anxiety and depression are more th uh up much more than a hundred percent.

Since twenty ten. The rate of self harm, hospitalization for self harm, is nearly tripled for preteen girls. So Gen Z is in big, big trouble. They're hurting, they're fragile. They're not doing well in the workplace. Managers are are finding them very hard to work with.

So we have a generation that's running off the rails. And this is not a moralistic thing, like oh those kids these days. This is a compassionate thing. Like these are our children. Like my kids are Thirteen and sixteen. Everyone either has kids or is you know, is uh has nieces and nephews. So this is I think the greatest emergency we face, the greatest health emergency. I think for kids this is much, much bigger than Covid. Covid was a

Big deal for old people. It wasn't a big deal for children in terms of the risk, but this is, you know, a doubling, more than doubling of suicide rates for kids since twenty ten. So that's what I'm working on now. What decisions have you made it? In your parenting.

That you feel Have been perhaps Most impactful, less typical, or the Venn diagram of those two overlapping. The terrible mental health of Gen Z is caused by two factors. One is the vast overprotection.

Kids need to uh practice independent, self governance from the time they're seven or eight, they need independence, but they don't get it anymore. You and I when we were growing up, I mean you're younger than me, but I presume you were allowed to roam around your neighborhood when you were eight years. I was free range. Yeah, riding bikes everywhere when I was younger. I was also in a rural environment, but yeah, I was out and about very early. So kids kids must have free range childhoods. They must practice independence. And uh we they had that before the nineties. And in the nineties, things got incredibly safe. We locked up the drunk drivers, we took the perverts off the street, crime plummets.

But we freaked out about child abduction unnecessarily. So in the nineties we stopped letting kids out. And this affects Gen Z in the late millennials. Anyway, but you asked about me. So what my wife and I did, we live in here in New York City in Greenwich Village. We, because we're friends with Lenore Sceneze, who wrote this fantastic book, Free Range Kids, we let our kids out to play in Washington Square Park.

We sent them out on errands. When they were eight, nine years old. You know, New York City was very safe back then. It's a little more dangerous now, but it was very, very safe in the mid in the in the twenty tens. Um And we sent them out and we had them walk to school way you know, a year or two before

before anyone else was was doing it. So I'm very glad we did that. Um We also made it clear no social media, at least until high school, absolutely none in middle school. And that's been very good. When they start sixth grade, my kids tell me everyone's on Instagram and we said, No, you're we're not gonna let you do it.

The one mistake I made was that when my son wanted Fortnite in sixth grade And we said no. Because video games can be addictive. But now that I've dug into the literature a lot more, now I see that Yes, a lot of boys do get in trouble from video games because they're on it so much that they're addicted to it and it pushes out everything else. But a couple hours a day.

For boys. to be in a group that's battling other boys, it turns out that's actually a good thing. And my my son was somewhat cut off. In sixth grade. Quick question. Good in what respects? How how is that assessed? Just in terms of acting as a release valve for aggression or social cohesion?

Group dynamics. So the release valve idea from Freud is does not end up being true. Kids don't need to blow off aggression. It's not like that. It's rather that Girls and boys each need to practice their gendered behaviors this is what play is. Play for all mammals is the way you practice in childhood the skill you'll need as an adult. And so boys and girls have very different play. Boys tend to Break up into groups to compete with other groups. And multiplayer video games allow them to do that.

So I'm not saying these are great. I'm saying ideally the kids should be out having adventures, but given that all the kids are home, they're not allowed out. Until they're, you know, eleven, twelve years old. So at least a multiplayer video game allows them to be part of a group. Now it's not a very creative group. The rules are all set by the company. So it's not like video games are anywhere near as good as being out on their own. But they're not bad. Until it gets to be heavy.

So that was a small mistake. Once Covet hit, we did let him get Fortnite and then that was the only way he talked with his friends. So that was okay. The one mistake I think we did make. We tried a few different summer camps, we never quite found one. But I wish we'd found a really good summer and I would urge this a for everybody who's a parent of young kids. From the time your kid is about eight or nine, certainly. I'd say eight. Find a sleep away camp that is pretty unstructured and unsupervised. The kids have to have a lot of independent. You know, some summer camps now are so overprotective you can't go to the bathroom unless you have an escort.

