The Coddling of the American Mind and How to Become Intellectually Antifragile — Jonathan Haidt

1. 0:00 – 1:33

   Start

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

      [upbeat music] Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm gonna hop straight into the guest because I have so many questions I would like to ask. My guest today is Jonathan Haidt, spelled H-A-I-D-T. You can find him on Twitter at JonHaidt. He is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. Jonathan received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff. He has given four TED Talks, and in 2019, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018, Jonathan has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. He is currently writing two books, Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing, and Life after Babel. Great title, also. Life after Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share. You can find him at JonathanHaidt.com and on Twitter, once again, @JonHaidt. Jon, nice to see you. Thanks for making the time.

   2. JHJonathan Haidt1:30

      Oh, my pleasure, Tim. Very nice to meet you.

2. 1:33 – 3:44

   Richard Shweder.

   1. TFTim Ferriss1:33

      So I thought we would begin with influences, how your personality, how your thinking has taken shape, and I wanted to begin with the name Richard Shweder. Could you please explain who Richard is and how he factors into your life story?

   2. JHJonathan Haidt1:56

      I have many mentors, and sometimes I do what I call the gratitude parade in my head, and people flash past, and there's a string of, of mentors. But Rick Shweder is the biggest on who I am and, and what I've written. So Rick Shweder is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago. And when I wrote my dissertation at Penn, I wrote it on a debate that he was having with some other people who study morality, who were saying that morality is always about harm, rights, and justice. And Shweder said, "Well, you know, yeah, where you live in Cambridge, Massachusetts it is, but around the world, the moral domain is much broader, and there's the ethics of community, ethics of divinity." So I planned a study to pit the two theories against each other, and I did a study in Brazil and the US across social classes, and Shweder's predictions really came out beautifully. I found big cultural variation, especially social class variation in morality. And in part because of that, I was able to get a postdoc doing research with him. So for two years after my PhD, I spent at the University of Chicago, and during that time, I got a fellowship to go to India for three months where Shweder worked in Bhubaneswar in, in the state of Orissa or Odisha, India. And that period, that year, 1993, that... I hope that's a year that we'll come back to a couple times during this conversation, 'cause that is the pivotal year in my life when my mind was blown in many ways. One of which was that I was reading Buddhism and Hinduism, and then I, I spent three months in India, and it really was like, like, you know, "Welcome to my world and my way of thinking." 'Cause Shweder is the most just brilliant, uh, iconoclastic, thinking for himself, perverse in the most wonderful way-

   3. TFTim Ferriss3:39

      [laughs]

   4. JHJonathan Haidt3:40

      ... intellectual I've ever met.

   5. TFTim Ferriss3:41

      [laughs]

   6. JHJonathan Haidt3:41

      So that's the beginning of who Rick Shweder is.

   7. TFTim Ferriss3:43

      [laughs]

3. 3:44 – 9:03

   Making sense of assertions in anthropology.

   1. TFTim Ferriss3:44

      Perverse intellectuals. That might be the, the headline of this episode. [laughs] So we are gonna come back to 1993. We're definitely gonna come back to Bhubaneswar. I was wondering how to pronounce that, so I'm glad you gave me the layup in advance. I'd like to visit a motto, I believe. You can't believe everything you read on the internet, but hopefully The Atlantic is reliable in this respect. A motto of Rick's that I'd like to unpack, which is, "If someone asserts it, try denying it and see if it makes sense. If someone denies it, try asserting it and see if that makes sense." Could you explain what this means and maybe give an example of how he used it or would encourage students to use it?

   2. JHJonathan Haidt4:30

      It comes from, I think, a brother-in-law of Rick's who is a dermatologist. And the dermatologist once said to him, "Oh, dermatology is easy. Just follow this rule. If it's dry, make it wet. If it's wet, make it dry." And Rick being, again, this, you know, this perversity, he takes that rule, and that was sort of the way he ran his intellectual life. And so it was, you know... So, so when I went to Chicago, it's like the most intense s- intellectual square mile in the country, and you'd be in these seminars with all these like, you know, Nobel Prize-winning economists and people, and someone would say something, and Rick would like turn it around and say like, "Is the opposite true?" And then he would ask, "Well, you know, isn't also the opposite of what you're saying true?" And then w- you know, and then you'd have to think like, "Wait, actually, yeah, that is too sometimes." And so the, what I take from it is we have such pressures to fall into line with our team, to, to go with what the dominant view is, and if you do that, you're gonna end up being a hack. You're gonna end up being like everyone else. But if you just automatically question things, not to be a jerk. Now you could do it and be a jerk, but if you just question it, just with pure intellectual curiosity, is it true if we turn it around? And usually it's not, but often it is, and that's how you get new insights. And so if you just have that as a habit, you'll just... I mean, it... So yeah, this is definitely good advice for anyone in a creative industry or, or in the academic world.

   3. TFTim Ferriss6:02

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JHJonathan Haidt6:02

      Just try turning things around.

   5. TFTim Ferriss6:05

      So how would Just as, as an example, Rick potentially used this in anthropology. K- Then that might have been a, a, a broader guiding tenet of his thinking that applied to much more outside of his declared field of expertise. But-

   6. JHJonathan Haidt6:24

      Mm-hmm

   7. TFTim Ferriss6:24

      ... is there an example you might give for how that would fit into anthropology or the type of research that you were doing at the time?

   8. JHJonathan Haidt6:34

      So one pops to mind, but it's so offensive that I have to-

   9. TFTim Ferriss6:37

      [laughs]

   10. JHJonathan Haidt6:37

       ... start with something else, 'cause otherwise, you know, I'll lose your listeners.

   11. TFTim Ferriss6:39

       You have to warm up the listening hamstrings. [laughs]

   12. JHJonathan Haidt6:42

       Yeah, no, I really do on this one.

   13. TFTim Ferriss6:43

       [laughs]

   14. JHJonathan Haidt6:44

       So just one example is he was in a discussion with some psychologists, 'cause, you know, he's an anthropologist, but he's in cultural psychology. I'm a psychologist. So he's in a discussion with some psychologists, and they were saying, "Well, you know, I mean, we, we have experimental evidence on this, and that's just so much more reliable than ethnography. I mean, ethnography, you know, an anthropologist goes someplace, and they take notes, and they report, but that's just one person's view. You know, experimental evidence is just much more reliable." And he turns it around and he says, "Oh, really? Well, let's see." And then you look at experiments that often don't replicate, and then you look at anthropological accounts where often multiple anthropologists will go someplace and it, and they will find the same thing. So the point is just he didn't, you know, we... You automatically assume, "Well, of course experiments with numbers and careful procedures are better." But he just sort of turns around and said, "Well, actually, maybe not." Okay, so that's the easy one.

   15. TFTim Ferriss7:37

       Mm-hmm.

   16. JHJonathan Haidt7:37

       I hope listeners are with me on that.

   17. TFTim Ferriss7:39

       [laughs]

   18. JHJonathan Haidt7:39

       Here's the harder one. Just about the most offensive cultural practice in the world for anthropologists and enlightened people is called FGM. Now, uh, that stands for female genital mutilation. And anthropologists and progressives are so tolerant, so quick to say, "Let's not condemn other cultures. Let's look at it from their point of view," but on this issue they don't. And what Rick was doing was saying, "In the societies where they do this, let's try to understand what they're doing." And he's totally open to the fact that sometimes it really is a horrible operation that, you know, that deprives the woman of sexuality, and... I mean, so there are such a range of practices. But if you simply say any modification on a female is, should be punishable by time in jail, well, then what happens is you have a variety of African and Islamic immigrant groups in the US and Canada where the mothers are put in jail. And Rick says, "Well, let's question this." And once you o- see what they're doing, and sometimes it's much more equivalent to male circumcision, which is common around the world. So anyway, I'm, you know, I may have... Actually, no, I, your listeners probably aren't gonna bolt just because of that, but I might get in trouble in other parts of the academic world. But that's an example of his perversity.

4. 9:03 – 10:17

   Why I invited Jon on the show.

   1. TFTim Ferriss9:03

      If they bolt just because of that, then honestly, this is culling of the herd, because let me... Before you continue, please hold your place. Bookmark. Folks, part of the reason I wanted to have John on, and I respect the work that he does, is that I believe using this type of examination and self-examination, you become more antifragile, and you can also see through the veil of your own conditioning in a more effective way. And you can examine your thinking and your assumptions vis-a-vis the language you use, the language you've absorbed, the labels that are your defaults, et cetera. And I think this makes you a better, more effective, and hopefully, ultimately, happier person who's a better contributor to society. So there's my sales pitch.

   2. JHJonathan Haidt9:54

      Wow. Perfect. We're done here.

   3. TFTim Ferriss9:55

      [laughs]

   4. JHJonathan Haidt9:55

      You said it. That's exactly, that is exactly right. That's why I'm so grateful to Rick, 'cause if you develop this as a habit, you become more intellectually antifragile, which we'll get to, I hope. It helps you step out of your team.

   5. TFTim Ferriss10:09

      Mm.

   6. JHJonathan Haidt10:09

      It helps you think independently. And you can see that your team does a lot of stupid things. Every team does.

   7. TFTim Ferriss10:14

      [laughs]

   8. JHJonathan Haidt10:15

      So yes, what you said.

   9. TFTim Ferriss10:16

      [laughs]

5. 10:17 – 17:04

   Moral relativism.

   1. TFTim Ferriss10:17

      What I said. All right. S- Let's then, we flash back to 1993, and I would love to revisit, I'm gonna write this down, sort of moral relativism and how we might think about that, and how we either embrace that or develop an awareness around it so we don't... You know what? Let's postpone 1993 and actually just tackle this right now.

   2. JHJonathan Haidt10:45

      Okay.

   3. TFTim Ferriss10:45

      So, so there are a number of books I read a long time ago when I was part of something called the Henry Crown Fellowship at the Aspen Institute. And one I am, I wanna say it was, I wanna say H.G. Wells, but I don't think that is right, who wrote an essay called Shooting the Elephant or something along these lines. You may actually be able to track back the proper author of this. But it spoke of sort of social pressures and during British colonialism, this series of events that led to someone feeling like he needed to shoot an elephant that was causing all this ruckus in a village, even though he didn't want to. So that, that was describing social pressures and how those can lead to actions that w- we, we find immoral or reprehensible ourselves.

   4. JHJonathan Haidt11:36

      Mm.

   5. TFTim Ferriss11:36

      But putting that aside, that's just an example, we also read a lot about morality, not in a structured way, I think, that would maybe stand toe-to-toe with the type of research you do in any way, but reading various accounts of people succumbing to moral relativism, where everything is okay-

   6. JHJonathan Haidt11:57

      Mm

   7. TFTim Ferriss11:57

      ... because it's in a different culture, it's in a different time. How would you suggest people think about that? Because on one hand, I think that's dangerous. On the other hand, there's, there's so much intolerance masquerading as tolerance, and there's so many issues that I'm sure we'll get into. But just with the Subject of moral relativism. How should we, how do you think about that?

   8. JHJonathan Haidt12:22

      Yes. This is a great topic to tackle in a longer discussion because it's, you know, it's one of the oldest questions in philosophy. It's an important one, and it takes a little doing. So there are a lot of intellectual puzzles where we just sort of naturally think about it on, like, a single dimension or as a binary. And if you kind of break it up into multiple dimensions, then you see, you see solutions. So the typical way of thinking about this is, is there, is morality real? Like, is it a real thing like, you know, like the laws of physics, such that if people are behaving contrary to it, they're wrong even if they don't know it? Or is morality just, you know... And Herodotus and, and ancient Greeks, they saw this. Like, well, in this country, you know, they kill their parents when they get old, and in this country, they eat pigs. And they, they could see the practice is different. And so, well, maybe, you know, it's just like language. It's just like whatever, you know, whatever hap- whatever happens in your culture, well, that's what's grammatical. But what I learned in part from Shweder and also reading a lot of philosophy, some of which he guided me to, was I'll put out a couple of concepts. So the first is moral monism versus moral pluralism.

   9. TFTim Ferriss13:34

      Hmm.

   10. JHJonathan Haidt13:34

       So it's, the question isn't, is there moral truth or not? It's, is there one moral truth or multiple? And once you do that, now you've loosened things up because a hallmark of my work, and this is where I departed from Rick a bit, is I've always been very influenced by evolutionary psychology as well as anthropology. So we are evolved creatures. We are homo sapiens, and we are all homo sapiens, and we are primates, and we are, have a lot in common with chimpanzees and bonobos. So that's the evolutionary psych. And then there's also the anthropology. We vary. And so when you look around the world, you don't find infinite variation. You find a few major patterns. A wonderful book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich. She says when the European explorers went out in the, you know, 16th, 17th century, they found wherever they went, people danced around campfires, had rituals that bonded the group together. They often used psychedelic substances. They had beat-heavy music. So this is human nature. But feudal systems are also pretty common. There are a few major patterns. And so one possibility is there's not just one way of doing things, but it's not anything goes. It's that there are several different sort of grammatical human forms. And this actually became the basis of my major, my major work in psychology, which is moral foundations theory, which is my effort to say, "What are the taste buds of the moral sense?"

   11. TFTim Ferriss14:58

       Hmm.

   12. JHJonathan Haidt14:58

       Because cuisine varies around the world. You wouldn't say that the French are wrong if they don't cook like the Vietnamese, but I think you could say that the French and the Vietnamese are both much better cooks than the English, or at least, you know-

   13. TFTim Ferriss15:11

       [laughs]

   14. JHJonathan Haidt15:11

       ... they were historically. It's not that anything goes. There is some truth. But here's where we bring in the second kind of abstract but really powerful concept, which is anthropocentric truth. So that means something can be true relative to anthro- to, to humans, to who we are. So if in- if intelligent aliens come to our solar system, they will find that the Earth is the third planet from the sun, and that was true before we existed, and it'll be true long after we're gone. And they would find that gold is a better conductor of electricity than is aluminum. That was true before we were here. It'll be true... You know? So those are non-anthropocentric truths. There's a fact, and so many people have been on a quest to find one of the moral truths. Like, and so Sam Harris, who for a brief time was my intellectual enemy. We kind of had like a feud for a few years.

