Abigail Schreier joins me to discuss her new book, Why the Kids Aren t Growing Up, and why it s so important to understand why this is happening. She also talks about her new memoir, Bad Therapy, which explores the root of the problem: bad parenting.
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00:01:07.720Hi, everybody. This is Gad Saad for the Saad Truth.
00:01:20.620I'm doing well. I went back to look at the inventory, my backlog of shows, and you came on the first time in October 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, when this beauty, we discussed this beauty, for which you won.
00:01:39.260And let me just put on my glasses, the Barbara Olsen Award for Excellence in Independence in Journalism 2021.
00:01:45.860It was named a best book by The Economist in the Times, and it has been translated in 10 languages.
00:01:52.240But today, we're here to discuss your latest one, which is also doing incredibly well.
00:02:14.100And in bad therapy, I asked, why is the generation, the rising generation, Gen Z, that received the most mental health interventions,
00:02:23.520the most mindfulness, the most wellness tips, the most psych meds, the most therapy, why were they in the greatest despair?
00:02:32.560They should be the picture of wellness.
00:02:34.440We've done nothing but work on their wellness, and yet they seem to have very poor mental health.
00:02:39.500And the other question I asked was, why did they seem to have no interest in growing up?
00:02:43.240And, okay, so I'm assuming that it stems from the, I'm okay, you're okay, tell me about your feelings, the coddling stuff that, you know, many of us have been pointed to.
00:02:55.480Is that the general reason why we're in this quagmire?
00:02:59.380You know, I think it sort of relates back to the parasitic mind, the points you made there, which is that we have this mind virus about trauma.
00:03:08.240We have this mind virus about mental health, and the mind virus is that all of us are traumatized, or we're very easily traumatized.
00:03:17.800Our mental health is extraordinarily fragile.
00:03:20.920Anything can upset the apple cart, and we're all basically one bad episode away from, you know, being schizophrenic, screaming at phantoms in the street.
00:03:40.180But the story that gets told over and over, especially to children and their parents, is that any bad things that happens to a child, any difficult thing can traumatize you for life.
00:03:50.900You know, I mean, thank you for mentioning the parasitic mind, because in there, I borrow the cards.
00:03:59.400I change it to, I'm a victim, therefore I am, right?
00:04:02.400So the way that I ascend the social hierarchy in today's social capital currency is I have to be a victim.
00:04:09.740And if I'm not a victim, say, Jussie Smollett, then I will manufacture a victimhood story, because there is no way for me to truly garner what I need if I'm not a victim.
00:04:53.540And yet, to your point, I always say, notwithstanding the difficulties I faced in my childhood, that made me exactly, I love the word, I know it's overused sometimes, more resilient, right?
00:05:07.020Facing those stressors allows me to not only overcome things today, but it allows me to contextualize some of the things that I might be whining about today in lieu of what I faced in my childhood.
00:05:19.340Because, oh, I'm feeling stressed because I've got to do X, Y, Z, and then I stop for a second and say, you miraculously escaped Lebanon.
00:05:34.860So many people who had difficult childhoods will say, you know, I overcame it, and it's part of why I'm so tough today, or in some ways it made me stronger.
00:05:44.880And it's something we instinctively know.
00:05:46.920It's something that the research bears out.
00:05:49.500Even combat veterans, most of them will not get PTSD, even if they've seen horrible, horrible things.
00:05:56.820The vast majority do not develop PTSD because we're actually built for resilience.
00:06:01.540But when you tell kids the opposite, when you tell young people that if their parents yelled at them or failed to ask them what was wrong, that they could forever be or were picked on or called a bad name in middle school, that their bodies hold on to this trauma forever.
00:06:18.280First of all, it isn't true, but it's really likely to do more damage than leaving them alone.
00:06:49.420I mean, if you go back to psychoanalysis, I mean, while it may not have been rooted in a ethos of victimhood, the argument that whether mommy hugged me enough or didn't hug me enough could cause schizophrenia, I mean, that used to literally be called a schizophrenic mother, right?
00:07:10.240Now, we know that schizophrenia, if there's ever an organic disease, it's completely an organic disease that is completely unrelated to any nurture mechanisms, right?
00:07:22.240I mean, you could take a pill, there's a pharmacological intervention, and now you no longer hear those nasty voices in your head.
00:07:30.380You get off the meds, and then you go back to being quite, you know, oftentimes paranoid schizophrenic.
