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[soft instrumental music]

[Kimi] I couldn't function, I could hardly sleep, I couldn't eat

because at the end of the day, you're kind of killing yourself.

I was deeply overwhelmed by it, for all of my freshman year.

I didn't really have a future in mind.

I, I thought I would maybe make it to 20.

Mental health.. [chuckles] among Gen Z is a travesty.

Most of the adults were worried I would be in hospitals forever

and not really be a functioning human.

Almost every other person I know

has some sort of mental health problem.

I was scared of what the day was gonna bring me.

It just kind of radiates outward and outward

until everything around you is destroyed.

[softly] No. [in normal voice] Let me think about this.

[laughs] Um...

Oh. How does this begin?

Kind of went against my parents will.

And this was like, "I'm going to California."

And when I came to America,

the very first day I landed in LAX

and went to, like, the first gas station.

I remember, like, the cashier inside the store,

just like waving at us.

And I was so taken aback.

I was like, "Are you, are you waving at me?"

Because in other cultures,

the level of friendliness wasn't that sincere and that deep.

My initial perception of America was that it was

the friendliest country I have ever been to.

So first goal was to go to college.

That was my main immediate goal

and that's what would make my parents take me seriously.

So I decided to go to an art school,

uh, the Art Institutes of California.

I had a lot of potential. I was very conscious of that.

I seen what my parents had achieved

in their lifetimes, in their day and age.

I was full of self-confidence when I was 18,

but while I was in college, that disintegrated.

[skate screech, clatters]

[dramatic music]

[music softens]

[Lucy] On a bad day, it could be, like, so anxious and overwhelmed

I can't even talk, not really knowing what's real,

sending my friends crazy incoherent texts

and they think I'm high,

wandering around at night with my shoes off.

Those moments are really terrifying, because...

...I really do feel like I don't quite know what's real.

I get really paranoid, but mostly it's just

stressful and exhausting

and I don't understand what's going on

and I don't know what to do.

I had my first depressive episode when I was eight

and things sort of kept getting worse in middle school.

By the time I was in high school, I was out for a year of school

and different treatment centers

and then finished high school somehow,

and then another year in treatment centers and hospitals.

So it's, it's been a wild ride.

[somber music]

The treatment centers, uh,

probably saved my life, but were also really hellish.

I ended up being sort of tossed from place to place

because they couldn't figure out what was going on with me.

Um, and I had these increasingly scary and chaotic episodes

of what seemed sort of like psychosis or really intense dysregulation.

And eventually I ended up at a place

where a doctor suggested, "Maybe you're on the spectrum,"

and gave me a checklist of autism symptoms,

and I think I threw it right back at her.

It seemed crazy to me, and I didn't even want to think about it.

[soft music]

[Kimi] I chose audio production. Creating music, producing music.

I translated the financial

into, like, the quality of education.

So I thought, "I'm paying a lot.

So they're definitely teaching me, like,

the golden rules for life."

I really, really believe that

my professors were like an extension of my parents,

and I took everything they said to heart,

like almost to a religious degree.

[Lucy] When I first got an autism diagnosis,

I, I rejected even the possibility that I might have it,

'cause it just seemed like yet another thing wrong with me.

And then I saw that the treatment I was getting

wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't had the diagnosis.

And so I started to go from kind of hating

this part of myself to accepting it.

It finally seemed like being myself would be acceptable.

[Kimi] So I believe my focus was just gonna be on the audio.

All the classes would just be audio specific.

But not too long into my college journey,

I was introduced to ideas such as microaggressions.

[Kimi] And so, through all of them teachings,

I was viewing a lot of interactions

through the lens of microaggressions.

[female voice reading]

I began to see myself through the lens of Black and a woman.

It was like everything that I tried to do

would always be met with opposition.

[soft tense music]

-I specifically remember the day. -[rain pattering]

Gray clouds outside, it was raining,

-and I remember the moment I was like, "Is this true? -[thundering]

Is what they're saying, like, real?

Is, is this how the world works?"

And then I was like... I accepted it.

I was like, "I think this is real and I need to wake up

and grow up and just adopt this."

Like, this is how the world works.

And that day it felt like something dark,

-like, entered my heart. -[heart beating]

And it was very vivid and very real.

And I was like, "The world's a lot darker than,

than I thought it was."

[muffled screaming]

[Lucy] Getting into Stanford was one of the only good things

that happened to me that spring.

And once I had that concrete goal in mind,

I decided I need to figure out how to get my life together

so I can actually do this.

And some of the doctors told me like,

"You're not going... in two months, you're not gonna go from, like,

a locked psych ward to Stanford. That just doesn't happen."

And that made me want to do it more.

College gave me the motivation to learn how to live independently.

It wasn't just that I hadn't been independent,

it was, I hadn't even been in a room alone for, like, ten months.

So it was really terrifying.

But I also finally had a really compelling reason to be

done with hospitals and have a somewhat normal life.

I was terrified every day, but I was also really determined to make it happen.

[birds chirping]

[upbeat instrumental music]

[Kimi] I thought that the only way that I was gonna get... ahead

was by acknowledging my victim status in society.

And so in order to kind of compete and get the best grades,

I sort of showed how, how much of a victim I was

in order to impress my professors

in order to seem like I understood their concepts the best,

because they had, they had me believing

that the only thing I could turn to was my skin color and my sex.

[Lucy] Ableism is discrimination against disabled people,

and as with most of these social justice terms,

um, it's a very real phenomenon.

But I think I also use the term "ableism" to describe

basically things where I felt personally

misunderstood or, or mistreated.

Ableism almost, it almost described

any situation where I felt excluded,

except I felt excluded by most things at this point.

And there had been a lot of situations where I was,

essentially, told to shut up

because I didn't belong to XYZ marginalized group

and, and therefore I couldn't, I wasn't really entitled

to an opinion on the subject.

And so I now had something

that would make people listen to what I had to say more and,

and give me a little bit more authority and give me power.

And I, I don't think of myself as power hungry or anything like that.

But I think it is kind of natural human instin--

instinct, um, to want more power.

[music continues]

You expect everyone to think like you.

And if they don't, you push them away.

When I started to use the vocabulary of, like,

marginalized, intersectional, hegemonic, blah, blah, blah,

people just kind of smiled a little bit more.

You share these religious ideas about the world.

And I started feeling like, I was, I was part of an in-group.

You know how the world works

through the virtue of just being oppressed.

It was just very clear to me that if I was an activist,

I was going to be accepted more.

It's just really exciting to think that, like,

this whole world is out to get you, but you are the hero,

like, you're Katniss Everdeen.

[dramatic music]

She plays in these evil hunger games

and she takes down the dystopian republic.

She's, like, really good with bows and arrows,

and she's also conveniently very pretty

and, like, why wouldn't you want to be her?

[Kimi] My professors, media,

Twitter, I would just follow their commands.

[Lucy] I was engaged in this wild crusade

to save the world from the scourge of ableism.

Any person who needed to be canceled,

I was ready to do their bidding.

I was ready for a fight. Ready to react.

[whimsical music]

[soft music]

[Saeed] Four hundred other students come, like, 500

like, they're all coming to college for the first time.

And first of all, I think I just overwhelmed,

like, by just the sheer number of... [whispers] white people.

Like, I just hadn't met any.

I mean, I'm coming from the biggest Black nation on Earth.

And then it's just like, you know, I've met

white people there and seen a few there,

I was in New York for a couple days,

so I'd seen a couple.

But this was just, like,

straight white people.

Like everywhere I turn.

And I was like, "What is going on here?"

"I'm Josh, I'm James, I'm Jos-- I'm Jake."

I turn around, I can't recognize any of them.

Like, I can't tell them apart.

It's really bad. Really, really bad.

Let's put it this way, you're coming to America

in the fall of 2016 from Nigeria.

Donald Trump is about to be elected president.

The tension on campus, you can literally cut it with a knife.

And I'm out here like, "Who's Donald Trump?

What is left? What is right?

Who is liberal? What is conservative?"

Like, I'm coming in zero knowledge of political America.

[music continues]

So I grew up in Abuja.

We weren't poor.

But we were just right above that not-poor line.

I grew up Muslim, every morning you know,

the routine was simple, school in the morning.

You would go to school from, like, 8 a.m. until 4 p.m.,

leave school, change clothes in the car,

and then you would go to Islam e-- in the evening from 4:30

to, like, 6:00 and then get back home, have dinner,

do your homework and then rinse and repeat

for, like, 13, 15 years.

