Dr. Niobe Way is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at NYU, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity, co-founder of agapi.teens, and the principal investigator on the Listening with Curiosity Project.
She is a leading researcher on adolescent development, with a particular focus on boys' social and emotional lives. Her groundbreaking books include "Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection" (2011), which inspired the Oscar-nominated film "Close," “The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences & Solutions,” and "Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture" (2024).
I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. It's a beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it's pretty big, so I tend to over-explain it—like I'm doing right now. Before I ask it, I want you to know you're in total control and can answer however you want.
You're doing what a good interviewer does.
Nice. So, the question is: Where do you come from? Again, you’re in total control.
I love questions like that. It’s what I spend my life asking other people, but I rarely get asked myself. Where do I come from? Okay, I have lots of things to say, but I need to figure out how to tell the story.
I would say an important part of me is that I was born in Paris, France, to hippie parents. My parents had my older sister and me when they were teenagers. My mother came from a very fancy family in Greenwich, Connecticut, and my dad was from the wrong side of the tracks.
They got pregnant with my sister the first time they had sex, at seventeen. Then they escaped—he went to Oberlin College, she followed him with my sister, and then they traveled to Greece for a year, then Paris for a year, and that's where they had me.
They worked at an American diner in Paris. That’s how my life began—with parents who lived outside the box. My mother is a modern dance choreographer and runs ODC San Francisco, a world-renowned dance company. My dad was a classics professor who specialized in Eastern and Western traditions. He lived in China for ten years, and I lived with him there for part of the 1980s.
My life started in Paris. Then we moved to Oberlin, Ohio; then to New York; and then back to Oberlin. Oberlin is where I really feel my roots are.
If I had to sum it up. I wasn’t born in the U.S. I grew up with creative, unconventional parents. I came of age in Oberlin, Ohio, during the 1970s. It's important to say: I was born in 1963. That means my adolescence was very much shaped by the 1970s—a distinctive period. I don't know how old you are, Peter, but the 1970s were very particular. And then I went to college in the 1980s.
I noticed you used the word escape at least twice to describe your parents going to Paris. What were they escaping?
They were escaping very oppressive family situations, especially on my mother’s side.
My grandfather was the vice president of Tampax Corporation. They came from a very wealthy, exclusive community in Greenwich, Connecticut—part of a country club that didn’t allow Black or Jewish members.
My mom married someone from a working- to middle-class background, which was scandalous to her family. When she got pregnant at 17, they wanted her to go to Mexico for an abortion. She refused.
So, when she and my dad moved to Oberlin, she was essentially cut off from her family.
Oberlin College had never had a married couple with a child before. They didn’t know what to do with them, so they gave them a house because they couldn’t put them in a dorm. I’ve seen a photo of them: two teenage kids, standing in front of a house, holding a baby. It's so surreal.
They left Oberlin because it was too hard for my dad to be a student and raise a family at the same time. That’s when they decided to escape again, this time to Europe.
My dad was studying the classics and felt this romantic pull to go live in Greece, the birthplace of so much of that tradition.
They tried to live "off the land"—though I think, in reality, it meant my mom was trying to make a living while my dad read a lot of books. They lived for a while on a Greek island called Skiathos, and when they couldn’t find enough work there, they moved to Paris and became managers of an American diner.
That’s how I came into the world: the child of two people who chose a life of creativity, defiance, and independence. And then my mom got pregnant with me. About a year after I was born, they moved back to New York because, you know, now they had two kids and they were just 20 years old.
So, they returned to Oberlin. My dad graduated, and my mom started dancing. Eventually, she became a professor of dance at Oberlin College—one of the first women faculty members there. I mean, there were a bunch of women, but still.
All of that is part of who I am. I was born in the sixties, and I definitely situate myself in that time—with hippie parents, always having a very global perspective. I come from multiple cultures. I’ve lived in China; I’ve lived all over the world. It definitely shapes how I do my work, how I think, how I take on the world, and how I see the world.
This is my biggest superpower, I would say. I love this phrase now—I used to hate it. My biggest superpower is that I am very good at what we call in developmental psychology theory of mind: I can take other people's perspectives very easily.
And the reason I think I can is because I’ve lived in different places, outside of my own culture. I’ve been an outsider many, many times in my life—not part of the mainstream at all, even in the American context, because my parents were serious hippies.
