Alright besties, I think that was another epic discussion.
People love the interviews, I can hear them talk for hours.
Absolutely.
We crushed your questions, I mean, we are giving people brown truths data to
undurring your audience.
What you gonna say? That was fun, how was great?
Alright everybody, welcome back to the All In 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 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 four of you one,
which is quite unfair sometimes and a little bit unruly.
And so we're planning on doing these as an experiment, maybe ten 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
and 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 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 the nature of the human being in a modern age causes these really interesting
kind of points of tension and 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 how we're wired, how our brains work in the context of modern technology, modern society,
is causing some behavioral system changes that maybe are a bit scary.
Yeah, I would just tell like 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
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 what's going wrong with our democracy, and that's the righteous mind.
What's going wrong with our universities?
That's the coddling the American mind and my project at heteroxicademy.
And now what's going wrong with family life and children and people born after 1995?
So I would just put a few more terms in there, but yeah.
From an institutional perspective, sure enough.
I thought about this deeply like outside of the context of your books 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.
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 I can livestream their private jet experience.
I can theoretically order a Louis Vuitton bag and have it arrive in a couple of hours.
If only I had the means that creates this kind of like tension.
I can have any experience I want to because of the system of markets 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 kind of make society believe a certain system.
But now you can kind of pump the right message to someone and shift their brain and things change quite considerably.
That's right. I mean, things change at different speeds.
And of course, evolution works extremely slowly unless you are a plant biologist who has a company
that is making it happen very quickly. But until very recently, our psychological evolution or the evolution of our minds
happened at the level of tens of millennia and then culture changes more slowly.
And really the origin of sociology is really in the huge changes in the 19th century,
brought by the Industrial Revolution.
The first Industrial Revolution.
I guess sure. For you guys, it's the first Industrial Revolution.
A lot of people discarded. They don't have as much attention to it.
Because it's not that big compared to what's happening now.
And 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 Weber and Durkheim and Tunis and all these German European guys,
they could see that something very deep about the way we live together is changing.
In a way that we don't really understand. And one of my concerns, again, we'll talk a lot about this.
I love technology. I love my phone. I love all the convenience.
I'm not anti-tech. But one thing that I'm thinking a lot about is how you guys, whatever.
The tech industry out in the West Coast, you do employ a bunch of social psychologists,
especially meta, a few other companies. Not necessarily for good. I think sometimes for manipulation.
But you do employ some social psychologists. 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
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 legislator.
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 bring this from a graduate school class and at the 40,000-foot view you guys are talking about
and bring it down to the reality of today. Maybe 20 years ago, 25 years ago,
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 indungeants 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 TikTok. 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 prenicious,
which is some black box on in TikTok knows this is going to maximize the dopamine hit.
So this is kind of gone, this is an experiment that's gone awry.
I think so. 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, you know, television was kind of hypnotic and some kids could watch for hours.
I did sometimes. But just as like the move from heroin to fentanyl
kills lots and lots of people because fentanyl 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,
Nielsen rating say this show is popular.
It's we have AI targeting this at you targeting it 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 happens if the media consumption suddenly gets 100 times more attractive or addictive
or short term dopamine focus. 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, as well.
Hush Rayberg and the velocity and the targeting is just, I think your TV
and knowledge is really interesting because we're both, I think we're all three of us,
Gen Xers here. I'm baby bomber by two years. I'm the end of the baby boom, 63.
Got it. And then, I think, Rayberg, you're the tall end of Gen X.
We would certainly take in the Gen X draft. When you look at this,
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 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 given way now to whatever the hell is going on on TikTok for our brains.
So I'm curious what you think that final jump, the TikTok jump, is doing the kids brains.
Yeah. I think this is the right way to look at things.
To look at how the changes in technology, even if they seem to be gradual,
they can have just really outsized effects.
When I wrote, I turned into the manuscript of the book in last August of 2023.
And I'd only taught this undergrad class on flourishing once.
I taught it as a grad class for a long time. But I teach it in why you 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 that TikTok and then YouTube short,
so the ones copying it, you know, Instagram, they're uniquely horrible.
And the reason they're many reason why they're horrible.
And let's start with the contrast.
So as 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 where when I was a kid.
I'm older than you guys, but I remember like, I dream of Genie and, you know,
the Brady butt. And there were stupid shows.