So there's this picture in my mind, the Oxford University debates.

I now look to the first speaker, Member of Secretaries Committee,

Sara Dube, Saint Hugh's College, to open the case for the proposition.

-[cheers and applause] -[Saeed] Someone would go up

and then be like, "This is what I think, blah, blah, blah, blah."

Today, the opposition will tell you

that this genetic engineering will herald

a new improved age for humanity.

You'd be like, "Oh my God," you know, like...

So I had this vision of Western education as a whole,

not just American education sort of being like,

"Okay, regardless of how controversial, sort of, like,

you know, whatever it was, let's go. We're gonna argue out.

We're gonna hammer it out." This is the picture that I have

what American college is gonna be like.

Lafayette, at this time, it's not an easy, you know, place to be at,

one on social media, but also on campus,

on social media, to start with.

Social media, social media.

[clicks tongue]

If you say this, it means something.

If you don't say this, it means something.

Social media

played a large role

in my view of the world.

If you like something it means something, if you don't like something,

it also sends a certain signal.

A very, very huge role, especially Twitter.

Oh, my gosh, Tumblr.

Lafayette is Facebook.

I hopped on to Twitter, um,

in 2009, and I was just using it

to follow my favorite artists and bands.

[Lucy] I got into Tumblr

because I just wanted to meet other autistic people online

and, and hear about their experiences and not, like, feel as alone,

and it was really great in that sense.

But then there was this really kind of fierce activist side of things.

[Kimi] And before I knew it, it was the only way

I had a grasp on what's happening in the world.

So liking or not liking.

Checking it every ten minutes.

Or sharing or not sharing

has all these social implications.

[Kimi] For a lot of the friends that I had.

I would analyze, I would analyze everything they were doing,

their interests, people they followed.

Oh, I remember there was this one guy who was following

Ben Shapiro on Twitter. That was enough for me.

Your job as an adult is to guide your child through life, not to sit around

waiting for your child to tell you what they think their gender is.

[Kimi] And when I saw that, I couldn't talk to them again

because I knew if they could f-- do something

as horrible as follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter.

Like, what more are they capable of?

[Saeed] So I think the biggest confusion that hit me

was just the weird, like,

lack of, you know...

...grinding intellectual discourse.

It felt as though all the conversations that were being had

all the debates that were being had,

were still very limited

to a certain group of pre-approved

or pre-agreed upon ideals,

which then tend to lean left. That was the consensus.

And, you know, debate should not stray from that consensus.

I became convinced that if someone used the phrase "person with autism,"

my brain would immediately go to,

"They think that autism can be separated from the person."

Well, that means that they want

autism to be separated from the person,

which means that they want autism to be cured,

which means that they want people with autism not to exist.

And that is eugenics, which amounts to genocide.

So just three words "person with autism,"

and I would immediately be thinking about genocide.

That is not healthy.

I tried to do whatever I could to...

...curb the existence of white supremacy and, like,

the roots of, of white supremacy,

which to me seemed to be coming from certain Twitter accounts

uh, such as Ben Shapiro, Ann Colter

and this guy Mark Dice or whatever.

And I was like...

..."Why are they, why are they on Twitter?

Like, how have they not been banned yet?"

And I thought that was just, just a function

of no one's actually taking the initiative to report them.

So I would sit down all the way through the night

trying to look for tweets where there was, like, a call to violence.

So like if Ben Shapiro would tweet something violent,

I would look for that in his timeline and report that

even if it bounced back and said it wasn't violent, I would try again and try again.

[students] It is right to rebel. Ben Shapiro go to hell.

[Lucy] I remember. This was probably November when Ben Shapiro

was coming to campus, and it was, like, this big thing

'cause it's Ben Shapiro, and there were fliers absolutely everywhere.

And they said Ben Shapiro's presence threatened the lives

or the safety of marginalized community members.

And, and I think my first thought was like,

"This is extreme, this is ridiculous."

And then I sort of... there was the, "Well, you're privileged,

you're white, you're not one of these groups.

You can't tell other people how they experience the world.

Um, you're probably just drawing on your implicit racism

and you need to listen to people's lived experience."

This, this, um, instant chorus of stuff

that made me feel like I shouldn't question it.

Not just that I shouldn't question it,

but that it was morally wrong,

um, for me to disagree even in my head.

-[students] Safety. Safety... -[man] Safety. Safety.

[Saeed] Coming to America and finding people so defined

by their politics is absolutely abnormal.

In Nigeria, politics is very simple, you know.

You don't have left or right. Everyone is just corrupt.

[laughs] And then you just decide

which level of corruption you're go-- you're going to be on.

-[people arguing] -[Saeed] I'm coming in,

I, I think a lot of international students

are coming in and are like, "Why?

Why are we all so annoyed? Why? Why are you screaming?"

[people shouting]

[soft music]

[Kimi] I was at a Bible study

with a lot of other youth my age,

but of different backgrounds like white, Hispanic.

However, I was the only Black person

and... I just remember sitting there

and taking into account everything that was happening.

I was conscious of someone scooting an in--

like, an inch away from me, and that was like,

a subconscious microaggression.

Or if someone would say hello to someone else,

I would interpret that as another microaggression.

You know, how are they forming their sentences?

Are they walking on eggshells because there's a Black person here?

[Kimi] 2016 was the year that I came to know of BLM

and a lot of the shootings that had taken place

of unarmed Black men at the hands of the police.

-[repetitive gunshots] -[man screaming]

So I was particularly traumatized

by the shooting of Philando Castile.

[woman] We got pulled over for a busted tail-light in the back.

So I would cry, like, a lot about that.

At the same time, Trump was running.

We are going to win again all the time.

[Kimi] And I just, in my mind, I couldn't conceive

-that it was even possible that he would win. -[crowd cheering]

I thought Hillary had it in the bag.

I was like, "The world's going to be saved."

But then... I went to my pastor's house

to watch the, uh, election,

and I just remember seeing, like, all the states turn

and it was, like, so scary.

It was, like, really, really scary.

And then everyone in the house was, like, celebrating.

[announcer] The president elect

of the United States of America, Donald Trump.

[Kimi] When Trump got elected, that's actually

a really traumatic memory for me.

It really, it really freaked me out

'cause I was convinced that I was gonna die.

[interviewer speaking]

Honestly, I didn't know how I was gonna die.

It was what CNN was saying. It's what Twitter was saying.

So however wa-- way it came, through starvation,

through, uh, lack of opportunities, it was gonna come.

-[somber music] -[crickets chirping]

The night Trump was elected. I, I could not sleep.

I had to stay up and, and just make sure

that the results were wrong,

'cause I was certain that there was, like, a glitch

or, like, a, a counting issue. So I stayed up.

I kept my eye on Twitter, I kept my eye on the news.

And the next day, I went to school.

The first people I turned to were my professors.

I was like, "It's wrong, right? Like, he, he didn't win.

Like, it was a-- they, they messed up somewhere, right?"

This one professor was like, "No, it's, it's done. Like, he's the president."

And I just remember beginning a new reality

where the world was that much more dangerous.

I could hardly sleep, I couldn't eat,

anxiety attacks, trembling, tremors,

nervous breakdowns, sleepless nights, insomnia.

[Saeed] I, you know, was trying to be as virtuous as I could.

So I joined all the social justice groups,

even though, like, I didn't really understand this sort of social justice.

We had this protest and they were inviting people up to speak.

And, you know, me trying to be all cool and be all virtuous

and, like, you know, trying to show support and everything. So I made this metaphor.

I didn't make it, but I sort of stole it from my father.

It was like, you know, "Blackness is not a skin color.

It's an attitude to life. If you believe in, you know, fundamental human rights

because Black people have been so long denied it,

you can, you are Black in that sense."

I go up there, you know, feeling all cool with myself.

Da-da-da-da-da. If you're white, you can be Black.

If you're Black, you can be purple.

Whatever it is, I'm like, "Everyone can be Black."

And what happened after that?

A lot of people I thought I was tight with,

just stopped talking to me. [clicks tongue]

[soft music]

My battle with, you know, beg-- like, beginning to feel depressed

at Lafayette started at the end of my freshman first semester.

It's a confluence of a number of factors.

