In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster joins the show to talk about his new book, Irversal Damage, and why he thinks we should all be more open about gender dysphoria. He also talks about the dangers of censorship and why it s important to be honest about what s going on in the world, especially when it comes to the trans community. And, as always, thank you for tuning into HYPEBEAST Radio and Business of HYPE. Please don t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our other shows MIC/LINE, The Anthropology, The HYPE Report, and HYPETALKS. Please take a moment to leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. Rate, review and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to the show on. Rate/subscribe to our new podcast, The J.O.V.E.D. Podcast, wherever you get your stuff! Thank you so much for listening and supporting this podcast. Please remember to tell a friend about it if you enjoyed it and/or share it on your social media if you're a podcaster, if you liked it! or share it and tag us in a story or a podcast mention it on Insta or tag us and we'll send it to a friend who needs a good friend! . Thanks again for listening! Timestamps: 5:00 - What do you think of this episode? 6: What's your favorite part of the podcast? 7:30 - What would you'd like to see more of it? 8:20 - What's the worst thing you've ever heard of someone else do more of this? 9:40 - Is it better than that? 10:00 11:15 - How do you would like to hear someone else's story? 15:00 | What's a good thing? 16:30 | What are you looking for? 17:30 18:40 | What s your biggest takeaway from it's better? 19:40 21: What is your favorite thing about me? 22: What s a good idea? 27:00 -- what's your biggest challenge? 26:30 -- what would you want me to do more? 29:40 -- what s your response? 30:00 // 15:10 -- how do you want to see me talk about it again?
00:01:17.000Especially when you want to try to stop discussions about a very serious and permanent thing that people are advocating to do to children that is also very profitable.
00:01:29.000And it's a dark, weird sort of a scenario that we're in here right now that's unprecedented, that no one's ever experienced before.
00:01:38.000And they're using terms like life-saving, gender-affirming care instead of castration and removing breasts and hormones.
00:01:54.000I think it's very important to talk about this and I think there's too many people that are scared to talk about it and that's why this stuff is getting so much traction.
00:02:33.000And it's not the way we've ever solved problems in this country.
00:02:36.000And it's a bad thing when you can't be honest about things.
00:02:40.000And the reason why they want to try to do it is because they know that there's too many people that agree with it and that these people have been silenced before.
00:02:45.000So they'd like to bully them into silence.
00:03:38.000Of trans celebratory books, hundreds of books celebrating gender transition for teenagers, even one that was critical of it, that was too much for them, because they knew it would break their monopoly on the narrative.
00:03:51.000Well, the really scary thing is when you see these de-transitioners get attacked.
00:04:53.000Like, you don't want to think that people can make mistakes.
00:04:57.000Even if you think that people should be allowed to transition when they're young, you don't think that some people are going to do it and regret it?
00:05:06.000You think that everybody who goes through surgery to remove parts of their body because they feel like they're in the wrong gen, you think all those people are going to be happy?
00:05:43.000I saw someone commenting on Twitter, and I think they're probably correct, and they said this is because the trial lawyers are involved now.
00:05:52.000I think this is why the New York Times has kind of shifted sides, because I think they realize the lawsuits are coming.
00:06:00.000And once a few of them are successful, and they will be, it's going to get crazy.
00:06:06.000Well, I think that is a part of it, but I don't think the lawsuits are going to solve it as easily as they did, say, the repressed memory scandal of prior eras and the multiple personality disorder,
00:06:22.000all these people who thought they had repressed memory of various kinds of harm and were imagining childhood molestation that didn't happen.
00:06:33.000Are you talking about the satanic stuff?
00:06:37.000I think that got reversed through lawsuits in part because they weren't following clear medical, clear protocols of their profession.
00:06:46.000The problem with the gender, going after the gender regime through the courts, and I'm in favor of it, don't get me wrong.
00:06:53.000But the problem is that the gender therapists, the therapists, the doctors were all following protocol when they transition a kid to, you know, and cut up their bodies in various ways, you know, incapacitated them in various ways.
00:07:10.000They were actually following affirmative care, which was the official protocol.
00:07:18.000There's so many things that we don't allow children to do because we know that children can't really make lifelong decisions at the age of 11 and 12 and 13, but yet we'll let them in this case.
00:07:35.000Yeah, I, you know, when I look back on it, you know, there are a few, I sort of had a few, there were a few sort of lessons of it.
00:07:43.000But one of the things that really stood out was that almost in every case, there were medical professionals who should have known better, and very often therapists who should have known better, encouraging a young girl who was a little anxious or had some anxiety,
00:08:00.000had some depression, encouraging her down this road as the solution.
00:09:16.000The whole thing is a money and influence game and it's run by very powerful people.
00:09:20.000And no one wants to think that those same factors are at play when it comes to gender transition.
00:09:28.000But, you know, I've shown people the map of gender transition clinics in 2007 versus gender transition clinics in 2023 and it's fucking insane.
00:09:59.000There wasn't enough oversight, but there also weren't enough good people speaking up.
00:10:04.000A lot of the best doctors who are like, I didn't enter the medical profession to do this, they went silent or they referred to others.
00:10:10.000They said, why don't you, you know, let me refer you to a specialist.
00:10:13.000Well, actually, the gender surgeons often, you know, weren't even, you know, adequate to the task because it's very, very complicated surgery, you know, involving, you know, transferring peripheral nerves and whatnot.
00:10:25.000So it's not easy surgery, depending on which surgery you're talking about.
00:10:30.000Very often they weren't even the most qualified surgeons doing the surgery, so you had a lot of, you know, surgeries that didn't go quite right.
00:10:56.000This is not something they've been doing forever that they have this long history of doing it successfully and they know exactly how to do it correctly.
00:11:06.000Yeah, the rates of, you know, all kinds of things going wrong.
00:11:10.000I mean, you know, if you talk about the creation of the neophallus, the ones that take a vagina to make something like a penis, the number, you know, getting it to, you know, urine to go in a stream as opposed to a spray.