Very flat. Yeah, very flat. Yeah.
So stories are great. There's no problem with stories, no problem with Netflix.
And then I say, how many of you use TikTok or one of those programs, at least once a week?
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 the, 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.
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.
Whereas TikTok and those that short form, it's really, you know, it's able to optimize for whatever,
whatever gives you 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. That was where your options. There was not like a feedback loop, or the television
is rewarding you for certain actions, whereas what TikTok 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 TikTok is, basically, if BF Skinner could come back to life,
you know, one of the founders of behaviorism, and observed TikTok, you'd say, this is brilliant.
This is so brilliant.
Yeah, variable rewards.
Yeah, exactly, variable rewards.
Can you just hit on why, from an evolutionary biology perspective, we are wired this way?
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.
So if something happens, you're making progress towards safe finding a mate, you get a reward.
And it feels good.
And that doesn't make you say, oh, I got my reward, I'm done.
The way dopamine works is the neurons, I think it's in the nucleus of convinced,
is one of the main reward areas.
Those circuits that use dopamine, the dopamine says, ooh, that was good, keep going, get more.
And that's why potato chips are the way they are.
Because you don't eat, you 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.
Another, but another thing which is a little more uniquely human, is the need for reputation.
And so chimpanzees do have a whole lot going on about status.
I mean, so these systems go back before humans.
And status is life or death.
It certainly is who get, among males, especially, it's who gets to mate.
So maintaining high status is extremely important.
And we certainly see this in adolescence.
Adolescents are, 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've got to do the thing that seems so imperative to us now, and that's reputation.
So we have, so I guess Dave, you started off that I'm something about evolutionary biology.
Yeah, I love evolution.
It's like, what is the design manual for humans?
And then it's customizable, but what is the design manual?
And so once you start looking at things like reward, reputation,
we like outdoor spaces that look like savannas 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, Chamath, I think, is one of the ones we talked about.
There's a great quote.
I think I made even, you know what?
I think I even quote him in the book.
There's 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 pair or a mate and have sex
and like have this dopamine release.
It's like, okay, yeah, let's find some more right pairs, eat a couple more.
Till we're full, this kind of a system that gets shut off naturally in nature.
And what sex?
Like, okay, yeah, we've had this orgasmic release.
We don't need to do it again for some period of time.
And not to get too graphic here about pairs and right pairs.
But, you know, when you're doing TikTok, there is an addiction here
that to skin it to your skinner point, variable interval.
And it's variable reward.
Something could be the hawk to a girl.
And everybody in the world is like, oh my god, sex.
And, you know, she's spicy, 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 an uncharted territory.
No human.
And 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, didn't.
No, that's right.
We evolved for small group interactions with a lot of gossip.
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,
a lot of those kids are considering suicide.
Because when you are being shamed and it seems like you're out,
a lot of kids will think of killing themselves because that's a way to relieve the pain.
So however, and the thing is, look, almost all of us as adults, we see this stuff.
If you post stuff on social media and then you read the comments and then you can be upset by the comments,
imagine if you were 12 or 13.
Your brain is not developed.
That's right.
You don't have any foundation.
And then some permanent solution for a temporary problem seems like a fine idea.
That's right.
And so just, you know, I really want to emphasize puberty as that's,
puberty is one of the key ideas in my books.
When the anxious generation, I really focused on, well, the subtitle is,
how the great rewiring of childhood 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 anyone could have ever imagined.
And the millennials are fine because they were already done with puberty by 2010 largely.
And so they had flip phones when they were going through puberty, let's say,
just in 11 or 12, it begins typically little earlier for girls.
To, you know, 15, 16 to sort of the peak, you know, that's like the mate, you know,
it goes on until your early 20s.
But it's especially early puberty, 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 flexible 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.
And they actually, and they used 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 Gen Z, it's supposed you're born in 1990, let's say born in 2000.
So you're seven when the iPhone comes up, but that's not so important,
because the iPhone doesn't change things for the first few years.
You're nine when social media goes super viral, when you get the retreat button,
the share button, the like button, the gamification.
Yes, exactly. That's right.
Social media changes radically beginning in 2009.
With that aspect.
Well, that's right, because then it's not about me connecting with your page.
It's now about the newsfeed and likes and what goes far.
I want to accumulate likes and views.
