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I'm going all right besties I think that was another epic discussion people love the interviews I could hear him talk for hours absolutely we crush your questions ad minute we are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion what you guys think that was fun pal all right everybody welcome back to the Allin podcast we're trying something new today you all love when we do interviews you love the great content that came out of the all-in summit but but you also want to not miss an episode of the four of us talking about the news of the week so today we are doing our first episode of what we're calling the all-in interview what is the all-in interview well it's two of us interviewing one guest as opposed to 4V one which is quite unfair sometimes and a little bit unruly and so we're planning on doing these as an experiment maybe 10 times a year since we know you love interviews and today we are really excited because we have Jonathan height with us he is a Fearless author of some really amazing books freeberg you have read all four of them I have read two of them so why don't you give us your take on these four books Dave and then we'll kick it off to John it's great to have you John thanks for joining us I know you've done a lot of media lately and a lot of it has focused on the anxious generation which has obviously got some really important topical conversations embedded within it that people are now having because of it I first read the happiness hypothesis years ago in fact in one of our first episodes on of the all-in Pod back in 2020 I referenced it and I referenced some material from the happiness hypothesis my general take on the themes of your work is evolutionary biology meets modernity does that sound like a reasonable take that that the nature of the human being in a modern age causes these really interesting kind of points of tension conflict and behavioral shifts that maybe are undesirable or that are different than what we've had as a species in the past and so much of like how we're wired how our our brains work in the context of modern technology modern society is causing some behavioral system changes that maybe are a bit scary yeah yeah I does that sound like a fair a fair way to describe the art if you can just do two terms I'd say yeah evolutionary biology meets the problems of modernity but if we can add in evolutionary psychology meets anthropology and cultural psychology um with a little smattering of Sociology in the head of a guy who is just really bothered when he sees systems and institutions screwing up messing up and he thinks to himself wait if we just did this it would work better and so I get deeply involved in in what's going wrong with our democracy and that's that's the Righteous Mind what's going wrong with our universities that's the codling the American mind and my project at herox Academy and now what's going wrong with family life and and children and people born after 1995 so I would just put a few more terms in there but yeah so from from an Institutional perspective fair enough yeah I thought about this deeply like outside of the context of your book that you know humans in the last kind of century and a half have had this kind of industrial production thrust upon us then digital media thrust upon us and then open markets and globalization thrust upon us all of which give us kind of instant access to knowledge about the state of the world in a way that we've never had historically humans maybe saw a family maybe their Village you know it wasn't like mass communication but with digital media I can see the good life of someone on a private jet a thousand miles away and they I can live stream their their private jet experience I can theoretically order a Louis vuon bag and have it arrive in a couple of hours if only I had the means uh that creates this kind of like tension I can have any experience I I I want to because of the system of of markets that that have kind of put in place and I think like historically took generations for things like the Bible or the Quran or monarchical systems to kind of permeate and and you know kind of make Society believe a certain system but now you can kind of pump the right message to someone and and shift their their brain and and things change quite considerably no that's right I mean things change at different speeds and of course Evolution um works extremely slowly unless you are a plant biologist who has a company that is making it happen very quickly but until you know until very recently you know our our psychological Evolution or the evolution of our minds happened at the level of tens of Millennia um and then culture changes more slowly and you know really the the origin the origin of sociology is really in the huge changes in the 19th century um rought by the Industrial Revolution and some the first Industrial Revolution yeah I guess sure for you guys it's the first Industrial right yeah a lot of people discard it they don't they don't pay as much attention to it yeah it's not that big compared to what's happening now right and you know because often we can see that we can see changes on the surface like oh people will now have more access to information that's great but a lot of the early sociologists like you know vber and durkheim and Tunis and all these you know German European guys they could see that something something very deep about the way we live together is changing in ways that we don't really understand and you know one of my concerns again we'll talk a lot about this I love technology I love my phone I love all the convenience you know I'm not anti-tech but one thing that I'm thinking a lot about is how you how you guys whatever the the tech industry out in the west coast you do employ a bunch of social psychologists like especially meta a few other companies not necessarily for good I think sometimes for manipulation but you do employ some social psychologist I've never heard of any company that employs a sociologist and what I mean by that is the changes that are coming to us because of tech are so Earth shattering um and so fast that they are changing the basic conditions of America's liberal democracy in ways that I think it may not survive that is all the assumptions made by the founding fathers about how we live together how news travels why passions affect the legisl all all those assumptions might now be rendered moot in ways that we do not understand and no one is studying and so anyway that's just one of my causes for concern and to to bring this from a graduate school class and you know the 40,000 foot view you guys are talking about and bring it down to the the reality of today maybe 20 years ago 25 years ago a lot of folks were building mobile social applications and they figured out hey games gamification levels being in martial arts going from white belt to yellow belt scoring becoming in Dungeons and Dragons 19th level Wizard or whatever this becomes highly addicting and they built it into these products and then once they built it into the products we then passed another Rubicon which was hey let's just hand this to machine learning or Ai and have them do the gamification without it being explicit and that's really Tik Tock so you had the gamification of Twitter and Facebook which was likes retweets follower count Instagram and then now it's transitioned into something even more pricious which is some Black Box on in Tik Tok knows this is going to maximize the dopamine hits so this is kind of gone this is an experiment that's gone ay I think so and just to build on that you know there was a lot of research on television television came in relatively slowly compared to what's happening now and uh you know television was kind of hypnotic and some kids could watch for hours you know I did sometimes um but just as like the move from from heroin to fentel kills lots and lots of people cuz fentel is so incredibly concentrated the move from television to algorithm driven social media where it's not just like Mass marketed we think this show you know neelon ratings say this show is popular it's we have ai targeting this at you targeting feed at you so what happens when you have a society in which kids are consuming media they're playing sports they're reading books they're doing all sorts of things what happen if the media consumption suddenly gets a 100 times more attractive or addictive or short-term dopamine focused and I think there are huge broad societal implications that we don't understand and I'm very concerned by them and what you're speaking to is the velocity here I think uh as well huh free BG Andel targeting is is just I think your TV an knowledge is really interesting because we're both I think we're all three of us gen xers here I'm baby boomer by two years I'm the end of the baby boom 63 got it I think fre BR you're the tal end of Gen X uh we we would certainly take in the Gen X Draft when you look at this the the TV analogy is so good because we did have a moment in time where TV got faster and was gamified it was called MTV and they were like hey let's make this a lot faster you're right now you're just going to watch three minutes it's called a music video so we're taking your 30 minutes down to three and then in that video the directors of V music videos became the directors of movies and TV shows later that's where they cut their teeth on little $50,000 projects but because they had to do so many Cuts in those projects to tell the story in three minutes or four minutes of a Michael Jackson video that made its way into things like The Sopranos which had a much greater