I mean, my mother wore mini skirts and all kinds of crazy stuff that embarrassed me. She was gorgeous—still is gorgeous—but it was hard having a mom wearing mini-mini hot skirts over in Ohio, you know what I mean?
I do. I mean, I love the idea of a serious hippie, number one. And number two: what about moving around, about being an outsider, develops theory of mind?
Oh, Peter, this is such a great interview. Thank you. It’s a gift for me to be interviewed in the way I try to interview other people. I would say that when you're an outsider—racially, ethnically, class-wise, culturally, in any way—it forces you to take the other person's perspective because you're out, right? You're in the minority.
And to me, what's interesting about women and people of color in this country—and men too, especially working-class men—is that when you're not at the top of the heap, you're forced to take other people's perspectives, whether you like it or not.
In fact, women have said this to me, and people of color too, across all ethnicities and races: You have to, because if you don't, you won't get your foot in the door. So you learn to take the other person's perspective literally as a way to survive.
Yeah.
Literally, to get into the house, you have to take another person's perspective. So you learn. I think that's partly why—I'm going to make a gross generalization, but I think it's true—people on the fringes of power tend to have better theory of mind.
Of course, there's variation among all groups. Some people might be a person of color or a woman and still not have great theory of mind. So I'm not generalizing completely.
But generally, I do think people on the margins are more likely to develop it, because when you're in the center of power, it's not demanded of you. You assume everyone will think like you—because why wouldn't they? It could also be a religious identity—Jewish, Muslim, Hindu. I'm not trying to limit it to non-religious differences; I'm just very American in that way. But being an outsider in any form helps develop that skill.
And I do think it’s a positive skill.
I have to share a story because it was really interesting to me. In 2007, after getting divorced from my husband of 20 years, I wanted to do something adventurous. So I moved with my two young kids to Shanghai to teach at NYU Shanghai. They were three and five at the time. We all learned Chinese—we went to Saturday school to study before moving—and I enrolled them in local Chinese schools.
I was terrified to bring my little kids alone, but we didn't live in an expat neighborhood. I wanted to live among local families, not foreigners. We lived in a Chinese alley, where at that time (this was 2007), there were still joint kitchens and bathrooms.
Our home was a bit unusual—it was built during the 1920s French concession, so we had our own bathroom and kitchen—but most families in our alley shared. Because of that, and because we were foreigners, we stood out a lot. We were definitely seen as more "upper class" in the neighborhood.
I remember taking my daughter to school. Her best friend in New York had been Mei Mei, which means "little sister" in Chinese. After her first day, she came home—she was just three—and said, "Mommy, they all look like Mei Mei!"
At first, I did this sort of white liberal thing—I got nervous and corrected her, saying, "No, no, they’re not all Mei Mei. They're just Chinese. They don't all look the same. But she insisted, "No, no, Mommy, they do look like Mei Mei!" I eventually realized: she's three. I let it go.
Then something beautiful happened. About a month later, she came home and said, "Mommy, I want black hair. Black hair is the most beautiful hair in the whole world. I don’t like my hair." At the time, she had long, blondish hair. I told her, "Yes, black hair is really beautiful," and I also affirmed that her hair was beautiful too.
But it was a gorgeous realization: when you’re the minority, your perspective shifts fast. At first, she was simply seeing the world through her own lens. But after a month of being the only one different, she began to value what the majority in her class valued—long black hair.
And so I just thought that was really deep and profound for me. Because that is why you want to raise your children where they're not always in the majority.
You put your child in a safe space, in a supportive space, in a loving space—I'm not saying put them in toxic places—but I'm saying, where you're not in the majority.
I think when you're always in the majority, you suffer in terms of your ability to take another person's perspective.
That's beautiful. I want to return—when you were young in Oberlin, what did you want to be when you grew up? Do you have a recollection?
Yeah. Oh God, are you kidding me? I had lots of things. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was ten because I thought the most— I still think this actually—I would still love to be an astronaut. To go out, outside of the earth. I've always been super curious, Peter, just like you. I've always been super curious about it. And then somehow the magic of going outside of the earth and looking back and stuff. So I wanted to be an astronaut.
Then I think I ended up being interested in theater. I was a theater major in the first two years of college, but I think it was really because I was surrounded by the arts. My mom was a modern dance choreographer. She started a modern dance company. We traveled across the country on a yellow school bus with her Oberlin students to start ODC San Francisco in 1975.