00:11:27.000Or making it so that the person can have an erection, then a strong enough erection to actually penetrate.
00:11:31.000These all require separate surgeries very often.
00:11:35.000Very often it doesn't go quite right, and there's all kinds of complications with the surgeries.
00:11:40.000I mean, I've talked to people who've been really butchered.
00:11:47.000When you wrote that book, did you expect the kind of blowback that you experienced?
00:11:51.000What did you expect when you wrote the book?
00:11:54.000Obviously, you felt the need to express this and you felt the need to share this information because you recognize that there's this contagion, this social contagion that seems to be happening.
00:12:42.000You can't find it in a public library in America, no matter how many people try to donate it to their libraries.
00:12:49.000So, to some extent, it was successful.
00:12:51.000But, you know, the campaign to stifle the book, but because I made it onto places like your podcast, because I made it into Amazon, people got it.
00:13:03.000And for the first time, I think, parents had another source of information besides the activist narrative of, oh, you know, you're either going to have a live son or a dead daughter, this lie that your child's going to kill themselves.
00:13:18.000If you don't do exactly what I say and let them transition now.
00:13:21.000This lie was the prevailing narrative and I think I was able to break through and I think that's what made people so angry.
00:13:30.000That lie falls apart under scrutiny when you look at the suicide rates of people that are trans.
00:13:34.000There's actually a new study out of Finland showing that, a really good long-term study, I think it came out maybe just this week, showing that the rates when you control for other mental health issues, the rates of suicide among those with gender dysphoria,
00:13:50.000the discomfort with the biological sex, the rates of suicide are no higher than for the general population.
00:14:33.000Well, there's a whole body of research on some of the side effects of therapy, and they include things like alienation from spouse, alienation from parents, worsening of depression, worsening of anxiety, feeling of incapacity, feeling like you can't do things without consulting your therapist.
00:14:51.000All those are well-known iatrogenic effects.
00:14:54.000Once you have a mental diagnosis, the labeling, feeling limited by that label.
00:15:01.000So all those things are well known, what they call iatrogenic effects, meaning whenever a medical procedure actually introduces harm, that's an iatrogenic effect.
00:15:11.000And we know that, of course, drugs and surgeries always come with, even the life-saving ones can come with some harm.
00:15:19.000And what people might not know is that therapy comes with these risks as well.
00:15:23.000So is this your opinion on therapy in general?
00:15:27.000Do you think there's a place for therapy?
00:16:08.000It's much harder for them to say, listen, I know I was bullied in middle school, but I don't think I have PTSD. It's harder for a kid to say that because they don't have the life experience behind them to know that.
00:16:22.000And they don't know if they're getting better as easily.
00:16:24.000An adult can say, you know, I've been seeing this therapist for three years.
00:16:28.000You know, my depression's as bad as it ever was.
00:16:54.000I mean, maybe it's just a biased sampling of the people that I know that are doing it, but it's the people that, it's not all of them, but the ones that I find problematic are very self-indulgent.
00:17:07.000And there's something about going to a therapist and talking about yourself constantly and your problems constantly that sort of reinforces this self-indulgent.
00:17:19.000And that's what can lead depression to get worse, sadness to get worse.
00:17:22.000As you sit and focus on your pain, if you're not careful, especially with teens and kids, it can make the pain, the worry, the feeling of being harmed worse.
00:17:36.000Aren't there good therapists that can give you tools to sort of change your patterns of thinking and behavior and move in a positive way?
00:17:44.000So if you're struggling with a condition of some sort, a phobia, anorexia, OCD, you know, any number of problems that you want to deal with, therapy can be great.
00:17:56.000Cognitive behavioral therapy especially can be great.
00:17:59.000But if you go, if you're a teen or kid who shows up bummed out, Or just generally kind of anxious.
00:18:08.000To a therapist, you have a good shot of having that problem made worse.
00:18:45.000Dancing is apparently amazing for low mood.
00:18:49.000Now, I'm not talking about severe major depressive disorder, okay?
00:18:53.000When you have severe chronic depression, you may need to treat it with medication or therapy.
00:18:58.000But for, you know, low mood, you know, sort of mild to moderate depression, exercise turns out to be better, and it doesn't have those side effects.
00:19:08.000But let me give you an example of a teenager I talked to.
00:19:11.000So I talked to this girl, Becca, is what I call her in the book.
00:19:14.000But she was a high school senior, and she had been in therapy since age six, okay, when her parents divorced.
00:19:20.000She didn't have any diagnosed mental disorder of any kind, but she had regularly been in therapy because her parents divorced and they said you got to go to therapy.
00:19:29.000So I asked her as a high school senior, so what are you working on with your therapist now?
00:19:33.000And she said to me, my therapist is getting me ready to make friends in college.
00:19:52.000Do you see, this generation feels that it can't do because they've gotten so much oversight and so much needless mental health intervention that they're questioning themselves all the time.
00:20:14.000One is I'm raising three kids in this generation, so I wanted to know, why was the generation that got the most mental health intervention, the most therapy, the most psych meds, the most interventions in schools, the most therapeutic parenting, why were they in the most distress?
00:20:29.000And why were they so afraid to grow up?
00:20:59.000It wasn't necessarily a gender therapist.
00:21:01.000Most often, it was just your vanilla psychodynamic therapist who was there to talk to an anxious or depressed little bummed out teen, you know, mildly depressed teen about their bad feelings.
00:21:13.000And lo and behold, during the course of, you know, regular psychodynamic therapy, they would say, and what are your feelings on gender?
00:21:20.000And with the therapist, they would go down that route.
00:21:41.000I wrote about it in the first book, and Jonathan Haidt, Gene Twenge have been talking about it for eight years now, and they've brought rigor and important research to show that that has – extracting kids from their social world is bad.
00:21:56.000And getting them – making them – getting the dopamine hit and the anxious worry about who's going to write me back and when and then getting the dopamine hit when they get that response and that whole cycle.