density of characters or Game of Thrones today and then that's giv way now to whatever the hell is going on on Tik Tock through our brain so I'm curious what you think that final jump the Tik Tok jump is doing to kids brains yeah I think this is the right way to look at things that to look at how the changes in technology even if they seem to be gradual they can have just really outsize effects um when I wrote I turned in the manuscript for the book in um last August of 2023 and I'd only taught this undergrad class on flourishing once I've taught it as a grad class for a long time but uh I teach at NYU Stern and in the fall I taught it again after I turned in the book and one thing I really learned from my students is is that Tik Tok and then YouTube shorts so the ones copying it you know Instagrams they're uniquely horrible and the reason there are many reasons why they're horrible and let's start with the the contrast so um as a little experiment I said to my class how many of you watch Netflix every week at least once a week almost every hand goes up how many of you wish that Netflix was never invented nobody no hands go up because stories are wonderful humans live in stories we tell stories we've always told stories the stories on TV are so much better today than were when I was a kid I'm older than you guys but I remember like I Dream of Genie and you know um the Brady butt they were stupid shows very flat yeah very flat yeah yeah so stories are great there's no problem with stories no problem with Netflix and then I say how many of you use Tik Tok or one of those programs at least once a week the great not everybody but the great majority of hands go up how many of you wish that it was never invented the great majority of hands go up and what's happening to and these are 19-year-old they're smart kids they're you know they're mostly sophomores at New York University Stern School of Business um but these things aren't stories a story is entertaining but it doesn't give you a huge hit of dopamine it's it's it's if it's really well told it can be an aesthetic experience you lose yourself but it's not about the quick dopamine reward system um whereas Tik Tok and those that short form it's really you know it's able to optimize for whatever whatever gives you the U that little bit of dopamine in your reinforcement Pathways and because there's a behavior response Loop which you didn't have with television with television you could raise the volume lower the volume or change the channel that's it those were your options there was not like a feedback loop where the television is rewarding you for certain actions whereas what Tik Tok pioneered is we don't care who you know we only care what makes you pause what makes you click what makes you react so um Tik Tok is basically if BF Skinner could come back to life one of the founders of behaviorism and observe tick and observe Tik Tok you'd say this is brilliant this is so brilliant yeah variable rewards yeah exactly very can you just hit on why from an evolutionary biology perspective we are wired this way what what what caused what is the wiring that's being tapped into here so we have to go back before humans because the brains change very slowly and whatever was built in by the time you get to mammals and primates is the basic architecture of our minds so we have a reinforcement system which has worked really really well for other animals and it is when certain things happen when there are signals that this is advancing your evolutionary project which is survive eat have sex leave Offspring um so if if something happens you're making progress towards say finding a mate you get a reward and it feels good and that doesn't make you say ah I got my reward I'm done the way dopamine works is is the the the the neurons I think it's in the nucleus cumbent is one of the main reward areas um those circuits that use dopamine the dopamine says oh that was good keep going get more and that's why potato chips are the way they are because you don't eat when say oh that was good you eat one say now I want one more than I wanted the first one so this worked really well for other animals and by the time you get to humans that's what we're stuck with is this it's very much based on a few kind of a few sort of imperatives um another but another thing which is a little more uniquely human is the need for reputation and so chanes do have a whole lot going on about status I mean so these systems go back before humans um and status is is is life or death it certainly is who get among males especially it's who gets to mate um so maintaining High status is extremely important and we certainly see this in adolescence adolescence are they you know they would gladly do something that knocked a few years off of their life at the end of their life if they could be more popular today again it's the short term we we've got to do the thing that seems so imperative to us now and that's reputation so we have all so you know I guess uh Dave you started off that I'm something about evolutionary biology yeah I love Evolution it is it's like it's like what is the what is the design manual for humans and then it's customizable but what is the design manual um and so once you start looking at things like you know reward reputation you know we we like outdoor spaces that look like savanas and golf course I mean there's all kinds of stuff you can learn from Evolution and then you can understand what some of these guys hacked and we have actually chath I think is one of the ones who talked to there's a great quote I think I might even you know what I think I even quote him in the book there's all you know a lot of the guys who were in there early they could see they could see exactly what was being done to hack into young people's concerns for their reputation and the prolonged dopamine release this is not good for your brain it's one thing to find a right or a mate and have sex and like have this dopamine release like okay yeah let's find some more right peirs eat a couple more till we're full this kind of a A system that gets shut off naturally in nature and with sex like okay yeah we we've had this orgasmic release we don't need to do it again for some period of time not to get too graphic here about Pairs and right pairs but you know when you're doing Tik Tock there is an addiction here that to Skinner to your Skinner Point variable interal and its variable reward something could be the HW Tua girl and everybody in the world is like oh my God sex and you know she's spicy or whatever but then there's another person on the other side of that and a society so you have the dopamine you know very primal thing happening but then you also have this next layer you're talking about socially which is now what happens to that girl what happens to her family is she going to kill herself is she going to become a reality TV star I don't know I mean we're in Uncharted Territory no human in evolution did not anticipate a billion people a million people understanding one person's or digesting one person's most candid worst embarrassing or thrilling moment did it no that's right we we evolved for small group interactions with a lot of Gossip um and when you you know so when kids are talking in small groups and someone says something stupid and others make fun of them people laugh and then you move on but when you put kids on a stage where potentially millions of people could be laughing at them and they could be the internet topic of the day and it might last for the whole week um a lot of those kids are considering suicide because when you are being shamed and it seems like you're out um a lot of kids will think of killing themselves because that's a way to relieve the pain um so however and the thing is look almost all of us as adults we see this stuff we you know you if if you post stuff on social media and then you read the comments and then you know you you can be upset by the comments imagine if you were 12 or 13 your brain is not developed you don't have any foundation uh yeah and then some permanent solution for a temporary problem seems like a fine idea that's right and so I just you know I really want to emphasize puberty as that's puberty is one of the key ideas in my book so in the anxious generation I really focused on well the subtitle is how the great rewiring of childhood is is causing an epidemic of mental illness so while it's childhood that got rewired from 2010 to 2015 it is unrecognizable the change that happened in those five years is beyond what what anyone could have ever imagined um and the Millennials are fine because they were already done with puberty by 2010 largely and so they had flip phones um when they were going through puberty let's say ages 11 to 12 it begins typically little earlier for girls uh to you know 156 is sort of the peak that's like the ma you know it goes on until your early 20s but it's especially early puberty the early teens the mid- teens that is the period where your brain is literally rewiring it is literally from Back to Front changing over from the child form to the adult form which is much more competent but much less flexible we don't respond to brain damage as flexibly as we did when we were children because everything's locked in and so the difference between the Millennials and gen Z is that the Millennials went through puberty on flip phones um and they actually and they Ed those phones to meet up with each other and they saw each other and they got together in person they made eye contact they laughed together they had a recognizably human childhood by 2015 that's not happening anymore I mean things have changed