00:07:36.100So, all that's happened is that instead of, in the, say, Freudian sense, rooting it to some repressed sexual thing, the same thing is happening now, except that we are now anchoring it in victimhood.
00:07:51.840Mommy didn't give me a Big Mac, therefore, that's why I'm not successful today.
00:07:56.980And, you know, there was a new study out by this amazing researcher named Kathy Widom, who's really just a brilliant researcher.
00:08:03.080I don't know anything, I don't know her personally, but just brilliant researcher in this new, she just came out with this new piece.
00:08:08.440She follows kids who had traumatic experiences, and unlike a lot of researchers, she actually does it correctly.
00:08:16.140She does it prospectively, so she looks forward.
00:08:18.980So, she documents the trauma, you know, the traumatic experience to make sure it actually happened, and then she checks in with them again or has researchers who don't know if they're dealing with the control group or the kids with traumatic experience check in with them again as adults.
00:08:33.700And what she found was that these kids who, as adults, had turned the traumatic experience into a central part in their narrative, they suffered in adulthood.
00:08:49.880But the ones who went through the same sorts of experiences in adulthood who decided they weren't a big deal, their childhood negative experiences weren't a big deal and didn't make it part of their narrative, they actually were flourishing.
00:09:03.200So, it really matters when we tell someone that they're going to be forever imprinted with trauma, because if they turn their lives, if they orient their entire lives around this victim story of trauma, they're much more likely to suffer in adulthood.
00:09:17.900Well, and I want to link all that you just said to, you know, not only my personal narrative, let's also look at that of my wife.
00:09:25.560So, my wife's family escaped, well, grandparents escaped the Armenian genocide, they then, right, I mean, they're escaping being executed.
00:09:37.320Then they move to Lebanon, my wife's parents are born in Lebanon, then they have to leave Lebanon because of the Lebanese Civil War.
00:09:48.680So, of course, we escaped, we went through about as rough and a harrowing experience as one can go through in the Lebanese Civil War as Lebanese Jews.
00:09:56.900Some of my immediate ancestors prior to my parents escaped from Syria, they're Syrian Jews.
00:10:03.440My brother-in-law's family is from Egypt, they're Alexandrian Jews, they had to leave there.
00:10:09.640So, this is not, I'm going back to 300 years ago, where there was slavery, or in the context of Canada, you know, there were some indigenous issues that happened in 1656.
00:10:21.460This is within my lifetime, and yet, we define ourselves in the fact that we've overcome all those difficulties, and look at us now, we're successful.
00:10:30.920Whereas other cultures say, no, no, no, I can't succeed because something happened to people 300 years ago that have absolutely no link to me.
00:10:41.620That's right, and it builds into, I mean, that's where the wokeism sort of comes in, because, of course, now you're currently experiencing the harms of slavery.
00:10:50.100If you have intergenerational trauma, about which I'm highly suspicious, because there really isn't much evidence for it, but if you have intergenerational trauma, you've been in slavery now, right?
00:11:03.740The effects are lingering, so it's very convenient.
00:11:06.580There's really not good evidence for it, and, of course, the evidence that we do have for epigenetic changes tend to be adaptive.
00:11:15.440They tend to help the cells or the next generation survive, so the idea that there's this debilitating thing that gets passed on, your trauma, and it harms the survivor, making it worse for you in the future.
00:11:34.940It's just not what the story of evolution has led us to believe or what we would expect, and there's just not a lot of good evidence for it.
00:11:48.280Yeah, I'm so glad that you mentioned epigenetics, because as you were saying that, that's exactly what I thought of.
00:11:54.520Okay, so just to be fair to therapy, you're not throwing eggs in all contexts, because I watched your brief appearance, I think it was maybe 10, 11 minutes long, with Ben Shapiro.
00:12:12.040Whom I love and so on, and it's great, I mean, you're great, but, you know, it was like, ah, talk therapy, bullshit.
00:12:17.620But, you know, we do know, for example, that, and he was right when he said that cognitive behavior therapy is the intervention strategy that has been most scientifically validated.
00:12:29.340But just the mere fact of my having a supportive wife or a really trustworthy friend that I can go to and unload on some ruminative thinking that I'm engaged in, that is very important, and it is psychologically very satisfying.
00:12:46.340So you're not egging all talk therapy.