   15. TFTim Ferriss15:58

       [laughs]

   16. JHJonathan Haidt15:58

       Now we're friends. We actually like each other quite a lot. But we had kind of a feud over this because he has a whole book, The Landscape of Morality, arguing that moral truths are like the truths of chemistry, and I say no, they are anthropocentric truths. This is from a philosopher, David Wiggins. There are things that are true because of the creatures we are. So there are things that are beautiful because of our senses. There are things that Shakespeare is a better writer than Kurt Vonnegut. Now, I love reading Kurt Vonnegut. I probably enjoy it more than Shakespeare. But man, I can see, and almost everyone can, Shakespeare is a complete genius at crafting words. Now, it's a fact. If aliens come here from another planet, they're not gonna agree because it, it doesn't make sense. It wouldn't fit with their nature. Anyway, so putting this all together, I think what we can say is there are moral truths and moral orders that are emergent. I am not a relativist. I'm not a monist. I'm a moral pluralist. There are multiple moral truths, and these truths are emergent from human nature interacting as people interact in societies. Okay. Wow, I think I just did

6. 17:04 – 19:42

   How an emergentist views human rights violations.

   1. JHJonathan Haidt17:04

      it.

   2. TFTim Ferriss17:04

      Oh, it was great, and I want to tag on a follow-up, which is how do you personally... And we're gonna come back to the from feud to friends story because-

   3. JHJonathan Haidt17:14

      Okay

   4. TFTim Ferriss17:14

      ... I think that could be a, I think that could be an instructive case study. Plus, I'm just curious because I'm, I'm friends [laughs] with Sam also, who is a very formidable sparring partner.

   5. JHJonathan Haidt17:24

      Yes.

   6. TFTim Ferriss17:24

      [laughs] When you look at global events, how do you think about, personally, human rights violations, what to accept, what to oppose yourself as a, as a pluralist? And I'm not saying that because I'm viewing myself as the opposite of a pluralist. I'm just curious how you personally think about what you are proactively going to push back against. Doesn't need to be outside the US.

   7. JHJonathan Haidt18:02

      So because I'm an emergentist, that is, I believe that morals emerge as we interact, I don't think that 50,000 years ago societies were wrong in dividing labor between male and female.

   8. TFTim Ferriss18:15

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JHJonathan Haidt18:15

      It's not like they were wrong, and they should have fixed it. They should have had perfect... Like, no. As we now have modern societies with labor-saving devices, and you don't have to divide labor between male and female, and there are other ways to live. So now any society that was to say, "Well, you know, women can't do certain things. Only men can," like, well, you know, well, that would be wrong. In a modern Western society, that would be unethical. That would be a violation of civil rights. Now, when we look at things like countries in which the secret police grab people in the night and take them away and torture and kill them, you don't have to be a very advanced society to realize th- this is horrific, this is wrong, this is brutality. This is not justified by m- appeals to morals. So I once developed a kind of a three-part test. Let me see if I can remember it. Because what we wanna do is we wanna separate things like veiling or things where they might be broadly accepted in a culture, but we're offended by them, from things like chattel slavery, where some people accept it, but the victims of it didn't accept it. So I think we, we can point to things. It's often tricky, but we can point to things where we can say, "We can criticize that practice and that culture." In extreme cases, we might even say we should try to undermine it or try to stop it. So y- we'd have to go case by case on, you know, widow burning in India and things like that, you know, which I think will clearly fall on one side. But that's how I would generally do it in the abstract. Now, I think you asked me a slightly different question though, which was more like me personally, not like philosophically, right?

   10. TFTim Ferriss19:41

       Yeah.

7. 19:42 – 22:37

   A turning point: why Jon almost never gets angry anymore.

   1. JHJonathan Haidt19:42

      So a funny thing happened to me as I've studied morality, which is that I almost never get angry anymore.

   2. TFTim Ferriss19:49

      Huh.

   3. JHJonathan Haidt19:49

      So before 1993, I was a normal person who got angry a lot. Uh, you know, I'm pretty even-tempered, so it wasn't like anger, I had anger problems. I'm just saying, you know, I'd be like... I'd read the newspaper, I'd be, you know, angry at the goddamn, you know, Ronald Reagan or whatever. And, you know, or someone cuts me off or something's slow. So I'm the sort of, you know, s- quasi type A, pushy, s- you know, smart aleck son of a bitch Jewish kid is what-

   4. TFTim Ferriss20:15

      [laughs]

   5. JHJonathan Haidt20:15

      ... a neighbor once called me.

   6. TFTim Ferriss20:16

      [laughs]

   7. JHJonathan Haidt20:17

      So I used to be like that. And then in, in 1993, I changed in part from... The key thing there was actually taking LSD for the first time while I was studying to go to India and reading the Bhagavad Gita and reading, you know, Hinduism and Hindu philosophy. And I was, uh, 29 years old. So here I am studying moral psychology and all these things, and in that year, I kind of stepped out of the matrix. I kinda stepped out of the world that I had been living in. And that is what allowed me, that year, allowed me to do the work I've done with the rest of my life, which is saying, "You know what? Let's try to understand progressives and conservatives in their own terms." Before then, I was just a standard straight issue, you know, Ivy League liberal progressive type person. But a roundabout way of answering your question is I don't get mad. I look at systems and I always think how can we make them better? And systems that are producing terrible results for human beings should be changed. So actually, I'll share, so one thing, and this was actually, this was before my turning point. In 1987, just before grad school, I traveled alone across Eastern Europe. And so I, I went to Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. And when I was in Romania, where Ceaușescu was the dictator, the people were literally cold and dirty. Like, they literally did not have soap to clean their clothes. They did not have heat in the winter. They were kept like animals, and they behaved like animals in some sense. Like, you, you know, trying to get on a bus. Like, there's so few buses, people push and shove. And, you know, it certainly didn't make me angry. It was like, "Oh my God," like... Actually, it did make me angry 'cause I directed... A- all of my feelings were against Ceaușescu, and I thought, "If I could kill this man with my bare hands right now, I would do it and I would love it."

   8. TFTim Ferriss22:10

      [laughs]

   9. JHJonathan Haidt22:10

      It was so horrific to see what this man had done to this society, him and his half million secret policemen. And so when he was shot in the mud in a, you know, in a courtyard in 1989, I was thrilled. So I guess that's more of a direct answer to your question. If I see someone, you know, o- oppressing a whole society or acting in that monstrous way, not for any moral-

   10. TFTim Ferriss22:32

       Mm

   11. JHJonathan Haidt22:33

       ... morally legitimate reason, yeah, I think we need to take action.

8. 22:37 – 27:40

   Taking LSD for the first time.

   1. TFTim Ferriss22:37

      Could you tell me more about your LSD experience? Why was that such a seemingly crucial ingredient in that turning point or that period for you?

   2. JHJonathan Haidt22:51

      I know you've had a fair amount of psychedelic coverage on this podcast, and I'm sure your listeners will, many will be experienced or familiar with it. So the turning point for me, it was June 11th, 1993. You know, like many other, uh, such experiences, one feels reborn, and you feel like you remember the day. You remember exactly when it happened. I was a postdoc in Chicago working with Shweder, and I went back to Philadelphia where I'd been a grad student and where my ex-girlfriend, we're still good friends, uh, was there and our, a lot of our friends. She got some acid and we all did it. It was my first time doing it at the age of 29. And the metaphor that I use in making sense of it afterwards was it felt to me as though, as though I'd spent all my life living in this amazing mansion with thousands of rooms, and I loved exploring this mansion, and there, and I loved to travel, and there were all these rooms to explore, and I thought I was doing... I was, like, ex- you know, seeing all this stuff. And then that night, it was like God punched a hole in the roof, reached in, picked me up, took me out of the mansion, and took me around the whole world and said, "You thought that was the world? No, this is the world."

   3. TFTim Ferriss24:06

      [laughs]

   4. JHJonathan Haidt24:07

      And it's, you know, beyond anything you can imagine. And then, you know, he b- puts me back in the mansion, seals up the roof and says, "Go on." And I don't mean literally God. I'm a, I'm a, you know, I'm a Jewish atheist. I don't believe literally in God. But these experiences have really helped me understand the way we evolve for religion, the way almost all societies have a way of using psychedelic plants But you interviewed Michael Pollan, so you know what he said. So that experience certainly changed me as a psychologist thinking about the human mind and consciousness and self-transcendence and all that. But it changed me as a human being because afterwards it was like petty th- like small things just don't matter. It changes your perspective. That's trite to say. But it also just helped me... You know what it did? Okay, what it did was here at the same time, I was reading the Bhagavad Gita. In the Bhagavad Gita, there is a specific scene. I talk about this in The Happiness Hypothesis. There's a specific scene where Krishna gives Arjuna a third eye to see the world as it really is.

   5. TFTim Ferriss25:20

      Right.

   6. JHJonathan Haidt25:20

      And he's like gasping for breath. He's like he can't process it, but he comes back and he wants to serve Krishna. Now, I didn't come back like I want to serve my fellow man, but I felt like all my old pettiness, all that just sort of burned off, and I just, I don't know, I just had a kind of an independence. Like I'm not on a team. I'm just, I just want to understand what's happening.

   7. TFTim Ferriss25:41

      Hmm. And did that then provide the fertile ground that allowed you to learn, and I'm once again quoting from The Atlantic article, "The power of rituals and viewing a commitment to religious purity as a way to knit communities together"? In other words, without that experience, without being plucked out of the mansion, do you think you would have come to those conclusions on your own in India, or were they mutually dependent in a way?

   8. JHJonathan Haidt26:14

      I think they were mutually dependent, yes. I don't think I could have done it. It would have been just more of a standard intellectual experience like, "Hmm, this is interesting. Let me write this down in my notebook. Let me try to make sense of this." Because the other piece we want to bring in here is that in grad school, I read Émile Durkheim, the French sociologist, and that so... And, and really comes out in The Righteous Mind. Like Rick Shweder and Émile Durkheim and Charles Darwin, like those are the three heroes of the book. Those three men, their ideas just transformed my thinking. And so you put those all together in a 29-year-old brain who's having a tremendously good time at the University of Chicago and then going to India, and then as you're shaking it up, you put in just a tiny little bit of LSD and like, boom-

   9. TFTim Ferriss26:56

      [laughs]

   10. JHJonathan Haidt26:57

       ... it comes out into a totally new configuration. So that's kind of what happened to me in 1993.

   11. TFTim Ferriss27:00

       [laughs] It is like the MSG of spiritual multidimensionalism.

   12. JHJonathan Haidt27:06

       Yes.

   13. TFTim Ferriss27:06

       Just a little, little bit of pixie dust of LSD [laughs] on top.

   14. JHJonathan Haidt27:09

       Pixie dust, yes. Well, you know, if you think about your frontal cortex as being kind of like locks down between 13 and sort of mid to late 20s, it's kind of locking down.

   15. TFTim Ferriss27:19

       Mm-hmm.

   16. JHJonathan Haidt27:19

       You know, it's very open to change in your teen years, but it kind of, you know, settles in by your late 20s. And so as it's kind of setting, you know, that period of change, you know, had it been five or 10 years later, it might not have had that much effect.

   17. TFTim Ferriss27:30

       Yeah. It would strike me as a sort of critical formative window, right? So if you are able to slow the setting of the concrete-

   18. JHJonathan Haidt27:39

       Yes,

9. 27:40 – 30:59

   My own transformative experience was happening simultaneously.

   1. JHJonathan Haidt27:40

      exactly

   2. TFTim Ferriss27:40

      ... or something along those lines metaphorically, then interesting things can happen. I, I will say, not to spend too much time on, on the psychedelic component of this, but that the, the loosening of self-identity even at advanced ages, let's just say in terminal cancer patients who are suffering from end-of-life anxiety, the ability, and there's some evidence to suggest, although I think it's simplistic, that the downregulation of the default mode network helps to inhibit self-referential thinking and that type of executive function, and therefore people experience this ego dissolution or ego death. But even in a, a less extreme instance of that, it frees you from the constructs that have been the lenses you've always worn but not realized you've been wearing. And to that extent, I, I do think it allows you to see something like, for instance, these behaviors and beliefs in India with a very different set of eyes than would otherwise be possible. 1993, I must say, just as, as coincidence, [laughs] 1992 to 1993 was also the year that probably most dramatically changed my life. So we were, we were having-

   3. JHJonathan Haidt29:06

      How, how was that?

   4. TFTim Ferriss29:06

      ... transformative experiences in the same 12-month period of time.

   5. JHJonathan Haidt29:10

      At the same time.

   6. TFTim Ferriss29:10

      It was my first time overseas, and I landed in Japan as an exchange student l- going to a Japanese school, living with Japanese families for a year, and that broke open my mind in such an incredibly, at points difficult, at points difficult ways, but in such a beautifully profound and productive way because it forced me to question the right... What it meant to do things the right way. It was my first time being in a country-

   7. JHJonathan Haidt29:45

      Hmm

   8. TFTim Ferriss29:45

      ... where people drove on the opposite side of the street. It's my first time being anywhere where the entire family shared the bath, didn't change the water, and you had to-

   9. JHJonathan Haidt29:54

      Hmm. [laughs]

   10. TFTim Ferriss29:55

       ... clean yourself beforehand.

   11. JHJonathan Haidt29:56

       Right. Yeah. [laughs]

   12. TFTim Ferriss29:57

       And the examples just where they cool their food by slurping it in is with great noise as opposed to blowing on it with exhales. And so it was [laughs] it was like this Alice in Wonderland topsy-turvy upside-down world for me, and I realized, oh, wow, all these things that I have assumed are just the way things are done are, I don't want to say arbitrary, but they're, they're social conventions. I mean, these are cultural emergent patterns. They're not laws of physics. And so during that same year, I, I also really, I think, unlocked my ability to start to ask, ask at least questions about my assumptions, right? Like, "Well, is that really true? Do we really have to do that?"