and so if j z suppose you're born uh in 1990 let's say born in 2000 um so you're seven when the iPhone comes out but that's not so important because the iPhone doesn't change things for the first few years uh you're nine when social media goes Super viral when you get the retweet button the share button the like button the gamification yes exactly that's right social media changes radically beginning of 2009 the status aspect well that's right because then it's it's not about me connecting with your page it's now about the news feed and likes and what goes I I want to accumulate likes and Views and I think that like and I want to come back to this point about status that you made earlier because uh and I want to kind of relate it to human history as well because it's really important to understand where that where that comes from where does status as a desire come from yeah absolutely let me just finish up the narration of j z and we'll go right to that um so Jen Z had the bad luck that they went through all of puberties if you're born in 2000 you are and let's say you're a girl 2011 2012 is when everyone is changing in their flip phones for smartphones 2010 you get the first front-facing camera on the iPhone and then Samsung copies that right away so 2010 you get the front-facing camera 2009 we got super viral social media of 2012 Facebook buys Instagram and that's when it really becomes popular in this period is when everyone's getting high-speed internet in 2010 most people didn't have it so the point is the Millennials in 2010 on their flip phones could not spend all day on their flip phones what are you going to do texting like that difficult texting on the number pad all day long nobody did that um but by 2015 gen Z you can be on your phone all day long like and half of them say literally half of American teenagers say that they are online almost constantly so if they seem to be talking to you they're thinking about what's going on their phone if they're on the bus next to other kids they're on their phone if they're in class the teacher's talking they're on their phone which let's be candid watching the funniest thing that happened on planet Earth in the last hour yeah yeah is by definition going to be funnier or more entertaining than the three of us having a burger that is a great way to put it I'm going to take that line and try to remember to credit you for it watching the funniest thing okay watching the funniest thing that's great yeah yeah and so can you blame them right it's it was kind this is my point about like instant access I've always had this belief that the Zen Buddhists got it right like they always had it right there are two key aspects of human nature that if you can address those you solve all the world's problems which is desire and dualism dualistic thinking tell me more what do you mean do if you solve those two things so desire yes Bud's all about cutting off desire and and the aspect of Desire that plays out in this context is I at any given moment now have access or can can see can create a desire for something that I would if I was sitting in a village without a phone I wouldn't have a desire to be on a private jet but now I'm sitting on this phone I'm seeing this funniest moment or this most beautiful person or this incredible experience that I am not a part of I am not in I don't get instant desire creation for me so the do the dopamine aspect I also question as anticipatory because I I I think I don't know if it was your book or some other research I've read about dopamine being released in anticipation not necessarily in the satisfaction of acis that the acquisition of something always feels a little bit okay I got it whereas the moment right before you get it is when you get the best opening like that that anticipation is really it is the experience of taking a scoop of ice cream and John just to as as a fellow East Coast where I grew up in Brooklyn and went to forom and spent my first 30 years in Manhattan in Brooklyn what you're experiencing here is also the two most important things to Silicon Valley people private Aviation and then the next greatest height owning a sports team so this is this is our version of sex and ripe fruit oh wow yeah private Aviation and then owning the Knicks the two things I'm working towards we could s here and talk about the dopamine release of this but it is true that there is an end state to all of this private Aviation and owning team apparently but I but I do think like this point about is status a point of desire right so um I don't know that I want something until I see someone else with it like that becomes the notion of desire for me absolutely absolutely that and that plays in to like I see someone with a million likes on their photo I don't have a million likes on my photo so I suddenly want that like that creates a new a new emptiness in my spirit that didn't exist before or in my brain that didn't exist before that then I'm on this constant circuit looking for how do I do something that creates a million likes because that's something that others have that I don't have yeah that's right the there's a there's a a great thinker who I I know is was talked about in Silicon Valley Rene Gerard French men who taught at Stanford uh I read I read some of the chapters of one of his books and you know I read some summaries of his work I think it's it's brilliant and the key thing is this we kind of naively assume that young people copy what they see other people doing but that's not true you know if my if my kid sees me doing something they're not going to copy me I mean when they're two they do but not older um if they see some other kid doing something they're not necessarily going to copy that just because the kid is doing it Gerard's point is what we copy is what they want so if someone we don't know what to want I mean yes we you know we're hot we want cool but beyond that we don't know what we want and so we're incredibly attuned to what everyone else in our reference group is wanting and that's always been the case and of course advertisers in the in the 19th century began to pick up on that how do you make it seem like everybody wants this product so advertising has always been about about trying to hack trying to really activate this Rene jard mechanism that we're copying each other's wants and um and that's where I think influencer culture represents the what not redu the like take it to its extreme conclusion where I speak to young people they come to ask me for advice on how to be successful and some of them have not even thought about what they can do that would be of Worth to anyone all they're focus on is how to get more followers right so you know like everybody wants likes so and followers so I want likes and followers well you know in the world before this you had to do something to get Prestige you had to have a skill you had to play guitar you had to be a rock singer Etc and I think kids have actually I give kids a lot of credit I think they've put it together pretty wisely they watched Kim Kardashian during this period of time we're talking about release a a sex tape uh or you know whatever participate in the release a sex I'm not sure exactly the details of it get a bunch of likes get a bunch of followers get a private jet get a TV show and to their point this does actually make sense it is a sequence of events that other people have now done they're not wrong there is a clear path that's right and that's a trap that's a trap that leads to unhappiness that's right but there's there's always been this notion of celebrity and kind of you know like this there there the celebrity replaced the monarchy replaced the church whatever right um but nowadays with the the influencer culture the celebrity is accessible meaning I have access to being in that state so it creates this deep dark hole for me at least this is my my read on it that I can't I'm not in that state but I should be I could be therefore I have this deep like emptiness because I theoretically I could be that person it's not like there's a cast system it's not like there's a monarchy where your blood determines whether or not you get to be a king or or the church where the Lord determines whether you get to be in charge in this case someone got there but I'm not there so I get to see and not only that but my reference library historically was like four to six sitcoms a week now my reference library is four to six Tik Tok videos a minute and you know I'm just like suddenly there's all these different things that I don't have as status statuses that I don't that I have an accumulated should we talk about thoughtful uh proposals in your book in the latest book uh the anxious generation i i i two things struck me as absolute Nob brainers and you are currently in a war with people trying to um I think maybe who got to these topics before you and maybe feel some ownership of them and they you've basically become I don't know the lightning rod for all of this discussion now and people are coming to you as the expert I get the sense some of these sociologists are a little upset that you've taken their uh their their shine putting it aside because you do reference them and you give them a lot of credit in the book The pouches at school for and the phone lockers uh maybe you could touch on that and then what's the proper age for kids to get a phone those two things to me seem like the most pragmatic proposals in the book okay so let me just set this up by by sort of jumping ahead to the notion of collective action problems and the four Norms that I suggest in the book to break out of collection Collective action problems