00:12:48.380No, and let me just say, of course, of course, those things are essential.
00:13:02.480And when I say, do you need it, I'm talking about children.
00:13:05.860Adults can go for any reason they want, and I think that's great.
00:13:09.940Adults, if they feel that they're going to get something out of it or they want it, by all means, you know, do it, and you might be helped.
00:13:18.220The point of my book is just to say the whole project is very different with a child because the child is not signing up to do the hard work of therapy.
00:13:29.120They're being strong-armed by an adult.
00:13:31.860No one is tracking side effects, and therapy can introduce harms, and we know this.
00:13:38.460There's a whole body of research on the harms of therapy, but with a child, a child can't say, or a teenager is not going to say to a therapist,
00:13:46.040listen, I know my mom shouldn't have said that, but I don't think I'd call her emotionally abusive.
00:13:52.360It's very hard for a child to say that.
00:13:55.040And also, listen, I don't seem to be getting better.
00:13:58.280We keep focusing on my social phobia, and nothing's improved.
00:14:03.340A child doesn't have the background, but an adult can say, listen, I've been coming to you for two years.
00:14:12.120I see it not just, I mean, as a professor, I deal with students, but who are obviously older than the demographic that you're typically talking about.
00:14:22.780But I've noticed, I mean, it's anecdotal in that I haven't done the actual statistical analysis, but the data is so clear.
00:14:32.880If I look at, so this is, I'm entering now, I'm finishing my 30th year as a professor.
00:14:38.340I'm almost 30, I can't believe it's 31 years.
00:14:48.640And so I've noticed that the first, let's go with 20 some years, 20, 21, 23 years.
00:14:55.640I almost never had a student who had registered with, I don't remember the exact name of the office, but like the office of disabilities or something for special dispensations.
00:15:09.780You know, I need 75% more time for my exam.
00:15:13.820And then over the last four or five years, it would not be, I'm not being hyperbolic, probably 10% of the students have some disability that they register with.
00:15:26.560So we went from, so in any given semester, I now have more students that are registered with that office than I had had in totality the first 20 some years.
00:15:38.280That's basically your book right there.
00:30:37.080But I have to tell you, I never, you know, I was never someone who took seriously immigration policy.
00:30:44.920I, you know, I generally thought immigrants were a great thing to America and very positive and still feel very warmly in general about immigration.
00:30:54.220But seeing people cheer on the mass murder of Jewish civilians, the decapitation, the rape of women,
00:31:05.480and cheer that in American streets, and then have places like the university administrators defend it or be, you know, pretend that it doesn't violate.
00:31:16.580They don't know if it violates the code of conduct.
00:31:19.520We have to check our, we have to check our, you know, our books to see, does this, you know, calling for a second Holocaust,
00:31:28.320does that violate our terms of code of conduct, the fecklessness of these administrators and the moral depravity, frankly, it's alarming.
00:31:37.960And, you know, I can tell you that I haven't in my life spent enough time thinking about evil.
00:31:46.900It's something that always catches me off guard.
00:31:53.080I think in general, people do underestimate evil.
00:31:56.840I mean, the savagery of October 7th was really, was really quite shocking to most people.
00:32:02.260And, um, we just, we're just not, you know, not all people want the same thing and you're going to live next door to people who want to kill you.
00:32:16.760Well, look, uh, you know, I'm someone who, for all the positions that I take, I'm often surprised by the fact that I don't receive more hate than I do.
00:32:27.720But that's, so if I do that as a comparison, then I'm feeling good.
00:32:31.880But if you have a platform, the size of the one that I have, and you take the positions that I do, even a small percentage of a big number ends up being a very big number.
00:32:42.480So the amount of Jew hatred that I have received since October 7th, it, it is unimaginable.
00:32:50.920And what's incredible about it is that it's now coming at me from all directions.
00:32:56.080So there are the Jews won't replace us folks.
00:33:00.420So these would typically be white folks who, you know, you know, the kind of the white nationals and so on.
00:33:08.740You've got the progressive academic leftist types, right?
00:33:14.220The Jews are the colonizers and so on.
00:33:17.080And, you know, whatever you learn in, in a political science or near each department at any Ivy League university.
00:33:23.500And then, of course, you've got all the Islamic folks.
00:33:26.540So anywhere I turn, any direction I turn, it turns out that I am, I am just the scum of the earth, right?
00:33:34.360I am a, a genocide supporting Zionist and so on and so forth.
