Joe Rogan Experience #1221 - Jonathan Haidt

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   In four, three, two,…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:02

      In four, three, two, one. Hello.

   2. JHJonathan Haidt0:08

      Hello, Joe.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:09

      Thanks for doing this, man. I really appreciate it.

   4. JHJonathan Haidt0:10

      Oh, this is exciting. I, I don't think I've ever had a conversation as long as we're about to have.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:14

      (laughs) I've been listening to The Happiness Hypothesis over the last few days, and I really, really enjoy it. I'm, I'm really enjoying it. And it's really fascinating stuff, man. Um, but one thing I wanted to talk about, because we were talking about it right before we got started, was what's happening with Peter Boghossian-

   6. JHJonathan Haidt0:27

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:27

      ... at Portland State University.

   8. JHJonathan Haidt0:29

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:29

      For folks who don't know the story, he and, um, I forget, his two colleagues, uh, James-

   10. JHJonathan Haidt0:35

       Yeah, Helen Plethros, and ... Yeah.

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:36

       Helen Plethros and James Lindsay?

   12. JHJonathan Haidt0:37

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:37

       Yeah. They, uh, released these fake papers, um, on, uh, like, homoeroticism and rape culture in dog parks and just really preposterous-

   14. JHJonathan Haidt0:48

       Yeah, crazy stuff.

   15. JRJoe Rogan0:49

       ... papers that are almost like an article from The Onion. And some of them, not only did they get peer reviewed and accepted into these journals, but they got lauded as being these amazing pieces of-

   16. JHJonathan Haidt1:00

       Yeah, one did. One got an award. Yeah.

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:01

       Yeah. (laughs) .

   18. JHJonathan Haidt1:01

       Mm-hmm.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:02

       And now, he's getting in trouble.

   20. JHJonathan Haidt1:04

       That's right.

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:04

       Yeah. And, um, we were just talking about it, and I just want- would love to know your thoughts as a professor. Like, what-

   22. JHJonathan Haidt1:10

       Oh, sure. Yeah. So, you know, for those who don't know, I guess most of your listeners probably do, but, uh, you know, it was called the grievance studies hoax.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:18

       Yeah.

   24. JHJonathan Haidt1:18

       Uh, because ... And, and you know, this is one of the big issues going on in the academy, which I hope we'll talk about, uh, is, um, you know, what does it take to have good scholarship? And, and the argument is that in some fields, as long as you hate the right things and use the right words, you'll get published. And that's not scholarship. That's activism. And so, these three, these three people who did this hoax, um, they were trying to show that that's the case. And so, they wrote these papers. One of them was actually a section of Mein Kampf-

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:45

       Yes.

   26. JHJonathan Haidt1:45

       ... and they just substituted in something about feminism for Nazism, something like that. And, um, I don't remember if that, that one actually got pub- ... I think it did. At any rate, the point is, they were trying to show that this is ... Some of these fields in the academy are not really about scholarship. They're just about showing that you hate the right things. They're activism. And so, uh, there's no way to break in within those closed worlds, so they did a time-honored thing. They did a hoax. They published ... They submitted these papers. They made up fake names, and, and a lot of them got accepted. And now, what's happening is that, uh, the univers- uh, Portland State University, which is, uh ... Only one of the three is at a, is a, is a professor. He's a assoc- uh, assistant professor, so he's not tenured. Um, you know, of course, uh, he has a lot of enemies, and, uh, of course, I don't know what's going on behind the scenes. But it looks like some of them wanted him investigated for violating the IRB, the Internal Review Board, because the claim is they fabricated data. Because one of the papers says, "I inspected the genitals of 10,000 dogs in the dog park."

   27. JRJoe Rogan2:45

       (laughs)

   28. JHJonathan Haidt2:45

       You know, it's like, obviously absurd.

   29. JRJoe Rogan2:47

       Yeah.

   30. JHJonathan Haidt2:47

       Uh, and he said, you know, "And 63% of the, uh, of the attempted humping ..." 'Cause the, the thing, the thing of the article was the, the idea that, you know, you go to a dog park and you see dogs humping each other, and they were interpreting this as rape, as doggy rape.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah. …

   1. JHJonathan Haidt15:00

      odds of being nailed are much higher than that. Um, and so, you know, I hear every day, or at least every week I get an email from a professor who says, "You know, I, I, I used a metaphor in class and somebody reported me." And like-

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:12

      Yeah.