so uh the clearest Collective action problem is any kid who doesn't get a phone is left out and so the kid says Mom I'm the only one without a phone I'm in fifth grade everyone else has a phone they're making fun of me and this hurts us as parents so we say okay I'll give you I'll get I have an old phone here we'll reactivate it for you and so we can you can end up in a situation where everyone has a bad outcome which is you get to the point where now you know in third and fourth great kids are all getting phones um but and you sort of get there because everyone else is doing it and uh j z feels trapped on social media I talk to my students why are you on why are you spending so much time on Tik Tok and Instagram and five other platforms every day you have no time to do anything of any use to anyone and they say well I have to because I need to know what people are talking about I don't want to be left out so this whole thing is a set of collective action traps that's how we got so deep into this and so the solution is collective action uh so in my book I kind of assume that we might never get any real help from the federal government that there is a chance that coost of the kids online safety act will will pass that is the one thing that really could pass but I really wrote the book assuming there's not going to be a legislative solution to this we have to do this ourselves and by changing norms and so in the book I propose I mean have like 50 suggestions 50 ideas for parents and teachers and schools but but I realized wait four of these are just really foundational things that we can do together and they're really powerful so in order they are no smartphone before high school we have just clear this all out of middle school middle schoolers should not be having the internet in their pocket give them a flip phone give them a phone watch give them something else but not a smartphone no uh social media till 16 social media is wildly inappropriate for minors it's full of extreme sex violence uh you know men from all over the world reaching out to you because they want sex I mean it's insane that we have children talking with men all over the world so no social media 16 the third Norm is phone free schools lock up the phones in a Yonder pouch or in a phone Locker in the morning they get it back at the end of the day and the fourth Norm is far more Independence free play and responsibility in the real world because until the 1990s kids had a childhood they were outside a lot they had Adventures they learned to be self-governing self-supervised we took that away from them beginning of the 90s totally gone by 2015 so our kids never get any fun or Adventure so all they have is their screens so if we do those four things we break out of these Collective action problems we restore childhood we delay the full social media immersion until age 16 when they're you know halfway or more than halfway through puberty that's my basic proposal so those are the four what's the reaction been to this proposal amazing it's not like it's not like met is gonna wake up someday and Zuckerberg's gonna have this Epiphany that he's done more damage to Children than the toac well I've got to imagine that the reaction has been amazing to anyone that's not gone through this problem as children right like you if you have you have you talked to the um the Gen Z about the proposal my good I think yeah yeah that's what's so exciting about this is that so I propose these four Norms I have this analysis of what happened at gen Z I paint gen Z as a generation that's been damaged that's going to be less than they would have been they're less ambitious they're less successful they're less happy they're less competent and I've given this I've given versions of this talk in middle schools in high schools in universities I always ask at the end of it what do you think did I get your generation wrong and I and I usually try if I remember I usually say Okay question time if you think I got something wrong please raise your hand now you know or or or or please be the first up to the microphone and maybe one time someone said I think you got this wrong the other you know thousands and thousands and thousands of times they say yep that's basically right now maybe some of them are too shy to speak up but my point is young kids like you know 9 10 they desperately want phone Tik Tok everything but by the time they're in late high school or certainly College the overwhelming view I find among gen Z is wow did this mess us up uh not that I'm going to quit because I don't want to be alone but man did this mess us up and that's why when you ask them do you wish social media was never invented most of them say yes I wish it was never invented so gen z um gen Z is incredibly supportive if you go to the website for the book anxious generation.com we have all kinds of activities for you know parents and teachers and genz we we have writing on my substack after babel.com by gen Z that's why this is so different from any previous Tech Panic is that the kids themselves see the problem what is the connection between beams and coddling of the American mind and the anxious generation and what we see on college campuses recently so um can you comment on the the protests MH the continuation yeah so my previous book The cing of the American mind began when my friend by the way I I I gave a copy to everyone at our Summit last year so we gave away 1800 of it was my pick yeah yeah so began when Greg lukanov who is the president of the foundation for individual rights and education noticed that all of a sudden around 2013 2014 it was actually the students who were demanding protections from speech from books from speakers shut this down ban this stop this person from speaking and he came to me and said something's go something's wrong something's really different about students today it wasn't like this in 2012 um something's changed uh and they are more fragile they want more protection from words books speakers they think speech is violence and at the time we thought that these were Millennials because that's was the name for the Young Generation Millennials um uh but and so we wrote an article on this in the Atlantic like laying out what we think is happening something is teaching the students to think in these distorted ways that are like cognitive distortions um and then in 2015 so the article comes out August 2015 in October 2015 or November 2015 everything blows up beginning at Yale the Halloween costume protest all sorts of things universities undergo a kind of a cultural revolution really some very similar a lot of similarities to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of pulling down everything High pulling down everything old a kind of a revolutionary young people's movement shaming professors spitting on professors all that sort of stuff um now so what's the continuity today the one of the worst things that the leaders did back then the university presidents is they did nothing uh students would shout down speakers no one was ever ever punished for shouting down speakers even when they used intimidation I should clar McKenna 20 there was one clar McKenna did punish some students in 2018 but hundreds and hundreds of shout Downs no one ever punished the message was oh as long as you're protesting for social justice you know you can break the rules you can use intimidation you can shout people down you can bang on glass and make people afraid for their lives you can do those things cuz it's for a good cause and besides we're actually kind of afraid of you too so that was the precedent that was set and that I believe was the beginning of one of the greatest brand destructions in American history highered used to have one of the greatest brands in the world Elite highered was the Envy of the world now it's a laughing stock it's a you know Harvard is a punchline in jokes around the world certainly in America um and so it's because there was fear there was lack of leadership and we permitted intimidation rather than persuasion universities must be about persu equ you can never win an argument by saying if if you don't agree with me I'm going to hurt you I'm going to destroy you socially we can't allow that but we did uh and so now Along come the protests um so of course the October 7th the the massacre was horrific the Israeli response has produced horrific suffering and death yes it's normal and expectable that there would be debates on a college campus there's no and nobody that I know of is saying people shouldn't be protesting in favor of the pales Ians and but the question is really about the encampments and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of the university to pressure the university to make a statement pro- Palestine or anti-israel or to divest from Israel so this is the use of intimidation and disruption which they allowed for nine years before they said since 2015 as long as you're protesting for social justice you can do whatever the hell you want we're not going to punish for anything so now the sort of the intersectional social justice protests that are pro Palestine and often anti-israel and often shading at anti-Semitism um the presidents don't know what to say and that was the spectacle we observed on December 5th in that uh house hearing room of the three presidents who could not explain why it was against their policies for people to call for death to the Jews like they couldn't they had been so tied in a not with their hypocrisy they couldn't even explain it so yeah there's there's a very direct continuity and In fairness if the protesters were simply doing a Sittin they got a