   13. JHJonathan Haidt30:42

       Yeah.

   14. TFTim Ferriss30:42

       "Is this really how it works?" Even the structure of thought is mirrored in language. I mean, Japanese is very, very different. Instead of being subject, verb, object, you know, I eat the apple, it's I the apple eat. I to school go, that type of thing. And it was a, it was a very productive year

   15. JHJonathan Haidt30:58

       I just want to pick up on that

10. 30:59 – 35:43

    Were my politics influenced or altered by this experience?

    1. JHJonathan Haidt30:59

       for one moment, because I think you had your experience at a sort of a more opportune age than mine. I mean, mine worked out great, but-

    2. TFTim Ferriss31:05

       Yeah

    3. JHJonathan Haidt31:05

       ... it's not, you weren't in college at the time, right? You were-

    4. TFTim Ferriss31:07

       No

    5. JHJonathan Haidt31:07

       ... a student at Princeton?

    6. TFTim Ferriss31:08

       I was actually, this was before Princeton. This would've been high school.

    7. JHJonathan Haidt31:12

       Wow.

    8. TFTim Ferriss31:13

       This was age 15 to 16.

    9. JHJonathan Haidt31:16

       Okay. You know, there's research on how we create stories about ourselves, and our stories are wide open. From about 14 or 15 is when it kind of opens up-

    10. TFTim Ferriss31:24

        Mm

    11. JHJonathan Haidt31:24

        ... through the mid to late 20s. That's like the key period. And so you had yours right at the beginning of that. And listening to you, you know, I, 'cause I think so much about left-right differences, there's research that foreign travel makes people more progressive, more liberal.

    12. TFTim Ferriss31:37

        Mm.

    13. JHJonathan Haidt31:37

        Because you see how things can be different. Did it have that effect on you? Were you progressive or liberal at the time, and did it change your politics at all?

    14. TFTim Ferriss31:45

        I am grateful, very, very grateful. I don't wanna, you know, throw my, either of my parents under the bus, but my dad was very vocal about various political stuff, and I completely turned off that-

    15. JHJonathan Haidt32:01

        Mm

    16. TFTim Ferriss32:01

        ... listening function. So I did not, this is gonna be embarrassing perhaps to admit, but I effectively paid little to no attention to politics until perhaps 10 years ago. And-

    17. JHJonathan Haidt32:14

        Okay

    18. TFTim Ferriss32:14

        ... so I didn't identify politically at all. I was really issue by issue, if they came up, if it was something that affected me or that I thought I might wanna change, that was the extent of my radar pickup. I will say that in retrospect, looking at my experience, probably also given the way that Japanese society is structured and the availability of healthcare and this, that, and the other thing, that many of those issues would probably be associated with a sort of left-leaning progressive mindset, I suppose. I, I would have to imagine that to be the case. I, I don't see how it would go the other way because I wasn't... Even though in Japan there is some pretty crazy nationalism and super hardcore, I suppose, sort of right extreme stuff, I was not exposed to that.

    19. JHJonathan Haidt33:10

        Okay. The idea that I was just developing as, from what you were saying was this. You know, I've long thought, since I wrote The Righteous Mind, and since I really tried to understand conservatism and libertarians, and really got sort of the wisdom from those traditions as well as the progressive or liberal tradition, and I've really come to see that a functioning society, it needs a sort of progressive wing pushing for change, and it needs a conservative wing saying, "Slow down," tapping on the brakes. You know, William F. Buckley, you know, stand athwart history yelling, "Stop." You need both in a healthy society. We don't have that now. Our left is not liberal. Our right is not conservative. We're a mess. But societies need those two impulses. And just from when you were saying, it didn't occur to me, it's like, actually, I wonder if in a person's development you kind of need both of those.

    20. TFTim Ferriss33:51

        Hmm.

    21. JHJonathan Haidt33:51

        That is, early on you kind of need to like open up and travel and see the world and question things. But if you stay that way the rest of your life, you might kind of be kind of dysfunctional, because there's interesting research showing that it's not age that makes people become more conservative. It's having children or starting a business or taking on responsibility.

    22. TFTim Ferriss34:10

        Ah.

    23. JHJonathan Haidt34:11

        Once you take on some responsibility, you realize, you know what? We actually need some rules here. We need some, you know, there has to be some authority or some hierarchy. You know, there have to be punishments for cheating.

    24. TFTim Ferriss34:20

        Hmm.

    25. JHJonathan Haidt34:20

        So in the course of a human life, maybe there's like the opening up travel period, and then the like, okay, you got all this stuff in your head. Now you have to apply it. You have to kind of focus and you have to be conscientious. All right, just a thought. Keep going.

    26. TFTim Ferriss34:31

        Yeah, I like that idea. I like that idea, and I've, I've never thought of it that way. I would also say Japan deeply resonated with me on a lot of levels that my experience in the United States did not. The cleanliness, the [laughs] sort of obsessive compulsive focus on detail, just the level of meticulous attention to the most minute of details, which can be crippling. It's not all upside. But that so deeply, to me, felt like a warm bath for maybe my predispositions or my neurosis-

    27. JHJonathan Haidt35:15

        Hmm

    28. TFTim Ferriss35:15

        ... that it was, it felt like a rebirth of sorts, right? I mean, I would have friends who would say like, "Timu ..." They'd be like, they would just be like, "You're not American. I don't get it. Like you look, you're white and you look like what you look like, but you're more Japanese than I am." And they would, they would make these jokes because it came so easily to me culturally in a way. So to whatever extent that makes any sense, there was that.

11. 35:43 – 41:02

    What being a Jewish atheist means to Jon.

    1. TFTim Ferriss35:43

       And do you know, I, I did want to ask you about your comment, the label you used of Jewish atheist. So I am a Jewish atheist.

    2. JHJonathan Haidt35:54

       Yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss35:55

       And I wanna provide some context for this, which is Paul Graham, who's famous for co-founding Y Combinator, had a tweet, I think it was actually in one of his essays also, along the lines of, "The more labels you apply to yourself, the stupider you become," something like that. I'm paraphrasing it.

    4. JHJonathan Haidt36:15

       Okay.

    5. TFTim Ferriss36:16

       But be careful with the labels that you use. I'm not forcing that on you, but I'm curious to know the thinking behind Jewish atheist.

    6. JHJonathan Haidt36:23

       Mm-hmm.

    7. TFTim Ferriss36:23

       And I'm friends with a writer named A.J. Jacobs who said-

    8. JHJonathan Haidt36:27

       Oh, yeah. I love A.J., yeah

    9. TFTim Ferriss36:29

       ... you know, what he s- he, what'd he say? Like-

    10. JHJonathan Haidt36:30

        Funniest-

    11. TFTim Ferriss36:31

        Yeah [laughs]

    12. JHJonathan Haidt36:32

        ... writers around.

    13. TFTim Ferriss36:32

        Yeah, he's hilarious. So he said something like, you know, "I am to Jewish what Olive Garden is to Italian," or something [laughs] like that-

    14. JHJonathan Haidt36:42

        [laughs]

    15. TFTim Ferriss36:42

        ... was, was his explanation-

    16. JHJonathan Haidt36:44

        Yeah, that's about it, yeah

    17. TFTim Ferriss36:44

        ... when he, when, when he wrote the book The Year of Living Biblically, which is a fantastic-

    18. JHJonathan Haidt36:48

        Mm. Oh, yes

    19. TFTim Ferriss36:48

        ... fantastic book. How do you think about being Jewish? What does that mean to you?

    20. JHJonathan Haidt36:56

        So first, we're having this discussion in the context of a, a Christian background culture. You know, Christianity is somewhat unusual, although Islam is similar, in making it's all about your relationship with God and faith.

    21. TFTim Ferriss37:08

        Mm-hmm.

    22. JHJonathan Haidt37:08

        And Judaism is a more ancient religion, and it's very much about a story about a tribe, a group that has these ups and downs in history and we're bound together. And of course, God is a very important part of the story. But as Jews have lived in different cultures around the world, well, that shapes your identity. So you know, you can be Jewish and not believe in God, just like you can be Italian and not be Catholic.

    23. TFTim Ferriss37:33

        Right.

    24. JHJonathan Haidt37:34

        So as an ethnic group, as an identity, as a culture, I'm Jewish, and I recognize the influence of just the norms. You know, the argumentativeness.

    25. TFTim Ferriss37:45

        [laughs]

    26. JHJonathan Haidt37:46

        You know, and here we're talking Ashkenazi Jewish. I should always be clear-

    27. TFTim Ferriss37:49

        Yeah

    28. JHJonathan Haidt37:49

        ... that Sephardic Jews are different. They're different kinds of Jews. But the American Jewish experience is sort of dominated by the Ashkenazi, the Eastern European immigrants. All four of my grandparents came here from Russia and Poland and Belarus around 1907 when they were teenagers, roughly. So yeah, it's part of my, it's part of my... Okay, so I was about to say it's part of my identity. I guess it is. But I'm playing these days with the idea that actually I'm an anti-identitarian.

    29. TFTim Ferriss38:14

        Hmm.

    30. JHJonathan Haidt38:15

        I think part of what's wrong with the country is that America, of all countries, needs to be a melting pot. We need to have a generally assimilationist ethos, and that worked so well for the Jews, the Irish, the Italians. You know, all the groups that came through Ellis Island into an assimilationist 20th century America, it worked out fantastically well. So anyway, that's just... We can follow that down in a moment-
12. 41:02 – 46:01

    From feud to friendship with Sam Harris.

    1. TFTim Ferriss41:03

       Let's talk about from feud to friends with Sam Harris.

    2. JHJonathan Haidt41:08

       Okay.

    3. TFTim Ferriss41:09

       And I know you described it in passing, but what was the feud? And then the more interesting part of that is... I shouldn't say interesting, but the part that I want to focus on is how did you go from that to then friends? Because that is... Feuds are where things start and end a lot of the time these days, [laughs] and maybe forever-

    4. JHJonathan Haidt41:30

       Yeah

    5. TFTim Ferriss41:30

       ... given human nature. But certainly online, people get rewarded probably more for feuding than they do for being friendly. So could you des- describe that experience, please?

    6. JHJonathan Haidt41:44

       Yeah, and that's kind of fun to reflect on it. So back when Sam really burst onto the scene, you know, he's a great writer and a beautiful writer, and he was so persuasive, you know, writing those first two new atheist books. We would be invited to a lot of the same conferences, 'cause I was beginning to write about how religion... You know, I'm a naturalist. I don't... You know, I believe we evolved to be re- you know, it, it... I don't believe it's God who made us religious. But you know, religion does all these good things, I was saying. And so we'd be invited to conferences together. There was, like, the Beyond Belief conference.

    7. TFTim Ferriss42:14

       Mm-hmm.

    8. JHJonathan Haidt42:15

       Sam and, you know, all the other new atheists went the first year, and then Sam and me, one or two others went the second year. And wherever I would appear with Sam or wherever we would clash in writing, Sam would always use this rhetorical technique of basically saying, "So John Haidt would say that human sacrifice among the Aztecs is a good thing because it binds people to..." You know, so he would always accuse me of, like, supporting atrocities.

    9. TFTim Ferriss42:35

       [laughs]

    10. JHJonathan Haidt42:36

        And by the third or fourth time he'd done this, I was... Okay, I said before I don't get angry. I was kind of pissed.

    11. TFTim Ferriss42:41

        [laughs]

    12. JHJonathan Haidt42:42

        And so I did a, kind of a dirty lowdown trick.

    13. TFTim Ferriss42:45

        Yeah, yeah. There must be some decorum. There must be some decorum. Yes. [laughs]

    14. JHJonathan Haidt42:50

        Yeah. So I did something, I'm a little embarrassed by it. It was kind- it was clever, but I'm a little embarrassed now. I did a kind of a, an academic trick. Which is one thing that bothered me about Sam, you know, he has a PhD, but he wasn't really socialized as an academic. He was writing more as a- rhetorician, you know, a public arguer. And he would use very strong language like, "Always this," and, "Never this," and, "Certainly this." And so I said, "You know what? Let me take all of Sam's writings and feed them through..." There's a program that analyzes word use by Jamie Pennebaker. Anyway, you feed it through and it counts, like, certainly, always, never. And so there's a category called certainty. And so I fed s- text of Sam's books through, and you get a number. How certain is Sam, and, uh, the couple things like that. And then I fed in the other New Atheists, and then I fed in Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and I put a whole bunch of them in. And then I put in me and David Sloan Wilson, who was also with me arguing that religion has nuanced effects. And it turned out that Sam was higher on certainty words than, you know, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and all those people.

    15. TFTim Ferriss44:04

        [laughs]

    16. JHJonathan Haidt44:04

        So I just wrote this up in a blog post, and I showed graphically that Sam is actually more certain of himself than these people that he's always lambasting. So it was a kind of a dirty trick, but it was funny. It was like young Twitter fighting, like-

    17. TFTim Ferriss44:16

        And the closing of the first round ends with [laughs] a one-two combination.

    18. JHJonathan Haidt44:20

        Yeah. [laughs]

    19. TFTim Ferriss44:21

        [laughs]

    20. JHJonathan Haidt44:22

        Yeah. And then I think I offered, like, I called it the Moral Psychology Prize or the Sam Harris Prize or something that...

    21. TFTim Ferriss44:27

        [laughs]

    22. JHJonathan Haidt44:27

        Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, I forgot a crucial thing. Sam wrote his book, The Moral Landscape, saying, you know, "Morality is a fact," and he offered money, I think it was money, to whoever could persuade him otherwise.

    23. TFTim Ferriss44:39

        Mm-hmm.