   3. JHJonathan Haidt15:12

      ... you know? And so i- once this happens to you, you, you, you pull back. You change your teaching style. What we're seeing on campus is a spectacular collapse of trust between students and professors. And when we don't trust each other, uh, we can't, we can't do our job. We can't, we can't risk provoking, being provocative, raising new ideas-

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:33

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JHJonathan Haidt15:33

      ... raising uncomfortable ideas. We have to play it safe, and then everybody suffers.

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:37

      Is social media partially to blame because-

   7. JHJonathan Haidt15:39

      Oh, my ... It's huge.

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:39

      Huge. Yeah.

   9. JHJonathan Haidt15:40

      Social media is a huge part of this problem. So, um, uh, in a couple ways. Um, so one is the generational thing, that we have, uh, um, uh, kids born after 1995 got this in middle school. It had a variety of effects on them. So kids coming in are more conversant with call-out culture, and so that's a big part of this. Um, the other thing, though, is that we used to have what you would call a reasonable person standard. So, uh, you know, so, um, you know, if a professor, uh ... What's one? Oh, so a professor just wrote to me recently. He said he, you know, he got frustrated while trying to explain something and he said, "Ugh, shoot me now." Um, and a student was offended by this because, "Are you making fun of people committing suicide?" And okay, you know, had she come to him and said, "You know, Professor, I know you didn't mean anything, but that was kind of insensitive." Okay. That would have been great. Like, that's the way to handle it. But for this generation raised with call-out culture and social media, you almost never hear of a student coming to someone else in private because you don't get credit for that.

   10. JRJoe Rogan16:41

       Yeah.

   11. JHJonathan Haidt16:41

       So you only get credit when you call them out publicly.

   12. JRJoe Rogan16:44

       (laughs)

   13. JHJonathan Haidt16:44

       And so that's why we're all walking on eggshells, 'cause most of our students are great. Most of them are fine. But if I have a class of 300 students, a lecture class, I know that some of them subscribe to this new call-out culture, safetyism morality. And so if I say one thing, it's not a reasonable person standard. It's a most sensitive person standard. I have to teach to the most sensitive person in the class.

   14. JRJoe Rogan17:06

       It's also that person has the opportunity to score, right? They have-

   15. JHJonathan Haidt17:10

       Exactly.

   16. JRJoe Rogan17:10

       They throw up that virtue flag, like, "I've got one on the board here. Look what I did. I nailed the professor on saying, 'Shoot me now.' And, uh, now I'm a hero."

   17. JHJonathan Haidt17:18

       Exactly.

   18. JRJoe Rogan17:18

       "And I've made this a safer space for everybody else."

   19. JHJonathan Haidt17:21

       Yeah. Tha- that's right. And so, and so that's really what is messing us up at so many levels of society. And the fact that a lot of these problems, the, the m- difficulties of democracy, the rise of authoritarian populism, the ... There, there are a lot of weird trends that are happening in multiple countries, and I think it's the rise of, of devices and social media is the main way we can explain why it's so similar across countries.

   20. JRJoe Rogan17:44

       Do you think that this is ...... a sh- is- is this some sort of a trend that will eventually correct itself when these kids get out into the real world and then go through a whole generation of that, and then people realize the error of their ways and the disastrous results of having-

   21. JHJonathan Haidt17:58

       Mm-hmm.

   22. JRJoe Rogan17:58

       ... these unprepared or emotionally unprepared kids?

   23. JHJonathan Haidt18:01

       Yeah. No, I'm-

   24. JRJoe Rogan18:02

       No?

   25. JHJonathan Haidt18:02

       ... pretty confident that it will not correct itself. I think that o- once we understand it, I think there are a variety of things we can do to change it. But I think here's the way to understand it and why it's not gonna change itself. So, so I'm a, I'm a social psychologist, is my main, my main area. Um, but I, I love all of the social sciences. I love thinking about complex systems. And systems composed of people are really different from systems composed of stars or, or neutrons, or anything else. And so, um, if you have a complex system composed of people, these people are primarily working to increase their prestige. So I mean, once we have, our needs for, you know, food and things like that are set, we're, we're always interacting in ways to make ourselves look good, uh, and to protect ourselves from being nailed, you know, or accused of something. So we're always doing reputation management. Now, um, think about w- a- in any group, what gives you prestige? And so if you look in a group of teenagers, you might have a group, uh, in which it's athletics. And so if that's how you get prestige, then all the kids are gonna be working out and training and practicing, and that doesn't hurt anybody. That doesn't impose an external cost on anyone else. But you could have some really sick prestige economies. Uh, and so there's, uh, there's an ethnography about a Ph- uh, uh, um, a- an indigenous population in the Philippines, uh, by Sh- Shelly Rosaldo, is the anthropologist. I think it's called Knowledge and Passion, about the Ilongot, which is a name for a, a tribe in the Philippines. And in this tribe, it's a headhunting tribe. They, they find people and cut off their heads. Not just for fun, for prestige. So in a lot of societies, um, you have a lot of male initiation. Boys have to do something to become a man. And if the thing you have to do to become a man is you have to cut off someone's head-