00:22:10.000There's no question that plays on our natural sort of propensities for addiction and makes kids more anxious.
00:22:19.000But I think it's part of what we're seeing.
00:22:43.000But let's say between 1955 and 1988, the rates of adolescent suicide quadrupled.
00:22:50.000So that's just one measure, but there are many.
00:22:52.000I mean, we've seen it from non-suicidal self-harm, suicidal self-harm.
00:22:56.000All of these rates have gone up for adolescents.
00:22:58.000But they've been in decline for—mental health of teens has been in decline for years.
00:23:04.000There's also some other statistics or some other reasons.
00:23:07.000I don't think phones explain the whole story.
00:23:09.000One of them is that in 2016, the CDC came out with a report and they said that one in six kids between the ages of two and eight, these aren't kids with smartphones, between the ages of two and eight, one in six kids had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis.
00:23:27.000That's a lot of kids with a mental health diagnosis, right?
00:23:31.000Do you think that it factors parents with mental health issues?
00:23:34.000And there's, I think, more adults are anxious.
00:23:38.000More adults are suffering from anxiety and depression, at least diagnosed anxiety and depression, now than ever before.
00:23:45.000I think adults are absolutely passing on their anxiety to their kids.
00:23:50.000And actually, we're seeing that in, you know, Jean Twenge came out with this book, Generations.
00:23:55.000And one of the things she said in it is that boys, even though teenage girls have the worst mental health in general, boys from liberal families had worse mental health than girls from conservative families in terms of anxiety and depression.
00:24:33.000We think that we can give them an unhealthy life and just pour in the mental health resources and remediate, but it doesn't work like that.
00:24:40.000And then the last reason I don't think that phones totally explain everything, or social media, is because in societies where they use just as much social media, it's not great for the kids' mental health, no doubt, but they have much better rates of anxiety and depression than we do,
00:24:57.000Where kids have more independence, they have more freedom, they're able to take more risks on their own, and they walk home from school, they do all kinds of jobs outside of the house, like run errands for the family, and they get a feeling of,
00:25:14.000first of all, short-term joy and long-term satisfaction from being able to take risks, see what they can handle, but also a feeling of efficacy in the world.
00:25:25.000So that's an interesting statistic that you were saying.
00:25:29.000So conservative families have less depressed kids?
00:26:01.000And I mean we could speculate as to why.
00:26:03.000There are lots of proposed reasons for that.
00:26:06.000But one of the many things that we might – first of all, we know it's in the environment at that point.
00:26:11.000It's not an organic – whatever these kids are going through, it's not organic, right?
00:26:15.000So we know it's something we're pouring into their life.
00:26:17.000And I think one of the things might be that, aside from the fact that parents in conservative families may be more comfortable asserting their authority with kids, and that's an old finding.
00:26:29.000We've known for generations now that authoritative parenting, meaning not cold parenting, not cruel, not unloving, but rules.
00:26:37.000Those kids have better mental health, they're happier, and they're more successful in all kinds of ways.
00:26:42.000So it may be something to do with comfort with rules, but also they're less likely to turn their kids' lives over to a mental health expert.
00:26:51.000So what is the speculation as to why rules alleviate anxiety?
00:27:19.000But we've known since the 1960s, Diana Bomeran did this research years ago, and it's some of the most, it's some of the sturdiest research we have because they've replicated it hundreds of times.
00:27:29.000And they've shown that loving parents who are also rule-bound, they call them authoritative, not authoritarian, which is the cold, unloving rule-bound, but the loving and rule-bound parents tend to raise the happiest kids because kids knows there are guardrails.
00:27:43.000And here's the thing, the people who are making the rules aren't some expert mom hired.
00:28:47.000We have permissive parents who are therapeutic, meaning they're always asking kids what they want and they're never asserting their authority, but they're doing something else.
00:28:56.000They're hovering and surveilling their kids.
00:28:59.000And so it's permissive without the independence.
00:29:54.000I wish I had had someone I could talk to.
00:29:56.000And so they sort of naively, and they had good experiences in therapy.
00:29:59.000And they sort of naively, you know, watched Good Will Hunting and they thought, you know, therapy is good for everyone.
00:30:05.000And they sort of naively turned their kids over to a mental health expert right away.
00:30:10.000You know, at the first – I talked to moms who signed their kids up for therapy because a cat died, because their grandma died, because basically anything that would happen in their life, even routine events.
00:30:20.000And yeah, look, having your grandparents die is very sad, but that's not – A unexpected trauma that's part of life, right?
00:30:30.000And signing up your kid with a therapist might help if they're having a real problem, but it could also introduce other problems.
00:30:55.000I mean, obviously, bad feelings can be devastating.
00:30:57.000But bad feelings also can let you understand the landscape of the world better and understand what to do and what not to do and what the consequences are of certain actions.
00:31:09.000You know, I had some friends when I was growing up that got...
00:32:49.000Because making happiness your goal is actually a recipe for being unhappy.
00:32:53.000And if you don't make a kid strong, he can't be happy.
00:32:57.000And I think about my grandmother because everybody has – if anybody thinks about their grandparents, they went through some hard stuff, right?
00:34:10.000But there's got to be some middle ground, isn't there?
00:34:14.000Is there some middle ground where children can have someone they can confide in and have conversations with that can express these things to them?
00:34:22.000That although you're going through something awful, that resilience is actually going to serve you in the long run?
00:34:28.000And even though this feels terrible now, on the other side of it, you will have new tools that will help you manage life?
00:34:35.000If that was what school counselors said to kids, that would be amazing.
00:34:39.000But the problem is the mental health profession doesn't look at, doesn't track.
00:34:43.000There's no requirement that they track negative side effects.
00:35:30.000So what do you think the requirements would be for someone to get good therapy?
00:35:34.000What would have to be wrong in the child's life?
00:35:37.000I think it would be something where you can't—the parent has tried to stabilize the kid, that they have a problem, it's interfering with functioning, and they can't stabilize the kid.