long history of people sitting in in the 60s and 70s protesting different things is virtuous it's this sort of tipping over into intimidation when five or six people surround a student and or chase them into a library or bang on the doors I mean if you were to just I always use uh my friend Sam Harris's you know technique which is just replace you know go through through each uh you know person on the victim Olympics and the identity politics bingo card yeah and just replace it okay now white students are chasing black students black students are chasing Hispanic students Hispanic students are chasing Japanese students lesbians or chasing hetero people whatever it is pick your from the bingo card and and then just see if this stands up and if it had been black students being surrounded by white students like people would be like what that's right exactly this is my point about like dualistic thinking like the whole core of like the Zen Buddhist approaches to get rid of the sides in a in a system but but can you talk a little bit about this oppressor oppressed yes concept and how critical it is to social behavior and now social Evolution I've thought a lot about this over the last year and I feel like so much of human societal development politics purchasing behavior is all driven by this concept of oppressor and oppressed which can be approximated as the Hales and the have-nots and at any given moment I can feel like a have not to some other have and theoretically I'm a have to someone else who's a have not my have not identity drives me to purchasing to getting likes on Facebook to changing who's in office to deciding which company I should spend money on and which company I should not spend money on and that this notion extends its way into feeling oppressed meaning there's a system in place that's keeping me from having something that someone else has and maybe you can talk a little bit about has this changed has this always been in human psychology is this changing because of modernity and why would be would be great no good no that's right that's another point of continuity from the codling uh so the the central idea of the coddling was that there are three great untruths ideas that are so bad that if any young person believes all three they're almost certain to be depressed anxious um not amount to much in life and those three are what doesn't kill you makes you weaker so avoid stressful experiences avoid speakers who are going to say things that you hate don't don't expose yourself always trust your feelings your feelings are right if you feel offended by something that someone has offended you um and and someone has to do something about someone has to punish that person and the third to your point about Duality is life is a battle between good people and evil people and this is the Distortion that's caused the most human misery I mean this is a normal thing people do this is part of being a tribal species we're very very good at coming together to say our side has been hurt or cheated or defiled by their side um they're the evil ones we're you know they're perfectly bad we're perfectly good uh so it's that third Distortion is really the most pernicious from a for societal level now what you just said before about the Haves and the Have Nots that's what the left used to be about from the time of Marx or the French re ution even um until the 1950s or 60s it was about the haves versus the have knots and the left uh was the one that stood up for the have knots and the left uh you know stood up for the poor and the people uh but we go through a period in the 60s and 70s of the conversion away from away from a a sort of a Marxist idea based on economics to something is it a little bit Marx is it Michelle Fuko there's different intellectual heritages here where now it's all about power it's not or Have Nots it's power and power is such that whatever you look at in society you will see that some people have power and privilege and they use that to oppress the opposite and this is what intersectional intersectionality is about it starts with a perfectly legitimate point that there are multiple dimensions of identity and um you know to be a black woman is not just the sum of being black or being woman they're unique indignities that hit black women that you don't notice unless you are tuned into this so intersectionality begins you know Kimberly crer with a very good Insight which I think is absolutely right but the way it plays out on campus what what Greg and I argued in our book is 18year olds coming on to campus they're easily lured into this incredibly simplistic and exciting way of looking at the world which is I don't have to know anything about you I can just look at you and I can say oh you're a man oh you're a white man oh that means that you're an oppressor um and I can feel virtuous to the extent that I am not that and this puts a lot of pressure especially on white kids to try to develop some identity as a victim um and which is incredibly disempowering um and just you know not good for the development and what we end up with is a movement that that thinks in these binary terms and this is what brings us to today is of course you know Jews I'm I'm Jewish we always thought that we were among history's victims and certainly you can't understand the creation of the state of Israel without understanding what happened in the Holocaust um but because of the way intersection played out because whiteness is so quintessentially evil like whiteness is the thing that is ruining everything whiteness is the you know so everything that's not whiteness unites together to to fight whiteness now most Jews as I understand it most Jews in Israel are actually spartic uh they're not from Europe uh but but in America Jews are quoted as white and therefore if there's a conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians then obviously one is the one is the oppressor one is the oppressed now obviously economically Israel is wealthy Israel is powerful so it's not that that there's no legitimacy to that view obviously there's a huge power differential in Israel versus Gaza um but the mindset that says everything is about power is so narrowing incorrect boring and offensive I I you know I spent so many years trying to help the left using moral psychology so they would stop losing elections and I finally decided they're beyond hope the right's Beyond hope too but um you know the left is losing Asians it's losing black men it's losing Hispanics in the time of Donald Trump why is this happening a big piece of it seems to be this oppressor victim mindset pushes policies that are so offensive to most people of every race that they're like I've had it with the left I don't like this so sorry that was a rant that was more of a rant than an answer to your question but I hope it was entertaining no I it it seems accurate do you think the pendulum is is Shifting what do you see broadly socially right now are we still in this Loop where we are creating oppressor oppressed kind of construct perpetuating policy or are folks in the left saying it's gone too far it's time to make a change now folks are feeling because I've seen a lot of folks that have traditionally been I'm not I'm not a politics guy and I'm not a in a political party or anything but um I've seen like a lot of folks who I know who are traditionally Democratic voters Democrat voters who are now Republican voters after what's happened over the last couple of years surprisingly shockingly would have never sworn that would have been the case 10 years ago are things changing now is that is that sort of shift GNA be what what pulls things policy-wise the other way yeah I I think things are changing um so at least on you have to look institution by institution and so at least on campus things got insane in 2015 I mean it was again it was like the cultural revolution began in 2015 it wasn't like this in 2012 and and I started a group called heterodox Academy if there are any professors listening to this please join heterodox Academy we advocate for Viewpoint diversity among professors we think that we shouldn't all think the same we shouldn't all be on the left and Progressive and every year since 2015 things got worse and worse and worse and especially 2020 with Co then especially George Floyd a lot of progressive ideas got supercharged ibram kendi became the patron saint everything was about anti-racism so that's when things really became completely Bonkers um not just on campus but in journalism in museums you know firing all the white guides and you know all just crazy stuff was happening 2021 uh 22 uh business went many businesses went that way but businesses have to actually make money and so by 2022 a lot of businesses were rolling it back they're saying whoa this stuff is terrible this is not making life better for for for members of minorities this is actually just turning everyone against everyone we all hate this um so business has begun definitely moving away from all this stuff um universities were not doing we're not really moving away until December 5th I think December 5th that that court that hearing was so humiliating for higher ed I think a lot of us feel much Freer now we feel like you know what you know the intersectional you know the the sort of the the people who will destroy your reputation if you question them they're on the defensive now you know we don't hear much from IAM kendi anymore we don't hear him referred to very much anymore um so I think that at least even on campus the pendulum is swinging I I was afraid it wasn't a pendulum I was afraid it's more like a tower that just Falls faster