And sometimes you need two escorts,'cause what if one escort falls down and gets hurt? Like that's crazy, crazy overprotective everywhere. But if you can find a summer camp That is not crazy over protective. Send your kid there every summer. That I think is is one of the few

Developed skills to be out in the woods. So I I wish we'd done that. I was fortunate in that respect. I I got sent off Two Summer camps.

in Wyoming where we would work on ranches and got kicked by horses and I mean I didn't uh suffer any terrible injuries, but it wasn't free of injuries, but that was okay. Nothing was cataclysmic. And That I think combined, I mean, if I don't have kids, but if if I do, and I hope I do at some point, I also think A year abroad in

A critical window similar to mine. Because of that forced independence And there are other reasons, there are other compelling reasons, but I came back a fundamentally different person in terms of my confidence in my abilities to handle uncertainty and to adapt. It was just

Night and day. Complete complete face shift. That's right. That's right. That's how kids learn to manage risk for themselves. You learn to be a risk taker. When we overprotect kids, we're not doing them any favors. We're not keeping them safe. We're increasing their odds of anxiety and depression, self harm and suicide.

And we're depriving them of the ability to judge risks for themselves. They're gonna be less successful, less likely to start businesses. No, we we've really messed up Gen Z. I feel like one other Unexpected blessing in my life was transitioning from a very bad public school on Long Island to a very good boarding school in New Hampshire, which was actually Largely my idea.

encouraged by teachers, a handful of good teachers at the Pretty low quality. public school on Long Island who effectively said you should try to get out of here. So I do owe them thanks. Yeah. when I went to the boarding school, which was very similar to, let's say, a Dead Poet Society type of setup, but

Class is six days a week. Mandatory sports. Mm-hmm. Looking back The mandatory sports I think was the force multiplier.

That allowed everything else to go more smoothly. On so many levels. So if I get to the point, I hope I do when I'm parenting it, I think I think physical activity in group sports will probably play a compelling role.

Research to support that, but Oh th there is, there is, but just two points I I think you're basically right, but just two points of nuance. One is to the extent that it's heavily supervised and there's a coach, it's less nutritious. They're not gonna learn as much. The ideal is for kids to be out making up their own games, enforcing the rules because then

you you have to keep the game going. You have to learn how to adapt to other kids. Whereas if there's a coach or a referee, then what you learn is how do I get the referee to come in on my side? And that's good preparation for college today, where if somebody says something, how do I get a dean to punish him? But that's bad preparation for life. That's the first thing. Second thing. I just came across a finding that

Participation in individualist sports like gymnastics and especially ballet. is bad. It actually is conducive to bad mental health. I would never let my daughter do ballet. But team sports where you're you know, soccer, basketball, where you really function as a team. over and over again, those have very good effects on mental health and development. So I would agree with that. Mm.

Yeah, you know, my so my sport was wrestling, which was certainly an individual sport. practiced in a team context, you would have wrestling partners and so on. I would. Have A child do wrestling.

I think. Now I'd have them wear headgear'cause I don't think cauliflower ears work. Terribly well for most people. It it goes doubly for females, I would say. And if you haven't seen Cyfluris on uh female ears. It is scar tissue that will not go away unless it's surgically removed. Saw a lot of it in Japan. in judo players, uh male and female. Lots of cauliflower, but

I found it to be For me personally at least. A Excellent venue for proving to myself. that I could exceed the limitations I thought I had. And in terms of

work capacity and pain tolerance also I will say critical critical component. So I can't Totally. With any conviction say that it was wrestling that did this, although I have Some belief that it contributed.

The coach. John Buxton. change the lives of almost every athlete. He coached. And

To this day, I'm still close to him, and many people in that wrestling team went on to do some Some pretty outstanding things and they have all To my knowledge, just about all of them have mentioned. Mr Buxton. We we we have a tough time talking about it. I have to ask you a question then.

Was he did he have a tough coaching style, or did he have like a warm nurturing style? He was extremely, extremely tough. And this is what I was gonna bring up. He was extremely tough. He uh did not suffer fools gladly at all. If People complained about something they could fix themselves or should try to fix themselves, he did not tolerate it. He uh was a very tough coach.

Good. And he was a very, very, very good performer. So he himself had been an outstanding wrestler and could go toe to toe with anyone in the group, including people who went on to become all Americans. I mean, granted in in their particular corner of the wrestling world. And Exceptionally tough, and he would give

occasional positive feedback. I don't want to say he was stingy, but you've really had to earn. You really, really had to earn it. That's what I figured. Because Wrestling is probably the best anti fragile sport there is, that is more than any other sport, wrestling is really gonna be about

developing your anti fragility, your strength in the face of adversity, testing your strength. So the sport itself is very conducive to growth in that way. And I kinda knew, given how grateful you were, I kinda knew that he was gonna be a tough coach, not a not a warm nurturing coach. Because you really need to to get the full benefit of the growth into strength, you need someone to push you. You need someone with high standards, you need someone to enforce those standards, you need to strive for them. A few years ago when I gave a talk on the coddling of the American mind, I was sitting next to somebody who'd been, I think, the head of the N CAA. Or high up in it. And he this was like twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. He said