One is, you know, you're coming from a very,

very different cultural background, and you're meeting a culture,

a new culture that's sort of telling you to change,

like, not change a little, but change radically. This is who you have to be.

-[protesters making noise] -The second was just the nature

of conversation on campus.

You know, no room for debate, no room for conversation.

You wake up every morning and it's every-- everyone's screaming at you,

"You're this, you're that." And I, and it's not like they're screaming at you,

but you can imagine them screaming at the version of you

that would have said certain things.

It felt like I couldn't live a true life.

What I thought to be true, I would keep in my head

and then say something else.

I would see that disparity

between the me that was being presented

and the me that was in my head.

That self-silencing way put me in my own head.

So I was talking to myself alone and just really, really, really

getting into a dark space where, you know, I would wake up

every morning and be like, "What the hell am I doing here?

What the hell am I going for here? Why am I in college?

I might as well just, you know, peace right now,

'cause what the hell am I doing?"

I couldn't consistently live

in that culture of, you know, vitriol and,

you know, more than anything, um...

...hate.

There's a Wawa convenience store right across the road.

There's no stop signs on that road,

So I would just be walking down, And I would always just wish

that, you know, a car would just run me over and I would just graciously die.

Because, you know, in that sense, if I died,

I wouldn't feel the guilt of taking my own life

and my parents being sad about it.

It would just be like, "No, I left."

[Greg] I'd gone to the, um...

...the hardware store right across from my house to get, you know, um,

to get wire, you know, to, to tie around a bag, um...

I decided that if I ground up all my, all my medications

and, um, took them all

and put a piece of wire around my neck

and with the, um, with the, uh, the bag, I could,

I could knock myself out and then when I would--

if I were to wake up from the drugs,

I, I, I'd, I'd suffocate.

So I could, just wanted to make it foolproof.

It felt desperately important.

It wasn't something I could wait on.

It was something that I needed to do

while I still had the will to do it.

And it didn't so much seem like I had

to do it in order to stop feeling pain.

It was something more like...

...I was bad and I was broken and I had to go.

It's really crazy what your brain can sort of convince you of.

I actually thought, you know, I thought things like,

"My family would be happy for me."

I'd gotten so s-- depressed,

but so warped in my thinking

that I actually thought that I-- my sister's a doctor.

that I-- if I'd asked her to help me kill myself, she'd help me.

-[birds chirping] -By the time you're at the stage

where, where you're gonna kill yourself,

you're not, you're not in your right mind.

And I was not myself.

It's hard to really describe how I felt,

um, when I got checked into the psych hospital, um...

Partially because there's such a constant feeling of terror.

It smelled really bad, of course.

Um, and the people were, were pretty stern.

Um, you know, I, I was kind of af-- afraid of some of the,

some of the attendants, and it was funny

'cause you, you'd have moments in there

where you'd be watch-- watching TV.

And, um, I remember, like, changing the channel

and, and having a moment that felt almost kind of normal.

And then having one of the girls who was in there come back

and just burst into hysterical tears because I'd changed the channel.

[water running]

Even that little glimmering second

that things felt slightly normal,

it was a reminder that, that, um, where I was.

[whimsical music]

[Jonathan] So I've always been really partial to, uh, to folk wisdom

and, and quotations from the ancients

because ideas from previous generations

get filtered through the generations.

People a thousand years ago weren't smarter than us,

but the only things we get from them are the really smart things.

So Greg had asked to talk to me,

uh, because years before, when he was struggling

with his own depression, he had read my first book,

The Happiness Hypothesis.

And that's a book about ten ancient ideas.

I read the wisdom literature from the entire world.

So one day Greg emails me and asks if we can go to lunch,

and we have this lunch that really became life-changing.

[Greg] So I'm recovering from

suicidal depression in 2008,

and the same time I'm learning about cognitive distortions.

This is when I started doing cognitive behavioral therapy.

Um, it was recommended by my sister-in-law, um,

and, uh, it's no stretch to say it saved my life.

[Jonathan reading]

...depression, anxiety, and a lot of other,

a, a lot of other disorders that are related to those.

It was discovered by Aaron Beck and a few others in the 1960s,

uh, who dis-- they discovered that their depressed patients

would go in these cycles, they would, they would ruminate,

they would say these distorted thoughts over and over again,

like, "This thing went wrong and it went wrong because I'm stupid

and I'll always be stupid, and this always happens to me."

And he would try to argue with them.

Uh, and he found that actually, uh, if you can get them

to interrupt those thoughts, then at least temporarily,

the pain goes away. They get a little bit of relief.

It's deceptively simple.

Uh, what you're supposed to do,

uh, is when you have, like,

a really strong negative reaction to something,

you're supposed to sit down and write down

what the initial thought was

and what the evidence was of that thought,

and then pick a cognitive distortion.

And cognitive distortions are, are mental exaggerations,

The-- they're, they're things that everybody's brain does...

um, that distorts the way reality looks like.

So, for example, a really common one is binary thinking.

That either everything's horrible or everything's great.

There's, there's, there's no shades of gray.

There is catastrophizing, of course, which is, you know,

like, a date doesn't go well and you, you, you think it's over for you,

that you, you're never gonna find anybody.

The amazing thing is that Beck's discovery was actually

widely known in ancient Greece and Rome and ancient India,

and almost all the wisdom traditions of the world

recognized that we, we have these distorted thoughts.

And if you can, if you can teach yourself to see

reality more clearly and break those thoughts cycles,

you get relief from the suffering.

And unless you actually make a habit of it, you, you're never gonna reach

the point where your brain starts talking back to those,

to those negative voices that you have in your head.

And that's why it kind of snuck up on me.

I was doing it several times a day

for months and months and months,

and at times even wondering,

like, if I was making real progress.

And I remember sometime in the fall of 2008,

um, having that, that little narrative

about being broken, you know, pop up in my head,

and it just didn't feel true anymore.

And in a relatively short period of time,

given how intense it was, it, it was amazing, like,

how much ground I was able to gain, gain back

over these things that I'd struggled with my whole life.

-[traffic humming] -[soft dramatic music]

I'm the president and CEO of the Foundation

for Individual Rights and Expression.

Uh, we defend free speech and free thought

on campus and off.

Since I, you know, work in higher ed,

I, I'm on campus all the time,

and I'm looking on campus and I'm like,

"Wow, it's kind of like administrators are telling students

to catastrophize, to engage in binary thinking,

to do all these things that I was taught not to do."

They've disinvited hundreds of speakers

to protect students from ideas or speech that might upset them.

Even James Franco got canned.

-[laughs] -Administrators have cracked down an,

an inappropriately-direct laughter, harsh text or emails

and lots of other speech crimes.

Colleges provide websites and phone numbers

so students can report people who offend them, even anonymously.

Administrators teach students that they're fragile

and in constant danger

and can be permanently harmed by words.

This is not a kind or compassionate thing to teach people,

but from 2008 to about 2013,

um, I was like, "Well, you know, administrators seem to be

selling all this catastrophizing, all these cognitive distortions,

but at least students aren't buying them."

They were, uh, kind of rolling their eyes

at what administrators wanted to tell them.

But then, right at the end of 2013,

but all the way through 2014, it was like lightning hit.

It was just completely different on campus.

And suddenly students were ca-- were popping up on campus

who were making arguments that, frankly, to me,

sounded a lot like, uh, cognitive distortions

[students] Racist, sexist, anti-gay. Charles Murray, go away.

[Greg] In 2012, there was none of this.

And by 2014, 2015, there was a lot of it.

[screaming]

It was an extremely rapid and very troubling shift.

Suddenly, just in the last few years, Greg says,

students on campuses around the country

are being taught to catastrophize,

to overgeneralize, to make mountains out of molehills.

[Greg] And if they keep going this way,

this awful worldview is going to make them depressed.

And it was like, boom,

"Oh my God, this is what is happening."

I thought Greg's idea was brilliant.

And so I said to, you know, I said to him,

"Greg, you've got to write this up. You've got to write this up,

like, as an article, like, for The Atlanticor something

and, and you, you know, if you want some help,

like, if you want a psychologist along to help you

with the psychology terms,

I, I'd be glad to join as the second author."

[Greg] Are you kidding? I told John I'd love to work with him.

I was already a huge fan and that was it,

the beginning of the collaboration.

[Jonathan] So, you know, we write the article

the first draft in late 2014.

We submit it in 2015, goes through editing

comes out in August.

It gets a lot of attention.