We were a bus of ten Oberlin students moving from Oberlin to San Francisco to start a modern dance company with my mother. My brother, sister, and I were all on this bus, traveling for two weeks across the country on a yellow school bus. I mean, Peter, I meant it when I said we were serious hippies.
Yeah, I mean, it's all right there.
You can't get more hippie than that. There's pictures of me on the bus—I'm ten—and I just looked like a total hippie child. I'm wearing this star shirt, and my hair is kind of—well, my mother always cut my hair. She would actually cut it very coiffed. But I'm just such a hippie child.
I think when I was surrounded by so many dancers and artists— Bill Irwin, do you know Bill Irwin?
Yeah.
He was a part of that clan.
Oh, wow.
His wife, Kimi Okada, at the time—Kimi Okada was one of the founders of my mom’s dance company. She was a student of my mother's. So Bill Irwin was a babysitter. He babysat me.
Wow.
Yeah. It was a bunch of really amazing 1970s artists. If I probably named a bunch of other names, you would know who they are. Many of them became very successful, along with my mom and her company.
Because I grew up in that climate, I thought arts and theater would be really interesting. But then I went to college, and I realized it wasn't interesting enough for me to turn into characters and act out plays.
I wanted to do something. I had, in some ways, bigger ambitions—to make the world a more caring place. And I thought I wouldn't be able to do that as an actor. So I switched majors into psychology.
But psychology in college, including at Berkeley where I was, is taught in a very boring way. It's often taught through textbooks, in big classes. You have to memorize stuff. It’s the most boring form of psychology.
So I was bored with it. I majored in it, but I was bored with it.
Then I got a great job after college working with teenage drug abusers in a family therapy clinic, and I became fascinated by family therapy and by the notion of working with teenagers.
After that, I ended up getting my doctorate at Harvard, initially in counseling psychology. Then I switched from counseling to human development because—and this relates to my work right now—I realized I wasn't interested in helping individuals.
I was interested in changing the story, right? I was interested in changing the story of how we understood ourselves, and adolescents in particular.
That's what I've literally been doing since 1988: trying to change how we understand what it means to be a teenager.
And in the last ten years, what it means to be a boy and a young man—and even more broadly, what it means to be human, and what's getting in the way of our capacity to act like human beings.
But it really came from seeing the larger picture. I would say, Peter, it goes back to my background. The larger picture came from being exposed to all sorts of cultures.
My dad lived in China in the 1980s, when there were virtually no foreigners in Nanjing.
And he was apparently there at the same time Kanye West and his mom were there, which is really funny.
Oh, wow.
Isn't that funny? But there were no foreigners there when I was a teenager and living in Nanjing. Anyway, I think that sort of big-picture thinking came from that experience—having to, as I say in my classes, pull the microscope in to see a person, and pull it out to see them in context.
I started doing it with myself—seeing myself in the particulars, then pulling back to see the larger context. And that, to me, is my biggest skill as a researcher. I'm constantly pulling the microscope in and pulling it out: to understand the individual, but also to understand the individual within a cultural context.
How do you introduce yourself now? Sort of catch us up. We've gotten your life story from the beginning—where are you now? What's the work you're doing?
Yeah, thank you. No, Peter, I just have to say: this is such a gorgeous way of being interviewed. I've never been interviewed like this. It's such a pleasure. It really is such a pleasure. And I have always believed that who I am is part of what I do. So if you don't know who I am, you can't really understand what I do. Thank you for that gift. It really is a gift.
So—I am a professor of developmental psychology at NYU. I've been there since 1995. And I have been focused, since 1987 when I started my doctoral program at Harvard, on understanding adolescent development, particularly the social and emotional aspects of development. By that, I mean relationships, identities—all sorts of things.
My question, even back in the '80s, was: What shifts during adolescence? Because what I started to hear was a story we weren't telling—and honestly, we're still not telling it. In the late '80s, I started hearing from boys and young men about their desire for friendships and for close, emotionally intimate friendships. This came out during sessions I was doing while informally counseling at a high school. It kept surfacing as a major theme.
