EXPERTS ON EXPERT: Wendy Mogel

[0] Hello.

[1] Welcome to the armchair expert.

[2] I am Dax Shepard.

[3] And we have a fascinating guest today.

[4] She will, she will be the inaugural guest for experts on expert where we talk to people who actually know what they're talking about, not just, you know, Monica and I who have a very loose grasp of the facts.

[5] And you want to differ?

[6] You're giving me a screwy look.

[7] I have more facts than you because I'm the fact checker.

[8] Well, Wendy Mogul is a Ph .D. She's a clinical psychologist, and she focuses specifically on childhood, or am I even saying that, right, Monica?

[9] Childhood psychologist.

[10] She wrote a very popular book called The Blessing of a Skin Knee, and she has a new book out called Voice Lessons for parents, what to say, how to say it, and when to listen.

[11] I think I would encourage anyone to listen to this episode.

[12] It's the most on fire, Monica, I have ever been with a guest.

[13] in the room because she's so smart and you had to stay on your toes and it was so intellectually stimulating and it has applications that are that transcend parenthood childhood anything there's tons of human kernels of wisdom in this episode yeah i don't have children and it was still very very interesting to me so please enjoy the super smart super fun super witty doctor wendy mogul oh oh oh before we enjoy wendy we need to move a fact check item up.

[14] We got to move it up early because we don't want any unintentional pregnancies on our hands.

[15] You're so nervous about that.

[16] I really have.

[17] It has been pointed out to us that you absolutely can get pregnant while breastfeeding.

[18] So if you are nursing, you know, your husband's going to have to wrap things up.

[19] You're just not safe from getting pregnant even though you're nursing.

[20] Clearly, we've been told it happens.

[21] So keep it safe, guys.

[22] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to armchair expert early and ad free right now.

[23] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[24] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[25] Wendy, I'm going to be presumptuous and call you Wendy, even though you're a doctor.

[26] So I should, do you prefer being called Dr. Mogul?

[27] Not by you.

[28] Not by me, okay.

[29] because we are peers because we're sitting in an attic together.

[30] Yeah.

[31] Okay, great.

[32] I really fancy myself a doctor, so this will work out.

[33] Please tell.

[34] Please.

[35] Please tell me he's not.

[36] That's why you picked armchair expert.

[37] That's right.

[38] Your podcast.

[39] That's right.

[40] Because I know it all with no data or facts to back me up.

[41] You were an anthropology major.

[42] I looked it up.

[43] Oh, my goodness.

[44] I'm about to get outarmchair expert.

[45] But you're basically our first expert on.

[46] armchair expert, which is really fun.

[47] I mean, of course, like Katie Kirk was a, is an expert in journalism, but you are an academic.

[48] You're a doctor.

[49] You're a clinical psychologist.

[50] You have a practice that has span a few decades now, I would imagine.

[51] 35 years.

[52] 35 years.

[53] And you've written a couple of very popular books.

[54] Three.

[55] The first book you wrote was The Blessing of a Skinned Knee.

[56] Is that accurate?

[57] Yes.

[58] And that was a popular book, right?

[59] It still is.

[60] It still is.

[61] 18 years.

[62] That's amazing.

[63] A guy who directed most of the episodes of this show, Parenthood, I was on Larry Trilling, who's one of my favorite human beings on planet Earth, Larry Trilling was telling me all about you and that he takes, he and his girls there for tuneups occasionally, he called them.

[64] And he kind of broke down the way you think of child psychology and child rearing.

[65] And everything he said appealed to me. I really like your opinions and theories about child rearing.

[66] Now, let me ask you this.

[67] do you find like I do as now a parent of two little kids that talking about parenting is one of the most triggering things for people in general that it really seems to cut right to our deepest fears being that we're going to do a bad job at this so when people get critical or they're even just voicing thoughts they have of their own about parenting it seems to really get temperatures flaring quickly I interviewed middle and middle schoolers and high schoolers all over the country, and I asked them a set of five questions.

[68] I said, what do your parents worry about that they don't need to worry about?

[69] What should they worry about that they don't?

[70] What are the sweetest things your parents do that they may not realize how much you appreciate?

[71] What do you like doing with your parents?

[72] and what don't your parents understand about texting.

[73] Oh, okay.

[74] But the most interesting thing was that every single group of kids from little towns in Texas to the hipster section of Brooklyn to D .C., everywhere, all the kids said the same sentence.

[75] Really?

[76] Because at the end, I would say, tell me what you want me to tell your parents tonight.

[77] They said, please, tell them to chillax.

[78] To chillax.

[79] Tell them to take a chill pill.

[80] Tell them to take a chill pill and relax.

[81] So my answer to your question is yes, it is wildly triggering.

[82] Yeah, because a couple of things I'd imagine, right?

[83] And here we go, I'm going to wait into some psychological territory.

[84] I have no business being in.

[85] But our children are an extension of our own ego.

[86] Is that accurate to say?

[87] more than ever so like i don't know about your family but certainly the families i grew up with the dads barely knew at the top of their head what grade they're a particular child was in so they would say uh i don't know fifth uh -huh and now we are so attuned and involved and concerned and competitive with each other about the kids and unsure of ourselves that we overthink almost everything.

[88] Yeah, if you haven't backpacked in the last nine days up to some beautiful scenic overlook with your children and lived off the land for two days in my community, you are an abject failure as a dad.

[89] And I do often say to my wife, you know, I've already spent more time with our two kids than my dad did in his, in the entire 18 years, I was a kid.

[90] So, yeah, it's evolving at this really rapid pace, isn't it?

[91] The expectations of probably both parents.

[92] The expectations of the mother of the father have certainly changed for involvement.

[93] And what you just described as a perfect example, the backpacking.

[94] So there's a Japanese term shinrin Roku, which means forest bathing.

[95] and if you haven't done any forest bathing with your kids in the last five days, you are a slacker dad.

[96] And since every snapshot you take of your children predicts their entire future, they're doomed.

[97] Yeah.

[98] And you're right.

[99] It's so documented.

[100] I think there was also a certain level of anonymity when my parents were raising me in that there wasn't all this photographic evidence and video that was going to exist and an online.

[101] presence of how you were parenting, right?

[102] There was really no way, unless you were out at the park, who the hell knew what was going on at home?

[103] But now you have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all these windows into people's lives.

[104] So you're kind of putting on a bit of a show at all times as a parent, right?

[105] At all times externally and internally.

[106] So that branding, we do an internal branding of ourselves.

[107] The minute we look and anybody else's any other parents, Facebook or Instagram, and I love that you said photographic evidence because it really is as though someone is going to come and take a DNA sample and see if your children have touched enough trees in the last 15 minutes.

[108] Yes.

[109] Or if we've exposed them to some kind of harmful plastic or something in a water bottle, you know, you got to kind of paintbrush those out of the photos before you post them.

[110] You don't want to, heaven forbid, someone see your kid holding like a bottle or something the water bottle the microbes in the sandbox the mother who follows the other mother to trader joe's to see if the vegetables she's bringing for the school snack are actually not organic uh -huh yes um so little detour this is um there's a whole field of anthropology called garbology, right?

[111] And the reason it kind of came about is that they would do these ethnographies on populations of people and they would ask them, what are you feeding your children, right?

[112] And then generally the mothers would say, oh, we had prime rib on Monday, we had a quinoa salad on Tuesday, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[113] But when they went to the town dump and they went through the trash, what they found was either one family was eating five million boxes of macaroni and cheese and all the other ones were eating exactly as they said, or everyone's just lying, right?

[114] So, there's this thought in anthropology that you learn much more about people by just going through their trash because you'll see the real evidence of how they're living, not necessarily how they would like you to think they're living.

[115] And again, it's very interesting in the age of social media that people are getting this weird window into our lives, right?

[116] And so if you don't have photos of your kids eating, then the presumption is they, well, they probably are eating macaroni and cheese on that day because you're not photographing them in front of the craft box, probably.

[117] Another study I did was with long -time school nurses because I thought that they would have a window into what was going on in families that was very different than the correct kind of report about your child.

[118] So teachers are inhibited about being very candid with parents because the parents are already so.

[119] raw and ready to be triggered and defensive bordering on paranoid.

[120] Yeah.

[121] So I thought if I talk to the school nurses, they will tell me what's really going on.

[122] And they were so glad to have somebody to talk to them because nobody had interviewed them in the past.

[123] Yeah.

[124] And we talked about, there's a concept called food orthorexia.

[125] Ooh, this is, you've got me aroused.

[126] Orthorexia.

[127] It is, in the broadest sense, substituting organized religion or other kinds of spirituality for food correctness.

[128] Ooh, that makes a lot of sense.

[129] And proper food choices.

[130] So what the nurses said.

[131] And as a responsible clinical psychologist and person in the field of health, I want to say at the Right before I say this, that there are very many more food allergies than there have ever been in the past.

[132] Yes.

[133] And we can talk about big agra and big pharma and all the reasons that this is genuinely happening.

[134] At the same time, parents are displacing their fears about a number of things.

[135] One is most of them are older than their parents were when they had kids.

[136] so they feel their own mortality a little bit as they are at the same time watching the planet kind of ailing feeling they have no control over that so so and then we have an unstable economy and very surprising things going on in the leadership of this country so what parents do is take all of these fears that they have no control over and focus it on one thing, which is their child's happiness, the purity of their child's diet, the quality of their child's friends.

[137] So we have a lot of parents talking to administrators at schools saying, it's not my child who's a problem.

[138] It's this other child that's a bad influence.

[139] on her or him.

[140] And please do not offer that child a re -enrollment contract next year in private schools or in public schools throw the bum out now.

[141] And what the nurses said is that they have very small children who can barely read trying to read the labels so that they won't eat the wrong thing.

[142] And my favorite example was a school where every.

[143] year at holiday time they had made gingerbread men and decorated them and they had to switch and again my caveat here is there are kids with gluten allergies and it's serious and peanut allergies for sure yep they no longer make gingerbread men they cut out um the supermarket bags that are similar color and instead of decorating them with candy they decorate decorate them with glitter and sparkles.

[144] Everybody has to do that now, the whole class.

[145] No more gingerbread.

[146] Yeah.

[147] Now, even as you say this, I am both judgmental and critical of those folks and very guilty of it.

[148] And what's really funny and interesting is my wife and I have different things we're obsessed with.

[149] She's currently out of town, so I have both girls by myself, which means we're eating a lot of hamburgers and savory food, which would not normally probably be in the diet.

[150] But my weird.

[151] Savory food.

[152] They can't savory foods are like salty you know yeah really savory yeah yeah yeah and what's funny is I don't have a any kind of fear about that stuff but I am psychotic about sugar I think it's poison and I just watch their behavior and I go oh well I put this in their body and all of they are they have a different personality and it's just a high they don't need again I'm probably bringing all my own baggage of being a recovering addict to it my own experience with feeling better, not eating sugar.

[153] So, you know, I'm guilty of it myself.

[154] I go, here's this thing that they just would probably be better without.

[155] And then I can get, I saw myself going down a neurotic path with it.

[156] And I had to say to myself, you know what, they're going to go to birthday parties.

[157] They're going to eat it at school at birthdays.

[158] And that's just going to be that.

[159] And that's part of being a kid.

[160] But again, it requires me policing myself.

[161] It's very interesting about humans as we succumb quite easily to guilt.

[162] in repenting and all these feelings that we need to go kind of do something miserable to pay for whatever our indiscretions are, right?