And I think that, like, I don't want to come back to this point about status that you made earlier,
because, and I want to kind of relate it to human history as well,
because it's really important to understand.
Yeah, look at it.
Where that comes from, where does status as a desire come from?
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's finish up the narration of Gen Z, and we'll go right to that.
So Gen Z had the bad luck that they went through all of puberty.
So 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 Superviral 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,
and 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.
But by 2015, Gen Z, you can be on your phone all day long,
like, in 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 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 is talking to their on their phone.
Which, let's be candid.
Watching the funniest thing that happened on planet Earth in the last hour,
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.
Watching the funniest thing.
That's great.
And so, can you blame them?
Right?
This is my point about instant access.
I've always had this belief that the Zen Buddhists got it right.
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, if you solve those two things?
So desire, yes, Buddhists all about cutting off desire.
And the aspect of desire that plays out in this context is,
I, at any given moment now, have access or 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 dopamine aspect, I also question as anticipatory,
because 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 acquisition.
That the acquisition of something always feels a little bit,
okay, I got it, whereas the moment, right before you get it,
it's when you get the best dopamine.
That anticipation is really.
It is the experience I've taken a scoop of ice cream.
And John, just to, as a fellow East Coast writer,
I grew up in Brooklyn and went to Fordham and spent my first 30 years in the West Coast.
My first 30 years in Manhattan and 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 our version of sex and ripe fruit.
Oh wow, yeah.
Private aviation and then owning the next.
The two things I'm working towards, we could talk to you 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 a band-aid team, apparently.
But I do think like this point about is status a point of desire, right?
So 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.
And that plays into 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 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.
There's a great thing I know is talked about in Silicon Valley, Renas Gerard,
Frenchman who taught at Stanford.
I read some of the chapters of one of his books and I read some summaries of his work.
And I think it's brilliant.
And the key thing is this.
We kind of now you'll be assumed that young people copy what they see other people doing.
But that's not true.
You know, if my kids sees me doing something they're not going to copy me.
I mean, when they're two, they do.
But not older.
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, for 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 eight, 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 Renas Gerard mechanism
that we're copying each other's wants.
And that's where I think influencer culture represents the, what, not reduct 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 focused 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 the role.
You had to be a rock singer, etc.
And I think kids have actually, I give kids a lot of credit.
I think they put it together pretty wisely.
They watched Kim Kardashian during this period of time we're talking about,
release a sex tape or, you know, whatever participate in the releasing of a sex tape.
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 always been this notion of celebrity and kind of, you know,
like this, they're the celebrity replaced the monarchy, replaced the chair,
whatever, but nowadays with 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 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 emptiness because theoretically I could be that person.
It's not like, there's a caste system.
It's not like there's a monarchy where your blood determines whether or not you get to be a king
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 TikTok videos a minute.
And you know, I'm just like suddenly, there's all these different things that I don't have
and as status, statuses that I don't, that I haven't accumulated.
Should we talk about thoughtful proposals in your book and the latest book,
the anxious generation?
I do think struck me as absolute no brainers.
And you are currently in a war with people trying to, I think maybe who got to these topics before you
and maybe fill 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 to send some of these sociologists.
It's a little upset that you've taken 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.
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 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 collective action problems.
So 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 mean, the 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 a, 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 grade kids are all getting phones.
And you sort of get there because everyone else is doing it.
And Gen Z feels trapped on social media.
I talk to my students.
Why are you on, why are you spending so much time on TikTok 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 what we got so deep into this.
And so the solution is collective action.
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 coast of the kids online safety act 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 by changing norms.
And so in the book, I propose, I mean, I have like 50 suggestions, 50 ideas for parents and teachers and schools.
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 to clear this all out of middle school.
Middle schooler should not be having the internet in the pocket.
Give them a flip phone.
Give them a phone watch.
Give them something else, but not a smartphone.
No social media till 16.
Social media is wildly inappropriate for minors.
It's full of extreme sex, violence, you know, men 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 till 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 supervising.
We took that away from them as it began in 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 Matt is going to wake up someday and Zuckerberg is going to have this epiphany that he's done more damage to children than the tobacco.
Of course.
I've got to imagine that the reaction has been amazing to anyone that's not gone through this problem as children.
Right?
Like, have you have you have you talked to the the Gen Z about the proposal?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah.
That's what's so exciting about this is that so I propose these four norms.