   26. JRJoe Rogan19:50

       (laughs)

   27. JHJonathan Haidt19:51

       ... okay, so that imposes rather a heavy cost on outsiders. All right? So this is a sick culture. This is not one where we can say, "Oh, well, that's just the way they do things." Okay?

   28. JRJoe Rogan20:00

       Mm-hmm.

   29. JHJonathan Haidt20:00

       This has to stop. Um, and e- ideally, they would cut off a stranger's head, like they find someone from another tribe or someone, you know, from, you know, a government agency. They'll just cut, cut off his head. Um, uh, but if, if necessary, if there's a fight or if there's somebody within their larger community, that can also get you points. So this is a really sick culture. Now, head, uh, now, um, call-out culture is not quite that bad, but it's the same logic. Okay? So if you have a group of teenagers or college students who are all struggling for prestige, as we all are, and if you get a subculture in which the way you get prestige is by calling someone out, showing that they're racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, whatever it is, if you can catch them, you get the points. What you're doing here is you are imposing an external cost on others. And that's what makes you so insufferable, because you are playing your game, but I'm paying the cost of your game. And so that, I think, it, it's hard to, people aren't gonna break out of that themselves. But once we understand what's happening, I think, in a sense, we can all come together and call out call-out culture and say, "Stop. Stop imposing these costs on us."

   30. JRJoe Rogan21:09

       How, but how are we gonna reach those kids if professors are so terrified to speak out and to cause controversy in class and no one wants to criticize them? Because if you do, you risk your job.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   So that Yale event…

   1. JHJonathan Haidt30:00

      uh, this n- new way of thinking, and Greg thinks, "Wow!... how are students learning to do this? Like, are, are we teaching them on campus to think in these distorted ways? And if we are, isn't that gonna make them depressed? So, Greg comes to talk to me in May of 2014 to tell me this idea, a- and I think it's really brilliant. I think it's a great idea, 'cause I'd begun to see this, you know, the safe spaces, the microaggressions, the trigger warning requests. Um, so we, we wrote up our, our essay, uh, submitted it to The Atlantic. It came out in August of 2015, and it was like we were just seeing the first outbreaks of a, of a virus. And then in the fall of 2015, it, it, it becomes an epidemic. And so many of your listeners will have s- heard of or seen the videos of what happened at Yale, um, in, in au- in, uh, November of 2015 when Erika Christakis wrote an email saying that, "Wait a second. Yale is telling you how to do your Halloween costumes. Maybe we should think this through ourselves. Maybe you're old enough to make your own decisions." Some students get very upset. They protest. They bring demands to the president. They were screaming at her husband. Uh, so it was then, when that protest was successful, when, uh, the president of Yale basically said, you know, "We, we're wrong. You're right. We validate your narrative. We'll give you as much as we can of your demands," um, when, when that happened, then the protest went national. And so throughout 2016, you have, um, you have groups of students making these demands, demanding microaggression reporting systems. So that's when NYU put in its systems, its microaggression reporting systems.

   2. JRJoe Rogan31:31

      So that Yale event wasn't just an isolated incident. It really was the spark.

   3. JHJonathan Haidt31:36

      I think so. Yeah.

   4. JRJoe Rogan31:37

      Wow.

   5. JHJonathan Haidt31:37

      Yeah. So there's all these tr- threads coming together. It didn't come out of nowhere. All these things are happening. It's almost like the, you know, the whole, the whole room is, like, almost at combustion temperature, and then Yale was the spark that sent it national.

   6. JRJoe Rogan31:49

      What's crazy about Yale is anybody that's objective that's watching from the outside is like, "These students are out of control. They're screaming at this professor." Like, "This is supposed to be a safe place, and-"

   7. JHJonathan Haidt31:58

      Yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan31:58

      ... you know, "You fucked this up." And they, they're, they're being incredibly hostile and aggressive towards him and surrounding him.

   9. JHJonathan Haidt32:04

      Mm-hmm.

