The Coddling of the American Mind moderated by Malcolm Gladwell

thank you all for coming thank you to all of our guests joining us this evening I wanted to start with each of you when or why don't you start I wouldn't need you to describe how you came to this issue for me the free range kids issue well I as you just heard I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone actually wasn't just me it was me and my husband who was out there somewhere America's worst dad I don't think God actually don't see him but anyway the reason we had let him do this was because he felt he was ready for it and we know our city we know our kid and it seemed like if he was ready we were ready and I didn't write the column about it immediately because it wasn't a publicity stunt although had I know but I when I did write it the the blowback was so immediate I really hadn't realized how scared my generation of parents had become to let their kids do anything on their own even though we all grew up loving our freedom as kids and the disconnect between the way we were raising our own kids and the way we appreciated being raised just struck me as bizarre and I've just been you know sort of exploring my way through it since you but you were you say you were unaware of how afraid your generation had become as parents but you you must have been at least partially aware if you thought it was worthy of an article to write about how your kid was five dollars um here's what happened I let him we let him ride the subway and then I didn't write about it immediately cuz it didn't strike me as that big a deal but I was talking to some of the other fourth-grade parents and they were like you did what I was like yeah we want to ride the subway and they were gonna wait till their kids were older like 38 or 39 and when I when I heard that I wanted to write it but I have to confess that when I look back at old columns of mine I used to be at the Daily News not anymore anyway I found columns of mine from when they were like four and six and I said yeah I let them go to the bathroom at the at the new victory theatre without me traipsing their boys without me going in is that terrible and I let them play downstairs in our courtyard when they were I don't know seven and nine is that so terrible and so I realized that had been a theme which was I just didn't understand why we were so afraid of strangers I'm a reporter by trade all I do was talk to strangers so that really got my gall when I and as a reporter I knew that the crime rate today is lower than when we were growing up so between not letting our kids do anything and having the reason be because times have changed it just didn't make sense to me and I just hate hysteria I know I sound slightly hysterical but I hate and and that's really what wakes me up every day I'm like I gotta fight this fight yeah John and Greg how did you come to tell what was behind the original this foray into well first thing I want to say as a disclaimer is that I'm recovering from a concussion from a car accident so if I say anything stupid that's the concussion but if I say anything really good that's all me so I always want the weird person who went to law school specifically to do First Amendment law I took every class that my law school offered I did six credits on Censorship during the Tudor dynasty when I ran out of classes to take up the First Amendment I interned at the ACLU of Northern California this was my lifelong passion and I started working for a new organization I became the first legal director of the foundation for individual rights and education which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this and even back in 2001 it was easier to get in trouble for what you said on a college campus than most people thought but at the time who you'd get in trouble with was overwhelmingly administrators and there was this kind of conservative stereotype about students being the ones reporting their professors and demanding speech goes and that was just not one another kind of curveball in the story is it's you know a little bit of a dark turn is around 2007 I I had a very bad bout of depression I like a scary hopefully the worst I'll ever have and I ended up being hospitalized for it and the thing that really helped me deal with and I had issues with depression my whole life but the thing that really made these battles winnable pretty much from this point on was cognitive behavioral therapy so I was working on campus defending freedom of speech while trying to train myself to not catastrophize a cognitive distortion that can make you anxious and depressed to not personalize to not engage in black-and-white thinking to not over generalize all these things are cognitive distortions that depressed and anxious people do a lot and amazingly if you get in the habit of talking back to those kind of exaggerated voices it's a it's very effective at dealing with anxiety and depression and I was watching on campus administrators in my opinion exercising modes of behavior that seem to be saying to students you're in great danger all the time and I was and at the time I was like well but thank goodness students aren't taking these lessons to heart and unfortunately that seemingly changed overnight 2013-2014 we at the time we had no clue exactly why students who used to be the best constituency for free speech on campus suddenly became to some degree sort of like the stereotypes people have of the don't you dare say that kind of attitude very very very very quickly and what was strange about it was that they were art there are sort of medicalizing the reasons for it they were saying not I don't want this guy on my campus because I hate him and he's a bigot I don't want this guy speaking on my campus because it will be psychologically harmful to people people I know not usually not to me but to other people other unnamed people will be harmed by their presence and this sounded exactly like the what I was a frightened was going to happen in terms of sort of bad pseudo medicalization pseudo psychological thinking so I went I had recently become friends with John and we went to get lunch at a place down in the village and we've chatted about the idea and to my delight he wanted to write an article about it so John are there I were there specific incidents in your own experience that led you to think that there was a broader trend going on yeah so so I've been teaching since 1987 when I started graduate school and at Penn and then at Chicago and then for 16 or 17 years at the University of Virginia and I thought the job of a teacher or at least how to be a good teacher is you provoke a variety of emotions during class you get people to look at things from different perspectives you lead them through a path which sometimes is uncomfortable and then you resolve it and so they couldn't be like a dramatic structure to a class and so that's the way I always taught and I was trusted my students and felt that they trusted me and then I moved to NYU in 2011 and it's not so much moving from UVA to NYU its that suddenly for the first time in the spring of 2014 I mean it really was overnight it was like from out of new really strange um in the spring of 2014 I had several incidents where students reported me to the Dean and demanded that he do something about things I had said in class like teaching the Milgram experiment one student thought that I was saying that the Nazis were okay it was just this level of it was just the sense that students would give you the benefit of the doubt because you're all in this together you're trying to put on a great class together that seemed to vanish after a couple of such complaints and I was really puzzled and and when students talking about issues in terms of I don't feel safe and like what what do you mean I couldn't understand it and this was all in the spring of 2014 and so when Greg invited me to lunch in May of 2014 you know it's sort of like you know like you're seeing you know people turn into zombies here and there and some of the guy comes along so you know in the lab I just found this music and so he told me his idea I said oh my god I said and I sort of suggest you should write that up and and I should write it up with you so we that's there was the origin Atlantic article a question for all of you the one thing that all of you have in common is that you live on the east coast of the United States in relatively privileged areas Queens John Southeast DC John you you you just mentioned Penn Chicago Virginia NYU I don't see the University of southern Kentucky how how certain are you that the phenomenon you're describing is national oh or do you think it is it is specific to privileged quarters of pampered American life charters because as we've been talking about the book around the country I always asked a few different questions and I and I meet with administrators I ask various questions and one thing that I found is whatever you go anywhere in America if you're dealing with kids born after 1995 everybody from the college president through the professor's through the guitar teacher through the Counseling Center everybody is saying what hit us that the anxiety the depression there's a tsunami of it you know in the tree another soccer coach says I mean like all of a sudden if you criticize a kid you know she won't come back to pray you know she quits the team and so the fragility the anxiety the depression that is totally national the politicization of it the idea that people are vulnerable not me necessarily but her and him and them they're vulnerable and therefore I'm gonna call you out destroy you because you said something that I you know etc it's that call out culture that is not national that is if you look at the top liberal arts colleges in the North East and the west coast and Chicago you find in fact that's where all the chap downs have been we have a map at heterodox Academy we created a map where every shout down where a speaker was literally shouted down so they couldn't speak and it's all right along the eastern seaboard and the rim of the Pacific coast and Chicago yeah what so what's special about Lorelei that you start with wait I had a Kentucky story I couldn't believe it you mentioned a state that I know something about so can I just tell you yes we're always open to Kentucky stories that's the 92nd Street wise motto where Kentucky stories live highly specific why come here um so this lady wrote to me about a month ago she's in Kentucky and every afternoon when her son who's nine gets dropped off by the school bus the rule that the school has is that there has to be an adult waiting at the bus stop to walk him home it's actually you can see her house from the bus stop and