[newscaster reads]

[man] How good intentions and bad ideas

are setting up a generation for failure.

You write about that adolescent anxiety and depression

-are unlike anything seen in modern times. -[man] Yeah.

I don't agree that,

you, when you become students at colleges,

have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.

[Jonathan] A few months later, all hell broke loose.

-Beginning at Yale. -[girl] Who the f#*#*#* hired you?

You should step down if that is what you think

about being a master you should step down.

It is not about creating an intellectual space. It is not.

[Jonathan] Things heat up even more in early 2017.

Violent protests at Berkeley.

-[distant explosion] -[woman] Mayhem on campus.

[Jonathan] At Evergreen State College.

What about our protection, right now?

[students chanting in protest]

[Jonathan] Basically took the president of the university hostage.

They wouldn't even let him go to the bathroom.

[Greg] So I call up John in 2016

-and say... -[Jonathan] "The problem is getting worse.

We have to turn this into a book."

I realize like, "Okay, you know what?

This is actually the problem of our age.

This is a whole generation going off the rails."

[Greg] I think it's really important to have great sympathy

for younger people today, because they're just doing

what older people are telling them,

like this idea that they're always in constant danger,

that words will permanently harm them,

and that they're much more fragile than they actually are.

We're taking these brilliant, hardworking,

amazing kids and teaching them

that they're capable of much less than they actually are.

[soft suspenseful music]

[Jonathan] So throughout the early 2000s,

and even as late as 2015, 2016,

we all thought that our students were millennials. The millennial generation.

[Greg] And what we discovered early on

was that this was a whole different generation hitting campus,

which is now known as Generation Z.

People born in 1996 or later.

[Jonathan] They are really different from the millennials,

much more depressed, anxious and fragile.

Interpreting generational change is a really tricky art.

And, and you look at almost any indicator,

you see, "Well, you know, it's going up a little bit here

or no, maybe it's going down a little bit here.

And where do we cut it off?"

You almost never see elbows.

You almost never see a hockey stick.

You never see a line like this.

Except in 2012.

Suddenly, from out of nowhere, teenagers, especially girls,

they start rising very quickly.

Nothing like this has ever happened before.

[Greg] An argument that comes up all the time is just,

"Oh, they're just more open about anxiety and depression."

Um, and that argument doesn't really hold up to the data,

because not only has, um, anxiety and depression

gone way up among people from Gen Z,

um, hospitalizations uh, for self-harm,

suicide attempts, and successful suicides

have gone up, uh, just the same amount.

So when John and I set out to write the book,

we faced this huge mystery,

"Why are Gen Zers so anxious and depressed?"

And the whole book is trying to figure out

what's so different about them and why.

[soft suspenseful music]

[music turns upbeat]

[Saeed] At the end of my freshman year, I go back home.

I think one of the things that I just... once I get home,

the first thing that really hits me

is just...

...freedom.

Like, I wasn't trying to pretend to say what I thought or not say what I thought.

It was just, like, while I was there, I was with me.

I remember food really helped.

I don't know why, but I'd just found Nigerian food again

and I was like, "Oh my God, you are me.

We have gotten back to our element."

I told my parents, I, I, I didn't tell them, you know, the full details,

but my parents, you know, obviously, they know their son.

You know, they could tell I was, like, deeply sad.

My parents were like, "Consider going back, you know, just give it another shot."

You know, it's bad when, you know,

your dream is to go to American "school"

and, like, you come back and you're like, "Uh-uh,

it's not for me. I'm not going back there."

[soft tense music]

[Lucy] I found out that George Floyd died from an email,

was from the student staff in my dorm.

It came with trigger warnings, of course.

The tone, tone was very somber.

We're here for you in this horrific time of,

um, violence, brutality, racism, everything.

There was this barrage of emails

from it seemed like almost every department.

Group chats were overflowing with like,

"These are the bail funds, these are things you can do."

It was so much pressure to take all these actions

and, and to have-- and to adopt these perspectives

without asking any questions.

It kind of sent me into a tailspin.

I was, I was anxious, I felt guilty constantly.

I couldn't stop thinking about the whole white privilege thing.

And the only, the only good thing to do

was to be anti-racist, which involved

counting my friends and tallying the number of Black,

white, brown friends I had, and then, and then making sure

to make enough friends, so that I had those numbers even.

It meant making sure I didn't read too many books

by white authors or listen to the wrong kind of music.

I was really torn on rap 'cause I didn't know if that was appropriation or appreciation.

Even in my own writing, because I write fiction,

I couldn't write about characters of color 'cause that was appropriation.

But I also couldn't write only about white characters because that was bad.

I essentially couldn't write about anyone

whose identity wasn't exactly the same as mine,

but then I would just be populating my stories

with many versions of me, which sounds incredibly boring.

I attended this, this vigil for George Floyd.

It was a Friday evening. Usually, I would be going to Shabbat services,

but this seemed more important.

I guess maybe that tells you something

that it, it started to seem almost spiritual, religious.

It started with the organizers saying

something about how you might not feel comfortable here,

and if so, you're probably part of the problem.

And I absorbed that message,

absorbed the idea that I was part of the problem.

And I, I felt like attending this vigil

was, was part of this atonement

for what I had done wrong.

And I guess what I had done wrong was just being white.

[Saeed] When I came back in my sophomore year, it didn't go away.

Like, the, the campus culture being very vitriolic,

and I just slipped right back into where I was.

One thing that began to help, I had found, um, Jonathan Haidt,

he, uh, spoke about why people felt so deeply, you know,

moved and pulled by politics

as a coping mechanism or whatever it was.

I delve deeply into Jonathan Haidt's work,

um, watched over like 200 hours of his videos on YouTube.

Like, you know, I was really just trying to understand what the hell was going on.

And, like, this guy seemed to have it figured out.

[birds chirping]

[Lucy] I don't wanna say that COVID had a silver lining,

but I think leaving campus

and being at home

was kind of a turning point

in, in emerging from the advocacy phase.

In the summer of 2020, I was

at home and surrounded by my thoughts.

In high school, my friend and I started the Kindness Club.

It involved a lot of lollipop distribution.

Her whole thing was always kindness as a way of, of life.

And with all of this activism,

it was becoming increasingly clear to me

that I had strayed from my goals of, of kindness,

compassion, um, genuine social justice

and that this, this set of thought processes

was really unhealthy and was making me miserable.

And I didn't want to keep going with that.

I wasn't really sure what the alternative was

until a friend sent me a link.

I was astonished to find that, like, there were Black thinkers

writing about race and sharing ideas that I never heard on campus.

I listened to a lot of, um, The Glenn Show

with John McWhorter, Glenn Loury.

That was great. I got really into Titania McGrath,

the fictional, uh, activist.

I read Coddling of the American Mind

and was like, "Oh, wow,

this is exactly what's been happening to me."

It was this whole new world of, of ideas,

this opened up to me, and it was so exciting

to feel like I was thinking for myself again.

[soft music]

[Kimi] I started these YouTube skate park reviews

to highlight the vibe of skate parks

and how safe they would be for marginalized groups,

anyone who doesn't fit the traditional, like, straight white male identity.

Are they going to hate that a Black woman's in their territory?

Will they literally pick up a skateboard and attack me?

Whereas prior, when I was, like, nine,

that didn't even occur to me as a possibility.

And now, now, it was an everyday question.

Is this the day? Are they going to attack me now?

One day I decide to do a review of a skate park in Orange County

that I hadn't dared gon-- gone to.

I was afraid of Orange County to begin with,

just because it was notoriously conservative.

So just going into Orange County was kind of scary for me.

I tried to go in with as clear of a mind as I could,

in order to really show how hateful and mean

these people were without my provocation.

So I go with a friend of mine who's also woke,

be classified as a marginalized person as well,

and would also be someone that I could,

if anything happened to me, I would have a witness on hand.

We skated our hearts out

and I noticed that a few pros were there.

I interpreted their fury and their energy

as like their training. And I'm done.

My energy is gone and I'm like, "This was a really great place."

I turned to my friend and like, "Wasn't that really cool skate park?"

And to my surprise, my friend was like, "No, I had a really scary time."

And then my friend explained to me that some of the pros

were looking at her funny,

and that was interpreted as aggressive.

[soft music resumes]

My friend and I went into the exact same skate park

and we came out with two completely different experiences.

That was when I knew there was a way that I was looking

at the world that wasn't right.