   10. JRJoe Rogan32:05

       And when, when you watch that from the outside, you think, "Well, obviously they've gotta punish these, these students."

   11. JHJonathan Haidt32:11

       Right. But no.

   12. JRJoe Rogan32:11

       I mean, they, they, they did the opposite.

   13. JHJonathan Haidt32:13

       Yeah. That's right. The main-

   14. JRJoe Rogan32:15

       That doesn't make sense.

   15. JHJonathan Haidt32:15

       That's... Well, well, it doesn't make sense from the outside, but again, you have to look at the-

   16. JRJoe Rogan32:18

       Yeah.

   17. JHJonathan Haidt32:18

       ... different games being played. So, um, so I went to Yale. I graduated from there in 1985. I loved it. I was in Davenport College. It's one of the 12 residential colleges. And there were a lot of intellectual events that would happen in the colleges. Like, the master of the college or the dean of the college would bring in all kinds of people to speak. So they were intellectual spaces as well as sort of home-like, or not exactly home-like. Like transitional places where, they were, they were places that you lived. (clears throat) So the Yale that I knew was a place that taught me to think in lots of different ways, and it just was constantly blowing my mind. Like when I took my first economics course, it was like, "Wow, here's a new pair of, of spectacles that I can put on." And suddenly, I see all these, you know, prices and supply and, like, I never, I never s- learned to think that way.

   18. JRJoe Rogan33:06

       Mm.

   19. JHJonathan Haidt33:06

       Or I learned about Freud in psychology or sociology. So a good education is one that lets you look at our complicated world through multiple perspectives, and that makes you smart. That's what a liberal arts education should do. But what I see increasingly happening, especially at elite schools, is the dominance of a single story. And that single story is life is a battle between good people and evil people, um, or rather good groups and evil groups, um, and, uh, it's a zero-sum game. And so if the bad groups have more, it's 'cause they took it from the, the good groups. And so the point of everything is to fight the bad groups, bring them down, create equality, um, and this is a terrible way to think in a free society. I mean, that might have worked, you know, in Biblical days when you got the Moabites killing the Jebusites or whatever. Um, but, you know, we, we live in an era in which we've discovered that, that the pie can be grown a million-fold. And so to teach students to see society as a zero-sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive.

   20. JRJoe Rogan34:17

       Now, in your book, you, you actually identify the moment where these microaggressions sort of made their appearance, and they were initially a racist thing?

   21. JHJonathan Haidt34:27

       (clicks tongue) So yeah, so the idea of a microaggression, (clears throat) it goes back to, um... I forget the schol- It's an African American sociologist in the '70s first coined the term. But it really becomes popular in a 2007 article, uh, by Derald Wing Sue at Teachers College. And so he talks about this concept of microaggressions, and there are two things that are good about the concept that are useful. And so one is, as racism, as explicit racism has clearly gone down, by any measure, explicit racism has plummeted, uh, in America and across the West, um, but, you know, there could still be subtle or veiled, uh, racist claims. So perfectly legitimate point.

   22. JRJoe Rogan35:07

       How do you define the difference between explicit racism and...

   23. JHJonathan Haidt35:09

       Well, explicit racism is, you know, calling someone a racial slur, or, "I hate you because X."

   24. JRJoe Rogan35:14

       Right.

   25. JHJonathan Haidt35:14

       Um, but-

   26. JRJoe Rogan35:14

       And they're identified because of they've been reported as crimes, or...

   27. JHJonathan Haidt35:18

       Well, I would just say that, um, f- if you are a member of a culture, you can tell when someone is saying something to insult, to put down, or to express hostility.

   28. JRJoe Rogan35:28

       Right.

   29. JHJonathan Haidt35:29

       And that's something, a judgment we can make.

   30. JRJoe Rogan35:30

       Right.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. JHJonathan Haidt45:00

      these different mindsets we get into, and one of them he calls the intuitive prosecutor. So if, if I'm ... If my goal as a scholar is to prosecute my enemies and maximally convict them, and I am always trying to defend, you know, seven different identity groups against the straight, White men, they're the, the, they're the accused, I want to define my terms to make it maximally easy to convict. And so I'm going to say, "Racism and, uh, you know, microaggressions, it doesn't matter what the intent was, all that matters is the impact. All that matters is what the person felt." That way, as long as someone's offended, I get to charge you with a crime.