I have this analysis of what happened to 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.
They always ask at the end of it.
What do you think?
Did I get your generation wrong?
And I usually try.
If I remember, I usually say, OK, question time.
If you think I got something wrong, please raise your hand now.
Or please be the first up to the microphone.
And maybe one time someone said, I think you got this wrong.
The other, 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 9, 10, they desperately want phone, TikTok, 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.
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, the Gen Z is incredibly supportive.
If you go to the website for the book, anxiousgeneration.com, we have all kinds of activities for parents, teachers, and Gen Z.
We have writing on my substack after babble.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 themes and coddling of the American mind and the anxious generation and what we see on college campuses recently?
Can you comment on the protests, the recent activities on campus and maybe help us kind of understand, is there a difference or is this a continuation?
Yeah, no, it's definitely a continuation.
So my previous book, the Coddling of the American Mind, began when my friend Greg...
By the way, I gave a copy to everyone in our summit last year.
So we gave away 18 other copies of your book.
Oh great.
It was my pick.
Yeah. So began when Greg Lukyanov, who is the president of the Foundation 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 wrong.
Something's really different about students today.
It wasn't like this in 2012.
Something's changed.
And they are more fragile, they want more protection from words, books, speakers, they think speeches of violence.
And at the time, we thought that these were millennials, because that's what's the name for the young generation millennials.
But so we wrote an article on this in Atlantic, like laying out what we think is happening, something is teaching these students to think in these distorted ways that are like cognitive distortions.
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 protests, 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,
shaning professors, spitting on professors, all that sort of stuff.
Now, so what's the continuity today?
One of the worst things that the leaders did back then, the university presidents, is they did nothing.
Students would shout down speakers, no one was ever, ever punished for shouting down speakers, even when they used intimidation.
I should claim up a mechanic, there was one, the climate mechanic 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 because it's for a good cause and besides, we're actually kind of afraid of you too.
So that was the president that was set and that I believe was the beginning of one of the greatest brand destructions in American history,
higher ed used to have one of the greatest brands in the world, elite higher ed 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.
And so it was because there was fear, there was lack of leadership and we permitted intimidation rather than persuasion.
Universities must be about persuasion, you can never win an argument by saying 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. And so now along come the protests.
So of course, the October 7th, 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.
And nobody that I know of is saying people shouldn't be protesting in favor of the Palestinians.
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 you for anything.
So now this sort of intersectional social justice protests that are pro Palestine and often anti-Israel and often shading and anti-Semitism, the presidents don't know what to say.
And that was the spectacle we observed on December 5th in that 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've been so tight in and not whether hypocrisy they couldn't even explain it.
So yeah, there's a very direct continuity.
So in fairness, if the protesters were simply doing a sit-in, we've got a long history of people sitting in in the 60s and 70s protesting different things as 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 my friend Sam Harris's technique, which is just replace, you know, go through each person on the victim Olympics and the identity politics bingo card 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 are chasing heteropieople, whatever it is, pick you are from the bingo card.
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 system.
But can you talk a little bit about this oppressor oppressed 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 haves and the have nots.
And at any given moment, I can feel like I have not to some other have.
And theoretically, I'm a have to someone else who they 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 great.
No good. No, that's right. And that's another point of continuity from the codling.
So the central idea of the codling 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, 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 someone has offended you.
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 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.
They're the evil ones where they're perfectly bad. We're perfectly good.
So it's that third distortion is really the most pernicious from a 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 marks or the French Revolution even until the 1950s or 60s.
It was about the haves versus the have-nots. And the left was the part one that stood up for the have-nots and the left stood up for the poor and the people.
But we go through a period in the 60s and 70s of the conversion away from a sort of a Marxist idea based on economics to something is it a little bit Marx, is it Michelle Foucault, there's different intellectual heritage is here.
Where now it's all about power. It's not haves 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 intersectionality is about. It starts with a perfectly legitimate point that there are multiple dimensions of identity and to be a black woman is not just the sum of being black or being woman, they're unique in dignities that hit black women that you don't notice unless you are tuned into.
So intersectionality begins, Kimberly Crenshaw with a very good insight, which I think was actually right.
But the way it plays out on campus, what Greg and I argued in our book is 18-year-olds coming onto 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. 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, which is incredibly disempowering and just, you know, not good for the development.