00:35:47.000They've tried other methods, and if they still can't stabilize the kid, I think therapy could be absolutely, you know, really helpful.
00:35:54.000And I think you should then research the therapist like you would any surgeon.
00:35:58.000So do you think it's something like antidepressants where it's just overprescribed?
00:36:44.000And a lot of times when you talk to people who went through a PhD in psychology, they'll tell you.
00:36:48.000That some of their colleagues were a little scary because they entered the profession because they had mental health struggles of their own.
00:36:54.000And it's important that a therapist not inject their own problems into the therapy.
00:37:00.000And for that, you need a really good qualified person.
00:37:03.000And I don't think that's the majority of what kids are getting.
00:37:49.000We know that as a treatment enters a population pool and it becomes more accessible and more prevalent, the rates of disease or malady or disorder should go down, right?
00:38:04.0001989 was the high-water mark of breast cancer, you know, death from breast cancer.
00:38:08.000As screening improved, As it got more prevalent and more accessible to people, rates of death from breast cancer have plummeted.
00:38:17.000So why are the people who are getting the most treatment and the most access to mental health treatment, they're having the worst anxiety and depression?
00:38:39.000I think that children today are experiencing unprecedented pressure in a weird way that no one knows how to navigate because no one grew up with it besides them.
00:39:57.000I mean, there's been good research out for eight years now.
00:39:59.000Why have the mental health organizations who have been in 2020 warning the Congress about climate change, systemic racism, police tactics, they were quick to announce their views on all those things.
00:40:12.000They had nothing to say about the lockdowns.
00:40:15.000They had nothing to say about social media.
00:40:18.000They'd never called for a ban on social media.
00:40:20.000They never issued the same warning that doctors gave about cigarettes.
00:41:18.000Do you think anybody would listen to that?
00:41:20.000That seems like the problem with that is it's like trying to put the water back in the dam.
00:41:28.000I just don't believe that that would be effective.
00:41:32.000Maybe they could have said something about it at the very beginning.
00:41:35.000If we knew the consequences of social media, let's go back to like 2005 or something like that, before it was really a thing.
00:41:42.000If they started seeing it happen, if they could put the kibosh on it then, But now that it's so ubiquitous, I just, I can't imagine a world where anybody would effectively say, there's a state that's trying, was it Montana that's trying to ban TikTok?
00:42:14.000Is it because of their access to questionable material?
00:42:20.000October 24th, multi-state federal lawsuit.
00:42:25.000On the screen, dozens of states are suing Instagram parent meta over addictive features and youth mental health harms.
00:42:38.000I think they're talking about algorithms.
00:42:41.000They're talking about how algorithms target children demand users constant attention.
00:42:47.000Meta has profited from children's pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem.
00:43:24.000So it says, Meta's design choices and practices take advantage and contribute to young users' susceptibility to addiction, the complaint reads.
00:43:32.000They exploit psychological vulnerabilities of young users through the false promise that meaningful social connection lies in the next story, image, or video, and that ignoring the next piece of social content could lead to social isolation.
00:43:50.000No one says that ignoring the next piece of social content can lead to social isolation.
00:43:55.000What they do say is that children feel left out if they're not on social media because there's a lot of these little chat groups and they share videos and information.
00:44:05.000That's how they find about songs and bands that they like and movies that they like and television shows they like.
00:44:29.000You can be on your phone, just not during the school day.
00:44:31.000That's so obvious that it's almost pathetic that we don't have that already in place, right?
00:44:37.000Because why do you need to be checking your texts?
00:44:41.000You're in school with your friends, right?
00:44:43.000So there were things that we could do and could have done, but we didn't do them.
00:44:50.000And I think one of the reasons was that I think that mental health experts, I mean, I know there are therapists who allow therapy over text message, right?
00:45:02.000But they have made no effort to stop this, to warn the public about this.
00:45:07.000And frankly, I think in many cases they've undermined it, right?
00:45:10.000There are therapists who went on Zoom and never went back.
00:45:14.000Yeah, well, Zoom is a little different, right?
00:45:16.000Because you actually are interacting with a person, even though it's through a screen.
00:45:20.000You're communicating with them, right?
00:45:21.000You are, but you get none of the benefits of in-person.
00:45:26.000So, you know, this they have measured.
00:45:29.000And the benefits of being in-person, seeing someone face-to-face, the psychic benefits are real.
00:45:37.000Even when you're with someone you don't want to be with, the kids who went home for the lockdowns and were in a big household full of relatives they didn't want to be stuck with when they wanted to be in college, they did better in terms of mental health than the kids who were isolated and stayed in school.
00:45:52.000Right, but you're sort of arguing against therapy, but yet saying therapy in person is better than therapy on Zoom.
00:46:03.000First of all, adults can see therapists for any reason.
00:46:13.000I'm concerned about therapy for kids, especially kids who don't really need it, who are a little bummed out.
00:46:20.000But in any case, we know that Zoom therapy or text therapy for the most anxious generation, for the most socially phobic generation, supposedly, well, that's not helpful.
00:46:33.000So the thing that gets me about therapy, that I've always talked, the people that I know that are doing it all the time, is I don't know how much you should be thinking about yourself.
00:47:36.000It's not just because they're repressed.
00:47:38.000It's because they know that if you want to get anything done in this world, you need to, yes, repress your feelings for a time and focus on the task.
00:47:47.000But is it even repressing your feelings or is it just not indulging those feelings and letting those feelings be the primary focus?
00:47:56.000I don't mean there isn't a place for it.
00:47:58.000But when you're in the school, focusing on school, focusing on seeing your friends and going to recess or whatever it else is, the basketball, whatever the...
00:48:07.000The activity is really good for you, as opposed to sitting around and thinking about doing social-emotional learning and thinking about the pain you're feeling right now, the emotional pain.
00:48:17.000That's not going to help you get through your geometry test.
00:48:33.000And it gives you positive reinforcement that you actually can get through something difficult and that the end result, the feeling of accomplishment, is very valuable.
