 Can you explain who Victor Frankl is and why he's important to bad therapy? Sure. Well, he was all, you know, he survived survivor of Auschwitz. He wrote a wonderful book called Mansearch for Meaning. And he was a psychiatrist himself. And one of the things that he says in the book, which was so sorry, that he says in his book that I quote and in mine is that actually one of the things that you need in life, there's a number of things that he felt got him through Auschwitz. One of the things was humor, which is an amazing defense. And unfortunately, it's become so politically incorrect that we are often not allowed to avail ourselves of it. But actually, it's really good for getting through hard times. The other thing he said was that if you want the parts of an arch to form together, you don't relieve it of weight. You put more weight on it. And what he was saying is, you know, actually, you know, making demands of children, which doesn't mean being cruel, but giving them chores, giving them responsibilities, making them responsible for each other, having them in the world doing things, that's better for your mental health than telling them they've probably been traumatized and might not actually recover. That's that's the worst thing you get. You know, the read one of the reasons, excuse me, I'm a big fan of Victor Frankel, I will point out for, you know, this was news to me and it's actually a little bit unsettling that there are some serious questions about Mansearch for meaning how much of the experiences he he showed as his own were actually compiled from other accounts and things like that. But another person that you cite in the book, Christopher Lash, who is best known for two works that came out in the late 70s and early 80s, the culture of narcissism and the minimal self. Frankel and Lash and you quote him in the book about the rise of therapeutic culture, how it's kind of gone everywhere. In the minimal self, Victor Frankel is one of his villains because he felt that Frankel and a number of other people expanded the experience of the concentration camp, which is a very unique historical experience and also one that is like unbelievably intense beyond virtually anything anybody today could be doing. And he would Lash argued that that was where trauma kind of trauma talk started seeping out in the 50s. People started kind of equating their everyday life in a relatively comfortable suburb with a concentration camp. You know, the most famous case of that is Betty Friedan and the feminine mystique saying that, you know, being a housewife was like being in a comfortable concentration camp. Do you, you know, where is, you know, there's no question that it's a vast army of kind of educators and people in the mental health industry that have fanned out into the schools. But what do you think about that argument that, you know, that the beginning of the redefinition of trauma to everyday life might actually start with the misapplication of the experience of the death camps in World War Two? I agree with it completely. We saw a vast expansion in the treatment of in America, in the treatment of the well. All of a sudden, mental health experts were not just treating the sick. They were they decided to treat the well. And so that meant mental health for everybody, first of all. And second of all, we see that these that people often extrapolate from people who experience the most severe trauma. Essel van der Kolk himself talks about combat vets and PTSD and then uses that to extrapolate to kids in elementary school who grew up in the most gentle circumstances. And and I think that's exactly what's gone wrong. We we use they often use these trauma experts often use metaphor. And so it's very hard to evaluate their claims because they slip between what seems to be a serious scientific claim into metaphor. So you can never tell. Wait a second, are you saying that you literally passed down your trauma through your genetic code? Or are you just saying that you told your kids really upsetting stories and upset them? And very often they sort of make a lot of headway by not being clear about that. What what is the nature of their claim? But no, I think that's completely right. How do we, you know, you you stress that I think, you know, this is an absolutely essential and correct distinction of saying, OK, when a kid has a real problem, like they they can benefit from counseling or therapy or some kind of intervention, but not everyday life. Like, how do we how do we draw that distinction in a meaningful way? So that's a great question. And I think parents, you know, know their kids best. But I think in general, a good sort of shorthand is is this something that I could handle when I was their age? So, you know, if something really didn't qualify as trauma when you were a kid, it probably isn't traumatic. It's probably something they can handle. Now, if you've tried to stabilize your kid, if you've, you know, taken the tech out of their environment or whatever else seemed to be contributing to their problem and you can't stabilize a child who is anorexic or severely, you know, has obsessive compulsive disorder and any other number of things where it's really interfering with their daily life and their suffering, by all means, get them help. I certainly wouldn't say don't get them help. Of course, get them help, get even medication if they need it. But unfortunately, the presumed we need to change our, you know, default settings and the default should be no intervention. The default should be let's see if we can give him a healthier life. Can I also ask you because this is I think related or at least in my mind and I apologize that my mind is not the universal mind, so it may not make sense. But you talked at length about your grandmother who was born, I think in 1927. Is that right? Yeah. And I mean, it's an amazing story where and it's a very typical story of people born in her. That's the same year as my mother was born of, you know, one who was a child where they're literally her mother died and there was not enough milk. So she was stunted in growth. She actually contracted polio and spent a year in an iron lung, you know, and then ended up flourishing. You know, is there is there a problem where we valorize, you know, the unbelievable stress that people were under in an earlier age, because I was thinking about that story. And I'm like, wow. And then she went to college, which, you know, in the 40s, like less than 5% of women went to college and a little bit more amended. And I think about my parents' experience. They were born in 23 and 27, grew up poor, very poor, and they were kind of broken by that experience really when I think about them as adults. You know, how do we make sure that we are not just looking back at the old days and say, you know what, we were tough or even better, our ancestors were tough. So our kids need to be tough. Well, a few things. First of all, I think we need to, you know, get clear on what the goal is. So the goal isn't someone who doesn't go through any pain or someone who doesn't, you know, we all have our different personalities. We all have, you know, different levels of patience with each other or forbearance, you know, some people are more irritable or whatever else it is. But but here's the thing, can they function? Because my