[163] It's just this kind of human thing we share in whether you do it on Sunday at a religion or you quit something for Lent or you're, you know, you could tell me what happens in Jewish households.

[164] But there's all these kind of ritualized things we do to weirdly repent, right?

[165] And if you're not, if you don't have an outlet for that, maybe this food thing is it feels right, right?

[166] Like, yeah, this stuff doesn't taste very good, but it's the right thing to do.

[167] What is it, do you think about this religious hole?

[168] By the way, I'm a very outspoken atheist, so I'm not purporting that you should join, you know, Scientology tomorrow to fill this hole.

[169] But what do you think's happening?

[170] But it is why people join Scientology to fill the hole or why people followed Baguan Shri, right?

[171] Oh, we were obsessed with the Bogwuan, by the way.

[172] Did you watch the whole thing?

[173] Wild Country.

[174] Wasn't it?

[175] This is what's happened to documentary films.

[176] Their art. They're amazing.

[177] It was so captivating and illuminating instead of just polemical and sort of that's good to know all that information.

[178] Yes.

[179] What a relief it is to be able to give up exactly what you're talking about this very complex overthinking about pleasure and self -control and freedom and meaning and purpose and a sense of agency to a, in this case, a kind of mysterious and dark turns out.

[180] The Bogwuan.

[181] The Bogwuan.

[182] Yeah.

[183] I love how you say it.

[184] I think she's saying it really correctly.

[185] You're definitely not saying.

[186] But she is, yeah.

[187] Yeah, sorry to interrupt you, but yeah, you're crushing it.

[188] That you watch it and think, I kind of get that.

[189] And the other part that goes back to what you were saying is that it was sanctified, wild unfettered sexuality.

[190] Yes.

[191] Yes.

[192] So you got both.

[193] You got to feel a community which people, and this is wired into the organism.

[194] We want to be part of a community with a purpose.

[195] So they had a utopian vision of eventually the whole United States would become members of this cult.

[196] And we would have, we would have rewritten the constitution of goodness, delight, purity, and togetherness.

[197] Yeah, yeah.

[198] So that's very appealing.

[199] Especially, and this is the problem of this moment, you mentioned before, things happening quickly.

[200] Yeah.

[201] I so hesitated to write a book called voice lessons for parents, what to say, how to say it, and when to listen, because I thought, parents do not need somebody.

[202] once more telling them precisely in little tiny detail just what to do and what not to do because they're already nervous enough they already don't have enough confidence yeah but looking at what's happened with technology how preoccupied we are with doing everything right and how quickly everything is changing I wanted to find a way to preserve the magic of childhood.

[203] Yeah.

[204] So I just took a glance at the picture frame your daughter made and thought, you can't buy a picture frame as child as that.

[205] Yeah, so for folks who can't see, although I do think they're in the photos on the website, yeah, my daughter made a picture frame that is, let's just say it's anything but symmetrical.

[206] It is not symmetrical, but it is.

[207] the ocean.

[208] It is light.

[209] It reflects light.

[210] It has the freedom and spontaneity of that children bring to us that we need so badly.

[211] Yeah.

[212] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[213] We've all been there.

[214] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[215] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[216] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[217] Hey, listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[218] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[219] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[220] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[221] Prime members can listen early and ad -free on Amazon Music.

[222] What's up, guys?

[223] It's your girl, Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's too good.

[224] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[225] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[226] And I don't mean just friends.

[227] I mean the likes of Amy Polar, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox.

[228] The list goes on.

[229] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[230] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[231] There are so many paradoxical things about being a human.

[232] So there's two conflicting things we want to preserve.

[233] And one is we are eventually going to join a society at large that has norms and rules.

[234] and goes by a clock, it requires all of us to participate in a way to make it function, right?

[235] So that's one truth that exists.

[236] And yet we have this little window where we kind of don't have to have that.

[237] Yet we're trying to prepare our kids for that world.

[238] They're eventually going to join.

[239] And for me, I'm always battling in my head, okay, I want to support what they just have naturally, what they're just born with, all this stuff that I'm envious of, you know, the not obsessing about the environment, say, or whatever, the politicians.

[240] So I have one side of me that's saying, protect this, let them run with this while they can.

[241] And then I have another side of me that's saying, well, they are going to end up getting a job with a boss that's going to be an asshole.

[242] And that is life.

[243] And so there's going to be rules that you regularly follow that you disagree with that make no sense.

[244] And that is what life on planet Earth is like.

[245] So it is really hard to navigate how much of each cup you're filling up.

[246] And now we've added one more ingredient in the cup, which is the children should be happy all the time and have very high self -esteem that we imagine they can acquire if we send out an email blast or post on Facebook, oh my God, she breathed in, then she breathed out.

[247] It's a miracle.

[248] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[249] So we are just giving them trophies and saying, ta -da, and praising them so much that it actually inhibits them from trying things they're not naturally good at or that are new to them.

[250] Right.

[251] So that's a paradoxical aspect of it as well.

[252] I have an article in the Times right now.

[253] So it's called Who's a Good Boy?

[254] about how we speak so much more sweetly and gently and affectionately to our dogs than to our young sons.

[255] Yeah, walk us through that.

[256] So you start off with an analogy that you've been on a long car ride with a dog.

[257] And what do you do when you get out of that car with the dog?

[258] Yeah, so the dog is grumble barking and you open the door and then you are not surprised if the dog runs in circles or even nips somebody a little bit.

[259] And the reason babies look so incredibly beautiful is that no one would do what we have to do to keep them alive if they didn't look like that.

[260] Right, right.

[261] If they weren't the cutest things on the planet, we wouldn't kill ourselves to keep them alive.

[262] And it's true for all animal species or certainly all mammals, great big eyes, round cheeks.

[263] That's why puppies look so great.

[264] And look at YouTube.

[265] There's nothing but darling little animals.

[266] So then they get real personalities and preferences and more irritable but less completely 100 % adorable.

[267] Mm -hmm.

[268] And it's -trackles give way to acne.

[269] Exactly.

[270] We want them to go from little buddy to junior statesman.

[271] Right.

[272] And skip adolescence, which now.

[273] terrify his parents.

[274] Yeah.

[275] And I want kids, just as you said, about the first boss you'll have, I want them to have a crabby, unenlightened, uninspired fourth grade teacher.

[276] Mrs. House for me. Yeah, because someday they are going to have a crabby, unenlightened, uninspired boss.

[277] That's right.

[278] And you need the tools, right?

[279] You've got to learn these tools.

[280] You need to learn to code switch.

[281] So, Key and Peel's sketch comedy video called The Phone Call is my favorite example of code switching that I've ever seen in all of art. Because what kids have to do when they go to school the whole day is speak the lexicon, use the body language, wear the proper clothes to please the teachers.

[282] The popular group that they're trying to join, which mostly they won't, because it's very narrow and pointy at the top, which is great because we don't care if they're in the popular group.

[283] But they're following all different sets of rules, and they come home and they're exhausted from code switching.

[284] And they kind of melt down with their parents.

[285] Most children are worst with their moms.

[286] and then if the mothers take it personally or again see that snapshot as the epic movie of their child's life, they're going to feel, one, they're not doing a good job and that they have to correct everything dad does if it doesn't follow exactly the ideology that mom has in her head at that moment, which will change tomorrow because she'll read another parenting book.

[287] Yeah, yeah.

[288] Yeah.

[289] But you just touch on something.

[290] I just want you to, as an expert, tell me if I'm right or wrong here or if I need to broaden my opinion of this.

[291] So, yes, the kid will generally give it to mom, right?

[292] This to me seems to be a little bit of a self -perpetuating circle, which is they tell mom that because as you say, mom is generally more affected by it, right?

[293] So my daughter will say to me, I don't like you.

[294] And I go, okay, I like you, though.

[295] For whatever reason, it's just my Y chromosome or whatever it is, that doesn't bother me, right?

[296] But my wife will say, well, that hurts my feelings when you say, like, but so right out of the gates, if you want a good long interaction and you're picking between the two parents, you go to mom because you guys are going to hatch it out now about saying I don't like you, right?

[297] And so it is interesting that they are the recipient of that, but I think it's not accidental that they're the recipient of that.

[298] There's going to be more attention given to that from her than there is from me. I won't even speak for every other couple.

[299] The corpus callosum that connects the right and left hemisphere of the brain is thicker in women.

[300] Oh, okay.

[301] Therefore, in every situation, women are using both sides of their brains in receiving information and responding to information.

[302] So it's more complex in some ways.

[303] That might lead to why they're better compromisers as well, right?

[304] Because mentally you're doing more compromising between your left and right brain.

[305] And I say this to audiences in a lighthearted way, but most men are somewhere on the spectrum.

[306] Sure, sure, sure.

[307] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[308] And most women have some degree of borderline personality disorder and bipolar too.

[309] Uh -huh, right.

[310] And then with the same.

[311] segment of parents that we're talking about, everybody has narcissistic personality disorder.

[312] Yes.

[313] This is great.

[314] This is all good.

[315] It's a good combo.

[316] I love what you said to your daughter because it's five words long.

[317] Uh -huh.

[318] We talk to kids so much because we're trying to be cheap public relations firms to just convince them that they're going to love camp and love fourth grade and love their teacher.

[319] and hang out with this one, but don't hang out with that one because I think she's going to be a gateway drug friend even though you're only in third grade.

[320] And so we're just, we're trying to forecast and smooth the road every rough patch, every bump before the child even gets there.

[321] And then we do this crazy thing.

[322] So that's childhood.

[323] Then we send them far away often to college.

[324] Yeah, yeah.

[325] College.

[326] So what I always say to parents is I want your child to be a counselor at a sleepaway camp because it's guaranteed that one of their campers will throw up and your child will have to clean it up because they're the counselor.

[327] And that prepares them for college where there's a huge amount of throwing up.

[328] Yes, yes.

[329] Vomitine is ubiquitous.

[330] But it is funny.

[331] You just, you're, talk about polar ends of the spectrum because probably the wildest craziest little section of your life is college, right?

[332] You're experimenting probably the most sexually, hopefully, that you'll do.

[333] And yeah, it's a real black and white transition from having a parent around or two parents around kind of, as you say, smoothing out all the bumps.

[334] And then it's just a free for all.

[335] I want to just ask you globally because, well, actually, let me just point this out.

[336] Because it feels like it's in keeping with something I heard Dr. Drew say one time, which is because kids are an extension of your ego and you yourself are trying to always avoid discomfort and pain.

[337] And what happens is you solve all these problems for your kids as they grow up and you try to mitigate every single source of discomfort.

[338] When you then let them leave your house, they haven't to quiet.

[339] a single coping mechanism for dealing with pain, rejection, loss, all these things.

[340] And so a really great alternative when they leave your house is benz -o, is an opiate.

[341] It is a drug because it's overwhelming.

[342] If you deny them the chance to go through heartache, heartbreak, skin, knee, right?

[343] What are they to have in their toolbox to deal with all the inevitable heartbreak that comes our way once we're adults.

[344] If you don't have anything to combat that with, all these drugs seem like a really great alternative.

[345] And they are a great alternative.

[346] What I see all the time is both parents and kids using both licit and illicit drugs and now it's sort of all blended together because you can get anything from anywhere as a way to flip the switch.

[347] from the full range of human emotions to the one you feel like feeling at that moment.

[348] Yeah.