    24. JHJonathan Haidt44:40

        And then I wrote my essay, I Bet That No One Will Be Able To Persuade Sam Otherwise, and Here's Why. And then I went, then I showed that how certain he is.

    25. TFTim Ferriss44:49

        [laughs]

    26. JHJonathan Haidt44:49

        So I just kinda put him in a bind.

    27. TFTim Ferriss44:50

        [laughs]

    28. JHJonathan Haidt44:51

        So that's how it started. So then we kinda had, like, a little, you know, cold... We just kind of ignored each other for, for a while. And I, my recollection of how it ended was, you know, Sam, Sam's incredibly courageous and is not a partisan, and he thinks for himself, and he does things that make people hate him on both sides, and I really do respect him for that. And it was something, I think it was, he said something about Islam and he was being lambasted, and I can't remember whether I, like, you know, retweeted something or said some- I put up some, like, little, tiny show of support for him. I think that's how it went. And then Sam acknowledged it and thanked me for it. And what happened was, our feud was in, like, 2014, and that was back before everything went insane.

    29. TFTim Ferriss45:31

        Mm-hmm.

    30. JHJonathan Haidt45:31

        And around 2014, 2015, everything went insane. And there was this incredible, you know, explosion of illiberalism on campus and in the academic world and the intellectual world. And Sam and I were then actually both on the same side, which is we believe in being reasonable and using evidence. So we, we, you know, we ultimately, we're sorta natural allies, and whoever first gave a little show of support for the other was like, "Okay, yeah, you know what? I like you."
13. 46:01 – 50:42

    He's a very, very smart cookieComplex dynamical system.

    1. TFTim Ferriss46:01

       He's a very, very smart cookie. I am, I'm also a very big fan of Sam. And flash boil 2014, 2015, what the hell happened? What contributed to things suddenly hockey sticking in insanity? Could it have been predicted?

    2. JHJonathan Haidt46:22

       I don't think so, because... So I find these, like, big ideas that really help me think, and so I'm gonna put another one out there, which is a complex dynamical system. And is this something you've talked about on-

    3. TFTim Ferriss46:32

       No

    4. JHJonathan Haidt46:32

       ... on your show before?

    5. TFTim Ferriss46:33

       Mm-mm.

    6. JHJonathan Haidt46:34

       So complex dynamical systems. So the human mind is really good at thinking about mechanical systems, machines, things moving in space. We have sorta two brains. We have sorta two minds. We have a mind that's really good at thinking about objects moving in space, and so there's Popular Mechanics for people like doing that. And we're really good at thinking about people moving in social space and forming alliances and betrayals and soap operas and all that, and so there's People Magazine for people like doing that. Those two things we're really good at. But there are a lot of things in our world that are nothing like that, like the weather, the economy. There are complex dynamical systems where you can't, even in principle, predict what it's gonna do because it's a chaotic, complex system, and you can change parameters, and you can kind of predict which way things are gonna go, but you can't really know. And when you change parameters, you can suddenly get a phase change. And so mechanical systems are easy to understand. Complex dynamical systems are very hard, but we live within them. And so what happened, I believe, is that we hit a phase change. It, it actually began in 2014, but it blew up in the academic world in 2015. And so this is what I've called metaphorically the fall of the Tower of Babel. So if you simply wire people up, if you just connect people more and more, you'd think that's good, right? We always thought that, you know, from the Roman roads and the first telegram cables or the Pony Express. I mean, it's good to have more communication. That's generally a good thing. But it could have some problems, and it might be that you just get to a point where everyone's so connected that everyone is yelling or everyone's mad at everyone. So it might just be that there's more and more connection. But I think it's something else. What I've come to believe in trying to understand what the hell happened is it's the nature of the connection changed after 2009. So once... What we used to call social network sites, they connected people. So you could use Facebook to communicate with your friends from high school. That was great. There's no problem there. But in 2009, Facebook introduced the Like button. Twitter introduced the Retweet button. Facebook copied it with the Share button. So social media isn't just connecting people anymore, and we stop talking about them as social networking sites. We start using the word social media platform. Now it becomes about performance.

    7. TFTim Ferriss48:54

       Hmm.

    8. JHJonathan Haidt48:55

       And it becomes much more viral, much more explosive. It's not about me talking with you. It's about me talking at you in the hopes that my, my slam on you will get picked up by others, and that will make me famous. That will get me prestige And once everyone's motivated to do that, or I should say once 10% of people are motivated to do that, the system develops new properties that were not there in 2008.

    9. TFTim Ferriss49:17

       Yeah.

    10. JHJonathan Haidt49:18

        And most of us, most of your listeners, if they're old enough, can remember, you know, it used to be an amazing place. Like, the internet was amazing, social media was amazing, Twitter was playful and fun. And they're still... It's still that in part, but it just became much nastier. One of the key innovations, I believe, was what Facebook called threaded comments. So it used to be, you know, if Barack Obama puts up a, a tweet in his first term, he puts it up and people can respond, and that's it. They just respond, and that's it. You can say, you know, you can say, "You're stupid," or, "You're terrible," and that's it. You say that. But in 2014, Facebook said, "How about to increase engagement? How about we let everyone fight with everyone everywhere?" So if Barack Obama puts up a Facebook post in his second term or after 2014, someone can say, you know, "Go back to Kenya." And then someone else can say to that commenter, "No, you are a fascist." And then before you know it, you've got people fighting in the comments. So it's like those scenes in a barroom brawl. You got two people having a face-off, and suddenly everyone's breaking bottles on everyone's heads.

    11. TFTim Ferriss50:20

        [laughs]

    12. JHJonathan Haidt50:20

        That, I believe, is what happened in 2014, 2015.

    13. TFTim Ferriss50:23

        Yeah.

    14. JHJonathan Haidt50:23

        And democracy is unsustainable. Institutions are collapsing. Universities are going crazy. So we're now in the post-Babel world, where we can't have any shared understandings of truth. We can't have any shared stories, hence the title of my forthcoming book, Life after Babel: Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share.

    15. TFTim Ferriss50:41

        Hmm.

14. 50:42 – 57:32

    How safe spaces and character cancellation took over colleges.

    1. TFTim Ferriss50:42

       Do you have thoughts on what we can do from a proactive incentive perspective to, I don't wanna say reverse some of these trends, but to redirect the currents slightly in different directions? And you mentioned Chicago. One thing that really jumped out to me, this is quite a few years ago now, I wanna say, but when the sort of woke supremacy [laughs] virus started spreading throughout academia, and sort of fragility was being reinforced and tripled down upon, I wanna say it was the University of Chicago put out a letter to say, like, "We, we are actually going to go in the opposite d- direction." And it was, it was notable to me because a number of friends of mine who are alumni from UChicago said, "This is the first time in 10 years that I've given money to the university."

    2. JHJonathan Haidt51:36

       Yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss51:36

       So there are, I guess, a number of questions in this word salad that I'm throwing at you. The first is, why do you think UChicago was able to do that then or willing to do it, and would they be willing to do it again now? Right?

    4. JHJonathan Haidt51:50

       Yeah.

    5. TFTim Ferriss51:50

       Just to understand the incentives, because I've seen so many people lose their posts. Doesn't really, doesn't seem to matter how high up you are. If you can be removed by the trustees, you are vulnerable, or whatever mechanism exists for replacing the, the top brass. And then separately, let's focus on the academic side first, and then we can look at the, at the technological side-

    6. JHJonathan Haidt52:15

       Mm-hmm

    7. TFTim Ferriss52:15

       ... and maybe the business side. So in the academic world, w- why do you think it was possible for UChicago to do it then? Could they do it now? And is it possible to create some type of counterbalance or change incentives such that this doesn't continue to go in the direction it's going?

    8. JHJonathan Haidt52:35

       So I can't answer that question until I explain the dynamics that have made leaders cave throughout the intellectual world.

    9. TFTim Ferriss52:44

       Mm-hmm.

    10. JHJonathan Haidt52:44

        Throughout the, let's call it, we have democratic institutions and we have epistemic institutions. Epistemic meaning in search of knowledge, so that's preeminently the universities and journalism, museums, other things like that. Why have they all fallen in the same way? So let me start with that, and then we'll get to Chicago. So I've been trying to figure this out, like, every day. I've been obsessed with this since it started in 2014. That's when Greg Lukianoff came to me. Greg is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. And he said, "Jon, weird stuff is happening on campus. Students are suddenly asking for protections from books, words, speakers, ideas." Before then, it was always administrators. And so Greg says, like, you know, "What's going on? The students seem to be explaining these things using the same cognitive distortions that I learned to not do when I was treated for depression." Greg suffers from depression, and he learned cognitive behavioral therapy. So anyway, I thought Greg's idea was brilliant. Somehow universities are teaching students to think, to catastrophize, overgeneralize, mind reading, all these distortions. So that starts in 2014, and then it's really the fall of 2015, especially after the Halloween incident at Yale, where the students demand that Nicholas Christakis apologize for a thoughtful, caring letter that his wife had written to the students of Silliman College. And then the president of Yale, Peter Salovey, never backed up the Christakises. They demanded that they be fired and the president, you know, just gave the students everything they demanded. That he, he couldn't give them everything, but he, he really made a big show of saying, "Yes, you're right." And that launched a wave of protests around the country. And it always goes the same way, which is a charge from a student that something w- that was said was insensitive about race, gender, LGBTQ. And then there's never a finding of information. It's, blows up on Twitter or other channels, and then within a day or two, the person's fired.

    11. TFTim Ferriss54:40

        Mm-hmm.

    12. JHJonathan Haidt54:41

        No, no due process. And we've... This keeps going. It happened at The New York Times. It just happened at the Association for Psychological Science here. An editor may have made a mistake. It looks like he probably didn't follow good process. But again, there's a mob, and then the leadership gives in. So that's what's been happening.

    13. TFTim Ferriss54:57

        Why are they all caving? I'm just trying to think of the incentives, because it doesn't happen everywhere, right? There are some counter examples.

    14. JHJonathan Haidt55:07

        So it happens when you get- Moral homogeneity. So you get an institution where the great majority or almost everybody's on one side. And so in epistemic institutions, it's always gonna be the left.

    15. TFTim Ferriss55:20

        Mm-hmm.

    16. JHJonathan Haidt55:20

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

    17. TFTim Ferriss55:44

        Yep.

    18. JHJonathan Haidt55:44

        Anyway, so you have moral homogeneity, which is a crucial background variable. You have moral homogeneity. You have students. Y- So usually it's members of Ge- oh, you have Gen Z. So the charges are usually from Gen Z or late millennials making a charge that the leadership is vulnerable to, because the leadership is usually older white liberals, and it's backed up with, with a, a barrage of darts. So a dart is anything that someone can do to hurt someone else. You can launch a dart on Twitter. You can make an accusation. You have no liability for it. So what you see is these leaders, suddenly they're in morally homogeneous, politically homogeneous institutions. They're attacked with darts. They cave instantly. It's very painful. They cave instantly. That just encourages the darters to, to go further. So I called this, a recent Atlantic article, I called this structural stupidity. That is, you can have very smart people, but you only get smart when bad ideas will be challenged. And if a bad idea... So for example, at, you know, at universities, we all now have bias response teams. So if I say anything and a student objects, they can report me in three ways, and they, that number is posted in the bathrooms. It's on the back of all the ID cards, like, "Here's 911. Here's campus safety. Here's the bias response line. If you're offended, call this number." This is a really, really bad idea, or at least there's no evidence that it's a good idea.

    19. TFTim Ferriss57:09

        [laughs]

    20. JHJonathan Haidt57:10

        But it's done everywhere.

    21. TFTim Ferriss57:11

        Yeah.

    22. JHJonathan Haidt57:11

        It's done everywhere because no one dares oppose it. Like, nobody in the faculty senate will say, "Well, wait a second. Do we really wanna do this?" Everyone's just like, "Oh, yeah, let's, let's do this. This will be anti-racist." So you get structurally stupid communities, and they all fold in exactly the same way. This is what happened at The New York Times with the firing of James Bennett. It's the same thing everywhere. Why was Chicago different? Two reasons.

15. 57:32 – 1:00:24

    Why did the University of Chicago initially resist this trend?

    1. JHJonathan Haidt57:32

       One is Chicago... So every institution has its own moral resources. Every institution has a sense of identity. And Chicago is unique in having this really intense intellectual, like really high intellectual identity. And when I was there, students wore T-shirts, "University of Chicago, where fun goes to die."

    2. TFTim Ferriss57:52

       [laughs]

    3. JHJonathan Haidt57:53

       And Playboy Magazine ranked them the worst party school in America.

    4. TFTim Ferriss57:57

       [laughs]

    5. JHJonathan Haidt57:57

       You know, 300th out of 300. Don't go to Chicago. And they were proud of it.

    6. TFTim Ferriss58:01

       Mm-hmm.

    7. JHJonathan Haidt58:01

       So they begin with this intellectually intense identity, the background, and then the other crucial element was leadership. They had Robert Zimmer. That's it. Robert Zimmer personally was calling bullshit on all this stuff. "This is not who we are. This, you know, the caving, the demands, the outrage mobs, like, no, we're gonna talk about ideas here." So Robert Zimmer single-handedly sort of said like, "No." And the letter that you referred to was not from him. It was by a dean of students who sent a letter to prospective students who were coming to the, to Chicago, and he said, "At Chicago, we don't do safe spaces." Now, he misspoke, or he, that was a mistake because if, if the gay students or LGBT students want to have a club where they have certain discourse rules, great. Free association, let them. What the dean meant to say was, "Our classrooms are not safe spaces."

    8. TFTim Ferriss58:51

       Mm.

    9. JHJonathan Haidt58:51

       "In our classrooms, people can criticize what you say." So, and if you have that, then you don't have structural stupidity.

    10. TFTim Ferriss58:58

        If we're looking at structural stupidity, I start to think about structural dynamics and the ways in which people are vulnerable or less vulnerable to losing their posts, right?