I was the one inflicting pain on myself

and it was robbing me of happiness.

[Aryaan] As I started writing this email,

it was a grueling six, seven hour process.

Not because I wrote for six or seven hours

because I reread everything I wrote.

The reason for that was I'm not living in oblivion.

I know when I click that send button,

my life is gonna be pretty different.

And so I wanted to make sure if I do this, I do it right.

First thing when you enter Michigan is

people raising their hands like this

and trying to point where in Michigan they live.

And to an immigrant, this was as if they're taking the oath.

And it was so weird. You ask, "Where are you from?"

And they just... their hands go up.

So that was my first, uh,

sort of welcome to Michigan learning

what this means and where I am.

So Alma College is right here.

I was dead set on getting jobs and completing the number

of hours I could work to earn as much money as I could,

because I really needed that.

And even though I'm on a scholarship,

you need money to go out or buy books.

And so I applied to as many jobs as I could,

and I got four jobs on campus that I was excited to start.

The first job was being an FYG, which is the First Year Guide,

so I would have basically trained, not trained,

but being a helping hand for first-year students.

Um, the second job was being a biology TA

the third was a biology tutor,

and the fourth was being

a writer for the school newspaper.

Of the four jobs that I had,

two required you to undergo a four-hour session

divided into two parts based on diversity,

inclusion and equity.

The DEI Training Program.

I entered this Zoom meeting,

which had 100 and some employees,

um, student employees with an open mind,

but it was so... obviously

toxic, it wasn't even subtle.

We were made to play a game.

This website had a game where a statement popped up

and all of us had to choose one of the opt--

option A, B, and C, D.

A was sexist, B was ageist,

C was transphobic and D was racist.

And we had to choose which of these forms of bigotry

was that statement?

That statement was a statement in vacuum,

bereft of any context, and it was gamified.

[Jonathan] There's a culture in the corporate world

where legal compliance is a big issue,

where they have mandatory trainings. Everyone hates it.

There's no evidence it does anything, but it's done for legal compliance.

Well, in the early 2010s, a lot more of this comes onto campus.

You have to have mandatory training about sexual harassment,

about alcohol use, about microaggressions.

There's a, an ever-enlarging campus bureaucracy

around freshman orientation and around student life.

These campus life staff, the bureaucratic staff,

their goal is to shape incoming students

to be warriors for social justice as they see it.

[sighs]

At the end of the training, a female student

asked the coordinator of this event a question,

and the question was...

..."Can you help me find my trigger?"

First of all, to drive a student to ask that question...

...is insane.

But we would assume that the coordinator would say,

"Oh, bravo, you do not have a trigger. Good for you."

But instead, the coordinator of that event

went on a three-minute rant explaining how to actually

find your trigger and how to find your trauma,

and, essentially, tell that female student

why you should be triggered.

Instead of, "Great, you're not triggered by anything. Don't be."

And that to me, exemplified what all of this was about.

This was all based in some pseudoscientific nonsense

which has no basis in any psychology or any therapy.

After all, the meeting was being conducted

by a gender studies professor, not a psychologist.

[Jonathan] Ideas are powerful, and there are ideas in psychology

that are right, and there are ideas that are really wrong.

And if you raise your kids or you structure an institution

around terrible psychological ideas,

you'll get terrible results.

[Greg] We identified the three worst things young people

are being taught, and we called them "the three great untruths."

The three great untruths are just terrible advice to give to anybody.

They contradict, uh, ancient wisdom,

modern psychology, and common sense.

If you practice the three great untruths,

you can pretty much guarantee that you're gonna be miserable.

[whimsical music]

[Lucy] The first week on campus, the first few days

is New Student Orientation, NSO,

which I found thoroughly disorienting.

There were some weird vibes

like, I remember they have this event that's called Beyond Sex Ed.

And I remember thinking like,

"No one likes sex ed. Why would we want to go beyond it?"

It was an, a really, a really strange setup

because it involved upperclassmen

sharing some really personal stories,

sometimes of, like, healthy experiences,

some of them of, like, abuse and, and rape.

But I, I didn't really want to leave

because there were counselors stationed at all of the doors

in case anyone was upset, like, like, to counsel them

and I j-- that, that just struck me as so odd

that we were expected to listen

to these very personal kind of oversharing,

with all due respect to, to the students involved,

"But don't worry, there are counselors if your feelings are hurt."

Seemed a little strange to me.

I mean, I, I just gotten out of psych hospitals,

and somehow it, it felt like,

Stanford expected students to be more fragile

than, than the hospitals expected of their patients.

[Greg] Schools, unfortunately, tend to teach kids

that they are fragile. They're really not.

[Jonathan] A wineglass is fragile.

If you give it to kids to drink out of,

they'll drop it, they'll play with it, uh, it'll crack,

and, and there's nothing good about that.

So we don't give them glass, we give them plastic,

'cause plastic is resilient.

So if they drop it, it doesn't break,

but it doesn't get better.

So what's the word for things that get better

when you drop them, when you challenge them,

when you stress them?

[Greg] "Antifragility" is this wonderful name

for something that we all know is true,

that they're particularly living things,

they need some amount of stress.

They need something to react against

to, in order to grow and grow strong,

Human beings, your body is antifragile,

that essentially you need uh, to challenge your muscles.

Um, so, for example, when people go up into space

and suddenly have no, no gravity when, when they come back to Earth,

they find that their muscles are very weak.

And that's because we are antifragile.

We need a certain amount of stressors in order to grow.

[Jonathan] People are antifragile. Children are antifragile.

They actually need constant challenges.

They, they need to sometimes explore and get lost. This is the way we grow.

And if you overprotect kids, if you don't let them have experiences that are

sometimes even frightening, in the long run, you're hurting them.

If you tell them that they'll be permanently harmed by words,

one, you're doing them a horrible disservice.

You're really underestimating.

But two, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[Aryaan reading]

We were shown this video on microaggressions.

It was a video in which microaggressions are like mosquitoes.

[female voice speaking]

[sighs]

[screaming]

Oh, I can't watch this.

[laughs] I cannot watch it.

I don't know if I'm gonna make it through the whole thing.

And so these microaggression mosquitoes apparently

bite some people more than they bite others.

-[female voice speaking] -[mosquitoes buzzing]

And that video then went on to show how

complimenting somebody for their English is racist.

[Aryaan reading]

I took it as a compliment. Of course I would.

I mean, I spent a lifetime trying to better my English,

and I don't think I have the best English out there,

but just being reaffirmed on a skill that you worked

a lot on is a compliment.

And if anything, it is "racist" to assume

that an international student is supposed to be good at English.

I think autistic people are absolutely more likely to commit microaggressions,

because just-- just because of how autism is,

um, autistics don't pick up on those subtle signals

and, and don't have a necessarily innate sense

of what is and isn't socially acceptable.

I have also noticed that...

...the microaggressions that I was introduced to through college

don't really relate to my interactions with African Americans.

I know a lot of my friends themselves don't find

certain things to be offensive

that the woke mentality would have you think are offensive,

and you can't ever ask that. You can't ever say that.

[interviewer speaking]

-It's considered a microaggression? -[interviewer] Yeah.

-Are you serious? -[interviewer] Yeah.

Really?

[whimsical music]

It's very hard for me to...

...understand

why anyone would speak against the idea

that America is the land of opportunity.

Because that is my life experience,

is working... to move to America

in order to pursue the-- my, my choice of profession,

which would be to work in the music industry.

And it does make me wonder

who's writing the script on what's offensive and what's not.

It's like the people with the power get to dictate

what we experience,

and then silence our voices when we say that we don't experience that.

[melancholic music]

[Lucy] If you constantly tell students that they're going to face

countless microaggressions every day,

well, of course students are going to be miserable.

It's like saying your entire well-being

depends on other people not using particular words.

That's like the exact opposite of empowerment.

You're teaching these students to strip naked,

buck naked and run straight

through the wild jungles of West Africa

and complain when you're being bit by those mosquitoes.

You're teaching them to be weak.

This is an innocent animation,

but it's actually really dangerous. Um...

Because that crazy...

That was me.

Right there with the mosquitoes

jumping up in the air with her eyes all crazy looking.

'Cause of the way I looked at the world,

I was the one inflicting injury on myself.

It was actually my choice.

It's your worst nightmare at your doorstep.

You know, someone's about to cross your path.