[349] So you can pick the emotional state you'd like to be in, find the drug, and we're not now talking about tolerance, dependence, and addiction, because that's another whole set of complicated steps that people find them, where a web people find themselves caught.

[350] Yes.

[351] But along with everything moving so quickly is the idea that we should be able to rid ourselves of distress, disappointment, frustration, heartache, longing.

[352] And these are some of the richest human experiences.

[353] If you can figure out ways that are not quite as quick, not quite as efficient, definitely less dangerous for their the workarounds for your own personal triggers and vulnerabilities.

[354] So for some people, that is the forest bathing.

[355] It is nature and backpacking and you want to take your kids backpacking.

[356] And for other people, it's taking a walk, exercise, music.

[357] Or creating.

[358] I think the source of most of our great art is probably from clinical depression or breakup or a death in the family or all these.

[359] tragic things that somehow metamorphosize, not a word, evolve into something really outstandingly beautiful, right?

[360] Metamorphose.

[361] There would be no art. There would be no art without pain and ecstasy that is created by the courage to be in uncomfortable situations, which means to travel.

[362] to be in nature, to use all five senses in the three -dimensional world, to push yourself to be in a social situation that might make you uncomfortable.

[363] Life is sort of dread, dread, dread joy.

[364] Yeah, yeah.

[365] If you're being realistic about the proportions.

[366] Yeah.

[367] And the joy is then such a tremendous, relief from the natural dread and the dread is healthy the four of us sitting in this room would not be here if we had not won the natural selection competition and part of part of our superpower in getting through it and everybody who's listening to this also did as well yeah is that we were anxious because we were on the savannah wondering about whether that That sound in the bushes was a lion who was going to eat us.

[368] That's right.

[369] The people who were not worried at all didn't make it.

[370] Didn't make it.

[371] And then chemically, too, in your brain, because the stakes are that much higher for you to be aware of a lion in your presence versus you ate a strawberry and it was delicious.

[372] Remember this bush.

[373] Those chemicals that we deal with, the good ones being oxytocin, right, that says, oh, good job, or that's your love chemical.

[374] That has a strength.

[375] And the negative ones, so adrenaline, cortisol, these chemicals have a disproportionately strong feeling in our brain because it is more important we learn to avoid a tiger than is remember a strawberry bush.

[376] Is that accurate to say?

[377] It is beautifully put.

[378] And the way we get rid of the distress of the cortisol or the depletion of serotonin is.

[379] seeking a dopamine hit yes so that's what we have become accustomed to doing the more you artificially provide your brain with lots of flooding it with dopamine it says okay fine good deal i'll stop making it myself and um and just to go back a a minute to to what you were saying about um this notion of how we should feel right which is dangerous now i am very very very pro psychiatry.

[380] I am pro mood stabilizers.

[381] I'm pro all these things.

[382] So I'll start by saying that.

[383] But I will also introduce the danger of all these drugs, which is psychiatrists, and again, I'm out on a limb here.

[384] So correct me if I'm wrong.

[385] But the psychiatrists, primarily, they rely on something called the DSM, right?

[386] And this is a standardized test that you can.

[387] It's not a test.

[388] The DSM is a text.

[389] Is a text?

[390] DSM -5 is the latest.

[391] It's produced by the American Psychiatric Association.

[392] And it's a manual of mental disorders.

[393] Okay, right.

[394] And it basically lists, though.

[395] Yes, absolutely.

[396] Well, let's start with the history of it.

[397] If I know it right, I don't even know what year.

[398] This was maybe the 50s.

[399] There was some English guy who was very critical of the way we were diagnosing people in America.

[400] So as an experiment, he had five people go into different psychiatric wards all around the country.

[401] And he said, the only thing you're allowed to.

[402] to say that's a lie is, I hear a thud in my head.

[403] I hear a thud.

[404] And then he saw what the results were.

[405] After they said, I hear a thud in my head, they had to then start telling the truth.

[406] And there was a wide range of diagnoses based on this, right?

[407] And ranging from, you know, schizophrenic to blah, blah, blah.

[408] And it was very critical.

[409] And it was a big uproar in the psychiatric world in an academia.

[410] And so they said, we need a standardized criteria for these mental disorders, right?

[411] And then through trying to standardize this, what inadvertently happened is that we came up with what normal is, right?

[412] This wasn't the intended consequence of the DSM, but one of the consequences is we have what we think is a baseline of being normal mentally, which is a little bit of a dangerous thought, is it?

[413] Or is it not?

[414] It's a very dangerous thought and a good intentioned one.

[415] Yes.

[416] And the best example is the debate over grief.

[417] Tell us about that.

[418] And the way you were accurate before about it being a test is, do you have five out of these six symptoms?

[419] Right.

[420] Because if you have five of them, then your insurance company, then you get this diagnosis.

[421] The insurance company will pay for your treatment.

[422] So it's a complicated set of economic and political forces.

[423] forces and we have again all very well -intentioned all of this sometimes we have we have the best version of it we can have at this moment but it can get better probably the DSM is working hard to keep up with enlightened definitions of healthy human individuality uh -huh they're slow right and so the reason I picked grief is if we attach numbers to how many months, is it healthy and acceptable for a person to grieve the loss of a loved one, for example?

[424] And when does it become defined as psychopathology or some form of depression?

[425] And therefore, you get to have a diagnosis that again, as I said before, the insurance companies will pay for and you can get your medication covered.

[426] Right.

[427] Yeah.

[428] So that's very tricky.

[429] And of course it brings out a lot of critics, right, and a lot of proponents.

[430] And I think I would just urge people who are critical.

[431] It is easy to point out these outliers.

[432] And certainly you've met someone who's probably overmedicated or a kid that maybe was medicated and shouldn't have been, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[433] blah.

[434] But I would argue it's a big mistake to focus on that as opposed to the huge grounds that have been made.

[435] So I would be optimistic.

[436] That's all I would say is I would urge people to be optimistic that we are learning things at a pretty great rate now.

[437] And is that stuff exciting for you to see kind of the scientific backing?

[438] It's so exciting.

[439] And it's really easy to have a kind of gauzy sentimentality about the past, about definitions of appropriate male behavior, female behavior, kids who just need a whack across the face.

[440] When I entered the field, we had one diagnosis, basically, for kids, which was a pervasive developmental disorder, and we had two drugs, Ritalin and Thor's.

[441] And we would give Thorazine to six -year -old kids who were a little bit restless.

[442] Right, right.

[443] It was really scary.

[444] I worked at a hospital, and if a 14 -year -old was drawing kind of gloomy, if beautifully artistic pictures, we could lock them up on the inpatient unit for an unlimited length of time.

[445] And the insurance company would pay for that.

[446] Really?

[447] What we know now, besides this very broad and subtle range of medication for kids, is all about learning styles and learning differences.

[448] And so we've made tremendous progress.

[449] But as with so much else in our culture right now, there is a kind of sensationalized paranoia coming from the news media.

[450] There was just an article the other day in the Times saying basically antidepressants, you can never get off them if you start them.

[451] And the drug companies decided to call it discontinuation syndrome instead of withdrawal because there was no money cuts in federal funding and the drug companies didn't want to pay to study what happened when people stopped taking SSRIs.

[452] right that's true every single bit of that is true but it doesn't apply in every case it's to grab your eyeballs yes it's pandemic now is we've lost nuance right so everything has to be binary everything has to be black and white SSRI inhibitors have to be terrible or a lifesaver you know and how many human beings have you met in your life and how many varieties of mental states have you seen that's how many different varieties of outcomes you could have with these different medicines, resist the urge to try to levy a verdict on these things, right?

[453] Like there's a lot of area in the success of these different things.

[454] And it's scary, right?

[455] Because the stakes are so high.

[456] If you're talking about medicating your child, boy, I can't imagine a harder decision for me to make as a parent.

[457] One of the things I sometimes ask audiences is how many of you, because a lot of parents, especially dads, get diagnosed with lifelong ADD, that they had no idea they had when their son gets diagnosed.

[458] Right.

[459] I used to do psychological testing long ago, but for years.

[460] And I would diagnose the child if the child did have ADD and the mom would immediately start elbowing the dad.

[461] Yeah, yeah.

[462] Who wasn't paying attention?

[463] Oh, my God, it explains everything.

[464] Yeah.

[465] Yeah, who wasn't paying attention.

[466] Well, a lot of, a lot of dads have also discovered there on the spectrum by going through that testing process with their child, right?

[467] There was an amazing Vanity Fair story about a guy who ended up trading credit to fault swaps.

[468] I think he was in the movie The Big Short, and he had no idea.

[469] But this thing, he being on the spectrum, allowed him to be interested in reading all these investment documents, these loan bundles that no one would read but him.

[470] And he became a billionaire because of it.

[471] is where the nuance comes in.

[472] This is where it gets scary, right?

[473] Because it is a, it is a tempting question to ask, wow, what are the results of labeling people?

[474] So if there is no label, and you're just for in this case, the guy in the Vanity Fair article, he had a glass eye.

[475] He was, he was born with some eye issue.

[476] So his whole life, he explained his discomfort in social interactions is, oh, I have this fucking glass eye.

[477] And that's why I can't stand talking to people, right?

[478] And it wasn't until he had a son where he goes, oh my God, it wasn't the glass eye.

[479] I'm on the spectrum.

[480] That explains so much.

[481] This guy was also a neurosurgeon before he became an investment banker.

[482] So had he been labeled in fourth grade as autistic, what do you have done all those things?

[483] And that's a scary question to ask.

[484] What do you think about labels?

[485] And that goes back to the wife who's elbowing her husband because that husband figured out both workarounds and ways to take this and instead of calling it a disability, this set of traits and find a way to express them in the world.

[486] My concern, and I had a conversation with the mom about this yesterday, about she was trying to figure out where her child should go to secondary school.

[487] And someone had said to her, don't send him to that school because that school doesn't have a program that best matches his talents.

[488] And she said to herself, that would probably be really good for him.

[489] Sure.

[490] He might broaden himself then.

[491] We are trying to predict how our children are going to be outstanding exceptional superstars.

[492] Right.

[493] When they're four.

[494] We're going to figure out the thing they're Michael Jordan.

[495] they're exactly because heaven forbid they're just scotty pitman at something that will be unacceptable and then you don't know how tall they're going to grow no you just don't know i mean it's like the girls who are gymnasts and then it turns out not going to be the right thing for the shape i'm turning into yeah and then we have the body shaming culture and this is a perfectly fine and wonderful girl yeah who hasn't figured out yet who she's she's going to be.

[496] And parents can look at that with wonder instead of with panic.

[497] Yeah.

[498] Also, I think we're victims of, to some degree, again, disclaimer, I think we live in the best economic system imaginable.

[499] I do think a free market is the best way to have, you know, explosions in science and health and all these things.

[500] But it comes with a cost.

[501] And that cost is we have to be the best at something, right?

[502] That is the sign of success in our society is that you come up with the idea that's Facebook.

[503] You do something that's so exceptional, exceptional, exceptional, exceptional, individual.

[504] We don't ever think that a huge success would be for our children to grow up and find a community that they get pleasure out of and interaction and right.

[505] We don't think that, oh, God, if they could find their niche, if they could just find their group, of 20 friends they have dinner parties with on Sunday.

[506] That is Michael Jordan.

[507] And that is Michael Jordan, right?

[508] If we study people and we measure what makes them happy, we find that it's not their job position ultimately, right, or their bank account.

[509] It's how engaged they are in their community.

[510] It's how much they help others.