    11. JHJonathan Haidt59:13

        Yep.

    12. TFTim Ferriss59:13

        Let's just say you are Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, and the company is doing well, and you want to remove... And I'm, I don't wanna speak for him, but this has been very well covered. You want to put out a letter that effectively says, "This is our mission. If you're aligned with this mission-"

    13. JHJonathan Haidt59:32

        Yep

    14. TFTim Ferriss59:32

        ... great, but our, our, we cannot be responsible for every cause-

    15. JHJonathan Haidt59:38

        Yep

    16. TFTim Ferriss59:39

        ... or world event that pulls our direction at a given velocity towards whatever outcome you might want. Therefore, if you would like to discuss these things and feel like it should be done at work-

    17. JHJonathan Haidt59:51

        Go elsewhere

    18. TFTim Ferriss59:52

        ... we're gonna give you a fantastic severance package. Part of the reason he can do that, aside from, I think, being very courageous, thinking for himself, and being willing to take a lot of flak in the short term, in the long-term best interest of the company, putting that aside, he's also, I think, in doing that, unlikely to get fired, right? It would take the-

    19. JHJonathan Haidt1:00:14

        That's right

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:00:14

        ... board of directors to remove him, and then there's the question of, well, who would we replace him with who would actually be a good enough operator to do a better job? Gonna be very tough.

16. 1:00:24 – 1:04:16

    What makes businesses more resilient against this trend than colleges?

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:00:24

       I suppose what I'm wondering is, within academics, do you think there's anything that can be done to provide protections or safety nets such that more people can actually take a counterposition?

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:00:38

       Yes. So let's just start by understanding the complex dynamical system of a company in a capitalist economy.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:00:45

       Mm-hmm.

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:00:46

       So all the stuff that started on campus in 2015, Greg and I wrote about it in The Coddling of the American Mind. We were gonna have a chapter on the coddling goes to work, but there weren't enough stories in 2017 when we were finishing the writing, so we closed down the book. And then in 2018, it all starts blowing up, all this stuff, you know, 'cause Gen Z graduates, they move into the corporate world, and they do the same stuff there that they were doing on campus. You know, the accusations that someone, "Someone wore a hat that offended me. You have to punish them." This is an HR issue. So all that stuff starts around 2018, 2019. And then, of course, in the summer of George Floyd, the political activism intensifies, you know, for, again, understandable reasons. But in that summer, almost all businesses, it seems, put out a statement on Black Lives Matter. Now, that was an exceptional summer, exceptional event. But that then led to pressures, that then led to a reorientation of much of corporate America, at least in progressively oriented, progressively in companies, much like what happened to us in the academy in 2015, 2016. So it was very, very similar. But the difference is that companies actually have to make money. They actually have to be tied to the real world. So if they do things that backfire, that cost a lot of money without any benefit, like, you know, mandatory diversity training. They're, you know... It takes a lot of money. There's not really any evidence it makes anything better. At some point, reality hits companies. Whereas universities are different. They're not like that. There is no reality.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:02:15

       [laughs]

    6. JHJonathan Haidt1:02:15

       The leading ones have gigantic endowments.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:02:17

       Yeah.

    8. JHJonathan Haidt1:02:18

       No matter how bad the service is, parents all over the world want their kids to go to the top 10 or 15 American universities, and it doesn't matter what happens. You know, the product can suck-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:02:28

       [laughs]

    10. JHJonathan Haidt1:02:28

        ... but the s- demand for it is infinite. So universities are not tied to reality in the way that a business is. That's the first thing. Second thing is that most businesses are not as uniform as universities. Of course, um, Armstrong, I presume he's right of center or libertarian. Do you know?

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:02:43

        I don't want to speak for him. I'm not sure.

    12. JHJonathan Haidt1:02:44

        Is he conservative?

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:02:45

        Yeah, I'm not... I honestly have no idea.

    14. JHJonathan Haidt1:02:47

        My point is that a number of right-leaning CEOs did that, and he was the first big one, and it's ca- it's called the mission focus movement. That, "You know what? Our company is not here to fix everything in the world. We're here to provide a great service for our customers." So mission focus. And a few right-leaning companies did that, and the big, the one that really changed things then was when Netflix did it.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:03:07

        Mm.

    16. JHJonathan Haidt1:03:07

        'Cause Netflix is a very progressive company, hugely important culturally. And when the Netflix CEO said something similar, which was, "If your values mean that you can't work on certain projects, maybe you shouldn't be working at Netflix." And I've s- I speak to a lot of managers and CEOs and leaders, and, like, oh, they were so thrilled because almost all leaders hate this woke stuff. Almost all university presidents hate it. It makes their lives hell. So in the business world, they're able to push back, and they have been. So the pendulum is swinging back in business. I don't yet see a sign on campus of a pendulum swinging back. I think it will happen eventually. The complex dynamical system is much more conducive to a kind of a crazy ideological thing divorced from reality on campus. But the way it's gonna break, I believe, is things get sort of tense enough, unpleasant enough, wasteful enough, and then some school is gonna break. And I originally thought Chicago was the school, and lots of schools would follow, and they didn't. Nobody followed Chicago.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:04:11

        Mm.

    18. JHJonathan Haidt1:04:12

        I mean, Mitch Daniels at Purdue, but that's a different story. He's, he's a conservative.

17. 1:04:16 – 1:08:31

    The University of Austin: a catalyst for academic reform?

    1. JHJonathan Haidt1:04:16

       So I'm on the advisory board of the University of Austin. Are you involved with it at all? It, it's in your hometown there.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:04:21

       I'm not, I'm not involved, but I, I have some passing familiarity. For people who don't have any familiarity, could you just explain what it is?

    3. JHJonathan Haidt1:04:28

       So it's a university founded on the idea of we're gonna rethink what a university should be, and Pano Kanelos is the president. He was the president of St. John's College in Maryland. It's not gonna have all the administrators, all the bells and whistles. It's gonna really be focused on classics education at the beginning, but then practical as you move on. So a lot of not just, like, take a course, get a credit for sitting in a seat, but do things as part of a team to solve a problem. So it's gonna be, you know, given that higher ed now is so expensive and is not as good as it used to be, the product is just not as good. It's not as much fun. It's not as rigorous. So given that the product is declining while the price goes up, Austin is developing a model where the price is much, much lower. The product is a hell of a lot of fun. It's very exciting. And now it's just one university, but the idea is it's gonna be a model for a lot of other universities to either change or be founded because I think we do need disruption and innovation. We need alternatives. We can't just have the one sort of Ivy League model of top universities w- and they're all making the same mistakes at the same time.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:05:39

       I have a number of questions that, that float to the surface, and I apologize for what is gonna be a very inelegant way of posing them. But I'm gonna give you a menu of options, and I'd love for you to choose whichever is of the greatest interest. So something that came to mind was how you have preserved your ability or ensured your ability to speak very openly about these things by maybe diversifying your identity and professional career, so not just teaching but also books and, and so on. Speaking, I assume. So you have a number of backup parachutes, I would say, perhaps in a sense.

    5. JHJonathan Haidt1:06:22

       [laughs]

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:06:22

       So maybe, maybe that's something to talk about. But what I wanted to ask you specifically related to University of Austin, because I did do a bit of reading related to it in prep for the Niall Ferguson conversation, it seems like, and I don't know if this coverage is accurate, but that some people have been start-to-finish strong supporters. There are and have been a number of very notable names involved, so I encourage people to check it out. It seems like there have also been people who agreed to be on advisory boards and so on who have folded or broken rank with, with public criticism. How would you describe the, the reception and some of those dynamics if, if what I'm reading is accurate?

    7. JHJonathan Haidt1:07:11

       We're in a space that is heavily politicized. There's a lot of attacks, almost all on Twitter and social media. Most professors are reasonable. Most professors are, you know, left, center-left- They believe in free speech. They believe in, that in class we should talk about ideas. So wherever you go, most people are reasonable, but the dynamics are such that if you stick your neck out, the small fringe of academic Twitter is gonna call you racist, sexist, transphobe, whatever. And, and for a while, that was really scary. And I think now it's kinda like the boy who cried wolf 10 million times. You know, once everyone's accused of racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia. I think now people are just so exhausted that I think now it's a little easier to stand that fringe on Twitter. When the University of Austin was announced, the... I think there was a mistake v- in that some of the, you know, some of the original material was a little bit pugnacious, like, and it sounded sorta like this is gonna be an anti-woke university.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:08:15

       Hmm.

    9. JHJonathan Haidt1:08:15

       And once any particle is labeled, like anti-woke, like now suddenly it's like, oh, you know, now it's... So I think there was a little brouhaha. I think that was a one fumble the people running it made in what was otherwise, I think, a very good launch. I mean, I think they really explained well what it's gonna be about. So I wish they hadn't done

18. 1:08:31 – 1:13:07

    The aim of Jon’s Heterodox Academy.

    1. JHJonathan Haidt1:08:31

       that because what I've learned from studying morality is in a polarization spiral or a culture war, the harder you hit your enemy, the stronger they get.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:08:41

       Hmm.

    3. JHJonathan Haidt1:08:41

       And so you don't win by punching them really hard. You can never destroy them. In a real war, you can literally kill them and take their land, but in a culture war, you can't do that. And so I think it's really important. This is what we've done at, at Heterodox Academy. So I founded an organization called Heterodox Academy. It's now run by John Tomasi. He's our president. And our attitude is we're not here to fight the culture war, we're here to build great things. We're here to help people remember why they love universities, why universities are so important, and I think Austin is doing that. [lip smack] So, so I think early on, you know, it was a new thing, and it wasn't clear what it was, and there were one or two people who left the advisory board at that early stage. But I think now it's settled in. It's being successful. It's had a class of... It's not, it doesn't yet have a full year of student. It had a summer program. And I think we need variation. We need innovation.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:09:32

       Mm-hmm.

    5. JHJonathan Haidt1:09:32

       And so I'm actually very excited about it.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:09:34

       Yeah, I agree. I'm excited to, to watch it. Could you say a bit more about Heterodox Academy?

    7. JHJonathan Haidt1:09:38

       Oh, I'd love to. So I gave a talk in 2011. I was invited by the president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology to be part of a panel at our annual conference on the future of social psychology. And, you know, we talked about my stepping out in 1993. I'm not on a team. I was still very much a Democrat. I voted for Democrats. But by the time I was writing "The Righteous Mind," I began to really take seriously that you need viewpoint diversity. You need conservatives and libertarians. You can't just have a bunch of progressives studying psychology. You get bad results. And so I gave a talk on how, you know, this is a problem. This is a problem. We don't have any conservatives. And I went through all kinds of methods of finding a conservative social psychologist, and I couldn't find any, and I finally found one. So I gave a talk on this, and I wasn't kicked out of the field. People actually said, "Oh, you know, you're right. Like, actually, this would help us if we had some political diversity." So that was 2011, and this was just a problem about the faculty. And some other, some other professors who were there liked what I said. They said, "Yeah, we think this is a problem, too." So we wrote a paper together on laying it out more formally. And I think the title was Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science. So this is a straight academic faculty project. And then it turns out, actually, the same problem was happening in law schools and sociology and a lot of fields. Their research was not reliable because of orthodoxy, political orthodoxy. So we all got together and said, "Hey, let's put up a website." And Nick Rosenkranz, a law professor at Georgetown, came up with the name Heterodox Academy. It's the opposite of Orthodox Academy. Orthodox means straight, one. There's only one way of thinking. Heterodox means there should be a variety of ways of thinking. We need that in order to be successful. So we put up the website. We started it as a blog around, like, September 12th of 2015. And very s- right after that, Yale blew up, the universities blew up, and suddenly it was like, wait a second, we thought this was just a faculty thing. But now it turns out, like, the campuses are going insane. The students are behaving in this strange way. They're saying everything is violence, everything is danger, everything's a threat. So Heterodox Academy grew from just this faculty project to really being much more about university culture. To do our jobs, we have to have not just viewpoint diversity, but a sense of, a sense of grace, a sense of tolerance, a sense of intellectual humility and generosity. We have to be able to think together. We have to have people like Rick Shweder saying, "Okay, you asserted that? Well, let me try the opposite." And then they don't get fired for doing it. So that's what we're trying to do. Heterodox Academy now has their c- we have a couple of big projects. One is, one is we're, uh, branching out and having campus communities. We're gonna be working directly on campus with our many-- We have about 5,000 members. And I, I invite everyone who's listening here, if you are a professor or an administrator, if you're an insider to universities, if you're part of the community that is tasked with preserving these precious institutions, please go to heterodoxacademy.org and click on About Us and join. You can see our membership. It's free. We have 5,000 professors as members, and we're equally divided left, right, libertarian. We're sort of all over the map. And it's a wonderful community. If you remember when it was fun, when there were jokes and exciting ideas, if you remember when everything wasn't so dangerous, please join us, 'cause that's what we're trying to recall and restore.

19. 1:13:07 – 1:15:02

    Distilling John Stuart Mill — the patron saint of viewpoint diversity.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:13:07

       Who are some of the thinkers who have informed how you think about intellectual heterodoxy? And I will throw one out there, John Stuart Mill.

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:13:19

       Oh, yes.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:13:20

       And is this quote from John Stuart Mill, "He who knows his own side of the case knows little of that"?

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:13:27

       He who knows only-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:13:28

       Only

    6. JHJonathan Haidt1:13:28

       ... his own side of the case, only his own side of the case, knows little of that. Exactly.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:13:33

       Only.

    8. JHJonathan Haidt1:13:33

       That's right.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:13:34

       Mm-hmm.

    10. JHJonathan Haidt1:13:34

        So John Stuart Mill is the patron saint of viewpoint diversity. One of the greatest works of the liberal tradition is On Liberty. It's a kind of a long book with dense prose, but chapter two is the key chapter on diversity of thought or freedom of thought, liberty of thought, I think it is. So at Heterodox Academy, we took that chapter, it's 15,000 words. We cut it in half. We edit it down so you have a shortened version, much easier to read, and it's beautifully illustrated by a brilliant artist, Dave Cicarelli. So if you go to heterodoxacademy.org/mill.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:14:06

        Mm.