00:49:13.000I talked to – there's a friend of mine I call every year on her birthday, and she's a research scientist, cell biologist.
00:49:21.000And every year she invites kids to her lab for an internship who are top kids, pre-med graduates from college before they go on to med school.
00:49:31.000And she said to me in the last decade, when I called her this year for her birthday, she said to me, I can't believe you're writing about this generation.
00:50:04.000It's weird because as a parent like you want to hear kids out and when they're having like some sort of anxiety and issue you want to talk with them and you want to talk through it you want to give you don't want to tell them hey You're gonna have to suck it up.
00:50:20.000I never say that and I probably should I mean I don't know if I should but I mean if I had boys I probably would I think I would probably treat them differently but I think that There's a fine line.
00:50:36.000Where is the point of diminishing returns?
00:50:38.000Where is it valuable to address feelings and anxiety and thoughts?
00:50:44.000And is it irresponsible to do so without giving them tools to mitigate those things?
00:50:50.000And along with those tools, to explain to them that there's things that they're going to have to do in this life that are very difficult, but that there's a great reward in doing these very difficult things.
00:51:01.000So the problem, as I see it, is not that you're not saying suck it up, it's that no one ever says suck it up, no matter how minor the scratch to these kids, okay?
00:51:11.000And sometimes being told, you'll live.
00:51:14.000Remember when Dad used to say, you'll live, or, you know, shake it off?
00:52:35.000So, like, I talked to this one amazing, you know, child psychologist who said to me, I start by having my patients sign a waiver in which they acknowledge that there can be risks.
00:52:46.000And the reason I do that is because I don't want them to experience harm.
00:52:50.000So if they see that their worries are getting worse, they have to tell me.
00:53:38.000And some of those therapies are extremely necessary and very successful.
00:53:45.000When this person gets, this person that you were just describing, if they get someone that comes to them that doesn't have a real problem, do they turn them away?
00:53:54.000Well, you can ask, but very often therapists don't turn them away.
00:53:58.000Too many therapists, I mean, you know, I saw, you know, I think back to the first book, and I would ask, like, was there ever, did anyone have a therapist who said, you know what, I don't think the trans identity fits you.
00:54:13.000You know, that doesn't seem to make sense to me.
00:54:16.000On almost no cases did the therapist stop a girl from going down that road.
00:55:23.000You know, I never really considered that until your book.
00:55:26.000Until I heard the title of your book and I read the synopsis of it, I never really considered it.
00:55:32.000I never considered that Thinking about your problems all the time and talking about your problems all the time literally make the problems grow.
00:55:50.000That's why stuff like exercise, that's one of the reasons, aside from chemical reasons, one of the reasons that doing anything, you know that running errands is good for your mental health?
00:55:58.000Getting out of your house and accomplishing anything?
00:56:02.000But sitting around talking and thinking about your problems, that's a bad habit.
00:56:07.000And the best cognitive behavioral therapists and others, you know, the dialectical behavioral therapists, the ones who do really well with depression, the first thing they do is try to break that bad pattern.
00:56:18.000But a lot of therapists just indulge it.
00:56:21.000It's also a luxury that's provided to you by a life that's fairly safe.
00:56:26.000You know, people that live in war-torn countries and have very difficult lives, they don't have that luxury of just sitting around all day and doing nothing and, oh, I go outside and run errands.
00:56:42.000And I think that there's an expression that someone told me once and I say it all the time.
00:56:47.000The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you.
00:56:51.000If it's you got a dent in your car or it's your parents get killed in a car accident.
00:56:57.000Either one of those things is the worst thing depending upon the level of whatever stress or anxiety or horrible things you've experienced in your life.
00:57:10.000That's your watermark for what you can and can't tolerate.
00:58:00.000It's not just, this is just a part of life.
00:58:03.000And, you know, what you need to do is just go out there and live your life and you'll get over it.
00:58:09.000And, you know, the thing is, the truth is that most kids and most people did.
00:58:14.000In other words, that didn't mean that dad didn't lose his job and they were forced out of the, you know, they had to lose their house or these things happen.
00:58:24.000And I think one of the many reasons that kids don't know this today is we've cut them off from extended family.
00:58:30.000The story of their grandparents is a story of resilience in almost every case, right?
00:58:36.000You hear about your family history and you're going to hear a story of pain and survival and resilience and overcoming.
00:58:43.000But today you've got teenagers who say, oh, I can't drive past my middle school where I was bullied because of my PTSD. They don't have PTSD. But they think they do.
01:00:43.000And when we go in and we give kids a pill for that, not only are they not developing an emotional musculature they're going to need as adults, but actually they're losing a really important part of the human experience, like feeling low because you were dumped and then seeing you can get over it.
01:01:57.000And the purpose, I learned this from talking to interviewing a lot of evolutionary psychologists.
01:02:01.000And one of the good things about depression is it shuts us down so we don't do anything rash and we think about what change we might want to make in our life.
01:02:10.000Because sometimes we need to make a change.
01:02:13.000And if we just medicate away the bad feelings, the worst feelings might be dampened, but we also might be locked into that low state and never make the change we need to make.
01:02:48.000It's interesting because this conversation is such a blanket conversation.
01:02:53.000And when you're talking about people's personal experiences, their personal depression and trauma, people are always very quick to sort of...
01:03:05.000Accentuate the negative aspects of whatever they've gone through.
01:03:20.000And there's this – so one of the psychiatrists I interviewed was this man, Paul McHugh, who used to be the head of the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Department.
01:03:29.000And he looked at vets, combat vets in America and Israel.
01:03:35.000And what he wanted to know was why was there less PTSD among the combat vets in Israel?
01:03:41.000And one of the things he noticed was that they treat them very differently.
01:03:44.000When an Israeli soldier saw something traumatic, a potentially traumatic event, maybe an IED exploding or something, their buddies torn apart and killed, they took them out of battle.
01:03:56.000They said, Just so you know, your reaction is totally normal.
01:04:01.000We're sending you home for a few weeks.