[511] Aren't these, these end up being the real indicators of what makes people happy.

[512] So we also in some ways act as though the normal curve has died.

[513] And children are either exceptional or failing.

[514] Nobody's in the middle.

[515] Right.

[516] Right.

[517] And everything has to be curated and choreographed.

[518] And those 20 people that are your community better be the right 20 people today.

[519] Yeah, I hope they're hot.

[520] Well, the other part is, I know, I always say to parents, I want your middle school age daughter to have a really slutty.

[521] shallow best friend.

[522] Tell me why.

[523] Because it's fun.

[524] Yeah, it is, right?

[525] It's fun and it's life.

[526] And they work so hard.

[527] They're taking AP classes already in 10th grade.

[528] So at least there's some liveliness and interesting things to talk about.

[529] We want it sanitized.

[530] I'm so glad that we got a doctor to say that.

[531] Yeah, he's going to use that a lot.

[532] That'll go.

[533] That'll be ammo for me. but you just you keep circling around this one thing and you think of it in terms of children and parenting but I think it's very much a live in America issue which you pointed out in a talk I heard you give you hear the story of the the pedophile that lives in a neighborhood or the the rapist right and so your fear level and your motivation to protect your kid from that is very natural it's of course you you get this very sharp pang of I have to prevent that of course nothing I can't Imagine something worse than my kid being a victim of that.

[534] How do we living in an era where we have an hourly news cycle or a 10 -minute news cycle?

[535] How do we balance staying informed and protecting our mental health, knowing that these things are very improbable, right?

[536] The likelihood of any of these things happening are so minute.

[537] It's like worrying about your kid getting hit by lightning.

[538] But the messaging is so strong in your brain.

[539] So how does one balance that?

[540] I find myself trying to figure out like, yeah, okay, I dislike the president, but I'm going to dislike them for the next three years.

[541] I don't need to check in every 10 minutes to reconfirm an opinion I already have.

[542] You know, I have to really be thoughtful about what I'm taking in because I know I'm outmatched in my brain.

[543] It's just how I've evolved and I know what my chemistry is and I can't compete with those negative chemicals.

[544] So what should we do?

[545] The indignation is very invigorating.

[546] and we're tired.

[547] We're tired because of the complexity of the life we live, of the amount of information that's coming at us all the time, how wildly exaggerated it is.

[548] I used to work with little kids, and then after I decided to have enough of that, I had parents bring me pictures of their children and put it in the file, and now they just turn their phone around and show me. And the story you're talking about is there were seven and a nine -year -old who had friends who lived around the corner and the parents wouldn't let them go on their own around the corner in a lovely neighborhood to go visit their friends and so psychotherapy is always peeling away the onion and I wouldn't let it go to try to find out why and the mother finally said Dr. Mogul I have to tell you the reason there are some painters working at a house between our house and the friend's house.

[549] So because of that, I just, I can't, I can't.

[550] And I said to her, I have seen pictures of your children.

[551] You showed me they're not that cute.

[552] Don't flatter yourself, honey.

[553] How did you respond to that?

[554] I have to, she laughed.

[555] I have to say that to them.

[556] Because the likelihood of a child being snatched by an abductor is exactly as you said, like lightning, just about zero.

[557] And kids do get taken much more often in contested child custody cases.

[558] And that is also rare.

[559] If we don't teach them the joy of wayfinding and being on their own, And there's a wonderful Norwegian child development specialist named Ellen Sansetter.

[560] She wrote a paper called The Antiphobic Effects of Thrilling Experience.

[561] And she says kids must be exposed to great heights, to fire, to dangerous tools, to physical and emotional aggression, and to finding their way and almost getting lost in figuring out how to do it.

[562] get where they're going because otherwise they are going to get very fearful.

[563] The article I just wrote was about this wave of phobias in boys ages six to 11 that I have never seen in 35 years of my practice.

[564] Really?

[565] These little boys are terrified.

[566] It is their creative imagination, their great physical energy and their spirit turned against themselves because they have so little freedom yeah i think it's an easy mistake to make as a parent that you think if i tell you if i tell the kid you can overcome anything you can rise to anything you can be anything telling your kid that they can do that won't actually instill that feeling right the kid has to actually do some of those things isn't that how a kid learns that they are capable is by doing something not being told they're capable if you say that to your child you you can do anything, they are quickly learning that you're an unreliable liar.

[567] Right, right.

[568] You're discredited witness.

[569] Instantly, it reminds me of what I call the brag planar parents.

[570] This happens a lot in high school.

[571] So this is the Olivia's mom or Sophie's mom who will say things like, we don't know how she does.

[572] It's just amazing.

[573] She's up in the morning before we are, even though she's gone to sleep long after we've gone to bed because she's always studying.

[574] And she made chocolate chip pancakes for everybody in the family and already walked the dog.

[575] And we don't know if you're aware, but she has started an NGO for women who want to open small businesses in Colombia.

[576] And that woman doesn't even speak Spanish.

[577] It's only that word.

[578] She's lying.

[579] And she's making you feel like crap.

[580] And then you look at your don't be normal, ordinary, wonderful daughter.

[581] And she doesn't look like she compares to that daughter.

[582] So it's constant talking yourself into and spreading the word about how well your family is doing.

[583] And this is a very basic 12 -step principle of we are comparing our.

[584] insides with everybody else's outsides.

[585] Yes.

[586] And also we're expecting that these external things will impact how we feel internally, right?

[587] It's an inside job, basically.

[588] And we think that we can do it externally, but it rarely kind of works that way.

[589] And the sad part for kids is they get wedged into the most competitive school they can be in.

[590] They are strapped in car seats and driven to extracurriculars and enrichment.

[591] I think of them sort of like parolees with ankle bracelets or in Supermax palaces, the ones whose families have money, but they have so little freedom and so little.

[592] little choice.

[593] And you made the point before that's so important, they also have to get civilized.

[594] So when the parents come to me with the anxious sons, little sons, who are really phobic, and I know these kids are not mentally ill, this is not a highly disturbed family.

[595] The first question I always ask them is if their son flushes the toilet after he poops.

[596] Because they bow their heads in And they say, not so often.

[597] Really?

[598] Yes.

[599] Later and later, they also don't wipe their own bottoms.

[600] Really?

[601] So, yeah, this is a distinct trend of children being babyed and catered to about very ordinary stuff.

[602] And I say to the parents, he can't pay the mortgage or the rent.

[603] He can't drive.

[604] There are so many things that you can do that he's.

[605] He can't do.

[606] He can wipe his butt and he can flush his toilet.

[607] Yeah.

[608] Because it's really gross to walk into the bathroom and find that old poop there.

[609] Yes.

[610] And he is not developing a sense of family citizenship.

[611] It is my job in this family to keep the path clear as much as I can of gross stuff or things that people will trip over.

[612] So that means leaving your shoes in a public place in the house.

[613] Yeah, it's not your space.

[614] It's our space.

[615] It is our space and we all work to help each other get through the day with the tools that we have acquired by the age we are.

[616] Yeah.

[617] No, I'm sitting here trying to impress you with how smart I am.

[618] You're doing a really good job.

[619] Oh, thank you.

[620] I'm putting a lot of effort into it.

[621] But I'm now going to try to shift and be vulnerable and say some things that I might be wrong about.

[622] So I'm going to give you some scenarios, which I'm on the fence of.

[623] out.

[624] This is a kind of a controversial approach I have.

[625] I have a hunch I'm doing it wrong.

[626] So I feel like I can clearly discern different types of crying in tantrums, right?

[627] If you hurt your leg, you're getting as many hugs and kisses as you need.

[628] You're getting the boo -boo bunny, blah, blah, blah.

[629] If your sister hurt your feelings, let's talk about that.

[630] If you're going to start crying at the dinner table because you didn't get ice cream.

[631] My policy is, I'm not telling you that you can't feel this way.

[632] You're absolutely welcome to feel this way as long as you want, but you're not going to ruin this whole experience at the dinner table with us.

[633] So you can go into your room and cry for a while when you feel better about it.

[634] You can come back.

[635] And I think I've said that out loud, maybe on TV or something and gotten a lot of pushback that I shouldn't send my kids to their room while they're crying.

[636] If I didn't not believe in gold stars, I would put one on your forehead.

[637] So what we're teaching children to do is to use their voice as a weapon.

[638] And it's a really tricky time in history about discipline because the kids will say to the parents, you keep this up, I'm calling child protective services.

[639] Wow.

[640] They do.

[641] Wow.

[642] And again, I'm going to stand on the side I was standing on before when I said all we had was Thorazine and Ritalin and didn't know anything about learning differences.

[643] I am absolutely not in favor of any kind of abusive treatment to children.

[644] But because we can't hit our kids, we have very few tools left to teach them.

[645] And everybody just wants to only use positive reinforcement.

[646] And it really depends on the temperament of the child and on the temperament of the parents.

[647] So I always want to know the context, and you mentioned how contextless we are now.

[648] If you're exhausted from your day, from worry or overwork, Donald Winnicott, the brilliant British psychoanalyst, talks about the manic defense against despair.

[649] Okay.

[650] Which is we keep ourselves super busy, so we won't feel any.

[651] Emotion.

[652] Any emotion.

[653] Yeah, yeah.

[654] Many emotions except a little bit of fatigue, maybe.

[655] So are you so irritable that a cranky child at the table is causing you to say, get to your room in a tone that communicates to her?

[656] And I sort of never want to see your face again.

[657] I don't love you anymore.

[658] And I wish I hadn't had you.

[659] Or are you responding to a. tool she has learned to use to get whatever she wants again because you're too tired to follow through you're willing to just surrender surrender and i see parents doing it all the time because it's easier well and again i think what what people maybe didn't understand when they heard me say that is yeah i didn't yell i don't yell at them and say get in your room i just say hey we're enjoying dinner and you're ruining it i don't enjoy being at dinner while someone's screaming and we're all here and it's not okay for you to ruin four people's good time because you want ice cream.

[660] So go sort that out and come back when you want to have a good time with us, you know.

[661] People are critical of that because they think you're triggering abandonment stuff.

[662] I have a hard time buying into that.

[663] I know the difference between abandonment and conditional love and boundaries and rules.

[664] Can't we navigate that?

[665] We can definitely have conditional like.

[666] Yeah, there we go.

[667] And conditional like what you do.

[668] don't want to do is get too big and global.

[669] So if you say to a very small child, you are ruining four people's dinner and sort of ruining their lives.

[670] Okay.

[671] You're making her tremendously powerful.

[672] So you want to focus on the behavior in a very concrete, simple way.

[673] Kids are really dumb.

[674] Okay.

[675] I mean, these really, you know, highly gifted, they're all highly gifted.

[676] It's a miracle.

[677] goal.

[678] That's what I mean about the normal curve dying.

[679] Highly gifted and learning disabled.

[680] Every single child you know has both of those problems.

[681] So they need they need extended time on tests.

[682] They need lots of testing to find that out to legitimize it and medication and a special school and the best fourth grade teacher anybody ever had.

[683] But back to the table, you can say that sound, her screaming, is it's, hard on my ears and we're having a conversation you need to go to your room and we look forward to you coming back and joining us and what I just said was too long so I'd like that sentence you said before that was I think five words yeah five words we talk too much to these kids we're trying to reach consensus with them and we are creating little attorneys by the time they are four years old, girls, not boys, because their language develops later.

[684] Girls are better attorneys than you will ever be, even if you're on the Supreme Court.

