The Coddling Of The American Mind: Good Times Have Created Weak Men | Greg Lukianoff

**Adam Taggart** (0:01)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
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**Greg Lukianoff** (0:07)
Over.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
Roger.

**Adam Taggart** (0:08)
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**SPEAKER_5** (0:31)
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**Greg Lukianoff** (0:56)
There's a category of things that get worse precisely because other things get better. One of them is that people get less able to deal with discomfort, even relatively minor discomfort.
This is a repeating theme all throughout history, is that when people who go through particularly hard times, when they're complaining about the younger generation not being as tough and enterprising as they are, they probably have a point, partially because these are themes. But they don't repeat just like this. They tend to repeat on kind of like a downward slope. They actually do get worse over time. Again, precisely because in many ways, we are becoming more comfortable.

**Adam Taggart** (1:43)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. The great engine of American success was built by generations of pioneers, entrepreneurs, scholars, soldiers, and immigrants defined by their grit, strength, and resilience. A contrast that indomitable spirit with today's generational cohort of special snowflakes who seek safe spaces and rush to cancel any discomforting realities and demand desired outcomes without putting in the effort to achieve them. What happens to a society when it loses its backbone? And once lost, how, if at all, can it be regained? For insights, we're fortunate to speak with Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and co-author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Coddling Of The American Mind. Greg, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Greg Lukianoff** (2:32)
Thanks for having me.

**Adam Taggart** (2:33)
Hey, it is such a pleasure. I've been really looking forward to this discussion.
It's a little bit of different fare for what we have on this channel, folks, but I promise we will tie it to the economy as best we can near the end. Greg, as I mentioned there in the intro, you have written one of the bestselling books of the past several years. Congratulations to you and your partner, Jonathan Haidt on the success of that work. Haidt. Thank you. To your partner and Jonathan Haidt. I think it's been a very important work in terms of opening society's eyes to taking perhaps maybe a little more honest look at itself right now. If we can, and for folks that have not read the book, if we could just start with a quick synopsis of it, what exactly is the coddling of the American mind? As I mentioned there in the intro, how do we devolve from the grit and resilience of the greatest generation to today's cohort, which is a lot more, how do you want to say it? Less resilient is probably the nicest way I can put it.

**Greg Lukianoff** (3:38)
I'm a First Amendment lawyer. I'm a Constitutional lawyer and I defend freedom of speech at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And I've been doing this now for 23, 24 years.
And I had my own psychological issues, partially being in the cultural world all the time. And when I was recovering, I was studying cognitive behavioral therapy. And in CBT, you learn to sort of talk back to exaggerated ideas in your head. You get in the habit of when you're on a plane, and you immediately go, we're all definitely going to die, to be able to be like, no, that's catastrophizing, that's fortune telling, that's all of these things. And to be clear, it's not the power of positive thinking, it's the power of rational thinking and rationally examining your thoughts, which is a pretty cool distinction.

**Adam Taggart** (4:28)
So like telling yourself the data planes are actually some of the safest forms of it?

**Greg Lukianoff** (4:32)
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So, and for me, this was literally life-saving. Like this has got me really helped with my anxiety and depression in a way that has been permanent, frankly. And, but I was working on defending free speech on campuses, and I was like, OK, so if this is, if we know there's enough research to show that if you engage in cognitive distortions, you will be anxious and depressed. Why do all the adults on campus seem to be kind of like telling students essentially, usually through example, do catastrophize, do overgeneralize, do engage in fortune-telling and worst first thinking? But at least as of 2008, when I started on this journey, the students weren't really doing this. But then very suddenly, right at the end of 2013 going to 2014, I started noticing that students, a new cohort of students were arriving on campus, where it seemed like they had imbibed what I would call reverse CBT. It's like they believed that you should catastrophize, that you should engage in emotional reasoning, which is believing any feeling you have must come from something real and specific, and you already know what that thing is. And I noticed this, and I realized pretty quickly that I've been worried about this for years because students who were showing up on campus, they were justifying cancellations, they were justifying deplatformings, they were justifying trigger warnings and new speech codes on the idea that they were, that people were really fragile, they could be permanently damaged by words, and it was all rooted in this catastrophic distorted way of thinking about everything, frankly.