and faster but I do think because the great majority of professors and presidents are true liberals they're on the left but they believe in free speech they're not illiberal what I think has happened on the far left and the far right we have illiberalism so if the far left is not liberal the far right is not conservative um and most of us the 70% in the middle are actually pretty reasonable people who could live together but we're all afraid of the extremes but we're less afraid of the extremes now than we were a year ago because Cano culture has ended essentially and like the left took it too far and the right took it too far is that what's you have to look institution by institution and so in institutions that are governed that are dominated by the left and that is all the knowledge creating institutions so it's journalism the arts media universities most of the scientific establishment other than the hard Sciences um in all those areas yes I think the left took it too far you know we went into a point where everything like chemistry has to be about anti-racism and and you know everything has to be about race and that was just kind of nuts and and um so I I I think there is a kind of a move to Common more Comm phenonium very racist element very racist element yeah just subtly racist can you talk a little bit about what traditional liberalism and conservatism should look looks like because a lot of people in our public audience a lot of people I talk to confused now about the terms because so much of traditional liberalism feels illiberal because of your point about far-left Behavior traditional conservatism feels illiberal because of far-right behavior what is the difference between the two and kind of help us bring balance to the force you know like so I'll answer your question as a as a psychologist which is um one of the amazing discoveries in Psychology since the 80s is that is that almost everything about our personality is partly heritable and if you have an identical twin separated at Birth you never met but if you're very much on the left your twin probably is too something about our brains make us predisposed to the right or the left and it goes back to openness to experience and conscientiousness a few personality traits but basically there's a there's a liberal or Progressive sentiment that says it's captured by this Robert F Kennedy quote some men see things as they are and say why I dream things that never were and say why not so progressives hisor are the people who look at existing institutions and say you know why do we you know why don't we change this like why don't we have some other thing uh which might be more just so progress is always pushing for Progress for change U but then the the um the wisdom of the right is to say you know what we may not understand our institutions but if we just go changing them willy-nilly it's going to be a disaster because we don't understand what we're doing in fact I opened our conversation with that that's actually a conser one something I learned from reading the the conservative intellectuals uh going back to Edmund Burke um you can't just go messing with institutions and expect it to work out well so a good liberal democracy is when in which you have some people pushing for change you got other people saying slow down like not so fast like let's be careful about this and that's William F Buckley's famous quote about National Review is going to stand a th history yelling stop or least slow down so that's great like you have a car with a gas pedal and a Brak like you need that and what happens when there are no conservatives what happens when there's no one to say slow down you know Progressive revolutions have an almost perfect record of disaster I mean it always descends into chaos and economic chaos and and and cruelty and what happens when there are no progressives when it's all conservative you tend to get much more repressive you know certainly lgbtq rights I mean you get you get very predictable pathologies on either side and part of my analysis what I think has gone wrong in in our country what you know I'm very focused on what social media has done to society as well as to gen Z is there always was a distribution where most people on the left are reasonable left they're progressives I sorry they're they're true liberals they they believe in a John Stewart Mill vision of a society in which people are maximally free to construct lives that they want to live that I think is the heart of the liberal Vision a liberal society and on the right you have conservatives who generally believe in Tradition family group loyalty religion the things that bind us together and and and limit bad behavior this is Thomas Soul talking about the uh the constrained vision of humanity right so so that's all healthy and then you always have some far-left radicals who they become maist in one generation they become robes peer in another you know they chop off heads prone to violence on the far left you got a group prone to violence on the far right that are reactionary that are authoritarian and let's say there was some distribution now then Along Comes Twitter Along Comes Facebook Along Comes social media what happens uh Mark Zuckerberg used to say how could it be wrong to give more people more voice that sounds great but what if you're not giving the disempowered more voice what if you're not giving everyone voice what if you're bringing everyone into the Roman Coliseum and saying okay let's fight it out for the for the entertainment of the people in the stands and the great majority of people don't want to fight with swords they just go quiet and some people pick up the swords like yes let's go um and and so the far left becomes super empowered the far right becomes super empowered and the center left and the center right go silent and that's what I think is you know that's I think a real disaster for for our country I think that was like such an excellent like commentary for for people to hear I want to ask one follow on which is why has liberalism and conservatism in some aspects switched so one one of the things I think a lot of folks observe is that modern liberalism is a lot of um uh redistribution equality for the oppressed bring everyone up to the same outcome the same level on an outcome basis which limits the freedom and flexibility of others it limits free markets for example you know more taxes more regulations is one way to characterize that that that conservatives will say more taxes and more regulation is not John Stewart Mill it's not more free market enablement and then on the flip side this idea of conservatives want to have less government less regulation less taxes um uh which you know can drive more inequality of outcome Etc can drive in fact fundamentally and I believe this very deeply free markets Drive progress technological progress and social progress and as a result by getting technology out the most disempowered benefit the most by new technology they can they can progress more than the wealthy can progress and so why has that flipped why is conservatism and liberalism in some aspects flipped and when does that when did that happen yeah so don't think of it as though liberalism and conservatism have flipped think of it as though the left and the right have really changed one thing I learned from studying conservatism from the intellectual historian Jerry Mueller is that conservatism in every era is a reaction to the excesses of the left I see so if the left was the revolutionaries in the French Revolution the right were monarchists they they wanted the restoration of the King right if the left in America is about you know pulling down the founding fathers because they were slave owners the right is going to be no we're going to get extra patriotic we're going to wear funny hats like the you know 18th century Americans so you you always have to understand the right as a reaction to what they perceive to be the excesses of the left now a lot of what's happened is as I said the the left is a political Coalition that that votes similarly in elections same with the right it's made of ax of different kinds of people um there's a wonderful study from Mor common that talked about the seven tribes of seven groups of Americans um the the progressive activists which is the group on the furthest left they were never liberal in fact they're really illiberal they're not even about bringing up the bottom they're much more focused on pulling down the top uh that's a kind of a that's like the the ugly side of egalitarianism so they're very focused on restraining rich people pulling down privilege they don't seem as concerned about bringing up poor people so that's the far that's the the far left they're not liberal but now but for a while they were really dominant not in the Democratic party this is an important point the Democratic party has two Wings which one usually wins the the liberal the moderate Wing not the not the squad not the so if you just look at the parties the Democrats are a functioning center-left party with a you know an outspoken Progressive Way that's great that's Viewpoint diversity I love that the right is different if you just look at the party you used to have all kinds of true conservatives you know George HW Bush through Mitt Romney they were true conservatives very decent men they believed in decency family Val I mean these you know I have a lot of respect for traditional conservatives but now it's the party of Donald Trump and the Republican party has gotten rid of nearly all its moderates the Democrats pulled some dirty tricks that actually wiped out a few of those moderates which