The tough coaching style, it's not that it's banned, but it's that Coaches are fine and they can't use the tough style anymore. Because the kids will cry, they'll report them, they'll say, No, you know, you need to be nurturing. Um and so tough coaching I think is is going out because what if you hurt a kid's feelings? And so in so many ways we've accepted, you know, and that's the great untruth number one of the calling American mind is what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Now that's

wrong. That's a falsehood. But that's what many people now believe. And I think your experience really shows that no, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That's what Nietzsche said, and that's what the psychology supports. So You know, I think for the lesson here for parents and teachers is we need to have standards. We need to push kids to meet the standards. Sometimes the kids are not going to be happy. And as long as we can be reported for pushing the kids, we're not going to push the kids. And the whole generation goes down down the tubes. So that's what we're doing. Yeah and

Coach Buxton also I think fundamentally believed I'll speak for myself personally, I don't want to speak for other folks, but He would reinforce the belief that he saw in me the capacity to do more to perform better. And it was in that context. Z

Being a tough coach. was the nice thing to do. Does that make sense? In service of realizing that unrealized potential. And I think all of the athletes he coached felt that way. That he saw something in us that we couldn't easily see, and he was pushing us to unlock that potential. So it was not

abusive for the sake of, say, breaking someone down, like perhaps a drill sergeant, might serve the function of like shared privation in that type of environment. I think there's a purpose to that and I think it actually can be good for the collective, but in this particular wrestling context The Wellspring Of the toughness. Came from a place of In some cases explicitly saying you can do better and I know you can do better.

And that was powerful. And that is beautiful. I think what you've just done there is you've stated what the Telos of teaching should be. Telos is this Greek word that I'm very fond of nowadays. It means the the end or purpose for which something is done. Yeah, the tealus of medicine is health. What is the telos of a university and and I've been focusing on the research aspect where our telos is truth.

But we're also teachers. And Artelo says teachers is not truth. And I've been saying, Oh, you know, it's the education of our kids, it's learning, teaching. But I think what you said is actually better. The telos of a teacher is doing this service

Of realizing their untapped potential. That's what we're trying to do. That's what we should be trying to do. And we don't always do it. Yeah, I've been very fortunate in that respect to have had a handful of teachers who We're Unrelenting. in their

pushing towards the truth that they saw, which was their students could in fact do the hard things. And that was true. I I'll I'll give thanks to another teacher Professor Shimano. Who was my first Japanese teacher. And

Surprise, surprise, when I transferred from Spanish to Japanese, I found Japanese to be extremely difficult. And I Almost quit, I want to say twice. once just because of the the difficulty with the language grammatically, and the second time when we started delving into the various writing systems in Japanese and I was talked off the ledge. By

Professor Shimano. who was able to just say, like, give it some time. I think you can do this. And I'm betting that I can help you do this.

And Good God, if I had not If I had not listened to that. If I push back, if I become offended and walked. from that class, my life would not be what it is today.

in any respect. So feel very, very grateful. Let's talk just a little bit if there's anything that you'd care to add about Intellectual anti-fragility. Are there other things that people can do, other practices. they can experiment with other resources. that you would suggest they look to to develop intellectual

Antifertility. So I I created a a resource, an online resource with uh Caroline Mel was working with me originally at Header Rock's Academy, but we it we it branched out. Um if listeners go to constructiv org We've created a program called Perspectives. that kind of walks you through some of the moral psychology, like why are we like this? Why are we so tribal? Why do we have confirmation bias?

And it teaches you how to open your mind and open your heart and it teaches you how to engage with people. And how to learn from them, how to listen. So all the things we've been talking about, if you go to constructive dialogue, and yes, dialogue is D I A L O G U E dot org we have a program that we created called Perspectives. It used to be called Open Mind. And if listeners go there.

It was designed. for use in college courses, like especially in orientation, because if everyone in a group has these concepts and they use these tools, you're gonna have great discussions. You're gonna be able to talk about hard things. It works really well in businesses as well. So that's one resource. Another resource.

I think what I found really helped me. when I was writing The Righteous Mind was I just subscribed to the best writing on the other side. So I was very much on the left when I started the book. And I would read The New Republic uh in the New York Times were things I read back when The New Republic was a good magazine. But I I subscribed to National Review and the Wall Street Journal.