[685] So you don't have to reach consensus all the time.

[686] And don't you think that's just our own codependency?

[687] Like what we really want is we don't want to ever be a jerk.

[688] We just want them to like us all the time and hug us and tell us that they love us.

[689] So we actually think we're going to make such a compelling argument to them that they're going to see it our way and be thankful that we've corrected their behavior.

[690] That is such scary collusion as though the four -year -old who's making the loud noise is going to slap her cheek and say, oh, father, thank you so much for enlightening me on this terribly important topic about dinner table etiquette that I did not realize until you brought it to my attention, how can I ever show my gratitude in the full -blown form?

[691] that you deserve, oh, holy one, Baguan tree, rises.

[692] Yeah, we don't, the thought of them being angry at us is very unsettling.

[693] You know, we just want them to adore us at all times.

[694] And that goes back to what you were saying before about this being a very good and exciting time.

[695] Families are really close.

[696] And there's a kind of friendship in families that a lot of us didn't experience in our own families.

[697] and I see a lot of families where everybody likes the same music.

[698] And they sing it together, the same shows and the same books.

[699] And it's a beautiful thing.

[700] The risk of it is there's no individuation.

[701] And we all think we have to be happy all the time, love each other all the time.

[702] And the children in particular should never be injured by a parental misstep.

[703] If you don't make mistakes in raising your children, then you're some kind of bionic pretend -a -i parent, yes, who got snuck into your house via drone.

[704] Yeah.

[705] And then shame.

[706] We just, we veer into it quite quickly, don't we as a species?

[707] Don't we?

[708] We succumb to shame pretty easily.

[709] I assume from being.

[710] More than ever.

[711] More than ever.

[712] Because, and again, this is the competitive.

[713] news portals, snark has become such a common mode of assessing everything that the automatic reaction to that is defensiveness, shame, or denial.

[714] So we are battered by these feelings about wondering whether we are good enough, parents, good enough.

[715] We don't worry quite as much as I would like.

[716] about being good enough spouses, that's sort of fallen very low on our agenda of character and success and the killer emotion there instead of shame is contempt.

[717] And correcting, there's a lot of correcting the other parent in relation to the harm they're doing to the children.

[718] Or the grandparents.

[719] So I have a whole chapter in the book.

[720] about let the grandparents do whatever they want.

[721] Yeah.

[722] Feed them all the sugar.

[723] I was at the airport and there was a man talking to a couple he didn't know, which is already amazing.

[724] Right, right.

[725] This time, nobody was looking at their screens.

[726] And the couple were on their way to fly to take care of their grandchildren for the weekend for the first time.

[727] Oh, okay.

[728] And he had done this lots of times.

[729] And he said, I'm going to tell you the secret.

[730] When you get there, your daughter, is going to hand you a list, and the list is going to tell you exactly what the children should eat, shouldn't eat, what time they should be in Delta Wave, sleep, bye, and who they're allowed to play with and not play with in the neighborhood.

[731] And he said, look at that list really, really seriously, really closely.

[732] Ask some questions for clarification about the list and nod your head a lot, possibly put your hands in prayer position and say namaste.

[733] And then the minute the parents pull out of the driveway in the Uber, he said, just tear it right up, throw it in the garbage and do whatever you want.

[734] Right.

[735] And grandparents and grandchildren have a wonderful relationship because they have a common enemy.

[736] Oh, right, right, mom and dad.

[737] So it's great.

[738] It's just great.

[739] Yeah, don't deny them that, right?

[740] Don't deny either party that delightful pleasure.

[741] As you say, I have to remember that probably the highlight of my childhood was going to Papa Bob and grandmas in Livonia, Michigan for the summer.

[742] And I ate as many ding -dongs as my body could consume.

[743] And I got macaroni and cheese every day for lunch.

[744] I would have died if I lived there all year around.

[745] Of course.

[746] Right.

[747] But I could make it through those summer sessions.

[748] And they, as you, they're the highlight of my childhood.

[749] And in my relationship with my Papa Bob was just couldn't have been close.

[750] I mean, talk about a guy I just wanted to be so bad, you know, and looked up to.

[751] And it was such a special relationship.

[752] I can't imagine how much less rich my life would be without that whole thing.

[753] It wasn't just the ding -dongs and the macaroni cheese.

[754] No, no, no, no, no. So talk about what happened in Livoni, Michigan with Papa Bob that was so much fun or inspiring or you think of now as a guidepost in your life.

[755] it was different than home.

[756] Oh, yeah.

[757] And it was because of the things you did there and the way they treated you.

[758] Yes.

[759] And I think, you know, if I really boiled it down, it's that I had a single mother with three kids who worked two jobs.

[760] So I went to this place where they chose to have me. They were excited to have me. I was the focus of their total attention.

[761] It's not just that they catered to my every need.

[762] It was that they were interested in what it was I wanted, what would make me happen.

[763] It was just this really nurturing.

[764] It was so fun to be the focus of the attention to that degree.

[765] You're making a really important distinction between what parents fear but kind of do, which is spoiling, and being a child feeling cherished and being with adults who are enchanted by their enchantment.

[766] And that's what your grandparents were.

[767] Right.

[768] And that feeling, and you wouldn't want it all the time.

[769] Yeah, I would have never worked.

[770] You would have never worked and it wouldn't be special.

[771] Yeah, yeah.

[772] But it was so specific and something you were craving.

[773] Yeah.

[774] And all children do crave being cherished in that way.

[775] Yeah.

[776] And even though we enrich their lives and we are so careful in figuring out the menu of activities and their emotions, that enchantment with their enchantment, and I suspect your grandparents did not make a whole bunch of judgment about whether the things you were interested in were going to give you a set of skills for your adulthood that were going to lead you straight to the top.

[777] Whether they thought it or not, I thought they thought I was on the exact right path.

[778] You know, like it seemed that they, they were just totally optimistic about who I was going to be, you know.

[779] As my grandmother in particular, she was a, she was a history teacher and a science teacher, double major, as a woman that grew up in the 30s, you know.

[780] So she loved education.

[781] She loved that I loved dinosaurs.

[782] She'd sit there forever with me with the book.

[783] And, yeah, it was very, very special.

[784] And, yeah, I pray every kid has that little.

[785] And, and again, yeah, it comes with some compromise.

[786] So I don't have the same ideology as my children's grandparents.

[787] Right.

[788] And that's been a challenge for me, you know.

[789] Let's just, your history really quick is that you grew up, if the internet is correct, you grew up in a secular Jewish household.

[790] Is that accurate?

[791] So Jewish traditions, but not a belief that Yahweh was necessarily at the center of it all.

[792] My father was the publisher of the National Lampoon.

[793] Okay.

[794] So I would not say Jewish traditions.

[795] Oh, okay.

[796] Except that he, by himself, went to synagogue on the high holidays every year.

[797] Okay.

[798] So he grew up in an Orthodox family in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

[799] Oh, okay.

[800] And then so you grew up not God -fearing per se?

[801] No, I would say no. Okay.

[802] But a lot of blessings of a skin knee call on some Jewish traditions, yes?

[803] That book is a child rearing guide, and it's an introduction to lots of Jewish teachings and principles.

[804] Right.

[805] And so my brother converted to Judaism when I was probably 23.

[806] How old was he?

[807] He was 28.

[808] And it was, I think there were a lot of motivations.

[809] One is he always had an unexplained affinity for Judaism.

[810] My father had a lot of Jewish girlfriends.

[811] he wore a star david uh as a kid um his children your brother my older brother yeah and his kids went to um jcc like a preschool at the jewish community center a lot of his neighbors were jewish his wife also not jewish they decided to convert and so we would join them for like baby naming ceremony right um uh different holidays and um again i it's probably all my baggage of hating authority I'm just very adverse to religion.

[812] I'm very adverse to any power structure of humans, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[813] But I would go to these things my brother would host, and I could see behind it what was happening.

[814] So when a baby's born, right, and you have a baby naming ceremony, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know a lot about this, but you would pick the first letter of like a grandparent.

[815] If say his name was Bob, you'd name your kid, you could name it with a bee, it'd be Bernie or something.

[816] But what happens in that ceremony is you end up reminiscing a ton about Bob, the grandparent.

[817] Grandpa.

[818] And I quickly, first, I was like, this is ridiculous, this religious thing, blah, blah, blah.

[819] And then I just find, oh, we're talking a lot about Grandpa.

[820] This is what a great way to keep Grandpa relevant today.

[821] And without that practice, you know, who's going to be a self -starter and just know to do that?

[822] So I can very much appreciate and respect the many different traditions that do serve a real pragmatic purpose.

[823] Tell me some of those principles.

[824] So I think about organized religion in its best sense as similar to composed music that somebody figured out something that works for human beings to civilize their roughest edges.

[825] Shabbat, the idea, so in the strictest sense, it is 24 hours from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday where you don't drive, you don't use.

[826] any machines you don't look at screens you don't do work you don't talk about work and you go to synagogue and everyone sings these beautiful minor key melodies in Hebrew and you are with your community right and you're not working yeah manic defense against despair always working uh -huh so we won't have to think about anything else and we feel like we're moving ahead and keeping up yeah when my children were growing up and it started for us very much like your brother i was in many ways like a person who was not raised a jew right when my kids were small we started to have shabot dinners every single friday night i would make holl off from scratch i got really good at it i could do three braids on top of each other the whole house smelled like the one wonderful baking bread, the kids' friends would come.

[827] They had lots of non -Jewish friends who now know all the prayers that you say at a Shabbat dinner.

[828] And we would go around the table.

[829] So once you light the candles, you light the candles, we did it in the name of anybody who needed a blessing.

[830] And that was sort of the sad news report.

[831] Right.

[832] Who's sick, whose husband lost their job, or who's going through a rough patch once the candles are lit you are required these are the shabbat traditions not to talk about work or troubling things so this is the script for the dinner table conversation right and we would go around the table and everybody would talk about what they were grateful for that week and don't you also i just got invited to a co -workers they did it at work and they had their kids and it was really beautiful and they said and I don't know if everyone this is always said but they said um I'm sorry for anything I did this week that hurt you is that part of that I've never heard that oh I really dug it though I like it all went around and kind of just said I'm so sorry if I did anything this week that might have hurt your feelings or anything it's just a nice way to clean the slate every Friday yep we didn't do that I've never seen it anywhere okay but this is also something that every family can do which is create traditions that give structure to the week and preserve and protect togetherness and delight.

[833] So at Chabat dinner, you have a better dinner than you had the rest of the week.

[834] There are all these candles that are lit for the people who need a blessing.

[835] You are singing songs.

[836] And this is the part of the brain.

[837] The amygdala is the seed of emotion in the brain.

[838] It's very, very old.

[839] lizard brain part of the brain and the hippocampus which is memory when you sing familiar melodies it triggers emotions which is why people who are beginning to have dementia or people who have Alzheimer's sometimes who have not spoken in weeks if you play the music that was popular when they were young it wakes up the brain oh wow And they will respond in not only an alert and articulate way, but in a happy way.

[840] So you're setting the template for that when you are singing these prayers and songs, which is why when people go to another synagogue or a synagogue gets a new canter, which is the song leader, and he brings the Nusach, which is the Hebrew word for the melodies of the prayers, that is different than the one you're familiar.

[841] with.

[842] People are very upset.

[843] Okay.

[844] Enraged.

[845] Get rid of him or her.

[846] Or I'm switching synagogues to where they have the nussach that I know.