01:04:34.000Which doesn't minimize what people, you know, all the traumatic things.
01:04:38.000I mean, some people will have harder time getting back on the horse.
01:04:41.000They may need more treatment than other people.
01:04:43.000But what's amazing is most people, even who go through traumatic experiences, even most combat vets, the majority don't get PTSD. Because actually, the story of human history, the story of our experience is of resilience.
01:05:14.000Our family has gone through hard things.
01:05:15.000I've gone through hard things, and you can too.
01:05:17.000And if you say that to kids, you have a much better shot that they will.
01:05:22.000How do we know that the majority of combat vets don't experience PTSD? There's this crazy study.
01:05:29.000So they look through – this is just one example.
01:05:34.000Vietnam vets, they know what percentage saw combat.
01:05:38.000It was something like 12 to 15 percent actually saw combat.
01:05:42.000But for whatever reason, when they surveyed Vietnam vets, 30 percent of them were reporting PTSD. That's iatrogenesis.
01:05:51.000That means that they've been hearing about the symptoms of PTSD, they were thinking about their friends who've had PTSD, and more people were coming to believe they had PTSD than actually could have had it.
01:06:02.000But you're still talking about a small percentage of people who go through some really hard things in combat.
01:06:09.000Something like, you know, at 70 to 80 percent, no matter how many traumatic experiences they've seen, you know, four tours in Iraq, they still, for whatever reason, don't have the symptoms.
01:06:20.000Yeah, I've talked to friends of mine that are veterans about this, and one of the things they said is that my friend who was a SEAL said that Special Forces guys experience it less, although they do experience it, because they're proactive.
01:07:40.000There's a lot of ways to be a Navy SEAL. I mean some is the official being a Navy SEAL, an actual Navy SEAL, but there's so many ways to be strong and make a difference in the world and do things.
01:07:50.000And that message that your friend mentioned, that's a good message for kids.
01:08:29.000And they have these things in schools called anytime passes, where if a kid's feeling a little anxious, they'll get a pass from the school counselor and they're allowed to leave class anytime they're feeling anxious.
01:08:41.000Well, how's a kid going to sit through anything if they've been given this pass to leave class, any class they don't like?
01:08:59.000Kids who've gone through hard things, and there are those kids, they need high standards, they need expectations, and they need to be told, you can do it.
01:09:09.000She was raising three kids out of foster care with her wife, okay?
01:09:13.000And these kids had gone through horrible traumatic experiences.
01:09:17.000I mean, so bad, so abused by their birth parents that the detective who took them from their home cried on the stand talking about what they had lived through.
01:09:26.000And she said to me, I'm trying to get them with actual professionals that I have picked to get through the day and not think about the hard things they went through.
01:09:55.000And all these teachers are just asking them about their trauma all day long.
01:10:03.000That's a very specific case though, right?
01:10:06.000Well, yeah, but I guess the point is it doesn't help the kids who've lived through serious trauma and it doesn't help the kids who are just fine.
01:10:14.000So is the problem that these people that are teachers, they're well-intended, they just don't understand that dwelling on this and talking about it constantly is not beneficial?
01:12:01.000There's also the opposite of that, too, where if you grow up with a parent that's very weak, you despise that, and you become strong because of that.
01:12:11.000I have a friend whose mom was a severe alcoholic, and because of that, he became very disciplined.
01:12:20.000Because he realized, if you let something like that control your life, he saw what happened to his mother, and he's like, that's never happened to me.
01:12:27.000And that's a really strong person as a result.
01:12:30.000And part of his strength, which I'm sure, is having that real life experience, which was hard.
01:12:44.000But it's very difficult to learn from a bad example sometimes, especially if your parent's constantly worrying and constantly negative about things.
01:13:53.000The dads will be like, can you give this to my wife?
01:13:56.000I mean, sometimes they'll say that to me because I think, you know, the biggest change in the last generation in parenting, aside from the role of therapy sort of taking over, and I think therapeutic parenting take it over, everybody's trying to be a mental health expert with their kids.
01:14:12.000But I think the biggest change was dad's.
01:14:14.000Dad stopped, you know, I think, being a sort of a backstop and saying, he's fine.
01:14:30.000They stopped doing that in part because they didn't feel like we were told.
01:14:34.000I mean, in general, we've all been told, right?
01:14:36.000The mental health experts tell you how to talk to your children.
01:14:40.000They tell you what your child can handle.
01:14:42.000They pretend they're experts on the brain.
01:14:45.000When the truth is, and I've interviewed a lot of neurobiologists and, you know, academic psychologists and psychiatrists, and they will tell you, we know very little about the brain.
01:14:54.000And a lot of these therapists don't know anything about the brain.
01:14:57.000We certainly don't know much about emotion in the brain, right?
01:15:01.000And so the idea that we need brain science in order to raise our kids is just not true.
01:16:55.000It's like looking for things to be bigger than they are.
01:16:58.000Taking a very small thing, whether it's someone like rolling their eyes at you or saying something that You know, might be insensitive and calling that insensitive thing a microaggression.
01:17:13.000And one of the things I looked at was, are we turning these kids into emotional hypochondriacs?
01:17:19.000And what I mean is, I interviewed a world expert, this man, Arthur Barsky at Harvard Medical School, on hypochondriasis, being hypochondriac, what they now call it, illness, anxiety disorder, or somatic symptom disorder.
01:18:25.000I would be really fascinated to see you have a conversation with someone who is a therapist who engages in this who thinks it's beneficial.
01:18:37.000I mean, I would like to see, you know, look, there are therapists that I've met who I would take my own kids to, who I'm very impressed by what they have to say and what they've done.
01:18:47.000But the therapists who claim that everyone needs to talk about their problems, well, no, they don't.
01:18:54.000I interviewed a lot of great therapists who tell me that a lot of people who have experienced terrible trauma, they do better by not talking about it.
01:19:02.000There are therapists who deal with, and I'm talking about people who work with convicts, people who have unspeakable childhood abuse, actually are very helped by acknowledging, I know you went through some hard stuff, let's talk about what you're doing now.