she has her father normally walk him home one day the dad was in the bathroom and one day the kid wasn't supposed to come home and so the the grandfather wasn't waiting to walk him home but if it becomes a third time she gets reported to Child Protective Services because she is neglecting this child and the child has to go back to the bus depot which seems like the least safe place you could possibly take in Kentucky but so you're wondering how do kids get so fragile they're being told they're being forced to be supervised every single second even in Kentucky and then the the reason the rationale for that is that otherwise they're not safe and it's like they are safe but if you're always being told that you're not safe when you are safe nothing seems safe and I think that's why we hear the word I don't feel safe on campus because that's just become the watchword for everything and if I could just add one thing on the class issue and I take the class issue extremely seriously and we and the book we recommend several books including putnams our kids which i think is just absolutely absolutely fabulous I do feel like my work at fire we still see a case at schools that tend to be more sort of working-class more commuter schools we still see cases exactly like the kind of cases I was seeing in 2005 where students are being told that they can't protest outside of a tiny little free speech zone a lot of these sort of like administrators throwing their weight around don't you dare criticize the university case but when it comes to these highly ideological cases we do see them at Morley colleges a couple questions John you mentioned something happened around students born in 1995 well let's dig into this okay what happened in 1995 and Lenore you can join chime in on this this shift that you have identified in attitudes of parents can you also locate the point at which this I can't locate it perfectly but I can tell you that it is this generation and possibly a little bit of the generation right before it you know 1984 we started putting the pictures of the missing kids on milk cartons and we neglected to say by the way this was a run away or this kid was taken in a custodial disappeared right and in a divorce battle and I think if you're growing up with you know here's your rice krispies and here's the person who's been missing it's really it's like you know it's like series and so that I think became you know we really became obsessed with the idea of predators and no child ever being safe and that's when the crime really was ramping up yeah you know seventies eighties nineties a peaks in 93 but the fear keeps going even though the crime went down so I can't say exactly when but I do feel like this idea that any child that is not supervised is gonna be snatched off their bike starts with the milk cartons but I think that's more the the background that's the priest story so Greg and I structured the book around this mystery of why is it so sudden why did it come out of nowhere with kids born in 1995 and so we think there's six different intersecting threads that really all come together and that is one of them that is the background of increasing paranoia and Lenore's always talking about this somehow in the 90s early 2000s we got the idea that if you take your eye off your kid just to reach for a carton of milk they're gonna be snatched milk again but but but we think we think that there's two major factors here that combined so one is the vast overprotection the central idea in the book is that human beings are anti fragile that is kids might look fragile but actually the evolutionary design is for us to go out fall down a few times then we learn how to stand up we reach for something it drops we learn how you know we're built to learn by trial and error where kids seek out risk once they mast or something they try to make it more dangerous that's what they need to do and beginning maybe in the 90s we started saying ah risk how about zero how about no risk is that good for you and so we basically deprived them of the ability to develop their normal abilities as an autonomous human being so that it really ramps up in the 90s and so we begin to get fragile generation we came in to get kids who are who are not as robust and then social media I think is the reason why their cutoff is so sharp because Facebook opens up it used to just be for college students when it came out and then in 2006 now it opens up to anybody who lies and says they're 13 but you know but 11 year olds aren't really getting on Facebook in 2006 and then the iPhone comes out in 2007 but it's expensive and so 11 years don't really have iPhones in 2007 but by 2011 they mostly do most teenagers now have an iPhone and social media and they're checking it hundreds of times a day there's a wonderful book called ijen by Jeanne twangy this is what really clued us into the sharpness of it you look at the behavior changes that happened the late Millennials are still getting driver's licenses they still sometimes drink with their friends they still sometimes go out on dates and go to work at jobs beginning with kids born in 1995 all that plummets because all they're doing is sitting home alone on their devices and if you do that it seems if you do that start if you get social media in college it doesn't seem to be bad for your brain but if you get it at age 11 12 or 13 now your brain is just beginning develop and your parents let you have your device at night so you're sitting there and somebody just commented on something you said and you know you're trying to go to sleep what you're worried about it and so if you imagine 11 to 13 year olds bathed in stress hormones and not sleeping year after year yeah suddenly when they show up in college in September of 2013 it's like from out of nowhere yeah it did line up extraordinarily well when we were looking into it and I think of social media I think if social media is something that really sped up two different factors certainly you know the depression and anxiety if you look at the data you know when people use a lot of it they tend to be you know tend to be more depressed it doesn't explain enough of the variance but a small effect that we can prove but right right it's it is there but when I when people are a little skeptical of this the way I try to and it disproportionately hits girls and the way I try to explain it is imagine the absolute worst of junior high school 24 hours a day forever and then they immediately get it but the other thing that it sped up that I that both John and I are very interested in and we do actually see as a as a causal factor had been the Morse the much slower process of Group polarization particularly political polarization and really social media Pat's you on the back for having an echo chamber whether it's on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook essentially gives you a nice dopamine rush the thicker your echo chamber is so I actually think social media speeds speeds up both the imperative depression and anxiety and the group polarization so a lot of trends one trend that was actually working was relatively quick sped up like crazy as soon as we had social media but yeah so here's my question I really have one question there was the Greatest Generation mhm people who grew up during the Depression fought in the war and in fact that they graciously and modestly accepted the term great great tells you something about how great they were but uh so the Greatest Generation looked at the generation two followed the baby boomers and said they were narcissists yep and blame television and there was the famous phrase the me decade right and there was a there was an established narrative of generational complaint that there here they are we sacrificed and this these people are all about themselves the baby boomers then turned around and looked at Generation X they say remember they said they were aimless mm-hmm there was that whole notion why were they aimless because of video games and heavy metal music possibly gangsta rap a D&D and there was I am old enough to remember books written on the many flaws of Generation X and how we were gonna be what the Generation X do well they turned around are you generation extra I'm blessed of the baby boom how your lesson are you Generation X yep yep all right well directly Gregg you then turn around yep and you looked at the generation that came below you and you said they're soft yeah everyone's got a problem with the generation below them yeah absolutely why is why can't I just say oh this is more of what's been going on forever yeah I'm sorry this was I have fun with this one I'm quite sure in fact that if we went back to the 18th actually Socrates has oh yeah George Washington looked at those whippersnappers at you know yeah I just said they don't want to cross but you know we when the original article came out the Atlantic had someone who wrote a letter there's basically a code you know just it's just the two old old guys complaining about the younger generation and they had a picture of Abraham Simpson from The Simpsons of the old man shouts of cloud and but I had fun answering it for two reasons one you know just saying that people always say this it's more of a it's not really an argument it's just saying that like this this is a truism and I've but also one thing that I like to point out is you know my grandfather was born in in 1889 in Russia his grandfather was a serf and and while I do say like listen I actually think there was some validity as a generation Xer when they were saying that we were aimless I kind of think we were aimless I think that when the Silent Generation picks on the baby boomers there's endless things to pick on the baby boomers about and they were right so intergenerational critiques aren't necessarily automatically wrong in fact sometimes there's there's some truth to them but but given the the tremendous amount of comfort and progress we've had just over the last two centuries it is the case that you can say pretty reliably that everyone's grandfather had it a lot of grandmother had it a lot harder than they do so what is the solution it's not that we say oh it needs to be hard like it wasn't the good old days the best possible thing that we could we could imagine having is a world in which we enjoy the fruits and comforts and video games and media of the current age but are able to also draw from the tremendous wisdom that was brought by much harder times from people like Seneca Marcus Aurelius or the Buddha I'd like to add to that by saying there's a psychological principle that losses loom larger than gains and so each generation is different from the one before and the one the older one looks at them and