[847] It's quite beautiful.

[848] You know, I get that sense of community from being an AA.

[849] And I had never really had it prior to that.

[850] But I have to say there's something undeniable about sitting in the room I do every Tuesday that I always think, man, how do you get this if you don't, if you have a. haven't wrecked your life with drugs in alcohol.

[851] I do think the thing that people should strive to find as a little community where you do share that space and that time and you're all.

[852] And you said it.

[853] You light a candle.

[854] You make a certain meal.

[855] I think it's important for kids to learn that it's not going to happen on its own.

[856] You have to take little steps, right?

[857] You have to physically do things.

[858] You have to be in action to shift gears in your brain.

[859] You're not just going to, you're not going to just be relaxed.

[860] You're not just going to be anything.

[861] You've got to take some steps.

[862] If they're repetitive, even better, you know, if they start, it becomes muscle memory.

[863] Oh, we sit down on Friday night.

[864] Now we don't, we put that thing away right now.

[865] Now I can shift.

[866] I can enter another compartment in my life.

[867] And these little barriers that signify when you're entering a compartment, they're valuable, right?

[868] To make it different from dinner Monday through Friday.

[869] Exactly.

[870] And the prayers themselves and the structure of the meal covers quite a lot of territory.

[871] So one thing that happens is the blessing of the children.

[872] And the parent puts their hand on the child's head and says a prayer over the children and it ends with and bring you peace.

[873] And it is such a special moment to be standing still.

[874] You're not hugging, you're not running around, you're not praising the child.

[875] The parent is putting their hands on the child's head and calling them.

[876] Oh, and another thing that happens is there's a prayer traditionally that the husband says to the wife, which is a good wife who can find she is more precious than and there are two different translations, rubies or Carl.

[877] Okay.

[878] And what a wonderful thing for children to hear.

[879] I'm so glad you just ended on that.

[880] Because the last thing I want to talk to you about is something that you touched on a minute ago, which is we give almost zero instruction on how to be a spouse or a partner, right?

[881] And something we read early on, my wife and I, that is very hard to do, maybe one of the harder things we do.

[882] But I think also one of the best things is, your children see you get in a lot of fights.

[883] They don't see you resolve anything.

[884] Generally, parents fight in front of their kids.

[885] They both get mad.

[886] There's a separation.

[887] Either that night in bed, they work that out.

[888] They talk it through or they actually go behind closed doors and they do it.

[889] So your kids never see the resolution and action.

[890] They only see how to further in sight or to amplify.

[891] They don't see how to admit wrong, take responsibility, apologize.

[892] And that seems to be something, well, A, it requires great vulnerability to do those things with your partner just on your own.

[893] And now you add an audience of two little monkeys and it's that much harder.

[894] It's important for two reasons.

[895] One is they are going to have conflict with their friends.

[896] And we want to much more than what we tell them to do.

[897] the long, pious, boring lectures.

[898] We give them all the time about how to live their whole lives.

[899] They're just watching us.

[900] They study everything.

[901] And yes, they're good attorneys, but the other thing they are is spies.

[902] So they're watching this.

[903] And if they can hear things, and it's hard not to make this hokey, but if you do it enough, it can become natural.

[904] If they can hear one spouse say to the other, let me see if I understand what you mean or tell me more about that.

[905] We get in our separate camps and we get really stuck there and that's where contempt and indignation really get in the way of communication.

[906] So they can hear us so respectful, potentially respectful of the other person's point of view.

[907] They learn that skill in talking to friends.

[908] The other thing, and I believe in this so strongly, is for a parent to say to the other parent, I hear what you're saying, I need some time to think about how I feel about.

[909] that or how I want to react to that.

[910] I'm going to get back to you.

[911] This is what I want middle schoolers saying to their friends who say, look, it's going to be fine.

[912] Your parents will never know we're going to have such a good time.

[913] What's wrong with you?

[914] Don't be so wimpy.

[915] Don't be so afraid.

[916] And for that middle schooler to be able to say, I need to think about this a little bit.

[917] I'm not sure what my decision is.

[918] What a tool that is.

[919] Yeah.

[920] And that takes a lot of confidence.

[921] This is one of the things that the kids said in the interviews, a lot, the middle and high school age kids.

[922] They said, please listen to me without thinking up the next thing you're going to say.

[923] Good luck.

[924] Yeah.

[925] But that is, they so long to be heard.

[926] And, And in marriages, that's where I see it happening least.

[927] And it's not so much that we're no -it -alls.

[928] We're anxious.

[929] And so we want to settle it right then.

[930] And we're tired and our nerves are afraid.

[931] Yeah.

[932] So it turns into a battle.

[933] And we're not taught at all, a vocabulary or a method by which to evaluate your emotions that I've never had that class.

[934] And so, yeah, the thing that happens a lot with my.

[935] wife and I is we start arguing.

[936] I now know, again, this is after 11 years of having to apologize after lots of arguments and I just don't like to apologize.

[937] So I'm trying to head them off in the past.

[938] It's out of selfishness.

[939] But I know have a feeling in my chest.

[940] I recognize.

[941] There's a physiological response when we start talking.

[942] If we're just arguing about who's picking up who, that doesn't get triggered.

[943] But if we get into something where all of a sudden my heart rate's increasing, my chest is a little tight.

[944] I know, ooh, a fear has been triggered.

[945] I'm a afraid of something.

[946] I need 10 minutes to go think about what fear this probably is because, again, I generally have about four fears.

[947] I just cycle through with everyone.

[948] It's the source of all of my issues with people.

[949] So I need to go sit in a room for 10 minutes and really think this through and figure out which of these fears is being triggered.

[950] And then hopefully I can come back and just say when you said that, I got scared.

[951] You were going to leave me. And then she goes, I'll never leave you and the whole fucking thing's over.

[952] And it, you know, again, it takes a, took me. a ton of practice to be able to recognize, oh, if I'm reacting strongly, it's generally I'm afraid, you know?

[953] Probably five people that I talked to this week in session described exactly what you're talking about.

[954] They would say, I would say, what did it feel like in your body at that moment?

[955] And they would say, I had a terrible tension in my chest.

[956] Sometimes in their stomach, sometimes it's in their chest.

[957] And the analogy I often give is to the kind of sex education kids get in school but no love education at all.

[958] Right, yeah.

[959] The language of emotions and how the body signals us with extremely important information about what's getting triggered and how we are turning from whatever adult age we are into two and a half and screaming at the table about wanting more ice cream.

[960] Yeah, yeah.

[961] I spent a good part of my day as the four -year -old decks.

[962] Everyone does.

[963] And you've used this word several times, and I have an understanding of it that could be incorrect, but I got it from a Malcolm Gladwell book, Blink, where he talks about thin slicing and how quickly your brain can kind of evaluate stuff much quicker than you'd think.

[964] He talks about a psychiatrist or a psychologist who studies married couples, and he would film them, and he would film them for an hour, and he could tell, he could predict with 90 -something percentage rate, whether they would divorce after watching the whole tape.

[965] but if he only watched 15 minutes, he could predict in the 80s.

[966] And even after watching people communicate for five minutes, he could predict like 78 % whether or not they would stay together or not.

[967] And the defining thing he looked for was contempt.

[968] This is a word you keep using.

[969] If he watches two people discuss something, you know, two people in a partnership, if they discuss something that's hard for them to talk about in general or triggering generally, if one of the partners starts rolling their eyes at the other person, that's contempt, right?

[970] And as I understand it, once you've permanently labeled your partner or something, so she's being a bitch as opposed to she's a bitch.

[971] Once you cross that boundary in your head that she's a bitch or she's a, she's irrational or she's blank, that's now a permanent condition.

[972] So it's easy for you to give up and to stop working on something because that that's a, that's not changing.

[973] It's not that someone's acting a certain way in that moment.

[974] it's that they are permanently that type of thing.

[975] And once you file them that way in your head, it gets harder and harder probably to think that there's any resolution or happiness in your future.

[976] And I've caught myself doing it with my kids and I have to police myself where I'll go, oh, she's messy or she is blank.

[977] She hates authority.

[978] She is this.

[979] And I have to try to, I try to remind myself, no, in this moment she's acting this way, She's not anything permanently yet.

[980] Is that part of contempt or have I just conflated a bunch of things?

[981] No, you have not.

[982] And it's the eye rolling, also finger pointing, talking to the person while you're looking at a screen, talking while facing in another direction.

[983] And what I talk to parents a lot about is, and I will often say to a parent, okay, fine, definitely you should get divorced.

[984] Divorce that person, yes.

[985] But before you do, let's also think about, and this gets back to context, the bigger picture.

[986] And we just start to make the room larger.

[987] So the reason I say, fine, get divorced, is to, it's just like saying about the kids, they're not that cute, so don't worry, they'll get abducted.

[988] Right.

[989] Because they're desperate.

[990] It's a whole legal team that's trying to get me to be the judge and say, oh, you're right.

[991] Oh, he's horrible.

[992] I can't believe you've put up with it this long.

[993] What a saint you are.

[994] Yeah.

[995] So the part that gets lost in contempt is compassion, and that's not pity.

[996] it's compassion why would this person act this way at that moment so part of it is what's triggered in you and your big five fears as you named yeah but the other is what is this person going through right now oh it's so hard to make yourself do that when you're angry at somebody yeah i don't really give a fuck what was caused this i just find this unacceptable and the reason you have to do it is that we are living so long that these marriages we're expecting them to go on for longer than they ever have in history used to be like a 10 year commitment you both be dead dad it was so great when i get my aging turned off through science i might be with this woman for 300 years and the thing everybody's afraid of is dying not death death is kind of a leaf, but dying.

[997] Everybody's panicked about.

[998] And yes, we're together for a long time.

[999] And we're trying to raise perfect children for a 21st century that we have no idea what will require of them.

[1000] So is it going to be perfect accentless Mandarin or foraging and welding?

[1001] We don't know.

[1002] So we're so focused on that.

[1003] The other person is just supposed to be part of your set of assets that you can provide to the children instead of, and this is the burden on marriage, we are expecting the person to be the best friend you ever had.

[1004] Yeah, right.

[1005] The perfect sexual partner, a wonderful provider and helpmate.

[1006] and someone who will never get on your nerves.

[1007] One of the things that helps a lot is humor.

[1008] And it's tricky because it's really easy.

[1009] Again, it's snark.

[1010] It can be weaponized quite easily.

[1011] Totally weaponized.

[1012] And it can just burst the bubble.

[1013] Yeah, there's a very fine line between making fun of something because you don't have the balls to bring it up as an issue.

[1014] and actually just bringing levity to a hard situation.

[1015] That's a hard line to navigate for it.

[1016] And the humor doesn't have to be about the other person's characteristics.

[1017] That's a risky one for exactly the reason you said.

[1018] Yeah.

[1019] Because it can be sarcastic or it can be a shield for saying something really pretty critical and nasty.

[1020] Yes.

[1021] But if you can just lighten the situation.

[1022] Uh -huh.

[1023] And I'll give you a personal example of that.

[1024] So I had this article in The Times.

[1025] You've been married for a long time, yeah?

[1026] I will have my 40th anniversary, June 25th.

[1027] Congratulations.

[1028] June 25th.

[1029] That's a tremendous accomplishment.

[1030] And we met when I was 19.

[1031] Oh, boy.

[1032] I had been 19 for two weeks.

[1033] Oh, wow.

[1034] And it's, so we've been through a lot of stuff.