I I think they really have a lot to answer for but my point is if you just look at the parties the Republican part has been gutted of its moderates now they do crazy insane things like let's work really hard to solve the immigration problem Oh Donald Trump says let's not do it okay let's thread out the window I mean insane stuff that is really hurting the country so I just want to make it clear I talk a lot about universities where the villain is the left there really is no right to speak of on University campuses but in Washington you I think the Republican party is the party that's really gone farther off the reservation or if one can still say that today uh whatever you know that's gone can we do some quick lightning round questions on sure on on parenting so my kids are I got three daughters under seven there's a conversation amongst the parents when do you let the kids get get phones when do you let them get on social media and some of the parents don't listen so then the kid you got a couple kids in the class that are on social media they're on iPhones it's fifth grade fourth grade whatever and the kids that aren't are the Have Nots they're left out they're they're not able to be on the text streen with the kids that are so they're not cool they're so disengaged they're angry at their parents they're sad how do you address that as a parent where you've got some of the kids in the class that are doing this given the the framing you provided earlier on the best rules yeah so the answer is collective action so for each each kid feels left out but what if you so I assume you you're in contact with the parents of your kids friends right because you got to drop them off pick them up you do all sorts of things so what if you were to talk with the parents of a few of the friends who don't have haven't given phones yet and you say hey we don't want our kids to have a phone based childhood um you know do you do you agree with me on that should we work you know if we work together you know John height says if we work together we can actually give our kids a fun childhood um are you in on that and what that means is we're going to follow the for nors we're not giving we are not giving our child a smartphone until High School let's just commit to that now you know we should be sending our kids out in which case like like I bought my daughter a phone watch a gizmo it could call three numbers that was it right that was was enough for two or three years that was all she needed she could go out and do errands she could go get bagels she could go you know bring food to my office across the park so it's okay to give kids a way to contact you but you just all agree no smartphone and you all agree no social media until 16 and that even includes Snapchat um which is what the kids are using to communicate but just lots of bad stuff happens on Snapchat but then if some of the parents don't agree and then you've got this class system that forms amongst the social you know groups of the kids you got some kids that are that you just hold the line H well but yes if you you can it's hard to hold the line on on your own it's much easier if you have three of you holding the line but it's even better if it's not holding a line it's offering a more positive vision of childhood so you and the kid so your kid and the other kids who who your parents all agree you make extra efforts to give your kids an exciting fun childhood where they do exciting things together the other kids can be home on their bed swiping all day long let do that they're going to end up basically anxious and never having really done anything to grow up whereas your kids are getting together for four-way sleepovers or you're taking them you know bowling and you just you know you just well to the extent that you're allowed to you step back like you let them be self-governing you know you give them money or give them an allowance I I suggest in the book be really clear about chores allowance and encourage them go ride your go ride your bicycles down and go get ice cream you know go get ice cream just before dinner for all I care be a little rebellious so if you you know we've really taken almost all the fun out of childhood there's very little Adventure left in child I've leaned into that my kids love the fact that I told them my Dad would kick us out of the house in the morning in the summer and we could come back on when the street lights came on that's the common rule that's right so tell me how you tell me how you do it because that's there's a lot of questions how do you do today and then um I just had them leave the house and I told them I'm locking the doors for 3 hours go have fun outside and then sometimes when we're in town I'll have them walk around I'll give them the 20 bucks I'll say you're going to meet me at the Apple Store at this time if you need to another time you can go ask them but we're going to meet at the Apple Store in two hours have fun anything goes wrong just go into any store and talk to an adult boom I'm just giving them those kind of like free range things yes that's beautiful and do they see this as punishment or are they excited they enjoy they love it of course they love it of course they love it they ran around the house found one of the doors open and say you forgot to lock this one lock it great and they said what if we have to go to the or we need a drink of water I said there's the hose and there's a tree yeah excellent that's how we did it inly yeah got the host and that's they think it's hilarious uh and they love it and then the other thing I do as a tip is I you know if they want to do screen time I tell them great uh come up with a creative project and uh one hour of creative project you can do one hour of TV or 1 hour of iPad or something so I just do one for one with them they have to earn it by doing something creative and they're like we don't know what to do and I'm like figure it out and then boredom I explained to them equals creativity you have to be bored your mind clears and then you come up with a great creative idea now they're writing movies they're writing stories they're making books they're writing songs like they literally will complain it's like you mentioned Skinner when you extinguish a behavior like an addiction yeah to devices the bad behavior spikes they scream they cry and then boom it drops down to zero and you're fine you just have to weather that like brief storm it's the withdraw that's right because when you've had hyper stimulation of quick easy dopamine those systems uh downregulate they react they try to restore homeostasis now it takes more stimulation to get them to the normal level you now you take away the video gam you take away the phones and for you know Anna lmy says it's you know two or three weeks to overcome withdrawal symptoms for especially for more serious drugs but in my experience is more like your it's like a few days it's you know the first three but by we actually most it that's like summer camp so your kids to summer camp and never your child to a camp that allows kids to keep phones on them never do that that's a wasted opportunity for detox this is what kids want by the way kids want to have a childhood they don't you you asked them you pulled the students and they they told you we don't want to be addicted to the stuff that's like if you were to ask Philip Seymour Hoffman you want to be addicted to heroin and you wish heroin was never existed he'd be like yeah I'm dead of course I wish heroin didn't exist yeah that's right this thing ruin my life like that they know they're on heroin what' you say that that was a pull like the whatever just I'm thinking about New York and just I mean I used to work out in the same gym as in Chelsea Piers and I'm every time I see Philip sore Hoffman in like the master or long came poly I just think this is what we're doing to our kids they get addicted to these things and then fent andol and like Talented Mr Ripley wasn't he just so many great artists gone and I think that's what's happening to these kids' brains I think their brains are being melted and all their creativity their ability to learn an instrument to interact with each other we stealing their childhoods and replacing them with Zuckerberg's payday yeah for the heavy users especially I mean I try to avoid saying brain melted I try to be a little you know a little more precise for the heavy users for the you know and and this is the thing about five depending how you measure it about 5 to 12% of the boys do get do become problematic users of video games so for most Boys video games are okay they're they're a lot of fun and I wouldn't say video games are melting most boys brains but 5 to 12% is a lot of boys to lose and these are boys who are spending you know three four five hours a day on video games for years and years and years they don't develop social skills they don't develop dating skills these boys I think are that's right exactly exactly it's just I mean it is you may not like to say you're an M Professor it makes these kids really weird these I watch these kids who are addicted to Tik Tock and addicted to video games they get really socially weird they can't make eye contact they can't have a conversation and then they become young adults they don't know how to go on a date they don't know how to talk to adults I mean they don't know how to work yeah tell me more about what you're seeing in in Silicon Valley in the tech industry are you talking only about boys or are you saying girls are this way girls aren't making eye contact no I think it's the boys mainly the girls seem to be a different subset of behaviors which is