And what we end up with is a movement that thinks in these binary terms. And this is what brings us to today is, of course, you know, Jews, I'm Jewish.
We always thought that we were among histories victims. And certainly you can't understand the creation of the state of Israel without understanding what happened in the Holocaust.
But because of the way intersectionality 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 fight whiteness.
Now, most Jews, as I understand it, most Jews in Israel are actually Sephardic. They're not from Europe. But, but in America, Jews are coded 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 there's no legitimacy to that view. Obviously, there's a huge power differential in Israel versus Gaza.
But the mindset that says everything is about power is so narrowing incorrect, boring, and offensive.
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 rights beyond hope too.
But, 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, it seems accurate. You think the pendulum is shifting. What do you see broadly socially right now? Are we still in this loop where we are creating oppressor, oppressed kind of constructs 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 a politics guy. I'm not a political party or anything.
But 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 sort of shift going to be what would pull things policy wise the other way? Yeah, I think things are changing. 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 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 COVID, then especially George Floyd, a lot of progressive agadias got supercharged.
Ibrahim Candy became the patron saint. Everything was about anti racism. So that's when things really became completely bonkers. Not just on campus, but in journalism, in museums, you know, firing all the white guides and all the just crazy stuff was happening 2021, 22.
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 to saying, well, 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.
So business has begun definitely moving away from all this stuff. Universities were not doing, we're not really moving away until December 5th. I think December 5th that that that hearing was so humiliating for higher ed. I think a lot of us feel much freer now.
We feel like, you know what, the intersectional, you know, the sort of the people will destroy your reputation if you question them. They're on the defensive now.
You know, we don't hear much from even candy anymore. We don't hear him referred to very much anymore. So I think that at least even on campus, the pendulum is swinging. I was afraid it wasn't a pendulum. I was afraid of 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. 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 cancel 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.
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 everything has to be about race. And that was just kind of nuts.
And so I think there is a kind of a move to comments.
So now we're talking about mononium, very racist, Alan. A very racist, Alan. 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, they're confused now about the terms because so much of traditional liberalism feels a liberal because of your point about far left behavior, traditional conservatism feels a liberal because of far right behavior.
What is the difference between the two and kind of help us bring balance to the force?
So I'll answer your question as a psychologist, which is 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 of the left.
And it goes back to openness to experience and conscientiousness if you personality traits. But basically, there's a there's a liberal or progressive sentiment that says it's captured by this Robert F Kennedy quotes some men see things as they are and say why I dreamed things that never were and say why not?
So progressives historically are the people who look at existing institutions and say, you know, why don't we you know, why don't we change this like why don't we have some other thing that which might be more just.
So progressives are always pushing for progress for change, but then the the the 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 concern that when things that I learned from reading the conservative intellectuals going back to Edmund Burke.
You can't just go messing with institutions and expect it to work out well.
So a good liberal democracy, one which when 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 will you met Buckley's famous quote about national review is going to stand toward history yelling stop or at least slow down.
So that's great like you have a car with a gas pedal in a break 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 always descends into chaos and economic chaos and and cruelty.
And 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 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 their progressives.
They're true liberals they believe in a John Stuart 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 that behavior this is time is so talking about the constraint vision of humanity.
Right so so that's all healthy and then you always have some far left radicals who they become Maoist in one generation they become Robe's peer and other Jenny they chop off heads prone to violence on the far left you got a group prone to violence on the far right that our reaction area that our authoritarian.
And let's say there was some distribution now then along comes Twitter long comes Facebook along comes social media what happens 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 bet for the entertainment of the people in the stands and the great majority people don't want to fight with swords they just go quiet.
And some people pick up the sorts like yes let's go.