says well they don't have this thing that we have therefore they're deficient and we don't notice the thing that they do have that is good that's the normal process that is eternal that's not what we're talking about that's part of it that's fine but above and beyond that if you look at objective measures of functioning such as the number who cut themselves to the point where they have to be hospitalized that's not just like we think that's bad but you know for them I mean it's a good thing you know absolutely so so this is what is so stunning is by objective measures kids born after 1995 are cratering in their mental health now the stats if you look at self-reported depression anxiety they go way up beginning with that birth here colleges are overwhelmed by people coming in saying they're depressed and anxious not schizophrenia not by a pull or not anything else just depression and anxiety not even stress they're not more stressed they just don't know how to deal with it but here's the kicker many people say to us oh you know that's just self-report like these these young people they're so comfortable talking about depression it's not a real thing and if you look at the graphs of hospital admissions for cutting yourself the graph for boys actually is fairly low and that actually does not go up the boys don't change but the girls the the millennial girls just sort of go like this the older i gen girls or the the rather the graph of late teens girls goes like this and the graph of 11 to 13 year-olds from the from around 2000 we get right here we get to 2013 it goes like this it's tripled three times as many girls are putting themselves in the hospital preteens same thing for suicide the rates way up and these exact trends are exactly the same in the UK and in Canada so that's why we think it's a combination of overprotection which is happening in all those countries plus the specific spur of social media which specifically affects girls a lot more than boys yeah how severe the the increase in anxiety and depression if I was talking about the two things that I did that really surprised me and working on the book the first one was how bad all of the data was on the increase in anxiety and depression and you know that's whether it's self-reports it's whether what we're hearing actually from people on the ground and that's what we're seeing from things that you can't and you know you can't effectively fake that scared me scare me to death it was much worse than I ever thought the surprising thing that really struck me about the book particularly as someone who has a one-year-old and the three-year-old was how well-established it is that kids need free time free play unstructured time and I felt like I talked to a number of experts we were practically yelling this you know saying this is really well it's a free time exactly and and meanwhile you know with my kids when I look at other people in in Washington DC my age like their their scheduling them from you know 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. like like this is not equal to 11:00 p.m. like this is not a thing what uh let me ask the question in another way what's good about the current generation so you if we if we go back to the if we go back to the you know the the generational paradigms that I was describing earlier we can say that the the greatest generation was were selfless and thrifty but they were also emotionally stunted and you know you name it cheap I mean whatever we can say that the baby boomers were narcissists but we can also say on the flip side they were you know open to much more open to different human difference much more tolerant of two person you know in each case so is there something that were there must is there a is there a flipside to all the things you're describing that's actually beautiful and positive about what this generation is doing yeah well the the data in i gen shows what we kind of all know which is that to them you know differences in sexuality are just not a big deal you know when we we were growing up it was like you know are you pro-gay marriage anti-gay marriage but it was like a thing and to them was like who cares so so the the march of tolerance which has been going on for decades and decades is certainly marching on so they're incredibly tolerant they're much less likely to to drink do drugs have premarital sex all sorts of things that get teenagers in trouble the flip side of that of course is teenagers probably need to get in a little bit of trouble to test the limits and so you know we can point to specific bad things that they're not doing but I think it is obeah stunting of ability which means that it's not just like well it's this and that it's I think it really is as twinky puts it by all the markers of development an eighteen-year-old today is at the level of a 15 year old from 30 years ago and this is why Gregg and I recommend in our book we should consider not having 18 year olds on college campuses they're really not ready for it a lot of them and so we should the norm should be a gap year and this might be the only way to get kids away from the overprotective helicopter parents so you know you think that's gonna get them away you're wrong they're gonna be tracked what I was going to say about this generation is all is not lost I mean we you know in their book in our book we you know let grow has a couple of ideas that are really practical and really simple to give kids back the independence that will lead to more resilience one of them is just this it's a it's called electoral project it's not even a project it's the teachers telling the kids to go home and do one thing on their own without their parents it's homework and when kids do it it it breaks the cycle pretty fast because the parents are so proud that the kid has done oh my god my kid got a Slurpee yeah you know high five but there that changes the parent as much as the kid because finally they've they've been forced to let the kids go and do something in the real world and the the reinforcement of the pride that the parents feel allows them to do it again and with people like us saying free time is good and kids need some independence between that and having a push from the school and everybody in the school is doing it so you're not the crazy mom that's really I mean that can just reset the whole thing I mean I know that sounds pretty easy and self-serving but it can it can really change things fast oh sorry ya know one of the things I wanted to add was you know put fire in a little bit of my group the defense free speech on campus and a little bit of an odd position because for years we'd been sort of lamenting sort of the apathy back back when students were very good on free speech they also could be a little apathetic but they would you know the petition saying save professor blah you know sometimes a lot more than that professor blouse colleagues but we were put in somewhat of a strange position where there was suddenly you know some real activism on campus and some of it was great and some of it was however activism that was requesting that people be fired what they said or for the using free speech to argue from what new speech code so we're like so we had to say it's like we're glad you've overcome the lack of apathy we're not totally psyched about the fact that some of it seems to be directed at at freedom of speech I think there is you know a desire to improve and change the world and but when you actually see it's hard to tell what the best aspects of a generation is going to be until they start getting out getting out in the workplace and starting really making their mark so I'm getting more confused not less so the current generation is more tolerant more open to people of different sexual orientations less likely to use drugs and drink heavily I'm assuming that that we could we could make some comments about that they might be more empathetic certainly they're they're they're what you're describing are people who have whose antennae for other people's pain and feelings is quite is is so why can't we just say that we have traded one set of trade-offs we have exchanged one set of trade-offs for another so first of all most kids this generation are actually doing fine most are not suffering from depression anxiety most come to college they want to learn the problem is that there's a with this new morality subset have been empowered to call others out this is the heart of the reason why we all should be alarmed very alarmed so think about it like this suppose you married someone who no matter what you said he or she just always took it in the worst possible way they were always looking to prove that you're bad you're wrong and it was this constant that would be really hard to be married to such a person and now imagine that you admit students to your school and 5% of them are like this and you're a professor you always trusted your students but no matter what you say 5% of them are looking for some way to report you to the Dean it changes your teaching you don't trust them and when trust leaves the university the fundamental character changes and basically can't really function and then imagine that these students that began graduating in the in May of 2017 imagine that you run a small company you have a tight-knit team you hire one of them and this person is always looking to call someone out and to and said what we there's even a review of our book thank you for writing this book now I understand why all those all our bright new young hires go running to HR as soon as they overhear a joke in the hallway I've heard from so many businesspeople now in the last in the last year it's like it's an unending soap opera we're all so exhausted because somebody said something somebody got angry this is taking up all our time so when this call out culture which was nurtured in the university in certain universities especially the Northeast in the West Coast this call out culture industries that hire from those school from those so journalism media and tech talk to people in those fields about their young employees and they'll say they're making life a nightmare there's no trust anymore everybody's walking on eggshells that makes it very difficult to be creative it makes me to be cooperative wait no no I will say John I am broadly in sympathy with you but the notion that everyone's life is a nightmare intact not everyone but no talk about my experience limited as it may be with Silicon Valley is they're doing just fine and if they have problems with people running to a chart because they're it's usually because their bonus is you know six figures as opposed to seven a year ago that was true talk to people now this is very new yeah and when