And National Review has all these really smart center right intellectuals, great writing. And I found that and I I would read about current events like for you know on the left and the right I just understood things much better. You know, it's kind of trite, but you literally can't understand something from looking at a single perspective. You kinda have to walk around it and look at it from all. All sides.

So, you know, resources are out there and the the internet is such that it will guide you to fantastic resources from each perspective. And if you don't seek them out, then what you get If you're on the left. You do encounter some conservative ideas, but usually you encounter reports of them in their worst form, or reports of them being held up to ridicule. And same thing if you're on the right. So yeah, if you want to be smarter and stronger. You must seek out different perspectives. It's kinda trite, but there it is.

So constructive dialogue.org and we'll link to all of these in the show notes and it I'll also create a URL by the time this comes up. It'll work. Which will just be Tim.blog. Slash Height H A I D T and that will forward to this episode so people can find all the links in the show notes. Really easily.

Let me ask you the billboard question. I'm curious. Okay. The Billboard question. A dead end and I'll take full blame for that if it is. But if you could put a message A quote.

Anything at all on a Billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get something out to billions of people, assuming they would all understand it. Mm-hmm. What might you put on that billboard? So if I could put something up on a billboard, actually I'm gonna I'm gonna nominate two. I feel if you'll could be the front and the back of the building. I'll I'll give you two.

Okay. So the first uh is a quote from a a Zen Buddhist philosopher in the eighth century. Sing San Was his name Chinese Buddhist philosopher? I've used this quote in most of my books. I'll just I'll just read I'll read the whole thing.

He says. The perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. Do not like, do not dislike. All will then be clear. Make a hair breadth difference, and heaven and earth are set apart.

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, Never before or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease. So

This is what we were talking about before about Getting beyond moralism. When you're moralistic, when you're judging, when you're saying this is good, this is bad. You get stupider. You don't understand the nuance of things.

So this quote is about sort of demoralisation, not like being demoralized, but like sucking the moralism or the morality out of something and just trying to understand it. So that's the first. And then if I have the back of the billboard. I would put this quote.

From Joseph Campbell. So Joseph Campbell was a professor at I think it was Brynmore Sarah Lawrence, rather. in the late twentieth century he studied myths and there was a wonderful PBS series. on the uh I think the hero with a thousand faces was one of his books. So this motto, this really Calms me because

I'm very alarmed at the way Things are going the way our complex dynamical system is kind of veering into chaos. And I found this quote to be really, really comforting. I I sort of have it up On my you know, my walls various places. He says the lesson from his studying of

Myths, hero's journey, the stories around the world, is this quote. Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. The warriors approach.

Is to say yes to life. Yes to it all. So that's what I'd put up. Love it. That's a great combination. And

You mentioned Buddhism and Stoicism earlier. I don't know if you feel this way, but I have felt over time that there's tremendous overlap. Oh yeah. In those two

Let's just call it lineages or broadly speaking schools of thought. And I suppose Both are also related to your front and back of the billboard in the sense of

Cultivating Equanimity. A sense of being unperturbed by the The vicissitudes, if I could use a fancy word.

of life, the daily flux, all of these tiny and large tragedies that befall everyone at various points. When do you or how do you revisit some of these practical philosophies. For yourself. Let's just

Let's just say that you're going through a period or there's an event where you've you start to feel disregulated, consumed by Emotions. What do you do? Thank you for that. That's what You know, earlier you asked me like do I have practices? Um

So beginning you know, there was the summer of twenty seventeen, I think it was, when Trump was like threatening nuclear war against You know, there's a possibility of like nuclear war with North Korea. And um Uh And I really thought like

he I think he might actually want to do it. I was really thinking like this really could be the end of the world. And it was then that I started rereading stoic writings in the morning. And my favorite two are Marcus Aurelius Meditations, the the Gregory Hayes translation is I think the best one. And then also Epictetus. Just yeah, it's his collected collected works. And what I do, whenever I read

I do all my reading electronically now and because I like to copy out. Text. So I I copy my favorite lines out into an Evernote file. And so what I do in the morning is I even have it in my calendar. How do I record it my calendar? Every day repeating there's a couple of different things I do, but it's basically either reading stoicism or Buddhism or reflecting on on psychotherapy. I've been in in therapy for a while. I have it right here, yeah. Stoic or Buddhist reading, and uh you know I have to check it off each morning. And I do that before I check email, before anything else. And

You're right, Stoicism and Buddhism they're very, very similar, except stoicism is sort of like a western version because it it is more about action in the world. Now Buddhism there's you know, there are Buddhisms that are very much in the world, there are those that Call you a way more. Um but there is a sort of an eastern sensibility like in Taoism about like

Don't do anything, just settle, just, you know, let the world arrange itself. And Westerners are not like that. And Stoics are not like that. But it is like Act and they were like, Okay, you're the Emperor of Rome. But you're still getting upset about things and you have to like everything's crazy around you. But it's not just for emperors, Epictetus was a slave.