You're walking down the street,

and if they look at you the wrong way,

that's the first microaggression of the day.

And it's like, you know, you kind of just get stabbed

with one knife and the day's already off to, like,

this very violent start.

So if I see someone, like, coming up with their dog,

for example, and the dog's barking at me,

I could interpret that as a racist microaggression

on the part of both the dog and the dog walker.

And then you go down the street and maybe it's another

lone person and they're happy

and they're like, "Hi," that could still be seen

as a microaggression because they're feigning happiness

and they're trying to look like they care about you.

Before you even reach the end of the street,

you've got like, three knives stabbed in your body,

just from these interpretations of interactions.

It's like playing out a horror movie every day.

[music increases, softens]

[Jonathan] We need to fundamentally change what we're doing to kids

and give them back childhoods, where they work out conflicts,

have experiences, and develop their antifragility,

give them back childhoods where they have huge amounts

of unsupervised free play.

Free play is the main way

that young mammals learn how to become old mammals.

Kittens, puppies, squirrels, children.

And if kids don't get a lot of free play,

their brains don't develop. They become anxious and fragile.

I was probably five the first time I was allowed

to leave home by myself.

Um, I could walk down to the corner store.

I mean, now that I think about it, it seems very strange.

But I was very independent, very self-sustaining,

from, probably, easily fifth grade on,

even probably before then. Hitchhiking with people I didn't even know,

I'd just be, like, I'm on my way to school someone would stop

by the side of the road, I get in their car and they drive me to school.

[Greg] We used to hop on moving trains.

I probably succeeded in doing it maybe three or four times tops,

and nearly killed myself all three times.

I just didn't know any better, but you learn as you go,

but at the same time, like as far as failure,

and I think Greg also f-- would feel this way

is I don't even worry about failure, because I know

I've bounced back from so many horrible situations

that are probably worse than anything I could possibly encounter.

[Greg] Whenever anybody asks me about my own childhood,

I'm-- I al-- I always qualify, I'm like, "Listen,

I was almost certainly way too free range."

I would wish for anybody to have all the upside

that I had as a kid with, with the independence,

with none of the downside. [chuckles]

1990s, we just decided, "No more of that.

At least not where I can't see you.

You can't go outside and play in a park. You might be abducted."

[announcer] America's Most Wanted has already captured four fugitives.

[Jonathan] Parents are paranoid. They've become paranoid

because what they see on cable TV and elsewhere,

that if you take your eyes off a kid for one second,

someone's gonna snatch your kid.

Someone calculated, if you look at the actual rate

at which people are abducted by strangers--

Now, they are sometimes abducted by the non-custodial parent.

But there's only about 100 abductions a year by strangers.

And so... if you were to put your kid in a car

and leave the car windows down and leave the car unattended,

how long would you have to leave it there

before your kid would be abducted?

And the answer is something like 50,000 years.

[Anna] I'm 22 years old. I have two older siblings.

My sister is 35 now.

My brother is 32.

If I'm not mistaken, my sister went on her first date when she was 13,

um, and I went on my first date when I was 21.

[Jonathan] And that's really the story of Gen Z.

So we used to think that these were basic things

that students did before they showed up at college,

and now, increasingly, many students are coming in

having never had a job,

a driver's license, a date or a drink.

They've not had the life experiences of previous generations.

They're not as ready for independent living.

And you might say, "Well, what are they doing

-with all their time?" -And I'm like, "All right,

so Mom doesn't really want me to have Facebook,

so I doubt she'll want me to have Instagram...

[inhales] but I'm going to do it anyways."

So I'm sitting there and I'm like, "All right, I'm just going to download it.

Like, she'll never know. My Apple account is, like, separate."

And then my older brother was, like, standing across--

so what was I? How old are you?

You're 12. So he was 22. He was my age.

He was in the kitchen and he was like,

"Do you really think that's a good idea?"

And I was like, "What do you mean, 'Is it a good idea?'"

He's like, "I don't think you should do that."

And I was like, "Well, I have to.

Like, I'm going to feel so left out if I don't."

Seventh grade, I got Instagram.

Eighth grade, I got Snapchat.

Eighth grade, I got Facebook.

After finally convincing my mom that I was on Tumblr,

like, it just was one after the other after the other.

[Jonathan] So the rate of depression and anxiety has more than doubled

on campus in recent years. Why? Why is this happening?

Why is it happening at the same time in multiple countries

and with a bigger impact on girls?

What's been happening to girls since 2012 or so?

The overprotection is a big part of it, but the gender difference

especially points us to social media.

Millennials. They didn't get social media until they were in college.

Gen Z is defined by the fact

that they got social media in middle school.

[Anna] Mary got social media when she was in college.

I got it in middle school, so it's evolved with me.

You've seen me grow up on social media

as compared to my brother and sister, where they were already grown.

You're 13 years old. You are a sponge.

Every person in front of you, you are pulling something

from them to create you.

To have access to social media was like having

hundreds of thousands of people in front of me

and trying to take little pieces of them to create myself.

[Jonathan] So what most people don't realize about social media

is that it was perfectly nontoxic when it first came out around 2004.

Facebook, Myspace, Friendster.

You just put stuff up about who you are, what bands you like.

Social media changes radically between 2009 and 2012.

Uh, the companies add the like button and the retweet button.

Anything you do could go viral,

either because you post it and people retweet it,

or because somebody reposts it

with a nasty comment, which goes viral.

And this is very important.

In 2009, teens didn't use social media that much,

but by 2012, most teens were using it a lot.

2012 is also the year when rates of anxiety

and depression start to go way up, especially for girls.

So the timing and the sex difference make perfect sense.

All kids are addicted to devices,

but the boys are mostly playing video games,

and video games are not actually as bad as many people think.

What the girls are doing is putting something out

and then waiting anxiously as people comment on it.

So it's the social comparison. It's the fear of missing out.

Also, girls' aggression is relational and boys' is physical.

Girls can never get away if they're getting bullied.

Imagine the worst aspects of junior high school

in your pocket 24 hours a day for the rest of your life.

That's terrifying and exhausting.

[whimsical music]

[Greg] University of Michigan said... [reads]

If you think that something wrong has happened

every time you feel like a spike of emotion,

um, that's not healthy.

This is setting up students for paranoia and misery.

The fact that I felt like I needed to die.

Um... [chuckles]

That wasn't good instructions for my brain.

You know, sometimes what you're...

what your brain and your heart is telling you

is the absolute worst advice,

um, you could possibly ever get.

[Jonathan] The Buddhists and the Stoics gave us this wonderful insight.

[reads]

This is the most widespread piece of wisdom around the world,

that we don't experience the world as it is.

We experience the world through the filters and distortions,

the cognitive distortions that we impose on it.

[Anna] I used to trust my feelings to the point where I wouldn't do things.

I was afraid...

...to wake up because everything

that I was going to do was going to take

every ounce of energy and every ounce of fight that I had in me.

Everything. And I'd obsess over it.

"Okay. When I go to the dining hall in the morning, who's going--

am I going to sit with? It's not the end of the world.

It's just breakfast. You, you can eat breakfast by yourself.

You can't eat dinner by yourself, but you can eat breakfast by yourself."

On my first day of classes,

I sat in the wrong lecture for 45 minutes.

I was too nervous to get up, even though I had another class.

So one, executive functioning, I can't read a schedule.

Two, my anxiety saying, "Oh, you're gonna get in trouble if you stand up right now

in front of all these new people and the professor."

[sniffles, clicks tongue, inhales]

Uh, that was a really, really that was a day.

[Anthony] She would have full panic atta-- like,

legitimate panic attacks in class,

hyperventilating, having to go out in the hallway,

full legitimate anxiety attacks

that would cripple her for days.

She'd be in my office all the time and, and process through things

and sometimes get mad at me about, you know, trying to reframe it.

[Anna] I remember leaving there, like, mad at him sometimes.

I'm like, "I'm so sad."

Like, "Why is he telling me I need to do this?"

[Anthony] You give them reasonable parameters

for their feelings at that point in time and you say,

"All right, well, this is, this part is legitimate.

This part seems very reasonable.

This part seems like, like, it'll never happen."

I'm an associate professor at Providence College in the education department.

So my first year at Providence College was 2012.

Students were more adult-like. They could handle their own situations.

In the past year, I've seen more acute situations happening across the board.

They want me to handle all of their problems for them.