grandmother formed a family. My grandmother had a stable marriage. My grandmother, you know, had had certain things. My grandmother could be depended upon by her neighbors. My grandmother was a good citizen. These are things we're seeing the rising generation opt out of. They don't want a step. They don't even want to leave their parents' house. And they don't want to get married. They don't want to have children. They don't want people depending on them. And so whatever else you say, you might say, oh, you're you're you're, you know, looking at the pastor rose-colored glasses. I think that's a fair criticism. But the question is, but but were these people undertaking adult responsibilities? Because that's ultimately what we want. We want to raise kids who can say you can depend on me to other people. That's what we want. Yeah. And you're not, you know, one of the things I think about in this context, my father started working in a real way, like contributing to his household when he was about 13. I started at Reason Magazine, which in many profound ways was my the beginning of my career when I was 30. And part of that was because I could afford to kind of hack around. I mean, my parents didn't support me. But, you know, we extend childhood. I mean, we created adolescents effectively after World War Two because we didn't need kids in the workforce in the same way. And as part of this, you know, we're misdiagnosing the fact that childhood is lasting longer and longer, which is annoying if you're a parent because it's like, hey, you know, you're 21, maybe you ought to think about getting your own place. But are we misdiagnosing kind of the curse of wealth that we can afford to start our work lives and our adult lives later for a crisis? Absolutely. There's no question that wealth has played a role. I mean, when I started writing the book, I thought, gosh, these kids have gone through no World War, no Great Depression. They have everything they could want. Why are they suffering? And one of the answers is actually having responsibility is really good for you. Having a job, having, you know, to show up on time, having people you see in person regularly, having neighborhood friends and cousins around. That's all really good for you. And the responsibility is really good for you too. And what I wanted parents to know was not only that that stuff was good for you, but to stop feeling guilty if they wanted to give it to their kids, that kind of responsibility. It is amazing how, you know, they kind of after school job, which used to be something of a rite of passage for everybody from the wealthiest to the poorest, sometimes out of privilege, sometimes out of necessity, was something that everybody kind of bought into. And that has really disappeared at every level of income. And I mean, is that, you know, we just need to put our kids back in, you know, kind of factories or something like that, at least for part of the day. We need to put them back into something. I mean, it's like people will ask me, well, what instead of doing social emotional learning in schools, what would be better for the kids? They could paint the gym. They could literally do anything. They could clean the yard with rakes. They could engage in any activity. They could dance. They could do anything would be better than sitting around and talking about their problems. And that's the truth. Like, we all need to feel productive. We do. And part of that is having responsibility where someone cares if you show up. How much of it is also to, you know, injecting a bit of free range parenting into all of this? One of the sources in the book that you come back to a lot is Camila Ortiz, who is a psychologist who teaches clinical psychology students at Long Island University in his private practice. And he is a big proponent of, you know, the Lenore-Skenazi kind of approach to free range parenting. You know, I was thinking when you were saying, oh, they could paint the gym. And it's like, well, they can't paint the gym because every kid right after school goes to some kind of organized or arranged practice, you know, for this or that year round and things like that. How, you know, so part of it is giving them more responsibility, but part of the solution might also be giving them more free time where they're expected to hang out with their peers and kind of figure out how to do things. That's right. I mean, tech-free free time is great. Sitting around on their phones is a lot less great. And we know that there's no question, you know, as Jonathan Hyde always talks about, the social media has played a really bad role in our mental health. The problem is this is a problem we've known about for eight years, how bad it's been. And we've done nothing to take it out. And why have we done nothing to take it out of that? Not even the schools. The schools allow kids on their phone and on social media all day long. And why have we not? Partly because that we've gotten absolutely in parents have gotten no support from the mental health establishments of these schools. They were happy to go in and give therapy and social emotional techniques and mindfulness. But they were less happy to do was take away the kids cell phones even during the school day. Can I push you on that a little bit, though, too? Because you do say, you know, that it's really not social media. You mentioned earlier in this conversation that, you know, the younger kids who have all these diagnosis, it's pre social media. But also in the book, you talk about how this is something. I mean, it's really more about the broader therapy culture and that it's more it seems like social media is more of an epiphenomenon of that that we allow kids to do whatever they want because we're afraid to discipline them or structure their debt. Can you talk a little bit about why why the therapeutic culture in your argument is more important than the social media one? Sure, because if you give kids a healthy life, then no one, you know, a nutritious thing or harmful thing is going to damage is going to be that damaging. So for instance, social media is bad. There's no question and it's harmful. My last book was about a horrible trend spread spread through social media. But here's the thing. It's like that old commercial when we were growing up, you know, with a frost of flakes, they would put a bowl of sugar cereal until what there was orange juice on the side and toast on one side and eggs and another and they would say part of a nutritious breakfast. And what they were saying is, well, so frost of flakes isn't great. But look at all these other things you could be eating too. And that's where it's not so bad if you eat a balanced diet. Right. And that's the problem. We have social media, which is bad. And then we have all these other things like a constant valorization of being, you know, emotionally traumatized, like regular therapy, teaching you that you need to check in with an adult or a mental health expert before you take any risks whatsoever. Like your mental health diagnosis, which now you believe limits you in some profound way and you can't just get over on your own like you can with, say, shyness or sadness. Now I have no, I have depression. Well, that suggests you need an expert. So all these things have contributed to the really incapacitating of these young people.