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:37

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JHJonathan Haidt45:38

      So, uh, and also on racism, um, you can say, as, as, you know, a lot of kids are learning in high school the- these days, "Racism is prejudice plus power." So by definition, a Black person or a gay person or whatever, any, you know, cannot be racist or whatever other term, because they don't have power, regardless of their social class. So-

   4. JRJoe Rogan45:58

      This is actually being taught?

   5. JHJonathan Haidt46:00

      Yeah. Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan46:01

      The- So the professors are ... This is coming-

   7. JHJonathan Haidt46:03

      Um-

   8. JRJoe Rogan46:03

      ... out of their mouth? Teachers are saying this?

   9. JHJonathan Haidt46:04

      Well, this is ... So, uh, this is taught in a number of high schools. Uh, my, uh, nephews went to Andover. Uh, they learned this.

   10. JRJoe Rogan46:11

       That's an offensive thing-

   11. JHJonathan Haidt46:13

       Yes, it's deeply offensive, and-

   12. JRJoe Rogan46:13

       ... to be teaching children-

   13. JHJonathan Haidt46:14

       And it's not just that it's offensive and obviously hypocritical, it's that it's crippling.

   14. JRJoe Rogan46:19

       Yes.

   15. JHJonathan Haidt46:19

       I mean, can you imagine ... Can you ... So look, you've got, you've got kids, right? You have two-

   16. JRJoe Rogan46:23

       Yes.

   17. JHJonathan Haidt46:23

       ... two daughters now?

   18. JRJoe Rogan46:23

       Three.

   19. JHJonathan Haidt46:24

       Okay. So you have three daughters. Can you imagine giving your daughters a cloak of invulnerability-

   20. JRJoe Rogan46:29

       Yeah.

   21. JHJonathan Haidt46:29

       ... where you say, "You put this on. Now, you get to attack others, but no one can touch you."

   22. JRJoe Rogan46:36

       Right.

   23. JHJonathan Haidt46:36

       Like, this is gonna warp their development. Power corrupts, and even moral or rhetorical power corrupts as well.

   24. JRJoe Rogan46:42

       Yeah, but how is this being taught though? I mean, how, how is this being justified?

   25. JHJonathan Haidt46:45

       Because the g- yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan46:45

       How is this accepted as a part of a curriculum?

   27. JHJonathan Haidt46:48

       So, um, because the goal is not truth, the goal is victory over racism, let's say. And so if that's the case, you're gonna focus on educating kids about their White privilege and, um, making ... And so that's what a lot of these privilege exercises are. You know, you line kids up by their privilege and you, and your, your goal is to make the, the straight, White boys feel bad about their privilege, and therefore talk less, take up less space.

   28. JRJoe Rogan47:13

       But their privi- this is what we were talking about earlier about the goal is no racism. The privilege only exists if there's racism. Like, instead of concentrating on the privilege, it only exists if people do preferentially treat certain p- with a ... Preferential treatment towards certain races. If that doesn't exist at all, then White privilege doesn't exist.

   29. JHJonathan Haidt47:33

       Well, I'm not sure, I'm not sure I'd agree with you on that. So we, we had a-

   30. JRJoe Rogan47:36

       Why so?
5. 1:00:00 – 1:12:22

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. JHJonathan Haidt1:00:00

      to make them tougher so that, you know, as they live in a, the world's safer and safer.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:00:05

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JHJonathan Haidt1:00:05

      Cars are safer. The death rate for kids is, has been plummeting for all, uh, all causes other than suicide, which has gone up. Um, so as kids live in a safer and safer world-... they also have the internet, which is gonna expose them to virtual insults forever and ever. So, how are we gonna raise kids to be maximally effective in this new 21st century world? Which is physically very safe, but virtually unsafe. Okay? How are we gonna do that? Um, and I think the key idea that we need to put on the table here, and that I think everybody who works with kids needs to keep in mind every day, is antifragility. I know you've talked about that on this show before-

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:00:43

      Yeah.

   5. JHJonathan Haidt1:00:43

      ... uh, but I'll just, I should, uh, I can just give a very brief, you know, explanation of it, 'cause it's such an important concept. Um, so, uh, antifragility, a lot of listeners will know, is a word coined by Nassim Taleb, the guy who wrote The Black Swan, um, because there are certain systems ... And he was, I think he was motivated by the collapse of the banking system. So, he had predicted the collapse because he said, "The banking system is really convoluted and it's never been tested. A system needs to be tested, challenged, shocked in order to then develop defenses against it. And our system has not been tested, so if anything goes wrong, it's all going down." All right. So-

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:01:16

      Yeah, you reference him quite a few times.