it comes to when it comes to tolerance for things like sexual diversity that and I'm an executive sexual expression that definitely pulls well but it's hard to kind of also at the same time say tolerance because when you look at sort of the speech policing that comes from the most activist members of the community it's just so easy to get in trouble for even you know what might be a faux pas and any other at any other time in history and so one of the interesting is also in the data that shows kind of the polarization of our society sometimes you can surprise people by saying and actually did you know that an i Gen you know people born a from gen Z people born after 1995 that there are actually more conservatives and people are kind of surprised when you say that it's like I'm there more liberals just there's a lot fewer moderates so some of the polarization of our of our overall society is actually reflected in our students and what work what I get worried about is sometimes the way the are the arguments actually happened on campus and the way of actually trying to show that you're tolerant open-minded it becomes a what I call a perfect rhetorical fortress where essentially it's just ad hominem questions without ever getting to the substance of the actual argument now again it's it could be a minority of students but it can prevent you from getting to the to the rich the dynamic of the discussions you can have would you feel differently if you were a gay person of color who grew up in the South in the 1950s and was looking at the world from that perspective what's actually kind of funny about that is I got approached by the complicado fence fund and I am a big comic nerds and they somehow they've sensed that about me and I've been talking to someone who very much follows that description and he's you know he's a gay man he's Latino and it's 40s and suddenly he's finding that he's being reported to the bias response team because he's not saying everything exactly right so I think it depends on which one you talk to but I am hearing this from a lot of people who are by every sort of privilege dimension not someone you would consider sort of like the oppressor you know coming to us saying listen like I I'm suddenly the oppressor I'm suddenly like the bad one because I don't say things exactly by this very regimented way that you're now supposed to in at my comic book art school so I actually think that from a number of them you could actually I mean this was interesting for a friend of mine who went to Vanderbilt she's a gay woman and she had friends you know obviously on campus but she also was friends with with a big part of the gay and trans population and she was and this is a former intern a fire and she said that she was told quite explicitly by the by the LGBT group at Vanderbilt not to bring the the kids from Nashville together the Townies the gay and lesbian kids from from town partially because they were constantly offended by the way these other kids talk so there is something very there's an elitist aspect to it that is actually quite exclusionary that actually ends up being used against in some cases people you would assume would be the people it was designed to protect but I think we can go even further with this I think we can acknowledge the the idea behind your question which is we're privileged middle-aged white men analyzing a generation book where we talk a lot about lenore skin easy we're privileged right book it's a great so and of course a lot of the activism on campus at Ridge originally was especially about racial issues and then LGBT and gender issues and now it's about everything it seems but I certainly agree with your point too that people would look at this from different perspectives but the book is organized around three psychological principles three great truths that are as true for black as they are for white gay straight or maybe they're true for all human beings so the three great untruths that we think kids are being taught are what doesn't kill you makes you weaker always trust your feelings and look at life as a battle between good people and evil people and if you're a human being those are probably the three worst ideas we could possibly put in your head if we want you to flourish and so thank you and so one of the in one of the best lines in the book one of the best things that gets retweeted and quoted a lot is a quote we have from Van Jones so you know Democratic activists speaks the University of Chicago where they had an issue they had somebody from the Trump campaign speak and some students protested and so David Axelrod asks Van Jones what do you think about this you know no platforming safeSpace stuff and Van Jones you know he's clearly been thinking about this and he's kind of he's got it it's amazing what he said he basically have more or less he says I don't want you to be safe ideologically I don't want you to be safe emotionally I want you to be strong that's different I'm not gonna pave the jungle for you put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity so he's saying if you're gay if you're black whatever you are you need to be strong in this world and going down this road of oh you know you're so delicate you're such a victim we're gonna protect you that's the worst thing you can do to those people but what if it's there I'm sorry to keep coming back to this I mean I and I these are all comments made in in the spirit of affection for this argument okay we like we like critics cuz I rewrite this is just a little nub of it that I that troubles is too strong a word that I can't get around it triggers you trigger I'm a let's go back to the example I gave her I'm a I'm a young black man living in southern Georgia in 1950 what is my life look like well my life is full of lots and lots and lots of both small and both small slights and significant structural impediments the both matter I am demeaned or if I it's even worse if I'm a woman I am demeaned on a daily basis through language through attitudes through reinforcement of my inferior status and through more than that through a general feeling by the white majority that I should be okay if I'm because I should just be able to buck it up and try hard and I could make it in America if I stop whining about racial prejudice right that was the line that was fed to black Americans for how many hundreds of years in this country you know there's a wonderful wonderful there is on an awful moment in I was reading this no I was listening to two podcast not my own and and there was a quote from someone in he was in the wood what part is it doesn't matter but it was a quote from a white guy in South in the 1960s who was saying you know we've had three years of this civil rights nonsense alright enough already you know let's just shut up about black people let's get on with our lives that is a kind of manifestation of this idea that we're just like if we just tough it out and stop whining everyone's gonna be fine I'm not saying that what I'm saying is that these I this notion that that small slights don't matter does not have a distinguished history uh-huh it was used it was part and parcel of a way in which women minorities all kinds of people were for many years kept down right so what we're seeing for what we see now is evidence of an overcorrection on the other side why is that a bad thing well if you're talking about places where the laws say you don't have equal rights and the norms say you're garbage and you've got to move out of our way that's a terrible situation and there are times and places when you have to have aggressive and well organized protest to try to knock things down Yale University in 2015 Middlebury College in 2017 we're talking about places that are trying as hard as they can there as a their their the the ethos the culture is explicitly anti-racist progressive welcoming inclusive so the strategies that were completely legitimate at a time when there were when there were actually legal barriers it's a completely different world from the one that we're talking about here on campus yeah and one of the things a study that came out that actually so played into my own experience I was immediately suspicious of it was the hidden tribes study which came out in the past just a couple months ago and basically my experience with a lot of the more aggressive kind of speech policing was it wasn't a poor black person from Georgia it was generally a wealthy white person whose going to a very elite college and that had been most of my experience of campus sensors they were elite there are people who came from wealthy backgrounds and one of the things that was in the hidden tribes study was it was talking about like the people who are the most passionate about this really aggressive form of speech policing is about 8% of the population it tends to it's the highest it's the highest economic class of any of the groups and the Edit has the least amount of actual racial diversity of of it every group except for the farthest to the right eight percent eight percent group so in a lot of times and I've watched this happen over and over again where people are saying but what about someone this other this completely other situation some other place and that's why I should be policing of policing microaggressions but it takes the form of this very kind of like almost Victorian kind of in it and in Sarah at Stanford you know that that essentially I'm going to police speech in the name of these people that actually I don't really know very well but I know that this is this is a great evil so I can make up for it somehow by being extra strict about what you're allowed to say so in a lot of cases I actually what I see in this is a lot of classism but it's partially coming the classroom is partially coming from the speech color polices I'll make one last point of that I will respectfully retreat back to by so here's another thing that that I can't get her around uh you're simultaneously making two claims what is it claim that we are on and I'm exaggerating only slightly we are on the brink of a highly significant social catastrophe and then simultaneously both you and Greg talk about how it's a minority it's your case if it's 5% to ruining for everyone and then we just had the eight percent from you you know if in fact the this movement is undermining the culture of high-tech firms in Silicon Valley how could 5% like five percents a very small number when when was when were when were the noisiest 5% of any generation ever fun to hang out with you know I mean by the way and a lot of your complaints are rooted in the behavior of students at relatively elite universities when did students at relatively elite universities ever conform