like um uh maybe more social pressure and more Depression more disorders self harm all that collection where maybe it's directed you know in some way of um harming yourself which is really internalizing disorders that's right internalizing disorders yeah yeah so and and tell me how gen Z employees are working out in general in your in your they're terrible and that's that's what I hear very widely yeah you just hire people in Canada or the Philippines and well Canada is almost as bad as America Canada has problems too they're very much like us but I agree immigrants from non- English speaking countries that's right they have a they have a better work ethic um and I'm G to you know what I'm hoping that will get to is because this problem is so w like this is what I you know I work in a business school I talk to a lot of people in business I always ask that question I always hear the same thing I've never heard anyone say oh yeah young people are so wonderful people are having problems integrating genz employees into their companies they're they're fragile they the top 20% are fantastic the majority are do not have the wherewithal the resiliency the Cal confidence the communication skills to operate in a business environment period full stop so what you know what what what do you think about this what about like instead of like don't hire American kids saying look for signs that this person can be a team player and work with other people so especially go for anybody who's ex-military anybody who is Major team sports yeah no people do hire based on that they always did in sales like the sales department you wanted military people you wanted discipline because it's a numbers game have to just grind it out but I do think like even for what what people don't realize is when everybody went home for covid managers learned how to manage remote workers once they figured out I can manage a remote worker dealing with somebody who has too much anxiety to come to work today or be in a meeting and told they did a job and like you need to Buck up and do a better job like people will quit on the spot people will start crying people will drop off the zoom because there's too much anxiety to be told you did a bad job now you tell that to somebody who's working in India or South America or Portugal or Manila hey this is not the standard at which we operate they're like can you tell me how to do better is there a is let me go look online I'll go find some way to do my job better thank you for letting me know that I could do better on my job this generation can't handle even the modest amount of I shouldn't say all of them but a large percentage of them have so much anxiety they cannot operate in the workplace okay so that that is similar to what I hear a lot from from people who are hiring young people but let me suggest one slight variation that you might try because a really good thing about jensi is that they're not in denial all the things you say about them agree with what I say in the book I think that's basically true but what I'm finding in my teaching what I find in general is that if you approach them in the right way and you first of all they have to understand the concept of antifragility very easy to explain chapter one of the codling American mind if you go to the coding.com I have chapter one we put it up there so that everybody can use it send it around to all your employees you know it's what doesn't kill you actually makes you stronger and you grow through adversity and it's stoic wisdom and it's wisdom around the world so if you have that concept you're talking about it and then you say to your new genz employees okay now we can do this in two ways um one is um since I really want you to be successful in this job so I'm going to tell you everything I think you're doing wrong and I'm going to try to make you better that's option one option two is I can be really sensitive about your feelings and really try to make everything gentle and try never to upset you which one do you want and I guarantee you the great majority are going to pick option one because they do want to grow they recog they're not in denial they're not defensive they're not like no I'm not like that no like so so um I especially would not I'm I'm not giving up on on genz especially those who are still in the early 20s um you know because that's what I'm teaching at NYU and they show incredible growth now there it's exciting because they're doing it together I have a class of 35 students we're doing it together but if you have a a cohort you know if you if you if you're selective and your hiring and you try to avoid the ones who are most you know showing the signs of the the sort of you know the extreme activism and the the um extreme emotionality um if you have a group and and you and you're explicit that you want them to get stronger you want them to succeed and that's why I'm going to give you some harsh feedback I think actually they they generally love it I I I do think some number will rise to the occasion I think it's really good advice the other advice you know I'll just tell you what people do practically in the real world please hire three people expect that one's going to be fired in the first six weeks because they present well in an interview but they're going to have a panic attack uh where they're just going to be don't have the work ethic to be successful in an intense field like venture capital or a venture back startup so and then one will leave um because they're got rich parents and they don't need to have the stress of the job whatever and then whoever's left that's the winner and so that's how people are approaching this now is hiring people on Project basis let's see them do the work let's see if they can maintain the intensity and that's really is like if you weren't allowed if you were monitored and helicopter parented and you didn't go to the store on your own and you didn't get lost and you didn't have somebody steal your money or you know you didn't get in a fight in the schoolyard or you didn't play tag and you know didn't get picked for Dodgeball you got smashed in DodgeBall and they bullied you if you didn't have all those experiences that are formative yeah you're not going to survive in the corporate world there's no time there's no time to teach you how to you know get smashed in the face you know with a with a dodgeball you know that should have happened in 12 12 years old it's uh it's going to be tough for them I I think you're doing God's work trying to get them back on track well let's you know let's hope that that parents and schools realize you know the the truth of what you're saying and we get to the point where um you know college admissions and hiring is not just going to go for the high GPA and the full resume of extracurricular activities they're going to go for signs of being a free range kid they're going go for signs that you traveled alone you traveled on your own for three months someplace you know when you were 18 or 19 they're going to go for signs that that you actually can handle adversity yeah I'd like to see your project work you know I see an myu or Forida I see any Ivy League school degree or something like that you're going to think oh my God this person's going to come here and start a union a movement you know they're going to distract everybody this is why coinbase and other folks are just saying we're here for this purpose if you're here you're here for this Mission and this purpose anything else you want to do on your own time they your business but got major major kudos to coinbase they were the first one Armstrong he was the first one to really put that out there and a lot of companies follow yeah that's yeah now now it's the standard hey you're here you the random group there's like a random channel on slack that is like one of the default channels that's where chaos occurs the first thing you got to do is delete the random Channel there's no random here we're here to work yeah there's no you know side hustle random you know your politics whatever indigenous group uh you know whatever group that you care most about yeah that's called the weekend we had a word for that in Gen X that's your weekend at 5 o'l on Friday you could start thinking about that the rest of the week you're focused anyway I'm old school Gen X I'm old school now it's so great to have you on here the books uh coddling of the American mind anxious generation and the first two buy all four everybody that's the message you should get here stop what you're doing get the audio book books are the greatest deal in the world 10 15 bucks you get a ton of knowledge and hopefully this podcast inspires you whether you're a parent educator or a young person to just understand what's going on here John you're a great guest thanks so much guys I just want to put in just a quick note to learn more go to anxious generation.com is the website for the book after babble.com is my substock where we put a lot of research a lot of writing and letg grow.org is an incredible organization that we created with I skazi to give parents like you more help more ideas in how to give your kids a free range child I have been all over that website lots of great ideas there yeah so I hope if there any philanthropist in the audience who are willing we we were it's a tiny little organization we could do so much more if we had some money and could hire some hire more staff so now let grow.org fantastic let your kids grow exactly exactly and let us know what you think of the all-in interview everybody who's a fan uh John you are amazing great guest thank you thank so much [Music] guys I'm going all in