[1035] Sure.

[1036] And I, oh, going to sound so corny um it's a better marriage now than it's ever been oh wow and i definitely think my husband would agree with that but it's possible he would say yeah she's so diluted and you've invited other lovers into the arrangement i assume oh loads loads loads how could we get through it otherwise but one thing he did the other day um was i had this article in the times and people were making comments and I was so naively responding to the comments, which my two very sophisticated adult daughters later said to me, mom, you never do that.

[1037] Don't ever do that again.

[1038] But I was getting a little upset about some of the things people were saying.

[1039] And my husband just said to me, everyone's a critic.

[1040] And it just, it was just air.

[1041] It was just air.

[1042] We both have to put up with a lot of stuff with each other.

[1043] He once came to a talk I gave and someone in the audience said to him, are you her husband?

[1044] And he said yes.

[1045] And he said, whoa, that's not easy.

[1046] And it's true.

[1047] And it's also true for me. So this is true for every single marriage.

[1048] Yeah.

[1049] And do you ever wrestle?

[1050] I have this internal debate in my head.

[1051] I really enjoy the examined life.

[1052] And I think I've learned a lot of tools.

[1053] And I think in general it's really helped me a ton.

[1054] But then there's another part of me that just goes, what if you never asked a fucking question and just floated through?

[1055] You know, did you personally go, is this the right approach?

[1056] Or is, what's the saying?

[1057] Ignorance is bliss.

[1058] Do you ever think like, oh, why couldn't I just float through?

[1059] Why do I have to be mindful at all times of all these motivations we have and fears?

[1060] And is it just the only option for us?

[1061] So, and it's actually being mindful all the time is an exhausting and unnecessary approach to life.

[1062] And I'm always saying to my patients, could you please be a little dumber?

[1063] Could we dumb this down a little bit?

[1064] Yeah.

[1065] Because everybody is too smart here and thinking too much and looking for the subtext and trying to control themselves.

[1066] but we happen to be animals.

[1067] Yeah.

[1068] And so sometimes we behave like animals.

[1069] Sure, a lot of the times.

[1070] Yeah.

[1071] Yeah, they say in AA, you can't be too dumb for AA, but you can be too smart for AA.

[1072] Yeah.

[1073] Oh, and intellectual defenses are just so appealing.

[1074] Yeah.

[1075] And we use it against each other.

[1076] That's why I'm always telling people.

[1077] I say to them, your kids are really dumb, and you better start getting as dumb as they are.

[1078] Uh -huh.

[1079] And you had one neat tip that I thought was cool if I had had a boy, I really would have liked to have heard this in your article about the boy and the dog.

[1080] It was just a tool, which I thought was great, which is try talking to your boys while they're playing basketball, taking a walk, doing something physical.

[1081] They don't want to be face -to -face with you.

[1082] They don't want to sit and stare into your eyes and open up.

[1083] So the girls, when the Girls enter puberty, what they often do is download to their moms every single bit of distress or frustration from every day, every moment.

[1084] And the boys go into their room and close the door and stop talking.

[1085] And one of the reasons they have to do that is there stuff they want to do in their room that you don't want to look at.

[1086] Yeah.

[1087] They don't want to get a safe.

[1088] talk about this, yeah, the frequency of masturbation for boys versus girls.

[1089] I'm of the opinion.

[1090] It's a bit higher for boys.

[1091] Yeah, I agreed.

[1092] That wasn't the conversation.

[1093] We were just disappointed that there's no real artistic representation of female masturbation, young female masturbation and film and television stuff.

[1094] It seems to be an issue that no one wants to.

[1095] It's ubiquitous for like boys masturbate.

[1096] That's something we all know.

[1097] The theme of whole movies.

[1098] Yeah.

[1099] And that's not something that girls, that's presented for girls.

[1100] I feel like that's bad.

[1101] I thought it was bad, too.

[1102] One of the many reasons I thought was that boys I do think are doing it a little more frequently.

[1103] Yeah, I think that's probably true.

[1104] So two sources of enlightened views about not just youth but humans are Lena Dunham's Lenny letter and the TV show High Maintenance.

[1105] Okay.

[1106] Because in both of those places, you see things that are true.

[1107] about the culture at this moment that have not been on screen before or in it or been in print oh and what was I don't I'm not aware of either of those oh you're not I know Alina Dunham is oh so she has it's I'm pretty sure it's weekly she and Jenny Connor are created it but there are different guest editors it's a newsletter and it's writing just by women about the truth of their lives and masturbation would be exactly the kind of topic they would talk about.

[1108] Right.

[1109] And it's a combination of really dark and serious stuff about women written beautifully.

[1110] Today's, this morning's Lenny letter was written by a poet.

[1111] Oh, okay.

[1112] About her medical problems.

[1113] With kind of jolly and adorable illustrations, which is always the good combination in music and art. Yeah, a little sugar.

[1114] with the syrup?

[1115] Dark subject matter, but light presentation.

[1116] And high maintenance is a television.

[1117] Yeah, on HBO.

[1118] Yeah.

[1119] And so this show shows women that you've never seen on the screen before.

[1120] And you say, are these actors?

[1121] Where did they find these people?

[1122] The acting is so great, but they look like real people.

[1123] And they're extremely beautiful.

[1124] Yeah.

[1125] And the kind of subjects that come up on high maintenance are these things that are not in mass culture and that people need to become aware of enjoy and respect like women masturbating.

[1126] Right.

[1127] So that's why I said sex education in school, it's so fettered because every single parent is ready to get up in arms.

[1128] Yeah.

[1129] So what they talk about is pregnancy, prevention, and disease.

[1130] Right.

[1131] And they don't talk about love and relationships.

[1132] In some schools, they do, but it's rarer.

[1133] Yeah.

[1134] And this is the big deficit.

[1135] I would say family citizenship and emotion education.

[1136] And I just heard, I had not known about this, there are now tests of social and emotional skill.

[1137] Okay.

[1138] And kids are getting numbers.

[1139] Oh.

[1140] So now parents.

[1141] Like an EQ and emotional.

[1142] Yeah.

[1143] EQ, but parents are going to be able to say my child was number two in the class and empathy and I heard yours was 11 and I can sort of tell by looking at how she behaves.

[1144] I had a dad in an audience who said, I fought with the pediatrician about my son's APGAR score.

[1145] Do you know what that is?

[1146] When a baby is born, the pediatrician gives them a score.

[1147] You know, is they're blue or not, how they're breathing.

[1148] Yeah, yeah.

[1149] It's just a medical thing.

[1150] One to 10.

[1151] Yeah.

[1152] And this vitals.

[1153] It is vitals.

[1154] So this man said, I fought with my pediatrician about my son's upgar score and I won.

[1155] Oh, you said to him, what did you win?

[1156] Tell me what you won.

[1157] We're attaching numbers to these kids all the time.

[1158] Well, good.

[1159] I'm going to close out what you just triggered one of my funniest memories.

[1160] I worked at California Pizza Kitchen and Brentwood for a while and I was a host.

[1161] And it came time for my review.

[1162] I think you got one every three.

[1163] months and I sat down with my manager and he was going through all these different categories and it's all out of 10 right and we got to punctuality and he said he goes okay I punctuality you've done a good job I gave you a seven and now on appearance and I go oh hold on Dan I got a seven I've been five to 10 minutes early for every shift since I started and he goes yep yep you have and I appreciate that and I go okay great what would one have to do to get a 10 out of 10 in punctuality half hour early and he said well you know we just we got to leave you something to aspire for and I go oh okay and then he kind of went through three more categories and I just go um Dan I don't think I want to work somewhere that they're trying to trick me into doing something better that I'm already doing well and I quit and here's the best part of the whole story the next morning I had a message on my answering machine and it was Dan and he said Hey, Dax, listen, I've thought over this punctuality thing, and I'm willing to go to an eight.

[1164] Oh, wow.

[1165] Well, Dr. Wendy Mogul, thank you so much for coming.

[1166] It's so fun to talk to someone as smart as you, and that has the facts to back up your opinions.

[1167] It's very stimulating for both Monica and I, and I hope you'll come back and see us again, because there's a million topics still I would love to.

[1168] they start screwing up even more and more and more as these kids age, it'll be fun to just get free sessions out of you.

[1169] I would be happy to come back.

[1170] And one of the things I just thought about is I have on my website a program called Over Parenting Anonymous.

[1171] And it started out as a 13 -step program to show it wasn't real.

[1172] And now I think it's 36 because I just keep adding them because we need these mantras to figure out how to navigate the shoals of this idea of perfect parenting.

[1173] Tell us the website.

[1174] It's wendymogel .com.

[1175] So spell that just for people like me. W -E -N -D -Y -M -O -G -E -L.

[1176] Dot com.

[1177] Loads of articles, videos, my lecture schedule, my book tour.

[1178] And again, if you type in Wendy's name, as I did to Google, you'll see all kinds of clips of her talking and she's a very very good public speaker you've obviously done it a bunch it's very entertaining it's very informative and the name of your book that's coming out okay it's voice lessons for parents what to say how to say it and when to listen and it includes it goes from before children are born through the whole span of adolescents and also how to talk to your spouse or partner your the grandparents coaches teachers and your and your efforts and your Oh, wonderful.

[1179] And how did you, the stakes for you are even higher that your kids turn out all right.

[1180] I mean, you're out saying all this stuff.

[1181] For you, we all have this already expectation on our own shoulders, but then for you who's supposed to have a little bit of knowledge on the topic, isn't it just exponential that your kids be self -sufficient at some point?

[1182] Were you hard on yourself as well?

[1183] Was I?

[1184] How about last night at 2 a .m.?

[1185] I just all.

[1186] which one I worry about each day and they're self -sufficient self -supporting adults but it never ends and we used to be we would be on vacation in a restaurant and a stranger would come up to one of my children when they were much younger and put their face in my child's face and say are you perfect so this is an occupational hazard but every occupation has and have a great time on your book tour i'll be in new york chicago san francisco and dc great and it's all on my website and okay wonderful thanks for coming wendy thank you so much for having me jack this is really fun stay tuned if you'd like to hear my good friend and producer monica padman point out the many errors in the podcast you just heard Monica Monica loves boys She also love checking facts Facts, facts Do she love those boys more than facts?

[1187] Is there any overlap with facts?

[1188] Good song.

[1189] Thank you.

[1190] Thank you.

[1191] That's, I can remember it.

[1192] That'll be your new intro every time we do fact check.

[1193] I hope it's different every time.

[1194] Oh, okay.

[1195] It probably will be because I probably won't remember it.

[1196] So Wendy.

[1197] Yeah.

[1198] There's not all that many facts, as you can imagine, because she's an expert.

[1199] Yeah, if you were trying to check her facts of the statement, she said, it would inevitably lead you to her statement.

[1200] Yeah, exactly.

[1201] Like the article would end up being about her anyway.

[1202] Exactly.

[1203] So it's probably me who probably misspoke a couple times.

[1204] Maybe.

[1205] We'll see.

[1206] Just want to list Wendy's books.

[1207] Blessing of a skin knee.

[1208] Blessing of a B minus.

[1209] Voice lessons for parents.

[1210] So she's written three books and you can find them on her website.

[1211] Buy them, support them.

[1212] Yeah.

[1213] Not support them.

[1214] Support her by buying them.

[1215] Correct.

[1216] Monica, Monica loves them facts.

[1217] Monica, Monica loves them boys.

[1218] Really good song.