Sure, you know, students are going through struggles,

but at the same time, the best way out is, is through.

You train the kid for the road, not the road for the kid.

Doctor Rodriguez is...

...the teacher you don't always want, but the teacher you always need.

Yeah, I could tell I-- I was not the professor she wanted.

He knows exactly when to push you, but to the point

where if he knows-- if he pushes you too hard, he's going to lose you.

She put in a ton of work on her own. She engaged in CBT.

She basically reminds me a lot of Greg in the female form,

who actually would have gotten help earlier than he did.

Even when a situation

continues to come up the same way it always did,

she reframes it in a completely different situation,

and she will actually come back and say, "You know, two years ago,

this panic attack, this would have ruined my whole day.

And now, it only took about an hour out of my day."

Walking into a store may feel like the end of the world to me,

and sometimes it does.

But if I listen to that feeling every time, I'd never walk into a store.

[soft melancholic music]

[Aryaan] After reading The Coddling of the American Mind,

one thing I realized was

these are the first signs

of an ideology, like, this gripping the college.

If you can cut it off here,

you can prevent your college from being a victim.

So I had sources for what I preached.

So I attached a Harvard Business Reviewstudy showing

why diversity trainings haven't worked,

showing that if anything, these trainings do

is make the environment more tense and more toxic.

I realized I didn't come to America

to have a job, which allowed me to say some things

and didn't allow me to say other things,

and so I decided to... quit my jobs.

[reading]

"Yours truthfully and sincerely, Aryaan Misra."

And, uh, then I click the send button.

And it said, "Are you sure you want to send this?"

I said "No." [chuckles] And so I again read parts of it,

just trying to convince myself, "It's okay, do it.

It's the right thing to do."

Then I send it again and it goes through.

But you know, when you send an email on Gmail, it says "Unsend" or "Undo."

And so I click that, I undo the email and I'm like,

"Are you sure you want to send this?"

[chuckles] And I remember the final time,

the third time I click "Send,"

shut my desktop, and I walked out of the room I was in.

And all of a sudden, coming out of this dungeon of a room

into a sprawling bright light with students walking by.

-And it was this out-of-body, surreal experience... -[muffled chatter]

...where you knew everybody you were seeing

is gonna see you differently from tomorrow.

[Saeed] I met this random guy called Abdul. I, I was like,

"Oh, really nice to meet you." He's really into Bollywood.

I was like, "I'm really into Bollywood too."

So we just bonded over Bollywood at first,

and then I remember I had dinner

with one of his frien-- with, um, with him and one of his friends,

and the guy just goes, "You're Muslim. Yeah?

Your prophet is the one who rapes ten-year-olds."

And I was so taken aback at first.

But then, like, I don't know where it came from.

I just wanted to talk to this guy.

I just wanted to really, like, you know, one first of all,

I knew he was wrong, obviously.

But then, like, I didn't feel the... [punches]

..."Let's go," I'm-gonna-punch-you type wrong.

I just, you know, felt this like, "Oh, my God

finally my chance to talk to someone,

finally an opportunity to do the debate thing."

And, you know, we started talking and, um, you know, we like,

not just that day, like, you know, the next day after that,

the next day after that.

And eventually somewhere along the line,

Abdul then starts doing this thing where he's organizing--

creating this Mill Series along with a professor.

He starts putting out fliers everywhere.

I missed the first Mill Series talk when they launch it,

but I attended the next ones after that.

I think the first one was "Are-- Safe space is bad for students."

[upbeat music]

John Stuart Mill was a, a British philosopher,

um, whose primary argument is that,

you know, free speech is really how truth comes about.

It's never the sole preserve of one side.

It's, it's shared between both sides.

There's, there's complexity in truth.

And free speech allows that to come alive.

[birds chirping]

I would wear a black hoodie at night

to go put up posters just so no one would recognize me.

I still wanted friends. I was still out here like, "Yo, what's up?"

You know, like, trying to get everybody to love me and know me.

The social consequences and the cost of associating

yourself with The Mill Series were dire.

[whooshing]

[music continues]

[Jonathan] Tribalism is human nature.

That doesn't mean we have to live that way, but it is our default.

It's very easy to ramp that up, to get people to think,

"Us versus Them. We're good. They're bad."

It's often taught in this way.

Let's take 18-year-olds who come into a college environment,

and rather than looking out and seeing all the different people,

let's teach them to see binary dimensions.

Some people are white, some people are nonwhite,

some people are cisgender, some people are transgender.

The point is, this is not just a way

to look at different dimensions of identity.

It's a moral framework.

Because the people above the line are bad.

They're privileged, which means they're oppressors.

They oppress the good people, the people below the line.

[Lucy] At Stanford, anyone who was not white,

straight, Christian, um, able bodied--

all these things was like--

a better person, somehow, just morally better.

It really felt like there w-- there was a lot of moral status attached to it.

[chuckles] I was talking to these guys, you know, uh, meeting new people.

And this, this guy comes up to me...

...and he starts off with an apology,

which is a very weird way to start a conversation.

He starts off saying, "I have really wanted

to know one thing for a very long time.

I'm very, very sorry if this is offensive.

I don't mean to offend you. I come from a good place--"

And this preface continues for one minute

and I'm, I'm out looking for, "What is he gonna ask me?"

And his question is,

"Do cows walk on the roads in India?"

And I'm like, "Dude, yeah, they do.

It's a very, very common thing.

And it's not controversial to ask me something

I have grown up watching.

Yeah, cows walk on streets in India all the time

and cars bang into them,

and the guy driving the car is lynched.

But it's not controversial

to try to understand where I come from.

It's a very meek question."

A culture where you're supposed to be careful, cautious...

...think a bajillion times before talking to a person of color,

it makes it much, much more difficult

for somebody who's brown or Black to make white friends,

especially when you're at, like, a...

[hesitates] demographically white college,

because the students, the white students

are afraid they're gonna get embroiled

in some sort of a controversy.

I send my email at eight in the morning

and I'm refreshing my inbox every five minutes.

That's a lie. I'm refreshing it every two minutes,

hoping for a response.

And the first response that comes is from a professor who's taught me,

not gonna name him, um, in support.

It was responded directly to me.

Then I shared this email

on my Twitter, screenshots of it, in its entirety.

And that is when it truly began.

When white people...

...were subtweeting me, retweeting...

...and calling me a xenophobe,

calling me racist, calling me sexist,

calling me homophobic, calling me a dumb mother.

And calling me whatnot.

And this continued, and this continued for a while.

The backlash that I faced on Twitter

very toxic, um,

very unsurprising at the same time,

was in juxtaposition

to the support I got, which was all private.

I got private Twitter DMs supporting me,

private Insta DM supporting me, private Snap supporting me,

private emails from the professors supporting me.

The support was "Reply to."

The backlash was "Reply all."

That hurt me.

[Jonathan] Someone says, "Well, you know, here's what I believe."

And someone says, "No, you're a racist."

And then everybody jumps on them for being a racist.

Of course, that's what happens on the left. On the right, it's different.

The right has its own crazy dynamics. And there it's not about racism.

It's about being a traitor to the country.

So each side uses social media to, to destroy the reputations

of anyone who dissents, anyone who challenges them.

And when we suppress dissent, when we intimidate dissenters,

we make ourselves stupid

because other people challenging us make us smart.

It's almost like they're an extension of our brain.

So social media and cancel culture

is like a way of shooting yourself in the brain.

[Aryaan] The fallout made me feel alone.

Not only are you alone,

you are evil.

Good versus evil. Us versus Them.

Any time you see the world in this binary,

you skew your vision and you're unable to understand

the other person as simply a human.

Students and administrators do not realize

the mental health toll

of being accused of bigotry by a mob.

Being accused of racism

when you know, deep down, you're not racist,

being accused of xenophobia

when you're a brown, immigrant international student in America...

...is not easy to process.

[Jonathan] So American society began to get much more politically

polarized in the early 2000s.

The clearest evidence of this is that the percentage

of Americans who say that they would be upset

if their child married someone from another race or religion,

that's been dropping steadily since the 1960s.

But the percentage who say they'd be upset if their child

married someone from the other political party,

that's been rising, uh, since the 1990s.

And what this means on campus or in any institution,

that's almost all on the right or all on the left,

is there's a collective sense of Us versus Them.