to our expectations of how Rize adults ought to behave you know all of us it's just the dysfunction took different forms my you know in my school it was a complete absence of connection to any meeting full social issues whatsoever I could have used a lot of what's going on in Stanford now I almost would have thought it was a more morally engaged experience as opposed to people just prepping for finance jobs so I don't know I mean I I'm struggling with I'm struggling with why I should have anything more than a kind of academic interest in this trend because the the dynamics of a group the dynamics of a culture is not a majority vote one of the big findings of the hidden tribe study the study it was put out by a group in the UK but it's a huge study of America is that majorities of every single group male/female old young black white majorities of every group disliked political correctness except for that group that is called the progressive activist group on the far left so almost every great majority people dislike political correctness but we don't take a vote and say you know what most of us don't like it therefore it's not gonna affect us it's not like that rather we are all responding especially to threats so it's one thing if five percent are kind of annoying and you know what they might say something annoying to you you can put up with that but what if instead we arm everybody with a little like a little like blowgun and they can shoot darts into you and it really hurts like it really goes into your skin and you know an inch and it really hurts and so five you know everybody's got one and five percent of them are just going around blowing them and like anybody who who looks askance at them I think I changed my behavior I think they all have that's basically what happened on campus most of our students are great but the fact that there is a poster in every bathroom at NYU telling students how to report me if I say anything they don't like so yeah I changed my behavior I don't say anything they might not like and I and I have two points about that one is just that it's also that lines up with hidden tribes study is that these are tends to be people from fancy schools and in my opinion we actually privileged people from fancy schools probably a little bit too much maybe this will actually be the time when some people start realizing wow I'm actually having a lot of trouble with the people I'm hiring from from Yale and Stanford maybe I should be hiring more from University of Indiana hello which actual heart is this which apps are all a problem stop hiring which I actually think would potentially potentially be a great outcome so they are disproportionately influential people and I'm not sure and I think we over we we give too much praise to people Frances schools the other thing that we just really have to get back to though is the mental health aspect of it nobody benefits from the kind of numbers we're seeing in terms of anxiety depression particularly when it's avoidable particularly when you have a situation in which people are more or less creating an environment that are causing people to believe that they are mentally fragile when they're actually anti fragile to believe to talk themselves into depression and anxiety that's the thing that scares of it that scares me the most personally that there's no upside to a huge increase in anxiety and depression in society so that that's that's one of the reasons why I think everybody should take this seriously it's not the kids talking themselves into it per se it's if you've been growing up and you've only been in the back of the SUV and you've been taking every place and there's always an adult organizing your life and mediating all your disputes and telling you what to do that's that creates anxiety because you don't really have the that what is it the internal locus of control yeah well it really is a scary place if you don't have an internal locus of control you're a victim of circumstance yeah and you've been told that everything out there is scary and that's why you have to be with an adult all the time and that's and I don't want to leave with the idea that we have some kind of like that we really should feel genuine compassion for a lot of these students because I think about Julie lifts got Haynes who wrote a wonderful book called how to raise an adult and she was she was the Dean of freshmen at Stanford and what you what she was seeing was these absolutely brilliant students who weren't they weren't spoiled there were they were built like heat-seeking missiles they were who were perfectly refined perfectly designed to get into the Princeton's and the Harvard's and all of all of these fancy schools that we disproportionately value but unfortunately they hadn't been taught how to do their own laundry how to make how to actually manage their lives and when you don't have a locus of control that is a perfect formula for having aged and depressed people and there's something really heartbreaking about the kind of stories Julie tells about these incredibly accomplished people who feel powerless in their own lives that I think it should be a tragic and effective to anybody who cares about next generation I promise I said I was done but I would not I mean I literally am done when I the last time I was at the Y was about a year ago and it was to hear Ronan Farrow Wow in conversation with and I'm blanking on her name the actress yes Rose McGowan I'm talking about Harvey Weinstein mhm and that was at that moment when we uncovered something catastrophic and heartbreaking about the culture of one of the central industries of our day right Hollywood that here was a guy who was one of the most wide seen one of the most important figures and he was a serial sexual abuser and had been protected by the the culture for a generation you know more now I'm looking at the three bad ideas in this book and there are three ideas here that are that you were enumerated that you just talked about that are thought to be highly problematic what doesn't kill you makes you weaker well that's sort of what we said to the people who were victimized by Harvey Weinstein we said we said to them well you should get over it you're fine you gots made some cases maybe you got something out of it this is not the same as blood over second thing always trust your feelings a bad idea well that was also what we did in the case of those women who were victimized in those cases we told them their feelings didn't matter that the hurt that they carried for in many cases years and years and years that had an extraordinary impact on their lives was something that was of no concern to the broader culture and that Harvey Weinstein's should continue to be able to make great movies because that's a secondary thing three life is a battle between good and people and evil people was a bad idea well Harvey Weinstein is an evil person mm-hm by the way and so are a lot of the other people who Les Moonves is not a good person right and I could go down the list of people who use their power we are now discovering in ways that had a profound impact so I understand that these ideas can be bad in certain contexts but I'm not upset about the rise of these ideas in this moment because I feel like there's still an awful lot of work that we have to do as a society to make society a equitable end I hate to use it safe place for everyone not just white men from elite colleges we don't disagree and and this is something where I agree with you know Stephen King I'm gonna I use this I use that move all the time as well by the way well to agree with my but essentially kind of like a lot of the problems that we see are are the results of good things taken too far you know that essentially political correctness is it like like you said it's an overcorrection but lumping together frankly the idea of someone getting in trouble and people demanding they be fired for defending students rights to our offensive Halloween costumes is the same thing as what happened with Harvey Weinstein these are really things of different of different hold on life and and and so basic basically like it is absolutely wonderful that we've that we are coming out against these monsters and and they are indeed monsters it's the same way I feel about the anti-bullying campaign well the anti-bullying campaign started my people expected me to be like oh this is speech policing and my response was no it's about damn time we didn't need to be as as to each other when we were kids as well as when I was a kid but every you know every virtue type taken to an excess turns to a vice and I think that if you look at the kind of cases we talk about in the book we're not talking about Weinstein cases we're talking about professors making arguments and in good faith in thoughtful papers and being treated treated like monsters for it I want all the Harvey Weinstein's in the world to be exposed and you know rapists of you to be to be arrested but if you think the same thing applies to the Brett Weinstein's of the world to the Rebecca Duvall's I think that's quite another story but is it agreed no I totally agree but I wonder whether you're being naive I wonder whether you're being naive I wonder whether it's realistically is it possible to have the 90% good without the 5% who take it too far sure if you have notions of Rights and there are people who violate other people's rights and then we prosecute them that's a good thing I mean rape is not a microaggression sexual you know I mean what Harvey Weinstein was doing was illegal monstrous so yeah but well I don't want to sidetrack too much but many of the things that are damaging aren't as cut and dried as that though right I mean there's a there's a reason that we're talking about this in there were cultures that were hostile to outsiders and that hostility was expressed in subtle ways and when people talk about microaggressions there are in a sense rehearsing arguments that may have real validity and meaning later on in the real world is that not a so the so the idea of microaggressions is right on two points and wrong on at least to the idea of microaggressions was proposed by Chester Pierce I think it was a sociologist in the 70s and then popularized in the 2000 six or seven article by Derald wing sue so if a microaggression is a small act of aggression maybe one that you could kind of deny that you had any intent that's fine that's a useful concept to have and the other reason why micro aggression is useful is that it's meant to apply you know so if you're if you're Asian or if your skin is dark people often ask you where you from and what they really want to know is what's your ancestry what's your heritage and so there's no