Since then, I have spent my career doing large-scale studies of teenagers of all identities—following them over time. That's the biggest skill I'm most proud of, because that's how you hear the real story. You follow the same kids—starting from when they're 12 or 13 years old—all the way until they're 17 or 18.
And because I follow kids longitudinally, using mixed methods—qualitative and quantitative: surveys, observation, interviews—with huge samples, I’m able to capture that shifting story over time.
So hundreds of kids that we follow over time with a large research team—you start to hear a pattern of what it means to grow up in the United States. And now we're doing work in China. We've been doing a 20-year study of Chinese families. We're just about to do the 20-year follow-up of 1,200 Chinese families—1,200 Chinese families. And we ask the same question. The kids in our sample in China were born in 2005.
So anyway, you start to hear this change. And this is the big finding. The big finding is that there are four themes that the boys have revealed in their data. And the reason I pick on the boys is not because they're more interesting—as I was challenged by my daughter (I have a daughter and a son, by the way)— it's because they tell a story that we're not listening to, Peter.
They just are telling us a story—and not just about them. That's the part we're not listening to. They're not just telling a story about themselves; they're telling a story about us and what's getting in the way, and how we can solve our own problems.
So this is what they teach us. And this is what they've been teaching us since 1987 when I started listening. And now it's thousands of boys and kids and girls and non-gender-conforming kids. But again, I think it's important to understand why I pick on the boys and young men—because that's a particular story.
So, the story we learn is: First, boys—like all humans, like all girls, like everybody—want emotionally intimate friendships with other guys. They want that. And we've found that around the world. There really is no gender difference in the desire for emotionally intimate friendships.
And for boys, for many boys, that means: Not being laughed at when they feel vulnerable. Not making everything into a joke. Being able to talk about things called "deep secrets" (which are almost always family-related issues). Wanting someone to process it with. Wanting someone to recognize their pain if their parents are going through a divorce, for example.
They very much want those friendships. Do all boys want the same thing? No, there's obviously variation. But definitely over half of the boys in our studies have expressed that desire. And that's now true in China and in all the different countries where we've done this work.
The second part—or rather, a nuance to the first finding—and this is the part we're really not listening to: they have the same relational and emotional skills needed to have those friendships.
This whole notion that somehow boys don't have the skills to have the relationships that they want—that's all just garbage. Because if you listen to 12, 13, 14, 15-year-olds, their relational and emotional intelligence is extraordinary.
You can see it in my book, Rebels with a Cause. You can see it in my previous book, Deep Secrets—which was made into an Oscar-nominated movie, a feature film, Oscar-nominated in 2023. And you hear the narratives of the boys—hundreds of boys at this point—saying the same thing: this desire for close, connected relationships, particularly same-sex friendships.
And then you see their amazing emotional nuance—their ability to understand relational nuance. Knowing about covering over feelings. Knowing what happens when you cover over your feelings. Knowing how much damage it does internally. This is what 13-year-old boys will talk about.
And no, they won't necessarily talk about it with their parents. If you're thinking, "Well, they never say that to me"— they don't want to talk about it with their parents.
No, no, I'm serious. I want parents to stop wanting their kids to speak intimately with them.
For the most part, they don't want to do that, especially many boys. It's not a problem. As long as they have the skills and confidence to do it with friends when they want to—that's what matters, for kids of all genders.
And so I want us to get off this ego-focused idea: "I want them to share it with me." Because it's getting in the way. Why should they share it with you? You're their parent—and you're likely going to judge them anyway.
And besides, often they want to talk about what's happening at home—not necessarily to you. So the whole point is: They want emotionally intimate friendships, and they have the skills to have them.
That's theme number one. Theme number two, which we find very clearly in early adolescence and middle adolescence, is this. This is my biggest finding and nobody's listened to this - I finally got some traction in California where the governor's starting to listen. I'll tell you why at the end of the conversation.
Boys' linking of social health is a predictor of mental health. They'd say things like, "If I didn't have a friend, if I didn't have someone to talk to, I would want to commit suicide. I would die by suicide. I'd want to kill myself. I'd be all alone."
I mean, they say that. This is before they actually feel that way. They say, "I need friends to basically function in the world. I need close, intimate friendships." They say that directly. "And if I don't have them, I will want to kill myself. I will feel all alone."
Then, as they go into middle adolescence—remember, it's longitudinal studies—as they go into middle and late adolescence, they start to what I call "go underground" with their feelings.