01:19:14.000That turns out to be better for some people.
01:19:17.000So this endless rehashing of your pain, this myth that you can only be helped by talking about your pain, it's just not true.
01:19:27.000And in fact, you know, there's these crazy studies that burn victims, people who've experienced all kinds of first responders, breast cancer survivors, have been made to feel worse by talking about it, by being therapy,
01:20:01.000Because they did other things that are healing too, like spend more time with family, like get involved in work, like, you know, pick up a phone and call a friend you haven't seen in a while.
01:20:25.000We know that the antidepressants come with all these horrible side effects, especially for adolescents, like the risk of suicide and other things.
01:22:25.000Is it something that is in the zeitgeist where people in this culture sort of gravitate towards that sort of thinking that therapy and talking it through is very important?
01:22:39.000I think we're not giving them a healthy life.
01:22:41.000And that includes, it's like, remember they used to give us with sugar cereals, they used to say like there'd be a bowl of sugar cereal and there'd be like eggs and toast and orange juice and they would say, Frosted Flakes, part of a nutritious breakfast.
01:24:31.000Relational stability, having this set of friends or relatives who are cousins around you, grandparents who love you unconditionally over your life.
01:24:58.000And monitoring is the same as stress for kids.
01:25:03.000Wonderful academic psychologist Peter Gray told me this, that when they want to introduce stress to a subject, they introduce monitoring because it's the same thing.
01:26:05.000On this, like you said, the response has been overwhelmingly positive, but what has the negative response been?
01:26:11.000So I think that some parents feel like, you know, it seems to be mostly moms, but some of them feel insecure, like, well, you don't know, you know, my kid really had sensory deprivation issues, so I really did need to see that therapist.
01:26:31.000I mean, I think in general, parents know their own kids, right?
01:26:35.000And if they have tried other things, the problem is not parents seeking out help.
01:26:41.000The problem is it's when it's the first resort.
01:26:44.000The problem is not that parents ever allow their kid to get a diagnosis.
01:26:48.000The problem is that some parents are going diagnosis shopping because sometimes a neuropsychologist will say, your kids, sorry, they're within normal range, and the parents will keep going.
01:27:00.000And they're doing it because they haven't, they don't have, you know, sometimes they don't, they're unwilling to be an authority in their home, maybe because they feel that that's traumatizing.
01:27:10.000They're unwilling to impose any kind of discipline.
01:27:41.000They don't care about the long-term effects of, or they might not be aware of them, the long-term effects of stratera, concerta, you know, Ritalin.
01:28:07.000There was a recent study that said 39 million, what is the number of prescriptions per year It's something bonkers.
01:28:45.000And it's an unnatural stimulant that you're adding to someone's mind and you're getting a result and you perceive those results to be positive because they fit along with what we're looking for in terms of outcomes.
01:28:59.000But you're not thinking of the long-term consequences of ramping up someone on fucking amphetamines all day long.
01:29:10.00041.4 million Adderall prescriptions were dispensed in the U.S. in 2021, up more than 10% for 2020, according to IQVIA, a health research firm.
01:29:47.000If this shit was around when I was a kid, I'd never paid attention in school, and I would have probably thought that I had a disease.
01:29:54.000Some startups diagnose people with ADHD and prescribe stimulants after 30-minute video calls entirely remotely and much faster than a typical diagnosis from an in-person psychiatrist, The Wall Street Journal reports.
01:30:08.000Yes, but the trouble with such rapid diagnosis is that it can be difficult to tell whether ADHD is actually the problem.
01:30:15.000Anxiety can present as ADHD and depression can present as ADHD. As Sanford Newmark said, Sanford Newmark, a professor at University of California, San Francisco Medical School.
01:30:45.000I mean, you know, there's an amazing piece in the Wall Street Journal by a guy who argued that in the military, in venture capital, where you have to have, you're constantly checking, you know, other companies or constantly looking into, being able, someone who's constantly shifting their focus turned out to be an asset, unmedicated.
01:31:44.000And colleagues made the case for the latter.
01:31:47.000They argue that ADHD traits likely evolved in early human environments that rewarded exploration, novelty seeking, and movement such as nomadic and migrating communities.
01:32:01.000And if you were strapped down doing something really fucking boring, that seems completely unnatural, which is part of the problem with children in the first place.
01:32:09.000We're subjecting them to eight hours a day of doing something you don't want to do because they say it's for your mental development.
01:32:17.000And what they're essentially doing is teaching you how to do something that you fucking hate so that you will be able to do that for the rest of your life.
01:32:30.000They also could tell them that there's other things you could do for a living if you could find the thing that you actually enjoy and focus on that.
01:32:39.000And that was the thing that I didn't know until I started doing things outside of school.
01:32:43.000I didn't know that there was things that I could excel at because I actually enjoyed them.
01:32:48.000And I would focus on those things and get very good at them.
01:32:51.000And I didn't know that that was a part of me.
01:32:57.000Everybody was just like, if you can't do this, you are going to be a loser.
01:33:00.000If you can't sit and pay attention to this boring-ass teacher, teach this boring-ass thing that they have no emotional investment in whatsoever.
01:33:30.000If I had the wrong parents at the wrong time in history, I probably would have been medicated.
01:33:35.000And who knows, I probably would have some fucking horrible job where I couldn't wait to get to my pharmacy so I could refill my prescription.
01:33:44.000Because I'm running low and I talk the doctor into ramping up my Adderall.
01:33:48.000We're putting seven-year-olds on Lexapro.
01:34:12.000The problem is not, and I'm not saying no medication for anyone ever.
01:34:16.000What I'm saying is, when you get in there and change a kid, you put a kid in an emotional snowsuit, not only will they never have the feeling, I overcame that on my own.
01:34:25.000I thought I had HD, but I'm so excited about this other thing I got into.
01:34:29.000Not only will, they'll never know they could get through a breakup without a pill.