    12. JHJonathan Haidt1:14:07

        It's a free e-book. Uh, you can buy it on Amazon for $20, but we put out a free e-book 'cause we want students to read it. And it'll really... I mean, it really just makes the case that you need viewpoint diversity if you wanna get smart, if you wanna figure things out. An amazing thing happens, and this is what I've really taken to heart from studying John Stuart Mill, is if you want to improve your thought, the world will help you if you ask.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:14:30

        Mm.

    14. JHJonathan Haidt1:14:30

        And if you go to people who disagree with you and say, "Here's what I'm thinking. Where am I wrong?" They'll tell you. And so when Greg and I wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, I paid seven social justice activists to read it. Paid them each $700. And they read it, and they gave me their comments and their criticisms. One or two of them were, you know, were kind of pissed off or annoyed, but the others were actually like, "Oh, you know, this is inter-..." Like, we really, you know, we really engaged with each other, and they made the book better.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:14:55

        Mm.

    16. JHJonathan Haidt1:14:56

        So you really need to seek out criticism. You need to seek out people who differ from you, and then actually you'll get

20. 1:15:02 – 1:18:21

    Aging out of anger and the disarming power of Daryl Davis.

    1. JHJonathan Haidt1:15:02

       smarter.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:15:03

       Have you found other people who have studied morality to defuse or defang their anger in the same way that you experienced it yourself? Is that a pattern that you've observed in other people?

    3. JHJonathan Haidt1:15:18

       What, the ability to defang the anger, to, like, get past it?

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:15:21

       Right. Your description of how you s- I wouldn't say ceased to be angry, but lost your anger in the course of studying morality. Is that something that you have seen replicated in other people?

    5. JHJonathan Haidt1:15:33

       Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So first of all, the Buddhists and the Stoics, these are the two most concentrated wisdom traditions on Earth, I believe. My first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was about... I, I read all the ancient wisdom I could find, took out all the psychological claims. So chapter four of that book is on the ancient idea, you know, why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye when you cannot see the plank in your own? We're all hypocrites. So following certain wisdom traditions, especially Buddhism and Stoicism, but also Christianity, Judaism, you find these injunctions to go past good and evil to be more, more tolerant. So this is just sort of the progression of wisdom that most great cultures have realized. You also see it in a lot of people. I think as people get older, so at least in men, our testosterone levels, like, they, they're really high in the teens, 20s, and then they kinda sorta go down steadily. And that steady drop, I think it also mirrors the drop in violent criminality, and I believe it also mirrors the drop in, like, aggressive rock music. Like, it's, you know, I used to, like, always need loud music, and as I get older, I, I don't. But I think it's just, it also, it's a calming. So, you know, young men are more passionate and moralistic perhaps, and then as you, as you get older, you get kinda calmer. But there are lots of paragons of this, Daryl Davis being perhaps the pree... you know, one of the preeminent ones. Daryl Davis, a Black musician, blues musician, who was playing in a bar and ended up sitting next to a Ku Klux Klan member, and he's conversing with the guy. And rather than getting upset or angry or running away, he listens to him, and listens to him, gets in a conversation with him, and they develop a friendship.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:17:12

       Hmm.

    7. JHJonathan Haidt1:17:12

       And he gets the guy to give up his robe and leave the Klan, and he's done this hundreds of times.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:17:16

       Wow. How do you spell Daryl's name?

    9. JHJonathan Haidt1:17:19

       Daryl Davis. Yeah, D-A-R-Y-L. Or is it double R? Daryl Davis is D-A-V-I-S.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:17:24

        Mm-hmm.

    11. JHJonathan Haidt1:17:25

        He's got one or two TED Talks that are great, and he's got a, a book or two. So Daryl Davis, what an inspiring example of how... Is your goal, is your goal to impress everyone else with your righteous reaction? Well, if so, then you should get angry, and you should yell and scream, and you should post things on Twitter. Or is your goal to actually change someone? And if your goal is to change someone, listen to them. Try to understand them. You listen to them like they have never been listened to before, and then an amazing thing happens. Then they'll listen to you. And so that's really the magic, and this is also Dale Carnegie. This is so many wise people, that the things we do to show off our morality for others end up isolating us and making us stupid.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:18:08

        And unhappy oftentimes, it would seem.

    13. JHJonathan Haidt1:18:10

        And unhappy, yeah. Anger's not a negative emotion. Anger in the brain is... looks more like a positive emotion because a shared anger is thrilling, and that's part of what's driving us off a cliff as a country.

21. 1:18:21 – 1:20:52

    How to get smarter, stronger, and more sociable.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:18:21

       What would you say are the, some of the conclusions or observations made in The Happiness Hypothesis that you revisit most often or underscore for yourself? And what is your set point, if you have one?

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:18:40

       So the set point question is easy. That just refers to the fact that happiness is heritable, and identical twins separated at birth will tend to be similarly happy. And my set point's sorta right in the middle. I'm not born... I'm generally optimistic, but I'm, I've been depressed at a couple points in my life. I'm not very prone to it, but I've had, I've had some. And so I'm sort of in the middle. But the level of happiness that you live at is not your set point. Where you live is sort of a range around your set point, depending on a few conditions. So and the, those conditions are basically love and work. Sigmund Freud said love and work. If you're doing well in those, you'll be at the top end of your range. So I teach a course at, at NYU, a graduate seminar called Work, Wisdom, and Happiness, and it's a positive psychology class. But in the last year, I've sort of readjusted the syllabus I've rewired the course so that the title could be Smarter, Stronger, More Sociable.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:19:39

       Hmm.

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:19:39

       And so we have sections on how do you get smarter, and you do that... It turns out the big thing you do, turn off your notifications, get your attention back, read Johann Hari's book Stolen Focus. So you can make yourself 10 or 15 IQ points smarter if you can regain control of your attention and cut down on the moralism. Those are the two big steps. So how do you get smarter? How do you get stronger? That's, that's The Coddling of the American Mind, Antifragility, Nassim Taleb. You get stronger by challenging yourself, by exposing yourself to threats and dangers within limits that you then surmount, and we have to do this with kids. And how do you get more sociable? Well, it's actually some of the same skills, but the main one is really listen to people, and you can't do that as long as you're always distracted, as long as you're always on your phone. So there are some really easy things you can do, and then the students learn to do some harder things. But if they can get smarter, stronger, and more sociable, then they will be more successful at work and in relationships. And if they're more successful in work and relationships, then I promise them on the first day, then they will be happier because that's how you live at the high end of your set range, is by having your love and your work

22. 1:20:52 – 1:22:53

    After Babbel.

    1. JHJonathan Haidt1:20:52

       go well.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:20:53

       Is this course in any capacity available online, or could it be made available online?

    3. JHJonathan Haidt1:21:00

       Oh.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:21:00

       Any aspect? Maybe, maybe a reading list, maybe questions.

    5. JHJonathan Haidt1:21:04

       Well, the syllabus is online. And you know what? I should do something like... So it was just a seminar at Stern with 35 MBA students twice a, you know, two sections a year, and I've just raised it to 55 students and I'll teach even more sections. I should put something up. You know what? I'm gonna start a Substack. Oh, this is... Oh, my God, this is great. I'm actually gonna start a Substack in January. I can't believe I have the... I didn't think of this. The Substack people would kill me for not announcing this. Like, yeah, so it's gonna be called After Babel-

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:21:37

       Hmm

    7. JHJonathan Haidt1:21:37

       ... is the name of the Substack, and I can just put up whatever I want. I used to blog at righteousmind.com, but that was not much. So I'm gonna start blogging, and I thank you for that, Tim. I will put some el- whatever I can put easily online-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:21:51

       Yeah

    9. JHJonathan Haidt1:21:51

       ... or in there, I will put there, at least the reading list and the syllabus.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:21:55

        Amazing.

    11. JHJonathan Haidt1:21:55

        And eventually maybe I could tape the lectures or do something to put it up. Yeah, I'll think about it.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:22:01

        Is there a department and number for the class, something that people could look for online?

    13. JHJonathan Haidt1:22:09

        No, because, well, I mean-

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:22:11

        I- I'm not sure how that would work in MBA programs-

    15. JHJonathan Haidt1:22:13

        No

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:22:13

        ... but I'm just thinking, you know, the class that I used to visit at Princeton was ELE 491, right? High Tech Entrepreneurship.

    17. JHJonathan Haidt1:22:19

        Right.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:22:19

        So it made it easy to find.

    19. JHJonathan Haidt1:22:21

        Oh, well, there's no point in them finding it because it fills up with Stern students. You know, even if-

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:22:25

        Yeah

    21. JHJonathan Haidt1:22:25

        ... you're at NYU but not at Stern, you can't take it.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:22:27

        Mm-hmm.

    23. JHJonathan Haidt1:22:28

        So all my stuff is at jonathanhaidt.com. I will find a way to put it on my site, and then I think our discussion, it might air before New Year's, but the Substack isn't gonna be up until late January probably.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:22:39

        Okay.

    25. JHJonathan Haidt1:22:40

        I'll do something. Thank you.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:22:41

        And it's easy for us to put in the show notes. So once anything is available, we can add it to the show notes at tim.blog/podcast, and people can find you by just searching H-A-I-D-T.

23. 1:22:53 – 1:27:29

    What the holy and hitched can impart about happiness for the secular and single.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:22:53

       Let's talk about religion and happiness. So I have observed, I'm not the only one, generally speaking, I would say the, let's just say, self-described rational materialist left-leaning folks [laughs] to be pretty unhappy as a [laughs] overall.

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:23:22

       Hmm. Yeah. That's right.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:23:23

       And I have found very smart, very thoughtful people who would identify as religious to, on average, be quite a bit happier. And I know happy can be a, a slippery term, but if we're looking at work and love, work and relationships, they seem to check a lot of boxes very well. But it seems to me, and I'm just gonna speak for a second here, that with religion, you also remove a lot of uncertainty, decision fatigue, paradox of choice, that makes life less of a death by a thousand paper cuts, and maybe that also contributes to general sense of wellbeing, that many of your decisions are more automated, perhaps the people you spend time with, perhaps your weekly structure, the architecture of your life. How, how do you think about this? What have you seen in your observations and studies with respect to religion and happiness, and are there ingredients from religion that secular folks can borrow to get some of that upside?

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:24:43

       So there's a huge amount of research on happiness and who's happy, and the two big things that really come out consistently are religious people are happier and married people are happier. Religion and marriage are, are the two giant demographic factors or quasi-demographic factors that, uh, that seem to go with happiness. And then there's a lot of question as to why. Why does religion make people happier? It might be what you said it makes, you know, you, you don't have to think about things, you have a sense of meaning, you don't worry about the afterlife, whatever it is. No, it turns out when they look, when you do empirical studies of what elements of religious people's lives correlate with happiness, overwhelmingly it's nothing about belief. It's participation in a community on a weekly basis, especially a community that has some sort of moral principle, some sense of uplifting, some sense of self-control, binding moral responsibility. And so actually this allows me to go back to Durkheim. I dropped that name in before but didn't really tell listeners anything about him. So Emile Durkheim is one of the most important sociologists in history. He's writing in France in the 1890s and early 1900s, and one of his early works is this incredible study of suicide.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:25:54

       Hmm.

    6. JHJonathan Haidt1:25:54

       Now, this is when European countries are just beginning to collect statistics. And he goes through all the data he can get on suicide in different countries in Europe, and he's looking for what makes the suicide rate go up and down. And he treats the suicide rate as a thing in itself. It's a sociological fact. It's an emergent fact about a country. Its rate goes up and down. What makes it go up and down? [lip smack] Well, when you go to war, the suicide rate goes way down. People are bound together. They don't kill themselves. When you look at who in a country kills themselves, it turns out if you're married, you're less likely to. If you're married with children, you're even less likely to. Whereas if you're Protestant, you're more likely to, but if you're Catholic or Jewish, you're less likely to. And over and over, what he finds is the degree to which people are bound into a society, the less likely they are to kill themselves. Now, in East Asian cultures and many cultures, you kill yourself because you're too tightly bound in and you're shamed. But in Western cultures, our problem is anomie or normlessness. You have a sense of meaninglessness. You're not connected. That's why Americans and Westerners kill themselves mostly. And so, so back to religion, [lip smack] if, if you're an atheist and you're not part of a community, and especially if you're a new atheist and you're angry or whatever. But the protective factor seems to be being bound into relationships and community, and that fits with everything else I know in psychology.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:27:18

       Hmm. The comment on wartime also makes me think about Tribe by Sebastian Junger, which I-

    8. JHJonathan Haidt1:27:27

       Oh, yeah

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:27:28

       ... highly recommend

24. 1:27:29 – 1:31:02

    What’s happening to Gen Z?

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:27:29

       to people. It, it really underscores the fragility of isolation and also the fragility of fetishizing comfort in a way.

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:27:43

       It's a-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:27:43

       I suggest people take, take a look at that. Well, Jonathan, we, we've covered a lot here. I could ask many more questions, but what have I neglected to ask? And I, and I do have a question about heresies of yours in a moment, but is there anything that you would like to bring up that I have not mentioned?

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:28:03

       Yes. We haven't talked about what's happening to Gen Z. We haven't talked about what's happening to kids. You know, I talked about them before in a sort of negative way, like Gen Z shows up on campus, and then all of a sudden there, there are all these problems. But, but again, I don't get angry. I'm not moralistic. We have to understand w- what's happening to Gen Z. So I just want to talk, if I can just talk a little about that.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:28:24

       Please. And could you also define Gen Z?

    6. JHJonathan Haidt1:28:27

       Yeah.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:28:28

       And then please continue.