They start to say things that sound like stereotypes:
"It's all good."
"I don't have any friends; I've given up on my search, but it's all good. It's all good."
You know, that repeated, sort of obsessive "It's all good," which is definitely covering over a sense of frustration and sadness—and at times, anger too—in their narratives.
The frustration of finding someone you can trust. The frustration—or just totally checking out, the what I call the "whatever" response.
"Whatever, whatever."
"Do you have any close friends this year?"
"No. Whatever."
You know, just that defensive thing. So that's what I call the social health linking to the mental health.
The third finding is what I just said: the crisis of connection that boys and young men go through as they feel pressures to "man up." I'll get to that theme—why they have a crisis of connection—in a second.
They experience a crisis of connection where they start to disconnect from themselves and from each other. Because it's—well, I'll tell you why. Just give me a second. What we know—hold on, I'm jumping because I don't want to jump. What we understand—I want your audience to understand this because I'm being misinterpreted constantly— I'm not saying only boys and young men experience a crisis of connection.
I am saying, we actually learned first about the crisis of connection from girls and young women. As they reach adolescence, they start to go underground with what they know.
So girls start to go underground with what they know and claim they don't know things: "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." And boys start to go underground with what they feel, right? And say, "I don't care," "I don't feel," etc., etc.
So girls start to go underground with thinking, and boys start to go underground with feeling. So what does that suggest about the reasons for the crisis of connection?
It suggests a cultural ideology, right? Here it comes: A cultural ideology that has masculinized thinking and feminized feeling.
And Peter, if you want the blunt answer of why we have Trump and why we're in hell right now, it's because we have given a gender identity to thinking and feeling. We have literally made it—given it—a gender identity.
Thinking and feeling. It's like if a sister came from another planet and said, "Wait a minute, you gave a gender identity to thinking and feeling?" Like, what? That is at the root of our—no, seriously, it's at the root of our hell. Not only do we give it a gender identity, but we privilege everything we've deemed masculine, and we demean and mock everything we deem feminine.
So it's not just that we give it a gender identity, but that we actually privilege what we consider masculine. It's not masculine—it's human. And we demean and mock what is so-called feminine. It's not feminine—it's just human. And what boys reveal—they reveal this hierarchy of human qualities in humans: male over female, masculine over feminine. Because they literally say things.
This is how they reveal the cultural ideology, which is the fourth theme—the fourth and final theme—which is the cultural ideology of masculinity. The cultural ideology of how we define maturity, which is about self-sufficiency, not having close, healthy relationships. That should be a core part of all definitions of maturity.
It's only about self-sufficiency and independence. So our privileging of the so-called masculine over the so-called feminine is privileging thinking over feeling, the me over the we, autonomy over connectedness, stoicism over vulnerability.
And what boys reveal—and I'm going to say this slowly so your listeners can really hear this— what boys reveal is not that they somehow have the soft over the hard, or the hard over the soft. They are equally both. They think and they feel. They want autonomy and they want connection. They are able to be stoic and they're able to be vulnerable.
And boys have been shouting that to us for decades, Peter. "Stop making me half-human by assuming that I am only capable of doing one thing and not the other."
And girls—if they had more power in the world—would be doing the same thing:
"Stop making me just a feeler and not a thinker." That's why I think a lot of girls are attracted to STEM, by the way—because it's their way to prove that they are thinkers too, not just feelers.
And the idea is that if we actually recognized humans in a yin-yang way—right?—we would value both our masculine and our feminine sides as simply what makes us human. All of us. I'm going to be very dramatic because I've been doing this for 40 years.
If we actually recognized that we have two sides to our humanity—a so-called hard and a so-called soft—and that both are equally important for survival,
we wouldn't be experiencing what we're experiencing now.
If we actually valued what we deem masculine and what we deem feminine—both—not feminine more than masculine, not masculine more than feminine—both,
and recognized that it's simply part of what it means to be human...
It’s part of the human condition that we have the capacity to think and feel. And we don't do it separately. I don't think, and then feel. I'm doing it right now. I'm thinking and feeling at the same time.
And so the idea is if we actually raised our children starting from a place—what I would call an Eastern philosophical perspective—that comes from my experience in China, an Eastern philosophical perspective: the yin-yang perspective. I wear a yin-yang on my wrist—I can't show it because it's an audio show.