01:35:08.000If you start such a person on an SSRI, meaning they're feeling depressed because of their circumstances, they might be less likely to make the important change they could make because it takes an acute problem and it turns it into a chronic one.
01:35:44.000It seems to depress all kinds of things.
01:35:46.000Maybe, you know, also, you know, depending on the drug, some depress anxiety, but they depress everything.
01:35:52.000But I do have to say that I have had friends that were suicidal, that got on SSRIs, and then because they felt better, improved their life and then weaned off of those drugs.
01:36:04.000I think that there's a place for these drugs.
01:37:06.000Look at legitimate problems, all sorts of issues that a child might have medically, and then on top of that, psychiatric disorders, and then prescribe medication for those psychiatric disorders?
01:37:20.000Pediatricians are usually the ones who give you the ADHD medication.
01:37:55.000And if the parents believe the narrative that these medications are beneficial and they believe that this is what this stuff is for and that this pediatrician wouldn't be prescribing this if they didn't know what they were doing.
01:38:35.000My take is, if you want to talk about a parenting expert, to me a parenting expert is someone who raised successful people to adulthood, meaning people who are good, stable adults, who are productive, who can be dependent on by others.
01:38:48.000Right, but you might not have access to those.
01:38:50.000I didn't have access to those when I was a child.
01:38:53.000I didn't have access to people that had raised successful, stable people.
01:39:00.000Look, I know a lot of people today that had terrible parents, and they had terrible grandparents, and they never had an example of someone who raised good children.
01:39:10.000They had the occasional child that was exceptional, that made its way out of that fucked up maze, and usually became hyper-successful.
01:39:19.000But the other siblings oftentimes are a mess.
01:39:23.000And sometimes the parents want to take credit for the hyper-successful sibling.
01:39:27.000You know, like, oh, I showed you the way.
01:40:18.000But then there's other cultures where people are happy and the family's a very tight unit and people don't leave the house until they're married.
01:40:27.000So in those cultures, I think it's a different situation and it is healthier, meaning they have their own ways of doing things and they get a job and they don't leave the home until they're married.
01:40:38.000And that is the way they define growing up.
01:40:42.000But in this culture, we have always defined growing up as leaving your parents' home, getting some sort of job, supporting yourself in some way, making strong, enduring relationships with others, starting a family.
01:40:55.000We have a vision in this culture, and we are not producing that.
01:41:30.000They do become adults in other cultures, depends who you're talking about.
01:41:34.000But in culture, say India, where families, you know, live with, you know, in the same home with extended family.
01:41:40.000And as soon as you marry, you go and live with the mom and dad.
01:41:42.000They know how to do that so that the young people who are raising the family are, you know, Absolutely dependable, independent adults, right?
01:41:51.000They're not sitting home playing Xbox while they're living with their parents, right?
01:42:39.000And it's so complicated if you're a parent, if you're dealing with this medical establishment that's so quick to prescribe drugs, and you're dealing with this world where therapy is so ubiquitous, and you're dealing with this world where people think that the way to handle things is to constantly discuss all these small problems and so that people can be heard.
01:44:22.000And if you're going to a university and this is a part of the environment, this is a culture that you are existing in, It can't help but have some sort of an effect on you, especially if you're young and impressionable and naive and you don't understand these people are mentally ill.
01:46:32.000But you're also dealing with emotionally challenged parents.
01:46:37.000Parents could relay that message to children and tell them, hey, you're not the only person on this plane and you are ruining this flight, this experience for a lot of people that are trying to sleep and trying to relax.
01:47:24.000But they think, if I always ask a child, how are you feeling, and attend to her ever feeling, I'm going to make stronger, happier, kinder kids.
01:47:32.000You're going to raise a child who thinks she can scream or thinks she can march into a room and silence the entire room based on her preference.
01:49:17.000It's not just them raising the child in a certain way.
01:49:20.000It's them realizing the harm that they're doing to their child and the fact that their own view of the world is fucked up.
01:49:27.000Well, I mean, that's why I wrote the book, right?
01:49:29.000I'm trying to get the message out that actually the best psychological research, and there is good psychological research, shows that the things we're doing with kids are not helping.
01:50:04.000I mean, I talk to moms who did it because a pet died.
01:50:08.000Or they did it prophylactically before the kids had any problems.
01:50:11.000They said, I wanted my teenager to know she had someone who was on retainer to talk to in case she had a problem.
01:50:18.000Not having any sense that that therapist could also introduce worries.
01:50:22.000And then there's also probably the issue of the child going to the therapist and enjoying the fact that the entire conversation revolves around them.
01:51:04.000But he said to me, one of the things he said to me was that alienation, very often we're seeing very high rates of parental alienation in this generation.
01:51:14.000Very often the stories the therapist, the therapist made the relationship with the parents worse.
01:53:32.000But what's fascinating about it is, first of all, it's fascinating seeing how the regulatory bodies get captured by money and about how they just decided to make it normal and normalize this idea of prescribing opiates to people and having them on them all the time.
01:53:50.000But also that there were certain doctors that did have integrity.
01:53:55.000Where the doctors who had integrity are like, what are you talking about?
01:54:00.000You're saying you want to prescribe heroin to people?
01:54:03.000And in the film, in the series rather, they have these women who are hired, these very attractive women who are hired to go to these clinics and talk to these doctors and push this stuff and try to get these doctors to start prescribing this.
01:54:18.000And they don't have any medical background.
01:54:20.000And one of them has this conversation with this ethical doctor.
01:58:05.000All of these fixes are really a lot of them are just common sense.
01:58:09.000And they're things we used to give kids and we stopped because we became so obsessed with the idea that anything could be traumatizing.
01:58:16.000Well, we're also worried because the media is constantly depicting these stories of children getting kidnapped and killed and this and that and predators.
01:58:57.000Because if I make my kids think, and I learned this from the process of writing the book, if I make them think that my job is to make sure they never feel any emotional distress ever, boy, that's a lifelong journey, and it's going to be a losing one.