And so it actually works at at any level of society. You can never control everything, even if you're the emperor. So both of them. Are just incredibly psychologically wise ways of living in a world that you can't control? And maintaining not just your economity But even the capacity to be open hearted and loving. There's some very similar passages about

Not necessarily loving your enemies, but actually sometimes it is, like But and they both use the same technique of saying And remember You'll both be dead before long. That's a quote from from the Dhammapada. Like, you know, how can you quarrel you know, knowing that you'll both be dead before long? It's it's all trivial.

How long is your document that you review in the morning, that Evernote file? You know, I've got a whole big one for Seneca, who I'm going through Seneca that's just so much writing and it it's not as dense in terms of gems, but you know, I've got one for Epictetus, one for Aurelius, one for Buddha. And if you go to thecodling dot com, which is the The webpage for The coddling of the American mind.

And you go to solutions, better mental health. I've actually put up at the bottom. I've put up a collection of sayings by Marcus Aurelius that basically are about the three great untruths of the book. So here's one. Today I escaped from anxiety.

Or no, I discarded it. Because it was within me in my own perceptions, not outside. The great untruth that we covered in the book is always trust your feelings. But what the Buddhists and the Stoics and CBT tell us is No.

Don't always trust your feelings. Question them. Sometimes they're legitimate, but sometimes they're gross overreactions to nothing. Uh so anyway. Uh yeah, I found that those are those are the great wisdom traditions in my opinion.

How long do you spend in the morning if you check the box of That calendar reminder. With that reading. Oh, it's i you know, about ten minutes. Ten minutes. recently I'm doing like a loving kindness meditation, like to you know'cause I'm very cerebral and I actually sort of need to open my heart more.

Mm-hmm. It's just the ri you know, I just I make I make uh you know sort of a coffee substitute, um I'm very sensitive to caffeine, so I'm experimenting with like these mushroom based things. Um anyway. What I just say make. You know, s a hot beverage and then I

Sit on a comfortable sofa and And I just about ten minutes.'Cause what I found is that my NBA students I asked how many of you check your phone before you get up to P? And how many of you wait until you actually have gone into the bathroom? And very few of them wait. It's like Right away. So I'm still okay what and you know, turn on the stream, turn on the stream, have it come in. Like, no, don't do that.

Yeah. Have a better boot up sequence. For your morning day. That's right. John, I really appreciate all the time. This has been a lot of fun. I've I've copious notes. I've there are many things that I'm going to be looking up. And I think the first will be on Liberty Chapter Two. I'm going to check in And give that a read, and then I have many others. Is there anything else that you would like to say, any closing comments?

Any questions, anything you'd like to point my audience to that we haven't mentioned or that we have mentioned? Any complaints you'd like to lodge, anything at all? My mission when I move to Stern. business school, you know, every everyone has a mission statement. So I made a mission statement, and my mission is to use my research and that of others in moral psychology to help Important institutions work better. And I've started various organizations. So if you're concerned about universities

Please go to Heteroxacademy. org. And join if you're an academic or support us financially if you can. If you're concerned about people's ability to talk to each other or you need to address conflict in your own organization, please go to constructiv.org. If you are a parent and you're you have kids born after nineteen ninety six, you have Gen Z kids. Please go to letgrow dot org, a site I I started with Lenora Skinesi to encourage free range parenting.

And so all three of those are nonprofit foundations. We we really need help. I'm trying hard to raise money for them, so please support us. And all of them I hope will help you solve problems. In your own lives and in your own organizations, in your own families. Perfect. That's the perfect place to wrap up and for everyone listening. All of these links. I will gather and put also in the show notes, so they'll be collected in one place.

And you can click them to take yourself to all these destinations. Tim.blog forward slash height. H A I D T On Twitter. Be careful. It's a full contact support out there at John. Height

And Jonathan Hight. dot com. John, thank you so much for taking the time and being so game. I really appreciate it. Oh thank you. This was Rolicing Good Fun. And to everybody out there, be just a little kinder than is necessary. Don't believe everything that you think.

Ask questions before you make strong statements, and thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun. Before the weekend. Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out. every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading,

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