In the past, you know, 20, 30 years ago,

if there was, say, a Republican who was invited

to give a talk on campus, okay, maybe you wouldn't go

if you were a Democrat, maybe you didn't want to hear that.

But in the period we're talking about here...

[protesters shouting] Get out! Get out! Get out! Get...

...where students got much more into the culture war,

it began to be, oh my God, we can't let that group give him a platform.

It wasn't about learning. It wasn't about exposure to ideas.

It was about this battle between good and evil.

[Saeed] Someone posted something about The Mill Series and I went to respond,

and someone then called me a tool of white supremacy.

I think he summarized a lot of what people were thinking.

I, like, I'm not a white supremacist.

It's, it's not white supremacy in any form.

Free speech is just, you know, a code word for white supremacy.

And, you know, that's like that's a very common thought today.

[protestors speaking]

[Greg] And that's just maddening to me.

You don't need freedom of speech

to defend the powerful and the rich.

All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper."

You only need freedom of speech

to defend the rights of minority points of view.

Somewhere I read

of the freedom of assembly.

Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

-[crowd] Yeah! -Somewhere I read of the freedom of press.

Somewhere I read that the greatness of America

is the right to protest for right.

[crowd cheering and applauding]

[Greg] It's John Lewis, the great John Lewis would say, that

"If it wasn't for the, uh, First Amendment,

the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings."

And what he meant by that, it just wasn't possible to have

the kind of demonstrations, to have the kind of activism

when the government had the power to shut you down.

-[crowd shouting] -[Saeed] You're coming in from Nigeria

or any-- from any country where primarily--

where free speech is sort of like a left liberal value.

It's been a week since Nigeria banned Twitter.

The government says it blocked the platform

because it was being used to spread fake news,

and has ordered prosecutors to arrest anyone who violates the ban.

It's like, "Free speech. Yes, for the press. Yes, for--

let's speak our minds, you know, let's have free discourse,"

'cause typically the government is the one trying to stifle free speech.

And that's why it annoys me when I come to America

to see a political side

that is usually squashed in other parts of the world

being the ones that are doing the squashing.

In India, free speech has historically been

a liberal value, there's no doubt about that.

Conservatives, even now, try to paint it as,

um, "Ban this movie, it offends us.

Boycott this product, it's advertising

something that is against our values."

Besides that, there are hate speech laws in India,

that governments misuse according to their benefit.

A small example of this is, recently, a Muslim comedian

was arrested on the grounds

that he was about to say a joke about Hindu gods.

Popular comedian Munawar Faruqui is now in jail for two weeks.

[Aryaan] He didn't say the joke. He was about to say a joke.

And on that pretense that man was arrested.

In America, often, the consequences of being canceled

are losing your job, mental breakdowns, depression,

which are very bad in and of itself.

But canceling in India is more of an existential threat,

where being canceled can lead not only to you being fired

but your house being mobbed, you being killed,

you being imprisoned by the government.

All of this has happened, and all of this is happening all the time in India

with journalists, with activists.

Well-known journalist Gauri Lankesh has been shot dead.

Reports suggest that an unidentified men shot her seven times.

[Kimi] America... and American youth

have been so protected

from seeing the ugliness of retaliation

that I think it's very hard for young people

to conceive that this sort of

bloodbath-type existence can happen to them.

So realize that you're just

like your fellow humans across the sea.

You're just like the Africans in Africa

or the Europeans in Europe, and you could fall

into the same revolutionary cycles that everyone else falls into.

[pensive instrumental music]

[Kimi] I grew up in Uganda.

I moved to Tanzania for a little bit,

and then I moved to South Africa.

[man] ...Madiba. Madiba. Madiba.

[Kimi] So when I was in South Africa, during my high school days,

we learned a lot about Nelson Mandela,

the leader of the armed struggle

against the apartheid government.

-He was, like, hopeless. -[crowd shouting]

He didn't know how to overcome this oppression

that was, like, blanketed over the country.

And unfortunately, he was put in prison

for plotting an insurrection of sorts.

But during that 27 years,

he had a moment of, of turning

where he realized that he could be released from prison.

But if he didn't let go of the resentment, he wouldn't be free.

[crowd shouting] Mandela...

And once he came out of prison...

...as apartheid began to crumble,

retaliation against the apartheid regime and,

and Afrikaners had already begun.

People were fighting back and, and getting payback through,

through acts of violence.

But Nelson quelled that,

and his presidency was marked

with just incredible acts of, of forgiveness.

I cherish the idea of a new South Africa,

where all South Africans are equal.

[Kimi] He let the people who protected the apartheid president,

the last apartheid president, protect him as well.

He didn't fire them. He just showed incredible acts of mercy like that.

Fast forward, once I moved to the States and I live in LA for a while,

I forget about this.

I had reached a point where I would cry for no reason.

I would just like black out and cry.

It's this self-inflicting pain

that it just, like, rips you open.

Just feels like everything is, like, exposed and fragile.

I realized that, that's

not the way I felt when I was in high school.

Why is it that when I was 17, 16, I was so happy?

But then I come to America and I feel horrible with no reason.

I just feel terrible all the time.

I will never forget

that my life can never, ever be that harsh.

So if he can forgive the way he did, how much more can I?

[crowd cheering]

So I remember this one day. I was like, "You know what?

Something needs to be done about this.

I can't function, I can't sleep.

I don't have any friends."

I just prayed to God. I was like,

"God, show me what I'm doing wrong."

And he just highlighted to me something very simple.

I was offended, and I'm not allowed to be offended as a Christian.

He was like, "Forgive them, release them."

And it was such a simple thought.

But it began...

...to set me free.

And I remember I just grabbed a journal

and I just started writing down everything.

All the microaggressions, every instance

where I was holding on to an offense,

I just started to write it down.

What someone did, what someone said,

why I interpreted their actions as racist

and giving grace to the people and saying,

"Wait, that might have not actually been racism.

They might have just been having, like, a bad day

or, like, indigestion or something."

So that seemed to begin to work

and I started to have more peace.

I was a more sane person then I was like,

"Okay, I'm onto something here." So I never let up on that.

And eventually, you know,

the worldview just began to fall apart.

[Lucy] By the end of the summer, I had made the definitive decision

to switch from justice to kindness.

I hadn't even turned 20 yet.

Who said I know anything about justice?

Um, justice is-- I mean, the,

the humankind has been debating that for centuries.

Kindness, though, kindness is a lot more tangible.

I had a pretty good sense of what was kind and what wasn't,

and so I resolved to do more kind things,

to kind of return to the Kindness Club.

And I found that the more, the more emphasis I put on kindness,

the happier I was and, and the more meaningful everything felt.

You don't have to be woke to care about the poor,

the widow, or the orphan.

Now, I'm more effective at paying attention

to instances of injustice,

because my energy is reserved

for when there is a real atrocity happening.

So le-- le-- letting go of wokeness, in my opinion,

actually makes you more effective

and have a st-- longer endurance

for real activism and real justice.

Back then, when I was a, a social justice advocate,

I was tired, miserable, pessimistic,

fragile, and stressed out,

but about things that didn't really matter.

And now, I would say, I'm excited, but also serene.

I'm open to new ideas. I'm excited to learn.

Um, I seek out different perspectives

instead of shying away from them.

And I'm still stressed out, but I'm stressed

about the things that matter.

Back then, when I was steeped in woke ideology,

I was full of fear, full of anxiety.

Now, that I'm out of that and I'm thinking for myself,

I'm much happier. I'm at peace.

If I had continued in the woke mindset,

today I probably would be an alcoholic.

I also most likely would have become homeless

because I couldn't function.

And I can't stress how serious that was.

You would have, like, a thousand daggers in you by the end of the day.

Just feels like, like, tiny knives stuck in you.

[interviewer speaks]

Ooh. Oh.

O Lord. [laughs]

It's like I'm not gonna make it. I'm not gonna make it.

[grunts softly, exhales]

[chuckles]

[emotional music]

It feels really good. Um, I'm lucky to have,

somehow, found a way to do that.

Taking the knives out is...

...the best thing that happened to me.

'Cause I feel like I lost my life for, like, six years.

[sniffling]

And I don't know who I would be

had that not happened.

I-- like, I wouldn't be a full human that I am today.

[gentle music]

[muted]

[interviewer] What advice would you give someone considering going to college?

Phew. Don't go. [laughs]

[whooshing]

[whimsical music]

[music continues]

[music intensifies]

[music softens]