And so the far left becomes super empowered the far right become super empowered and the center left the center right goes silent and that's what I think is you know that's I think a real disaster 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
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 is one way to characterize that that that conservatives will say more taxes and more regulation is not john Stuart Mill it's not more free market
and then on the flip side this idea of conservatives want to have less government less regulation less taxes 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
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 flip why is conservatism and liberalism in some aspects flipped and when does that what 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 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 can you always have to understand the right as a reaction to what they perceived 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 election same with the right
it's made of a mixture of different kinds of people there's a wonderful study for more in common that talked about the seven tribes of the seven groups of Americans 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 that's the kind of a gap 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 far left they're not liberal but now but for a while they were really dominant not in the democratic part is an important point the democratic party has two wings which one usually wins 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 we're going to be a lot of people
with a you know when I spoke in progressive way that's great that's viewpoint diverse 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 H W Bush through Mitt Romney they were true conservatives very decent man they believed in decency family vow I mean these you know I have a lot 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 think they really have a lot to answer for but my point is you just look at the parties the republican party 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 is really is no right to speak up on university campuses but in Washington I think the republican party is the party that's really gone farther off the reservation or if you want to still say that today 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 they have not they're left out they're they're not able to be on the text screen with the kids that are so they're not cool they're socially disengaged they're angry their parents they're sad how do you address that as a parent where you're not going to be on social media
so you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because you're not going to be on social media because
you know, do you agree with me on that? If we work together, you know, John Heights says if we work together, we can actually give our kids a fun childhood. Are you in on that? And what that means is we're going to follow the four norms. 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. And that 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, which is what the kids are using the communicator, just lots of bad stuff happens on Snapchat. But 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 have just hold the line. Yeah, well, yeah. Yes, if you're going to be able to do that, you're going to be able to do that.
If you, you can, it's hard to hold the line 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 kids, so your kid and the other kids who were 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 beds, swiping all day long, let them do that. They're going to end up basically anxious and never having
done anything to grow up. Whereas your kids are getting together for four-way sleepovers where 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-coverning, you know, you give them money, you give them an allowance, I suggest in the book, be really clear about chores, allowance, and encourage them. Go right, go right 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, you know, you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able
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to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able to do that. So I think you're going to be able
to do that. 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 X 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 want to military people want to discipline because it's a numbers game. You 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 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 is similar to what I hear a lot from it from people who are hiring young people. But let me suggest one slight variation that you might try.
Because a really good thing about Gen C 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 if first of all they have to understand the concept of anti-projility. Very easy to explain.
Chapter one of the Kotlin American mind. If you go to the coddling.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 and you're talking about it and then you say to your new Gen Z employees. Okay, now we can do this in two ways.
One is 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 going to pick option one because they do want to grow they record they're not denial they're not defensive they're not like no I'm not like that no like so.
So I especially would not I'm not giving up on on Gen Z especially those who are still in the early 20s.
And 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 were doing it together. But if you have a cohort you know if you if you're selective in your hiring.
And you try to avoid the ones who are most you know showing the signs of the sort of the extreme activism and the extreme emotionality.
If you have a group 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 generally have it.
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 where they're just going to be don't have the work ethic to be successful in an intense field like venture capital or venture back startup.
So and then one will leave because there are 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 enough fight in the school yard 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 time to teach you how to you know get smashed in the face you know with a with a dodge ball you know that should have happened in 12.
We're 12 years old. It's it's going to be tough for them. 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 truth of what you're saying and we get to the point where you know college admissions and hiring is not just going to go for the high GPA and the full resume of extra critical activities.
They're going to go for signs of being a free range kid. They're going to 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 where you know I see an NYU or for the I see any I believe school degree or something like that you're going to think oh my God this person is going to come here and start a union or movement.
Yeah, they're going to distract everybody. This is why coin base and other folks are saying we're here for this purpose. If you're here you're here for this mission in this purpose anything else you want to do on your own time.
They sure business but that's what major major kudos to coin base 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 that's right now it's a 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 had 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 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 five o'clock on Friday you could start thinking about that the rest of the week focused.
I'm old school Gen X I'm old school now. It's so great to have you on here the books yeah.
Carling of the American mine anxious generation and the first to buy all four everybody that's the message you get here stop what you're doing get the audio book books of the greatest deal in the world 1015 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 great to just thanks so much guys I just want to put in just a quick note to learn more go to anxious generation dot com is the website for the book after Babble dot com is my sub stock we put a lot of research a lot of writing and let grow dot org is an incredible organization that we created with I can
be the North can azy to give parents like you more help more ideas and how to give you kids a free range of been all over that website lots of great ideas there yeah so I hope if
there any philanthropists in the audience who are willing what we were tied to tiny little organization we could do so much more if we had some money it could hire some higher
staff so let go of donation now let grow dot org fantastic your kids grow exactly exactly and let us know what you think of the all in interview everybody who's a fan
John you're amazing great thank you so much guys