    8. JHJonathan Haidt1:28:30

       So millennials are those who were born in 1982, and we used to think that it would go to maybe 2000. But it turns out that kids who were born in 1996 and later are different from those born, say, 1994 and earlier. I mean, it's a surprisingly sharp cut, equivalent to what we find with birth year 1946. You know, the post-war world really was different to grow up in. And I believe, so I'm drawing on work by Jean Twenge, but I've also added... She and I are working together, and I've added a lot. What happened is that if you were born in, say, 1990, you didn't get, you couldn't, you didn't get an iPhone until maybe around 2009 is when teenager, 10 is when teenagers started getting it. So if you're born in 1990, you didn't get an iPhone, a smartphone until you were 20. And you didn't get on social media. You might've been on Facebook partly, but y- you don't live on social media until you have your own smartphone. Whereas if you're born in 1997, you are 13 in 2010 when you might get your first smartphone, and you might get on Instagram in 2012 when huge numbers did. So I believe Gen Z is defined by the fact that they got smartphones and social media during early puberty. There's a lot of research pointing to early puberty, around 11 to 13 for girls, 12 to 15 for boys. What's coming into your brain then is really important because your, your frontal cortex is, is wiring itself up. So when human beings are raised without much independence, but yes, with a phone, and they spend their childhood just interacting with a screen, and especially social media, I believe it, it messes up cortical development. The girls in particular, the rates of anxiety and depression are more than, up much more than 100% since 2010. The rate of self-harm, hospitalization for self-harm is nearly tripled for preteen girls. So Gen Z is in big, big trouble. They're hurting. They're fragile. They're not doing well in the workplace. Managers are finding them very hard to work with. So we have a generation that's running off the rails. And this is not a moralistic thing like, "Oh, those kids these days." This is a compassionate thing, like these are our children. Like my kids are 13 and 16. Everyone either has kids or is, you know, is, has nieces and nephews. So this is, I think, the greatest emergency we face, the greatest health emergency. I think for kids, this is much, much bigger than COVID. COVID was a big deal for old people. It wasn't a big deal for children in terms of the risk. But this is, you know, a doubling, more than doubling of suicide rates for kids since 2010. So that's what I'm working on now.

25. 1:31:02 – 1:36:33

    Jon and his wife’s free-range parenting style for fostering independence.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:31:02

       What decisions have you made in your parenting that you feel have been perhaps most impactful, less typical, or the Venn diagram of those two overlapping?

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:31:18

       So the terrible mental health of Gen Z is caused by two factors. One is the vast overprotection. Kids need to practice independence, self-governance. From the time they're seven or eight, they need independence. But they don't get it anymore. You and I, when we were growing up, you're younger than me, but I presume you were allowed to roam around your neighborhood when you were younger as well.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:31:37

       Oh, I was free range. Yeah, riding bikes everywhere when I was younger. I was also in a rural environment. But yeah, I was out and about very early.

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:31:44

       Yeah. So kids must have free-range childhoods. They must practice independence. And they had that before the '90s, and in the '90s, things got incredibly safe. We locked up the drunk drivers, we took the perverts off the street, crime plummets, but we freaked out about child abduction unnecessarily. So in the '90s, we stopped letting kids out, and this affects Gen Z and the late millennials. Anyway, but you asked about me. So what my wife and I did, we live in, here in New York City, in Greenwich Village. We, because we're friends with Lenore Skenazy, who wrote this fantastic book, Free-Range Kids, we let our kids out to play in Washington Square Park. We sent them out on errands when they were eight, nine years old. You know, New York City was very safe back then. It's a little more dangerous now, but it was very, very safe in the 2010s. And we sent them out, and we had them walk to school way, you know, a year or two before, before anyone else was doing it. So I'm very glad we did that. We also made it clear, no social media, at least until high school. Absolutely none in middle school. And that's been very good. When they start sixth grade, my kids tell me everyone's on Instagram, and we said, "No, you, we're not gonna let you do it." The one mistake I made was that when my son wanted Fortnite in sixth grade, and we said no, because video games can be addictive, I... But now that I've dug into the literature a lot more, now I see that, yes, a lot of boys do get in trouble from video games because they're on it so much. They're addicted to it, and it, and it, it pushes out everything else. But a couple hours a day, for boys to be in a group that's battling other boys, it turns out that's actually a good thing. And my son was somewhat cut off in sixth grade.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:33:23

       Good in what respects? How, how is that assessed? Just in terms of acting as a release valve for aggression or social cohesion?

    6. JHJonathan Haidt1:33:32

       Group dynamics. So the release valve idea from Freud does not end up being true. Kids don't need to blow off aggression. It's not like that. It's rather that girls and boys each need to practice their gendered behaviors. This is what play is. Play, for all mammals, is the way you practice in childhood the skills you'll need as an adult. And so boys and girls have very different play. Boys tend to break up into groups to compete with other groups, and multiplayer video games allow them to do that. So I'm not saying these are great, I'm saying ideally the kids should be out having adventures, but given that all the kids are home, they're not allowed out until they're, you know, 11, 12 years old. So at least a multiplayer video game allows them to be part of a group. Now, it's not a very creative group. The rules are all set by the company. So it's not like video games are anywhere near as good as being out on their own. But they're not bad until it gets to be heavy. So that was a small mistake. Uh, once COVID hit, we did let him get Fortnite, and then that was the only way he talked with his friends. So that was okay. The mistake, the one mistake I think we did make was we didn't... We tried a few different summer camps. We never quite found one. But if we... I wish we'd found a really good summer... And I would urge this of, for everybody who's a parent of young kids. From the time your kid is about eight or nine, certainly, I'd say eight, find a sleepaway camp that is pretty unstructured and unsupervised. The kids have to have a lot of independence. You know, some summer camps now are so overprotective, you can't go to the bathroom unless you have an escort, and sometimes you need two escorts, 'cause what if one escort falls down and gets hurt? Like, it's crazy overprotective everywhere.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:35:03

       [laughs]

    8. JHJonathan Haidt1:35:03

       But if you can find a summer camp that is not crazy overprotective, send your kid there every summer. That, I think, is one of the few chances they really have to develop skills to be out in the woods.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:35:15

       Hmm.

    10. JHJonathan Haidt1:35:16

        So I, I wish we'd done that.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:35:18

        I was fortunate in that respect. I, I got sent off to summer camps in Wyoming where we would work on ranches.

    12. JHJonathan Haidt1:35:27

        Yeah. That sounds great.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:35:28

        Got kicked by horses and [laughs] I mean, I didn't suffer any terrible injuries, but it wasn't free of injuries, but that was okay. I mean, nothing was cataclysmic. And that, I think, combined... I mean, if, I don't have kids, but if, if, if I do, and I hope I do at some point, I also think a year abroad in a critical window similar to mine-

    14. JHJonathan Haidt1:35:52

        Yes

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:35:52

        ... because of that forced independence, and there are other reasons, there are other compelling reasons, but I f- I came back a fundamentally different person in terms of my-

    16. JHJonathan Haidt1:36:05

        Hmm. Yeah. You grew

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:36:06

        ... confidence in my abilities to handle uncertainty and to adapt. It was just night and day. Complete, complete phase shift.

    18. JHJonathan Haidt1:36:14

        That's right. That's how kids learn to manage risk for themselves. You learn to be a risk taker. When we overprotect kids, we're not doing them any favors. We're not keeping them safe. We're increasing their odds of anxiety and depression, self-harm and suicide, and we're depriving them of the ability to judge risks for themselves. They're gonna be less successful, less likely to start businesses. No, we've really

26. 1:36:33 – 1:39:53

    Group sports vs. individualist sports.

    1. JHJonathan Haidt1:36:33

       messed up Gen Z.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:36:34

       I feel like one other unexpected blessing in my life was, was transitioning from a very bad public school on Long Island to a very good boarding school in New Hampshire, which was actually largely my idea.

    3. JHJonathan Haidt1:36:51

       Hmm.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:36:52

       Encouraged by teachers, a handful of, of good teachers at the pretty low-quality public school on Long Island, who effectively said, "You, you should try to get out of here." [laughs]

    5. JHJonathan Haidt1:37:04

       Mm-hmm.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:37:04

       So I do owe them thanks. When I went to the boarding school, which was very similar to, let's say, a Dead Poets Society type of setup, but s- classes six days a week, mandatory sports.

    7. JHJonathan Haidt1:37:17

       Hmm. Mm-hmm.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:37:20

       And looking back, the mandatory sports, I think, was the force multiplier that allowed everything else to go more smoothly on so many levels. So i- i- if I get to the point, and I hope I do, when I'm parenting, I think, I think physical activity and group sports will be, will, will probably play a, a, a compelling role. I don't know if there's any research to support that.

    9. JHJonathan Haidt1:37:46

       There is, but just two points. I, I think you're basically right, but just two points of nuance. One is to the extent that it's heavily supervised and there's a coach, it's less nutritious. They're not gonna learn as much. The ideal is for kids to be out making up their own games, enforcing the rules, because then you have to keep the game going. You have to learn how to adapt to other kids. Whereas if there's a coach or a referee, then what you learn is, "How do I get the referee to come in on my side?" And that's good preparation for college today, where if somebody says something, "How do I get a dean to punish him?" But that's bad preparation for life. That's the first thing. Second thing, so I just came across a finding that participation in individualist sports like gymnastics and especially ballet is bad. It actually is conducive to bad mental health. I would never let my daughter do ballet. But team sports where you're, you know, soccer, basketball, where you really function as a team over and over again, those have very good effects on mental health and development. So I would agree with that.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:38:45

        Hmm. Yeah, you know, my, so my sport was wrestling, which was certainly an individual sport practiced in a team context. You would have wrestling partners and so on. I would have a child do wrestling, I think. Now, I'd have them wear, I'd, I'd have them wear headgear because I don't think cauliflower ears work terribly well for most people. [laughs] And it goes doubly for females, I would say. And if, if you haven't seen cauliflower ears on female ears-

    11. JHJonathan Haidt1:39:16

        Oh, my

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:39:16

        ... it is scar tissue that will not go away unless it's surgically removed. Saw a lot of it in Japan in judo players, male and female.

    13. JHJonathan Haidt1:39:24

        Hmm.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:39:24

        Lots of cauliflower ears. But I found it to be, for me personally at least, a excellent venue for proving to myself that I could exceed the limitations I thought I had. And in terms of work capacity and pain tolerance also, I will say critical, critical component. So I can't totally with any conviction say that it was wrestling that did this, although I have-

    15. JHJonathan Haidt1:39:51

        Hmm

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:39:51

        ... some belief that it contributed.

27. 1:39:53 – 1:46:06

    A tough coach or teacher tests limits and taps potential.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:39:53

       The coach, John Buxton, changed the lives of almost every athlete he coached.

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:40:01

       Hmm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:40:02

       And to this day, I'm still close to him, and many people in that wrestling team went on to do some, some pretty outstanding things, and they, they have all, to my knowledge, just about all of them have mentioned Mr. Buxton. We, we have a tough time calling him John.

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:40:17

       I have to ask you a question then.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:40:18

       Yeah.

    6. JHJonathan Haidt1:40:19

       Did he have a tough coaching style, or did he have, like, an, a warm, nurturing style?

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:40:22

       He was extremely, extremely tough, and this is what I was gonna bring up. He was extremely tough. He did not suffer fools gladly at all. If-

    8. JHJonathan Haidt1:40:31

       Right

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:40:32

       ... if people complained about something they could fix themselves or should try to fix themselves, he did not tolerate it. He was a very tough coach.

    10. JHJonathan Haidt1:40:44

        Good. That's what I expected.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:40:45

        And he was a very, very, very good performer. So he himself had been an outstanding wrestler and could go toe-to-toe with anyone in the group, including people who went on to become All-Americans. I mean, granted, in, in their particular corner of the wrestling world. And exceptionally tough. And he would give occasional positive feedback. And, and I don't, I don't want to say he was stingy, but you really had to earn it. You really, really had to earn it.

    12. JHJonathan Haidt1:41:15

        That's what I figured. Wrestling is probably the best anti-fragile sport there is. That is, more than any other sport, wrestling is really gonna be about developing your anti-fragility, your strength in the face of adversity, testing your strength. So the sport itself is very conducive to growth in that way. And I kinda knew, given how grateful you were, I kinda knew that he was gonna be a tough coach, not, not a warm, nurturing coach. Because you really need, to get the full benefit of the growth into strength, you need someone to push you. You need someone with high standards. You need someone to enforce those standards. You need to strive for them. A few years ago when I gave a talk on The Coddling of the American Mind, I was sitting next to somebody who'd been, I think, the head of the NCAA or high up in it. And h- this was like 20 s- 2018, 2019. He said the tough coaching style is no longer ... It's not that it's banned, but it's that coaches are finding they can't use the tough style anymore.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:42:07

        Hmm.

    14. JHJonathan Haidt1:42:07

        Because the kids will cry. They'll report them. They'll say, "No," you know, "You need to be nurturing." And so tough coaching, I think, is going out because what if you hurt a kid's feelings? And so in so many ways, we've accepted, you know... And that's great untruth number one of The Coddling of the American Mind is what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Now, that's wrong. That's a falsehood. But that's what many people now believe. And I think your experience really shows that, no, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That's what Nietzsche said, and that's what the psychology supports. So, you know, I think for, the lesson here for parents and teachers is we need to have standards. We need to push kids to meet the standards. Sometimes the kids are not gonna be happy. And as long as we can be reported for pushing the kids, we're not gonna push the kids, and the whole generation goes down the tubes. So that's what we're doing.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:42:51

        Yeah, and Coach Buxton also fundamentally believed, I'll speak for myself personally, I don't want to speak for other folks, but he would reinforce the belief that he saw in me the capacity to do more, to perform better.

    16. JHJonathan Haidt1:43:07

        Mm-hmm.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:43:07

        And it was in that context that being a tough coach was the nice thing to do. Does that make sense?