harm intended no hostility but that can become tiresome and so we it would be good to have a word for that and it'd be good if we're trying to assemble the most diverse possible campuses it will be good to teach incoming students from all over the world you know what don't keep asking people where they're from unless you you know unless you literally mean you know like where were you born in there but it's useful to have a concept for that and we have a concept it's a very necessary concept it's the word faux pas well it's so necessary we had to borrow it from French because we didn't have the word but we needed it okay so faux pas and so if you're bringing people together and they're human beings young human beings from diverse places diverse social class you can say you know what there's me a lotta misunderstandings let's try to work this out diversity is hard diversities hard work if we do it right we get benefits if we do it wrong we don't trust each other and we have endless litigation and so let's teach you about some things that you probably shouldn't say let's teach you about the concept of a faux pas and that will be one school but then in another school they have the same incoming class same kinds of issues to deal with with what they do as they say it's not a faux pas it's an act of aggression the world is divided between good people and bad people and you can tell by looking at them if they're binary dimensions mail is powerful which is bad and every other gender is weak which is good white is powerful bad so you teach students you don't see all these people out there break them up into binary categories one side is good the other side is bad so let's throw away hundreds of years of progress where we try to get over labeling people and hating them because of the group let's bring that all back hate those people those people and those people put it together now go oh and by the way here's the number to call if anyone offends you report them which school would you rather go to regardless of what your race sex or sexual orientation is which one would you rather go to that this has affected the way you teach yes what tell us about that what do you not teach now oh I wouldn't teach so for example in one example would be so I teach a course on professional responsibility I teach in the business school and we we've always had a unit on discrimination law you know it's they're going out into the into the world and these are MBA students mostly entirely and so they need to know what the law is on on on all kinds of discriminations we cover that that I can do but I used to talk about what are what are the issues you know is it numerical representation is it hostile climate what are all the issues and I would ask the people in the class what are the kinds of issues that you face in the workplace and it was kind of hard to get them to talk because even you know by 2012 when I started teaching this course people were you know a little on on edge about talking about these issues but we I had I felt like I could do that and it was a good thing for us to do in the class but I wouldn't do that now I don't do that anymore so for example if we were to talk as we say in the book the issue the issue say in tech or anywhere else if women face obstacles because their gender that's terrible that has to end if they are demeaned if they're not taken seriously all those issues are about how you're treated if any group doesn't have people dignity that's a serious problem unfortunately we've gone in widely across the culture for a concept of under-representation so if a group is underrepresented we then are taught we're supposed to say that's evidence of structural sexism or racism and you would not look at the pipeline do not look at the pipeline just if it's not 5050 in the physics department it's structural sexism now I used to bring that argument up I used to say what counts what are the problems which one should we focus on and which ones should we say you know what if there's no obstacle and people choose differently that's okay I wouldn't dare do that now because that's a microaggression that's a micro invalidation I would be invalidating someone who believed that there was structural sexism so I don't touch that stuff a way for you to make that argument without I'm puzzled by that you strike me as being both extraordinary intelligent and extraordinarily articulate you can't say that in a way that wouldn't get her well I can and I just did I just wouldn't do it at a school that I teach at [Applause] [Laughter] I I mean I can see first of all I hear you that it's a shame you can't teach the way you want to teach but I don't understand why that in you you that because there's ones we visit if there's one student who objects I'm really really busy and this could take up weeks of my time yep plus there could be articles written about me in the paper I mean it's just a nightmare so it's just just don't don't provoke if I got out at a point from from the from the book and something I've been developing a little bit more since we wrote the book is you know I've been working on college campuses and it was since 2001 and it's always been a problem if John says something that can piss off the PR department I'm in class that's that's been an issue for a long time it's always been a problem that if John says something that that someone uncharitably into determines is being even arguably like something that is discriminatory in in class he gets reported to the to the general counsel and I see a lot of really frivolous cases of people being reported for actually you know for example discussing racial epithets not actually using them for multiple cases that effect that was already the case in 2013 now you have to worry about who is the single V above least trustworthy student in your class because sometimes these are made in good faith sometimes are not and now we've had an extra level to it where what is this gonna look like when it hits Twitter and and you have people on the Left who will come after you but now you've got the addition of Fox News and people actually forming right-wing mobs getting people fired and when we talk about in the book we have a whole chapter on how this is actually gone worsen it's been one of the major trends of the last year so right now professors have every reason in the world to be pretty worried about what they're able to say in a classroom and that's a pretty unhealthy situation that's right there's the spectacular collapse of trust the woman who runs heterodox Academy is a group that I co-founded to encourage viewpoint diversity in universities so dead magic is here in the audience and she talks about the last time she taught a course at Harvey Mudd College out in the Claremont Colleges and how there was a student who was clearly taping her he was clearly videotaping the lecture and you know it's not clear whether the person is on the right or the left you can I mean you might know if you know other things but right you can you know you don't know who there's some you know people can get you in trouble and so it's just better just but as a Deb says one of her students said to her my motto is silence is safer that's a terrible model for a college student but this is what you hear not again not everyone in the country but at the elite schools especially walking on eggshells and just in the last three months I'm hearing people in business say that much more we have questions here miss oh this is a good one and this is great so this is actually a wonderful segue the question is what trends do you foresee as this generation graduates and enters the workforce and I wanted to you've talked a little bit about that John and they're like all of you actually that to weigh in on this because so I can see that in as you first enter if you if let's concede that in fact there is a core of students with this malignant set of attitudes and who are and they I can see how when they first enter the workforce they might bring these attitudes with them but I think this question is about persistence just do is this is are the disciplines of the workforce such that these kinds of things will get washed away can you continue to behave this way and still have a functioning career into your 30s because I teach in a business school and I study moral psychology and business ethics so I've been talking with a lot of people in business and I think the CEOs are now where the university presence were in 2015 they don't know what hit them and when there's a problem they're reactive and what they don't do is stand up for a principal what they end up doing is validating the narrative and that's a big mistake so like at Yale for example when the protesters charged at Yale is structurally and systemically racist and had all kinds of charges again Yale and they said that the Erica Nicholas Christakis were terrible and some cult in him to be fired a good leader would have said I hear you I can agree with you on this point and this point however these faculty members were acting in good faith and I'm gonna stand up for them so that would be leadership and that's what almost no university president has done I can name two examples where they did that and it works brilliantly and but if you validate the narrative that this place is terrible life is divided between good people and evil people we need more diversity training and again University doesn't do anything but it's Kabuki theater but let's just do it again anyway if you validate that narrative you're stuck and you're just gonna keep doing it so in 2015 when our article came out a lot of people said oh come on when they got into the real world this will wash away and we didn't know what happened now it's clear it's not washing away if leaders give a good if they can set norms and obviously you have to attend to issues of inclusion sexism of course so we're not saying just just say oh no go to hell suck it up that's not gonna work and that's not the right thing to do but if you really are trying and you can show that you're trying and then you can also stand up for norms something like we're all in this together we have a good company we think we make a good product for our customers we have a lot of external competition but we have to all hang together we're gonna hang apart now people have problems we've got to work it out we've got to give each other the benefit of the doubt that's the key phrase benefit of the doubt and that's what has vanished from my world I had something to say yes and this is just because I really wanted to tell this one story and then I think it actually is relevant which is that I interviewed about 20 kids two months ago they were in grammar school about what they would do