But the idea is: the opposites are always in. If you look at a yin-yang symbol, you see the half white, half black—and the opposites are inside each side.
You always have feeling and thinking, and thinking and feeling. You always have—you can't have connection without autonomy. You can't have autonomy without connection. It doesn't exist. Developmental psychologists show you that too. In order to explore the environment, you need to have the confidence of connection. So yeah, go ahead.
Can you help me understand? Because I love everything you're saying and it resonates with my own experience. And I'm wondering: when you say that they've been telling the story but nobody's listening—what would it mean if we listened? What would it look like? What does hearing the story ask of us?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to have me hooked as an interviewee. I'm going to have to interview you!
This is how I feel—that we're not listening because we keep on blaming the other group. We keep on not seeing ourselves. We keep on not seeing it. What I say very bluntly: we are experiencing a culture and nature clash. We're naturally social, emotional, relational. That's natural. We're born that way—you see that in the early childhood studies. We naturally are curious about each other.
But we grow up in an antisocial culture, right? We're naturally social, but we grow up in an antisocial culture that doesn't value actually thinking about another person's thoughts and feelings—or even tells children, "Don't worry about what other people's thoughts and feelings are."
A fifth grader—just the other day, on the street, who I randomly ran into (because I always ask questions of everybody)— I asked her about her school, and the first thing she said, fifth grader, she said, "My teacher teaches me how to be selfish and not care about other people." That's literally the first thing she said. And so, my point is we are raising our children in an antisocial culture.
And so, we should not be surprised—if we are social animals and we are being raised in an antisocial culture, right? Money over people, money over people, Peter—that we're going to have massive psychological, behavioral, everything problems.
And so, to me, how I know they're not listening is, we have Trump. That's how I know. We have an administration that is probably the most brutal in my generation—born in 1963—probably the most brutal administration we've ever had. And it just feels like, as everybody's talked about, like 1930s Germany.
And I think the real reason is because—and I'll tell you why. One of the things mass shooters teach us (I didn't get to this, but I want to mention it)—mass shooters teach us. Don't flip the hierarchy. Don't take the group that you hate and put it on the bottom.
Because if you do—and we have access to weapons—we may try to kill you. Because nobody wants to be on the bottom of a hierarchy of humanness. And that's exactly what the left has done and exactly what the right has done. I'm not going to—neither party gets a pass on this. We flip the hierarchy.
Men and women are doing it with each other. Even though I'm definitely a hardcore feminist. Yeah, my feminism is not rooted in putting men on the bottom. Because quite frankly, even if I can get mad at men—my sister was raped, I have lots of negative stories about men—I know it's not going to solve the problem.
Nobody wants to be on the bottom. So you put men on the bottom, then they get angry, then they hate women. Then they try to put women even more on the bottom.
We have to stop the madness. And to me, the voices of young people—if we were listening—we would understand that our culture is embedded in a hierarchy of humanness, where we think some people are more human and deserving of healthcare and food and housing than others, right? That's an antisocial culture: if we think some humans are more valuable than other humans.
And then, a culture that values only one half of our humanity over the other—masculine over the feminine. So if we live in such a culture—which the boys expose—that culture, mass shooters literally say, Peter, it's stunning, "I don't want to be on the bottom of the hierarchy."
They say the word hierarchy. It's not like an academic term. They say it. They don't want to be. So if we flip it, and we try to put them on the bottom—which is what we've done—and now I'm speaking as a Democrat— what many Democrats have done is put the needs of the white working class, poor working class people, on the bottom.
Of course they're angry. Are they saying racist, horrible, horrible things? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm not forgiving it. And I'm not saying it's okay. It's hateful. It's like 1930s Germany, right?
But the idea is—the solution can't be "Let's put them on the bottom and say you're shit, and I don't give a shit about you because you're racist and sexist and all that kind of thing."
Because I get the anger of— if you felt like you were put on the bottom, and someone said, "Well, we're going to continue to put you on the bottom because you say ugly things about us."
You know, just the—I get the anger. Even though what Trump and his colleagues are doing with our country is so revolting I can barely stand it, I get the anger of those who voted for Trump. I get it.
So to me, the boys and young men—even though I'm mostly talking in my samples about boys of color from working class communities—they get it too. They get it too.