   7. JHJonathan Haidt1:01:17

      Yes, that's right. He's really-

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:01:18

      In the concept of antifragile.

   9. JHJonathan Haidt1:01:20

      Yeah. That's right, it's a key idea in, in our book. And it's, I find as I talk about this around the country, once you explain this to people who work with kids, like everybody gets it right away. All right. So, so Taleb says there's no word for this property. He says, "We, we, we know that some things are fragile." And so, like if you have a glass, you know, if you have a wine glass on the table and you knock it over, it breaks. Okay? It doesn't get better in any way. And so, uh, you know, you don't give kids a wine glass. You give them a plastic sippy cup, 'cause plastic is resilient. But if a kid knocks over a sippy cup, it doesn't get better in any way. And Taleb wanted to know, what's the word for things that do get better when you knock them over? And the classic example is the immune system.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:02:00

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JHJonathan Haidt1:02:00

       So, the immune system is an incomplete system. It's a miracle of evolution that we have this system for making, you know, antibodies. Um, but it doesn't know exactly what to be reactive to. That has to be set by childhood experience. And so, if you keep your kids in a bubble and you use bacterial wipes and you don't let them be exposed to bacteria, you're crippling the system. The system has to get knocked over. It has to get challenged, threatened. It has to have, um, it has to learn how to, uh, expand its abilities. And so, um, so this is why peanut allergies are going up.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:02:32

       Yeah, that was a really shocking part of your book.

   13. JHJonathan Haidt1:02:34

       That's right. It's stunning how fast this happened.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:02:36

       Ple- could you please explain that to people?

   15. JHJonathan Haidt1:02:37

       Sure.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:02:38

       The whole peanut allergy thing? Um-

   17. JHJonathan Haidt1:02:40

       Yeah. Yeah, so peanut allergies used to be really rare. And most of us, you know, older folk, we brought peanut butter sandwiches to school. Uh, and when my son, Max, started, um, preschool in, uh, 2008, uh, you know, they went on and on about no nuts, nothing that touched a nut, nothing that looks like a nut, nothing that has the word nut in it. I mean, it was crazy how defensive they were about nuts. And as we were writing the book, I thought back on that and I said, "Wait a second. Like, why ... You know, we're freaking out about nuts and the more we freak out about it, the higher the allergy rate goes." And it turns out, there was a study done and published in 2015 where, um, the, the researchers noticed that the allergy to nuts is only going up in countries that tell pregnant women to avoid nuts. And they thought, "Well, maybe that's why." And so, they did a controlled experiment. They got about 600 women who had given birth recently, and ha- um, and whose kids were at higher risk of an allergy. 'Cause they had eczema or some other, you know, immune system sort of issue. So, uh, about 300 of them are told standard advice. "Your kid's at risk of a peanut allergy, so y- you should not eat peanuts while you're lactating and keep peanuts away from your kid." And the other half were told, "Here is an Israeli snack food. It's a puffed corn with a peanut, uh, uh, peanut powder dusting on the outside. Give it to your kids starting at, you know, three or four months, whenever they're ready to, to eat." And so ... And they monitored them. They made sure that there weren't, you know, fatal reactions or s- or, or strong reactions. And then, uh, at the age of five, they gave them all a very thorough immunological test and, of the ones who followed the standard advice, 17% had a peanut allergy. They would have to watch out for peanuts for the rest of their lives. And-

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:04:19

       That's such a high number.

   19. JHJonathan Haidt1:04:20

       Because these were, because these were-

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:04:22

       Yeah.

   21. JHJonathan Haidt1:04:22

       ... kids were already predisposed.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:04:23

       Yeah.

   23. JHJonathan Haidt1:04:23

       Um, and but the half that were predisposed but given peanut powder, 3%. Just 3% had a peanut allergy at age five. In other words, we could almost wipe out peanut allergies by giving peanut powder to kids. And sci- uh, just a few months ago in Science, the front page article was on doing that. And so again, good intentions and bad ideas. We're trying to protect our kids so, "Oh, keep them away from peanuts."

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:04:47

       Right.

   25. JHJonathan Haidt1:04:47

       But that's exactly the wrong advice, because kids are antifragile. And so, we're doing the same thing, I think.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:04:52

       Most of them. The p- the real issue is the people that have an actual severe allergy.

   27. JHJonathan Haidt1:04:56

       Well-

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:04:56

       If that's your child.

   29. JHJonathan Haidt1:04:57

       Uh, yes. But that's what the Science article-

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:04:59

       Yeah.

Episode duration: 2:05:10