if they could have some independence if they could do something on their own what was their dream and the story that stuck with me the most is a I think was a fourth grader said he wanted to get himself to judo I was like okay that's pretty good you know this isn't the suburbs it was on Long Island and I said how like you're gonna take a bike or a skateboard you're gonna walk there and he said no I'm gonna get out of open the car door and then I'm gonna look very carefully both ways and then I'm gonna walk into judo while my parks the car in the parking lot so for him as a nine-year-old this was the most independence he could even imagine was I don't know 57 seconds without his mom with him going into yet another supervise organized activity and and the reason I think it's relevant to your question about what's happening in the workplace is before that I had been speaking to a friend who worked at a small nonprofit not any of ours and she said that there was one of the young women that she was working with had just said I have to take a couple weeks off I'm anxious and just took two weeks off and I feel bad for that person feeling that anxious but I think I would feel very anxious if the sum total of my independence was even at age nine or ten or eleven just always being supervised and John actually something that I've heard you talk about in boy if I heard you guys talk a lot everywhere is that human beings are the one species that doesn't go straight from from zero to reproduce die which is good because it gives us a little more time but but what what humans do is they they start out growing really really fast and then around six seven eight nine they slow down until puberty and the theory your theory which I now have co-opted is that why do we slow down and it's because that's humans need to take in so much more than gazelles or whatever worms so that's when kids are playing and exploring and arguing and fighting and making things happen and copying adults and getting all this wiring in their brain and if instead all they're doing is walking from the car to judo and maybe they're really missing out on a fundamental part of their maturity which has been taken from them under the guise of safety and and now they're left without it you know when kids learn a language when like they're six seven eight nine you throw them into another country they learned the language and they don't have an accent but after that they do because that was the time when they we're really ready to soak everything up and we are not letting them develop and so that's the connection between us is that if you're keeping kids indoors constantly supervised constantly in structured activities and they don't develop those sign APS's then they're kind of unformed and they get to college and they're anxious and they're sensitive I'm willing to go so far as to make some predictions and a stock tip and I would say two things what the actual scale of this and how business adapts to it business can be very adaptable and I think that some of these schools that actually hire from University of Indiana are gonna end up doing better than some of these companies that hire exclusively from Yale but I do think I'm willing to predict that there are going to be several you know currently prominent nonprofits cause based organizations that are either completely fail due to some of these new cultural pressures or rendered irrelevant in the next five years I think and I think they're gonna be you're gonna see lots of stories about this changing in culture because I'm hearing a lot about this my stock tip is invest in human resources companies the HR departments are gonna get a lot of work and there and there's gonna be a lot of litigation I tell them what did judo I mean part of me wants to end on a stock tip this being manhattan information you can use but wait maybe we have time for one other little I have to just go and do these questions oh I am to remind you that John and Greg will be signing their books next door in the art gallery after we conclude and so do stick around and have your book signed the signing process will be supervised by a whole lawyers to take about I feel like all these questions were I'd asked them would simply we would never get out of here and everyone there questions it will be reassuring to all of you that these questions suggest that no one particularly was interested in what I had to say and was terribly interested in what you had to say so I was interesting to me that we've got a winner ask one last question and that is all of you have ideas about ways in which we can correct this cultural trend how optimistic are you that we we will will be able to do that we'll be able to bring some kind of course correction you do go to bed and get anxious over so I you know why do I start like well why do we start let grow because we are optimistic and we think that everybody's gonna recognize that no one wants to raise fragile hypersensitive whiny fall apart us and so once we get our ideas out there which is what we're doing here let grow dot-org there daniel Shakman our Chairman is here he said get the name out there it is let grow Arg there's so many easy ways to get kids to give kids more independence and to get them playing again and solving their own problems they're if they're free and so many parents are sick of helicoptering and worrying and driving and spending all their days at parties where they're eating cold pizza because somehow they can't drop their kids off and they're 20 at a party some make it 20 I shouldn't but the point is that I'm very optimistic because I think we have some really easy ways to course-correct and I think the culture is ready for him I mean my number one motivating concern is freedom of speech and I wrote a book called freedom from speech in 2014 in which I argue that what we call problems of progress in the book as things get better there are certain things that tend to get worse and my belief is that as a lot of a lot of positive changes that I want to see happen there's a negative side of it in which people get less and less capable willing or able to deal with people they disagree with to deal with people who do they genuinely differ with so I think that there's almost like a historical force pulling against freedom of speech and freedom of speech is extremely rare in human history but it's this incredible invention and it's and and you know particular when you include things like the scientific method and jonrosh is liberal science we have so much to thank for it but I am pessimistic in the sense that it's gonna be an uphill battle and that's one of the reasons why you know what fire we're working on everything from you know video pieces I'm writing a with graphic novel to try to get the kids you much much earlier where they have one that's coming out we're trying to get these ideas to students earlier and spin it in a new way that it's that's a little bit humbler that basically freedom of speech is just knowing the world as it actually is and that means that you're not safer from a bigot if you don't know he's a bigot if you're not safer from evil if you don't know where it is you know and that essentially as as Harvey silverglade puts it I want to know who the Nazi in the room is so I know not to turn my back to him and I think that if we think of the world a little bit more in terms of the way maybe a scientist would see it and anthropologists would see it we start getting what the real value of freedom of speech is it's to tell you the uncomfortable truths about the reality around you not to pretend that we're better off just not discussing it at the dinner table yeah the last word yeah so what when I look at current trends and I sort of graph the matters are they were going to continue yeah I get very pessimistic because you know if this continues then Trust will drain out of business and every other institution and then will completely collapse but whenever I think whenever I go down that mental road there's a little Steve Pinker in the back of my head literacy Steve thinkers the last two books talking about how people have always thought the world's going to hell and in fact things are getting better fast and globally and Nick Kristof has been talking about this beautifully too globally things are getting better fast poverty is declining racism is declining you know all these things are good and one of the main things I've learned from reading and reading Steve's work and also Matt Ridley is that when there are problems the amazing thing about human beings is we're actually really inventive and creative and we figure out what's the problem and and then we figure out ways to solve it and so I think two or three years ago I think most parents didn't know just how serious the mental health issue was for teenagers especially for teenage girls but I think this is the year just because the data really only just came in a year or two ago it was happening two or three years before we didn't have data on until a year or two ago so I think this is the one it's gonna turn around we're all gonna put our heads to this we're all gonna recognize this is not political this is not like you know conservative kids are depressed and liberals aren't advice it's nothing to do with that this is the health of our kids so I think that so things happen like we start let grow and there's gonna be all kinds of innovation we're in a situation it's sort of like the Emperor's New Clothes where most people don't like political correctness most university presidents don't like what's happening but they're afraid it's like there's so many people who see that there's a problem and if we can now just we talked about a lot of possible solutions in the book I think this is the when people are gonna gingerly start trying them and discover that they actually don't get shocked for it that actually a lot of people applaud and that's going to encourage them universities that grab onto this and figure out how to create an environment which people can actually speak up in class and you know that if you go into a seminar class at this school people might disagree with you they're not afraid to those schools are gonna attract more applicants that's gonna make the US News numbers go up and once some selection ago when the University Chicago as their numbers are going up other schools are gonna copy them so even though I'm often pessimist stick you just think about what happens when humans face problems we usually figure out how to solve them and I think this one will be like that good well let's hope that movement starts tonight thank you all very much for coming one that's a minor book signing in the back be safe out there [Laughter] [Applause]