They don't say directly what I'm saying, but they say, "Hey, I have a hard and a soft side. My story should be as important as your story. Listen to what we have to say, because if you don't listen, we get angry. We get angry."
And so to me, what it would look like if we were listening to young people— and the other thing is—one thing, since my book has come out since July, Peter... I mean, I've had some good interviews, so I don't want to critique people who have interviewed me, for the most part. But I'm amazed at how much I will tell the story, Peter, and then the summary of it will be "Boys have a crisis of connection and we need to be nicer to boys."
Yeah
And I'll be like, oh, you know—and then it looks like I'm flipping the hierarchy and putting girls on the bottom. You know what I mean? It looks like I'm only valuing boys and I'm not caring about girls. And so—and I'm like—I will even say to interviewers, "Don't do that."
Yeah, yeah.
Don't say that my work is about boys. It's what boys teach us about us and how to solve our own problems—not just about boys. Although my Deep Secrets previous book was just about boys. But the point is that people are only hearing what they want to hear, Peter. They're only hearing what confirms their assumption of what I'm going to say.
Yeah.
And so, to me, if they listened—to finally answer your question after 10 minutes— it would be to create, honestly, a politics, a creative politics, and homes and schools that made, as their starting point, that all humans are equally human.
And I know that sounds like lefty kind of garbage. It's not. Just: all human lives are equally valuable. And so whether you're poor white working class—you know, white, let's even put them in the, you know, racist category—or you're a lefty person... Actually, I'm going to make this extreme to make a point. A rich white guy living in Beverly Hills or wherever—that both lives are equally valuable.
Yeah.
Both lives are equally valuable. And by the way, equal also means the rich guy too. Not just saying that the poor guy matters and the rich guy doesn't matter because he's rich. We have to understand that Donald Trump is making us suffer—meaning, it's the rich guys that are making us suffer. So we can't ignore the rich guys.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
Yes, I do.
They're a reflection of their own suffering. I mean, what I want to say to Trump—and it doesn't sound aggressive enough, so, you know, whatever—but I do want to say: "I'm sorry that you're so lonely."
Yeah.
You know, because at some level, I truly believe—listening to boys my whole career—that his anger comes from a deep, deep and profound loneliness, right? Where he's trying to get people to like him. He's constantly trying to get people to like him because he feels empty. And I would never say that publicly, but I'll say it in your interview because you understand the context in which I'm saying that.
Yeah, yeah.
You know what I mean? So we have to care about everybody—not just our group.
Yes. I want to get to the idea because I feel very—I always tell the story—I feel very lucky. I applied to what I thought was an ad agency, and it turned into, like, a research firm. So I didn't look to become a researcher, but they kind of put me in front of people and told me to ask them questions. You know what I mean? And I really feel grateful that I became—you know what I mean? You've been complimenting my questions and my interview.
Yeah.
I feel so lucky that I was given that opportunity to become an interviewer. And I'm just—everything—and so you and I, I think, are alike in that we talk to people, we listen to people, we ask questions in order to occupy their perspective for moments.
Exactly.
Can you tell me more about, I guess, a little bit about your methodology? About how do you listen to young people, and what does it mean to listen to people? Because so much—I agree with you—so much of, I mean, maybe this is just what it's like to be a researcher in a very divided—
No, no, no.
Environment, you know?
Yeah, yeah. No, basically, because I'm not just a researcher—that's the answer.
Yeah.
So about 10 years ago, I started to do a project called the Listening with Curiosity Project in public schools. We now have been in public schools across New York City, and also I've taught it at university—at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU New York. And we created basically a framework and a method of teaching this—our practices. There are nine practices of listening with curiosity. I write about it in my Rebels with a Cause book.
And we've integrated it into a curriculum where the framework is that we are experiencing a crisis of connection due to our cultural-nature clash. A cultural-nature clash leads us to disconnect from ourselves and each other, right?
So I want people to understand that. Living, growing up, being social animals, growing up in an antisocial culture makes you disconnect from your own self, what you know about yourself, and what you know about others, what you know about your own humanity and other people's humanity.
So the crisis of connection is the outcome of the cultural-nature clash. And the consequences of the crisis of connection are depression, anxiety, suicide, violence, domestic violence, mass shooters, drug abuse, right?