[1219] I don't even think it was the same as the one a minute ago, really.

[1220] I don't want it to be.

[1221] Okay, okay.

[1222] Okay, so you talked a little about anthropology and garbology.

[1223] Oh, uh -huh.

[1224] Which was interesting.

[1225] A field and subfield?

[1226] Yeah, but also it's and also a field in archaeology.

[1227] Which is anthro as well.

[1228] What do you mean?

[1229] Anthropology is the heading.

[1230] And under it, you have cultural anthropology, a physical anthropology, archaeology is anthropology.

[1231] Oh, it is?

[1232] I didn't know that.

[1233] Because if you were studying, no, if you were digging up bones for dinosaurs, you'd be a paleontologist.

[1234] But archaeologist is specifically digging up human remains.

[1235] Right.

[1236] If you had a degree in archaeology, you have an anthropology degree?

[1237] Yeah.

[1238] You're in the anthro department.

[1239] Interesting.

[1240] Didn't know that.

[1241] So, yeah, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so field of anthropology, and then garbology is a subfield of archaeology.

[1242] Yeah.

[1243] Um, I just thought it was interesting because the word was invented, you can tell me if you think this is wrong.

[1244] Uh, A .J. Weberman in 1971 went through Bob Dylan's trash.

[1245] And that's how it was.

[1246] Really?

[1247] Yeah.

[1248] Huh.

[1249] I, uh, I did not learn that part of it.

[1250] I was like some town, some Midwest town where the guy went to the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the.

[1251] the municipal trash dump and compared what they said they were feeding.

[1252] Yeah, you use that example.

[1253] I think.

[1254] That's how I was introduced to it.

[1255] Yeah.

[1256] But Bob Dylan's weird, perverted stalker fan is the guy who invented it.

[1257] I don't know.

[1258] Maybe that was just the first time he said the word.

[1259] I don't think maybe he invented it.

[1260] But I think raccoons invented going through trash.

[1261] Probably.

[1262] We should give me credit.

[1263] credit or credits do.

[1264] Okay, so you talk about sugar and being very strict on sugar.

[1265] And there's obviously, there's a ton of science about why sugar is terrible for you.

[1266] But Fed Up is a very good documentary on it.

[1267] If anyone is interested in learning a little bit more about sugar, I've seen it.

[1268] Oh, you have?

[1269] Yeah.

[1270] And it's pretty startled.

[1271] Red flag, red flag, red flag.

[1272] We have a pretty airtight.

[1273] commitment about watching all documentaries together as a family.

[1274] You and Kristen and I generally consume all documentaries.

[1275] So I just want to know fucking when and fucking where.

[1276] It wasn't cheating.

[1277] This is before you.

[1278] This predates us.

[1279] Yeah.

[1280] This predates you.

[1281] We watch a good one.

[1282] Oh my God.

[1283] I introduced you to American movie.

[1284] Yeah.

[1285] The other night, which is still I think my favorite documentary of all time.

[1286] It was so many things.

[1287] It's so touching and inspiring and hysterical.

[1288] Yeah.

[1289] It really is special.

[1290] To me, it's the Raising Arizona of documentaries.

[1291] Mm -hmm.

[1292] It has a similar vibe too.

[1293] Yeah, like just the specificity of the characters, you'll just never be.

[1294] It'll be never be topped.

[1295] There's no way you're listening to Mark Bortchard.

[1296] But my God, if someone who knows Mark Bortchers listening, just I love you, Mark Bortchard.

[1297] And Mike Shank, I love you, Mike Shank.

[1298] It was a really good one.

[1299] Everyone should watch that.

[1300] Yeah.

[1301] Okay.

[1302] Well, speaking of documentaries, wild wild country comes up and people should just really watch it.

[1303] It's on Netflix, six part, eight part, four part.

[1304] I don't remember a documentary series on Netflix about a cult that really took off worldwide.

[1305] Rajneeshis, I can finally pronounce that word after now six months of talking about it.

[1306] I just got it a week ago.

[1307] They worship a man named the Bogwan.

[1308] The Boguan.

[1309] And yeah, it's very good.

[1310] Change his name to Osho.

[1311] Yeah, right?

[1312] Okay, so she mentioned when she first entered the field of psychology, they would give either Ritalin or Thorazine to kids.

[1313] And I think most people are fairly familiar with Ritalin.

[1314] Yeah, everyone snorted Ritalin at some point.

[1315] Oh, I did not.

[1316] Ritalin is a central nervous system stimulant.

[1317] use for hyperactivity and ADHD and ADD.

[1318] But thorazine is an antipsychotic medication.

[1319] And normally is used for the treatment of schizophrenia symptoms.

[1320] So that should not have been used.

[1321] Willie -nilly is sort of the takeaway.

[1322] And is what she was saying.

[1323] Yeah.

[1324] Those are two drastically different options.

[1325] In really intensity level.

[1326] Kind of carpet bombing, it sounds like.

[1327] the conditions.

[1328] Yeah.

[1329] I never messed with, I never fucked with Thorzine.

[1330] Maybe I should.

[1331] No. I'm not giving you any ideas.

[1332] Can you freebase Thorstein?

[1333] You mentioned the Vanity Fair article about the guy with the glass eye.

[1334] Yes.

[1335] The movie The Big Short is about him essentially.

[1336] He's one of the characters.

[1337] He's the main character.

[1338] You said he was a neurosurgeon before I became an investment baker, which is pretty much true.

[1339] The article is called betting on the blind.

[1340] side.

[1341] Oh my God.

[1342] If you can get your hands on this, this is, it's tied for me with the very first article in the New Yorker about the director leaving Scientology.

[1343] Oh, Paul Haggis.

[1344] Paul Haggis leaving Scientology, who, an author of that article is the same guy who ended up writing the book going clear, but that article and then this one in Vanity Fair, I've never been so like, it was just like, it was like eating sugar.

[1345] Like every sentence was incredible.

[1346] And you can find it and you should and you should yeah it's really a great read and it's about michael barry well it's spelled b u r r why but as i remember it being pronounced it was barry michael burry yeah that's i'm not even going to try to tackle that one um and uh he studied economics and pre -med at the at ucLA went on to earn an md from vanderbilt and then completed his residency in neurology at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, and then he left that residency to start his hedge fund.

[1347] It's quite a story.

[1348] That movie is so good.

[1349] The big short?

[1350] I love that movie.

[1351] Yeah, it's a really good movie.

[1352] I almost, though, wish I had seen the movie prior to reading that article.

[1353] Because, again, that article for me is just a plus plus.

[1354] But that's more about him.

[1355] So, of course, I wanted the movie to be more about him.

[1356] Oh, right.

[1357] And that's just not what the movie's about.

[1358] And Christian Bell played him, right?

[1359] Yes.

[1360] Christian Bell.

[1361] Christen Bell.

[1362] It's a fantastic movie, in my opinion.

[1363] You talked a little bit about happiness and what makes people happy in and not being a bank account and not a job position.

[1364] It's sort of how engaged they are in their community and how much they help others.

[1365] There's a very good documentary on this.

[1366] It's one of Kristen Bell's favorite movies.

[1367] Is called I Am.

[1368] Yes, by Tom Shadyak.

[1369] And it's very good.

[1370] sort of delineate pretty clearly the things that actually make us happy in life, the things that don't and the things that we think will.

[1371] So it's mentioned that the likelihood of abductions is very small, and you likened it to worrying late your kid will get struck by lightning.

[1372] Washington Post article in 2013 said, children taken by strangers or slight acquaintances represent only one hundredth of one percent of all missing children.

[1373] The last comprehensive study estimated that the number was 115 in a year.

[1374] Oh, wow.

[1375] I wonder how many people get struck by lightning a year.

[1376] I bet it's around that figure.

[1377] Maybe.

[1378] I didn't look.

[1379] How many people are struck by lightning each year?

[1380] So just to put it into perspective, I'm reading something on Wikipedia that says, One estimate is that 24 ,000 people are killed by lightning strikes around the world each year.

[1381] And about 240 ,000 are injured.

[1382] Another estimate is that the annual global death toll is 6 ,000.

[1383] Well, that's a gigantic gap.

[1384] But regardless, both estimates are way more than 140.

[1385] But that's worldwide.

[1386] So it is way different.

[1387] Well, all right, but you just, here's what you're going to do, Monica.

[1388] You're just going to multiply that, okay, by a factor of 20, okay, because we're one.

[1389] 120th of the world's population roughly.

[1390] So 20 times 100, of course, it's going to be 2 ,000.

[1391] So again, even globally, of course, we can't speak to the abduction rate outside of this country.

[1392] Exactly.

[1393] We don't know.

[1394] Still, though, I'm feeling very confident by saying there's probably better odds of your kid getting struck by lightning.

[1395] Okay.

[1396] Yeah, I'm going to stand by that.

[1397] Bad news for me. Okay.

[1398] Over the last 20 years, the United States averaged 51 annual lightning strike fatalities.

[1399] Oh, no, fatalities.

[1400] Okay.

[1401] Placing it in the second position just behind floods for deadly weather.

[1402] Okay, so not bad news for me. 51 people are dying, surely a couple hundred are getting struck.

[1403] All right.

[1404] I guess.

[1405] I wonder what the chances are of getting struck for real and not dying.

[1406] Probably.

[1407] I don't know.

[1408] It's another fact to look up.

[1409] This is endless.

[1410] This is a fact vortex.

[1411] I'll be thinking about lightning strikes for the next 24 hours.

[1412] Malcolm Gladwell, thin slicing.

[1413] You bring that up.

[1414] And the psychiatrist who studies married couples is John Gottman.

[1415] I'm so glad you've finally figured this out.

[1416] Because I think I'm also saying he, in the past I've said he was a professor at Stanford.

[1417] I don't think he is.

[1418] Does it say where he's a professor?

[1419] I mean, it does.

[1420] I have to have the question before I look it up.

[1421] I feel like you're starting to get defensive in these facts.

[1422] Check.

[1423] I'm just saying I have an inquisitive mind.

[1424] I'm not it's I'm not saying you did you failed me. I'm just saying you get me. I know but when you ask questions and I can't answer you're my muse Monica Monica Monica Monica Monica Monica Monica Monica Monica Monica facts facts facts yeah God am I a good singer such a good singer you're a nice singer um anyway John Gottman and In the book, it says after analyzing 15 minutes of a conversation, he could predict within 90 % accuracy.

[1425] Damn!

[1426] Yeah.

[1427] That's pretty conclusive to me. Whether the couple would still be married in 15 years.

[1428] Mm -hmm.

[1429] Yeah, it is incredible.

[1430] That's all for facts for Wendy.

[1431] Thank you, Monica.

[1432] Everybody have a great rest of your day or evening or morning or afternoon or whatever it is you're up to.

[1433] One thing that I really liked about this episode that I think about once a week for sure is the part where she talks about dread and joy and how we fall into a human pattern of dread, dread, dread, dread, joy.

[1434] And I definitely do that.

[1435] Yeah, I observe that.

[1436] And I'm very codependent with you, right?

[1437] So how many times a week do you think I ask you if you're okay?

[1438] It's got to be nauseating.

[1439] It's a lot.

[1440] It's about as many times as someone gets struck by lightning a year.

[1441] Yes, a week is how many times the year.

[1442] Okay.

[1443] I love you.

[1444] I love our arm cherries.

[1445] armchair expert on the Wondry app, Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[1446] You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[1447] Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry .com slash survey.