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 207,615

Rating: 4.8633142 out of 5

Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, political correctness, campus, free speech, free speech on campus, haidt, lukianoff, libertarianism, leftism, left, right, conservatism, liberal, liberalism, Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt, Lenore Skenazy, malcolm gladwell

Id: rGTS9vZFV2o

Length: 76min 39sec (4599 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/PeterSimple99]

I have always found the idea that the issue is coddling or snowflakes to miss the mark. Yes, today's youth are particularly intolerant of dissent, but I don't think it is primarily a matter of fragility. Woke fragility - safe spaces and the rest - seems to me to have often been a ruse behind which lurks the iron fist of a radical ideology.

[u/TAW12372]

I watched this a while back. Gladwell is pretty ridiculous in this and I'm not clear on why he turns this into such a debate and what problem he sees with their findings. When he brings up Harvey Weinstein I stopped taking anything he said seriously, and Haidt's bemused response to that is pretty funny.

[u/motivated_electron]

I've been finding Gladwell more and more insufferable as I've listened to some of his talks throughout this year. Am I just being prejudiced here, or is there something a bit smug or disingenuous about him in this discussion?

[u/mts259]

I am kind of surprised that Gladwell doesn't fully buy Haidt and Lukianoff's thesis. I've read his books. They are well-written and thoughtful. To equate Halloween costumes with Harvey Weinstein is an over-simplification.

[u/menowritegood]

Submission statement:

I think it's a great discussion on how our youngest generation have become incredibly fragile (it ties in with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's work very well). And I had never heard Skenazy before this video. She started the "free range" kids movement. I kinda wish she had more speaking time here.

I couldn't find this video posted here, though there were similar ones about a year ago.

Gladwell is skeptical at a lot of points, and it was nice to see Haidt get the push back (though I think he answered the skepticism pretty well in general).

[u/SatreidesW]

Where is a mind more coddled than in a modern corporate workplace environment? Independent thought is deeply frowned upon as in taking the initiative. At least with Covid people are able to get a bit of independence from management through at home work set ups.