    18. JHJonathan Haidt1:43:16

        Yeah, absolutely.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:43:17

        In service of realizing that unrealized potential. And I think all of the athletes he coached felt that way, that he saw something in us that we couldn't easily see, and he was pushing us to unlock that potential. And it was, it, so it was not abusive for the sake of, say, breaking someone down like perhaps a drill sergeant might serve the function of, like, shared privation in that type of environment. I think there's a purpose to that, and I think it actually can be good for the collective. But in this particular wrestling context, the, the wellspring of the toughness came from a place of In some cases explicitly saying, "You can do better, and I know you can do better."

    20. JHJonathan Haidt1:44:03

        Yeah.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:44:04

        And that was powerful. It was very powerful.

    22. JHJonathan Haidt1:44:06

        And that is beautiful, and I think what you've just done there is you've stated what the telos of teaching should be. Telos is this Greek word that I'm very fond of nowadays. It means the end or purpose for which something is done. You know, the telos of medicine is health. What is the telos of a university? And I've been focusing on the research aspect where our telos is truth. But we're also teachers, and our telos as teachers is not truth. And I've been saying, "Oh, you know, it's the education of our kids. It's l- learning, teaching." But I think what you said is actually better. The telos of a teacher is doing this service of realizing their untapped potential. That's what we're trying to do. That's what we should be trying to do, and we don't always do it.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:44:45

        Yeah, I've been very fortunate in that respect to have had a handful of teachers who were unrelenting in their pushing towards the truth that they saw, which was their students could in fact do the hard things.

    24. JHJonathan Haidt1:45:01

        Yeah.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:45:01

        And that was true. I- I'll, I'll give thanks to another teacher, Professor Shimano, who was my first Japanese teacher. And surprise, surprise, when I transferred from Spanish to Japanese, I found Japanese to be extremely difficult [laughs] and I almost quit, I wanna say twice. Once just because of the, the difficulty with the language grammatically, and the second time when we started delving into the various writing systems in Japanese. And I was talked off the ledge by Professor Shimano, who was able to just say, like, "Give it some time. I think you can do this, and I'm betting that I can help you do this." And good God, if I had not, if I had not listened to that, if I had pushed back, if I had become offended and walked-

    26. JHJonathan Haidt1:45:58

        Yeah

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:45:58

        ... from that class, my life would not be what it is today in, in any respect. So feel very, very grateful.

28. 1:46:06 – 1:49:11

    Developing intellectual antifragility.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:46:06

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

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:46:28

       So I created a, a resource, an online resource, with Caroline Mehl, who was working with me originally at Heterodox Academy, but we branched out. If listeners go to constructivedialogue.org, we've created a program called Perspectives that kind of walks you through some of the moral psychology, like why are we like this? Why are we so tribal? Why do we have confirmation bias? And it teaches you, it teaches you how to open your mind and open your heart, and it teaches you how to engage with people and how to learn from them, how to listen. So all the things we've been talking about, if you go to Constructive Dialogue, and yes, dialogue is D-I-A-L-O-G-U-E .org, we have a program that we created called Perspectives. It used to be called Open Mind. And if listeners go there, it was designed for use in college courses, like especially at orientation, because if everyone in a group has these concepts and they use these tools, you're gonna have great discussions. You're gonna be able to talk about hard things. It works really well in businesses as well. So that's one resource. Another resource, I think, what I found really helped me when I was writing The Righteous Mind, was I just subscribed to the best writing on the other side. So I was very much on the left when I started the book, and I would read The New Republic. The New York Times were things I read back when The New Republic was a good magazine. But I subscribed to National Review and The Wall Street Journal. And National Review has all these really smart center-right intellectuals, great writing. And I found that, and I would read about current events, like for, you know, on the left and the right. It just, I just understood things much better, you know? It's kinda trite, but you literally can't understand something from looking at a single perspective. You kinda have to walk around it and look at it from all sides.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:48:19

       Hmm.

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:48:19

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

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:48:51

       So constructivedialogue.org, and we'll link to all of these in the show notes, and I'll also create a URL. By the time this comes up, it'll work, which will just be tim.blog/haidt, H-A-I-D-T, and that will forward to this episode so people can find all the links in the show notes really easily.

29. 1:49:11 – 1:51:52

    Jon’s billboard.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:49:11

       Let me ask you the billboard question. I'm curious-

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:49:14

       Okay

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:49:14

       ... what, what your take on this might be. The billboard question is sometimes a dead end, and I'll take full blame for that if it is. But if you could put a message, a quote, anything at all on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get something out to billions of people, assuming they would all understand it, what might you put on that billboard?

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:49:38

       Ah, that's actually easy. I'm gonna nominate two if you, if you'll give me the front and the back of the billboard.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:49:43

       I'll give you two.

    6. JHJonathan Haidt1:49:44

       Okay. So the first is a quote from a Zen Buddhist philosopher in the eighth century. Sengcan was his name, Chinese Buddhist philosopher, and I've used this quote in most of my books. He says, "The perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. Do not like, do not dislike. All will then be clear." Make a hairbreadth difference and heaven and earth are set apart. If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease. So this is what we were talking about before, about, about getting beyond moralism. When you're moralistic, when you're judging, when you're saying, "This is good, this is bad," you get stupider. You don't understand the nuance of things. So, so this quote is about sort of demoralization, not like being demoralized, but like sucking the moralism or the morality out of something and just trying to understand it. So that's the first. And then if I have the back of the billboard, I would put this quote from Joseph Campbell. So Joseph Campbell was a professor at, I think it was Bryn Mawr or Sarah Lawrence rather, in the late 20th century. He studied myths, and there was a wonderful PBS series on the, I think The Hero with a Thousand Faces was one of his books. And so Campbell, so this motto, this really calms me because I'm very alarmed at the way things are going, the way our complex dynamical system is kind of veering into chaos, and I found this quote to be really, really comforting. I sort of have it up on my walls various places. He says the lesson from his studying of heroes myths, hero's journey stories around the world is this. Quote, "Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. The warrior's approach is to say yes to life, yes to it all." So that's, that's what I'd put up.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:51:48

       Love it. That's a great combination. And

30. 1:51:52 – 1:57:35

    Revisiting practical philosophies when times get tough.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:51:52

       you mentioned Buddhism and Stoicism earlier. I don't know if you feel this way, but I have felt over time that there's tremendous overlap-

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:52:04

       Oh, yeah

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:52:04

       ... in those two, let's just call it lineages or broadly speaking, schools of thought. And I suppose both are also related to your front and back of the billboard-

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:52:20

       Hmm

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:52:21

       ... in the sense of cultivating equanimity, a sense of being unperturbed by the, the vicissitudes, if I could use a fancy word [laughs] -

    6. JHJonathan Haidt1:52:34

       Yeah

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:52:34

       ... of life, the daily flux, all of these tiny and large tragedies that befall everyone at various points. When do you or how do you revisit some of these practical philosophies for yourself? Let's just, let's just say that you're going through a period-

    8. JHJonathan Haidt1:52:56

       Yeah

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:52:56

       ... or there's an event where you f- you start to feel dysregulated, consumed by-

    10. JHJonathan Haidt1:53:01

        Oh, yeah

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:53:02

        ... emotions. What do you do?

    12. JHJonathan Haidt1:53:04

        Thank you for that. That's what... You know, earlier you asked me, like, do I have practices? So beginning, you know, there was the summer of 2017, I think it was, when Trump was, like, threatening nuclear war against, you know, there's a possibility of, like, n- n- North-- nuclear war with North Korea, and I really thought, like, he... I think he might actually wanna do it, and I was really thinking, like, "This really could be the end of the world." And, and it was then that I started, like, rereading Stoic writings in the morning, and my favorite, my favorite two are Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. The Gregory Hayes translation is, I think, the best one. And then also Epictetus, his collected works. And what I do, whenever I read, I do all my reading electronically now at... because I like to copy out text. So I copy my favorite lines out into an Evernote file. And so what I do in the mornings, I even have it in my calendar. In fact, like, let me see. What, uh... How do I record in my calendar? Every day repeating. There's a couple different things I do, but it's basically either reading Stoicism or Buddhism or reflecting on psychotherapy. I've been in, in therapy for, for a while. And so yes. I have it right here. Yeah. Stoic or Buddhist reading, and, you know, I have to check it off each morning.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:54:15

        Hmm.

    14. JHJonathan Haidt1:54:16

        And I do that before I check email, before anything else. And right, you're right. Stoicism and Buddhism, they're very, very similar except Stoicism is sort of like a Western version because it, it is more about action in the world. Now Buddhism, there's, you know, there are Buddhisms that are very much in the world. There are, there are those that pull you away more. But there is a sort of an Eastern sensibility like in Daoism about, like, don't do anything. Just settle. Just let the world arrange itself. And Westerners are not like that, and Stoics are not like that. But it is like act in the world. Like, okay, you're the emperor of Rome, you know, but you're still getting upset about things, and you have to, like, everything's crazy around you. But it's not just for emperors. Epictetus was a slave.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:54:55

        Mm-hmm.

    16. JHJonathan Haidt1:54:55

        And so it actually works at any level of society. You can never control everything, even if you're the emperor. So both of them are just incredibly psychologically wise ways of living in a world that you can't control and maintaining not just your equanimity, but even the capacity to be open, open-hearted and loving. There's some very similar passages about not necessarily loving your enemies, but actually sometimes it is. Like, but... And they both use the same technique of saying, "And remember, you'll both be dead before long." Like, that's a quote from the Dhammapada. Like, you know, how can you quarrel reme- you know, knowing that you'll both be dead before long?

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:55:31

        Hmm.

    18. JHJonathan Haidt1:55:32

        It's all trivial.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:55:33

        Hmm. How long is your document that you review in the morning, that Evernote file?

    20. JHJonathan Haidt1:55:38

        Well, you know, I've got a whole big one for Seneca, who I'm going through. Seneca, there's just so much writing, and it, it's not as dense in terms of gems, but, you know, I've got one for Epictetus, one for Aurelius, one for Buddha. And if you go to... Actually, on... You know what? On the... If you go to thecoddling.com, which is the webpage for the, for The Coddling of the American Mind, and you go to Solutions, Better Mental Health, I've actually put up at the bottom, I've put up a collection of sayings by Marcus Aurelius that basically are about the three great untruths of the book. So here's one "Today I escaped from anxiety," or, "No, I discarded it because it was within me in my own perceptions, not outside." So this is the great untruth that we cover in the book is always trust your feelings. But what the Buddhists and the Stoics and CBT tell us is, "No, don't always trust your feelings. Question them. Sometimes they're legitimate, but sometimes they're gross overreactions to nothing."

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:56:35

        Yeah.

    22. JHJonathan Haidt1:56:36

        So anyway, yeah, I found that those are the great wisdom traditions in my opinion.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:56:40

        How long do you spend in the morning if you check the box of that calendar reminder with that reading?

    24. JHJonathan Haidt1:56:47

        About 10 minutes.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:56:48

        10 minutes.

    26. JHJonathan Haidt1:56:48

        And sometimes I'll, like recently I'm doing a love and kindness meditation, 'cause I'm very cerebral and I actually sort of need to open my heart more.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:56:55

        Mm-hmm.

    28. JHJonathan Haidt1:56:56

        I make, you know, sort of a coffee substitute. I'm very sensitive to caffeine, so I'm experimenting with like these mushroom-based things. Anyway, so but, no, I just, I make a hot beverage and then I sit and at my, on a comfortable sofa and I just about 10 minutes. It just... 'Cause what I found is that my MBA students, I asked, "How many of you check your phone before you get up to pee, and how many of you wait until you actually have gone into the bathroom?" And very few of them wait. It's like right away, it's like, "I'm still, okay, what's..." And you know, turn on the stream, turn on the stream, have it come in. Like, no, don't do that.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:57:28

        Yeah. [laughs] Have a better boot up sequence for, for your morning and day.

    30. JHJonathan Haidt1:57:33

        Yeah, exactly.
31. 1:57:35 – 1:59:55

    Parting thoughts.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:57:35

       Jon, I really appreciate all the time. This has been a lot of fun. I have, I have copious notes. I, there are many things that I'm gonna be looking up, and I think, I think the first will be On Liberty, chapter two. I'm gonna, I'm gonna check in and give that a read, and then I have many others. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any closing comments, any questions, anything you'd like to point my audience to that we haven't mentioned or that we have mentioned? Any complaints you'd like to lodge? Anything at all? [laughs]

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:58:06

       No, I'd just like to say my mission when I moved to Stern, uh, you know, Business School, you know, every- everyone has a mission statement, so I made a mission statement, and my mission is to use my research and that of others in moral psychology to help important institutions work better. And so, and I've started various organizations. So if you're concerned about universities, please go to heterodoxacademy.org and join if you're an academic or support us financially if you can. If you're concerned about people's ability to talk to each other or you need to, to address conflict in your own organization, please go to constructivedialogue.org. If you are a parent and you're, you, you have kids born after 1996, you have Gen Z kids, please go to letgrow.org, a site I started with Lenore Skenazy to encourage free-range parenting. And so all three of those are nonprofit foundations. We really need help. I'm trying hard to raise money for them, so please support us. And all of them, I hope, will help you solve problems in your own lives and in your own organizations and your own families.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:59:09

       Perfect. That's the perfect place to wrap up. And for everyone listening, all of these links I will gather and put also in the show notes, so they'll be collected in one place, and you can click them to take yourself to all these destinations, tim.blog/haidt, H-A-I-D-T. On Twitter, be careful, it's a full contact sport out there, @JonHaidt and jonathanhaidt.com. Jon, thank you so much for taking the time and being so game. I really appreciate it.

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:59:42

       Oh, thank you. This was rollicking good fun.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:59:43

       [laughs] And to everybody out there, be just a little kinder than is necessary. Don't believe everything that you think. Ask questions before you make strong statements, and thanks for listening

Episode duration: 2:00:17