00:33:39.700And I'm, I'm not sure that we can get out of it.
00:33:42.760I mean, there might be a mechanism by which their voices will suddenly become a bit less amplified, but the cat is really out of the bag, right?
00:33:50.700So the fact that after October 7th, we've seen an orgiastic increase in global Jew hatred makes me feel very pessimistic, Abigail.
00:34:00.460Yeah, I, I, I can't say that I'm terribly optimistic.
00:34:05.940There have been, there have been some good signs.
00:34:08.400So I have to say that it was, it really has meant so much to me to see so many good people I know who are not Jewish, you know, standing up against the antisemitism.
00:34:20.920And that really needs to be said because, because there's so much of the antisemitism, but the number of people who have stuck their neck out who didn't have to, who aren't Jewish, you know, there, there have been wonderful efforts, not only by personal friends of mine or prominent people, you know, Fox News ran an antisemitism tracker, basically tracking the, the regular on their site, tracking the violent incidents against Jews.
00:34:47.020Because of course, everyone was screaming Islamophobia every time a Jew was tracked in the streets.
00:34:52.240So there have been wonderful and people who did that weren't Jewish, the people behind that weren't Jewish, they were not, they were, you know, Christians and whatnot who cared.
00:35:01.240And, and that has really meant the world to me and, and to, you know, my family and friends, but, you know, but, but also there's no question that we seem to be entering a different phase of things in America.
00:35:13.560And we're going to have the, you know, our civilization is going to have a choice to make.
00:35:17.340I mean, we are right now, there are seeing really ugly antisemitism online on the right.
00:35:23.180It seems to be very young and very online.
00:35:25.960I don't know how much it translates into the real world.
00:35:32.620And then on the left, of course, you have the prestige antisemitism, you know, that's in the halls of Congress and gets to, you know, throw its weight around the Democratic Party whenever it feels like it.
00:35:46.420And, and, and that's obviously very, very alarming.
00:35:51.760Well, speaking of prestige and universities, so my, my alma mater is, well, one of my alma maters is Cornell, where I'll be going in two weeks.
00:36:00.960I'll be, I'll be giving, I'll be delivering two talks.
00:36:03.800One is on the parasitic mind and idea of pathogens and so on.
00:36:06.780The other one is on Jew hatred and there is security concern.
00:36:11.500So, you know, Cornell was so historically Jewish that when you would buy, you know, Cornell regalia, you know, Cornell university, oftentimes it would be written in a way that it almost looks, I mean, they make it look as if it's written in Hebrew because the university was so, you know, Jewish.
00:36:29.560Well, now the Jewish alumnus from Cornell, who's returning as a professor, professor to speak about Jew hatred at Cornell has to make sure that there is police security that says it all.
00:36:45.940I mean, I don't need to say anything more.
00:36:47.520That's, that's the world we now live in.
00:36:49.820Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a very sad and disturbing thing.
00:36:54.560I mean, uh, uh, you know, and, and, you know, the, I, these are idea pathogens, right?
00:37:01.560Because I mean, as you say in your book, like, I mean, it's so absurd on its face, you know, why, why are these people who violate the basic codes of conduct of their university?
00:37:16.680You can't run and scream in their face.
00:37:20.360That's not allowed in a university, right?
00:37:23.440You can't throw things at them or make threats.
00:37:26.760And yet all these things happen across the country and it's given, you know, no one's ever, there are kids who, Jewish kids have been spat on.
00:37:35.500They've been threatened with violence and kids and the perpetrators are almost never subject, subjected to any form of university punishment.
00:37:45.480Do you think that some of the lawsuits that are now, you know, being, uh, uh, what would be the term enacted, not enacted, uh, lawsuits taken, uh, you know, I think, uh, even at my university, some, you know, in Canada, historically, you don't have quite the same litigious ethos.
00:38:07.760Right. So in, in the U S you know, you step on my shoe, I sue you for $148 million in Canada.
00:38:14.000It's not quite as much so that the fact that now there is an organization that is suing my university because it's not protecting its Jewish faculty and students.
00:38:22.260And you're seeing it at several other universities in the United States.
00:38:24.720Do you think that that's just ultimately a bandaid solution or is this the only mechanism by which you're going to get the attention of the administrators to do the right thing because they care about money?
00:38:38.080Right. I think the lawsuits are incredibly important.