Because once you disconnect from yourself, guess what happens? You disconnect from others. And once you can't see somebody else's humanity—that's it. You can't see your own, you can't see others. And the solution is—right?—so it's the cultural-nature clash leading to the crisis of connection. The solution is to go back to the first part of the story: our natural social selves.
So the Listening with Curiosity practice is really fundamentally to tap into our five-year-old sense of wonder with each other. And I've been spending the last semester hanging out in a pre-K classroom of three-year-olds, four-year-olds. And Peter, I just have to say this because it's been so shocking to me:
You go into a four-year-old classroom—it is bubbling not only with questions about each other. I get questions—when I first walked in, the questions were:
"What's your mother's first name?"
"Why am I wearing this necklace?"
"Why do I seem to like the necklace?"—because it was the second day I'd been watching them.
A million questions—they're asking each other questions. "Where is Harrison?"—because Harrison's supposed to be in the class—and "Is he sick?"
I mean, basically all these questions about each other—interpersonal curiosity. We don't even study that topic in developmental psychology, Peter. It's not even a topic we investigate—interpersonal curiosity.
What?
We don't even study it. We don't think it's a thing—because we feminized it. We feminized it. And thus, we don't think it's a real thing.
We study intellectual curiosity—curiosity about the world—but not the natural curiosity of each other. If you want to know the answer to why we're having a crisis of connection, it's that.
It's that we don't nurture our natural interpersonal curiosity in other people's thoughts and feelings. It's all about me. What can I tell you about me? It's not about, actually, what can I learn from you?
So what children are doing—showing—four-year-olds are showing that if you don't have that, if you're not nurturing that sense of "Who are you?" and "What can I learn about you?"—and then ideally, it goes both ways—that's what creates connection. That's what creates connection.
So not only are they engaging with questions, but it is the most social, moral context I have ever been in, in my last 20 years. They are taking care of each other—even when they fight, because there's obviously some bad behavior going on (they're four years old).
But even when they fight, it's hilarious. I mean, it's funny, almost—because they will start to hit, and then you'll come over, and one kid will be mad at the other kid, and he's sort of hitting him on the arm. And you'll say, "Oh, come on, you can't do that. You can't hit." And then you'll walk away, and you'll see him sort of do it again, and then the other kid will sort of do it again.
And before you know it—I promise you, it's happened many times—there's a group hug going on. A group hug. Like, the two boys will start hugging, and then all the other boys will jump in, they'll start hugging each other, and then they're starting to laugh. I mean, it's just amazing.
Yes, do some kids act out and act poorly? Sure, of course. But what's amazing to me is how social and moral it is. They're paying attention.
We had a little story—I have two quick stories to tell you, because I'll tell you why I'm telling the story: because it's directly answering your question—How do we fix it?
We fix it through remembering that we were naturally like this.
So they're reading a book about a boy who wants to step on an ant. It's a fantastic children's story—I don't remember the name of it—but it's fantastic. And so the teacher turned it into a discussion about whether the boy should step on the ant or not.
And it was amazing to hear the kids arguing about why the boy should not step on the ant. And it did not feel like it was just, "Oh, that comes from the parents," you know what I mean? It came from them.
They were like, "The ant has a family, and he would lose his family, and his family would be very sad." You know, all the kids—all the kids.
And one kid—which I loved, one of the most delicious young kids in the classroom—he said, "Well, I think the boy should step on the ant."
And I said, "Why do you think that? Why do you think that?"
And he goes, "Because it's a little bit fun."
And I just loved it—you know, that's a four-year-old—the honesty, the honesty.
He wasn't just saying what he thought he was supposed to say. He looked at me with this lovely devious smile and said, "But it's a little bit fun."
And so, anyway. Then the other thing. One little boy showed a video of the way he gets to work—well, school—to school. And the teacher then opens this up and says, "What questions do you have for him about the video?" It’s a two-minute video. All of them raised their hands—all of them. And they asked real questions.
It's not just raising their hand to raise their hand. They're asking questions like:
"Who videotaped it?"
"Where was your dad?"
"We could hear your dad's voice—what was he doing?"
"Where are you?"
"Why are you scrooching down on your video?"
I'm just saying—you get what I'm saying. And in my NYU classroom or my Yale classroom—or wherever I've taught (I've taught in lots of places around the world)—you ask a question or you ask what their questions are:
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
I want to slow-motion this idea that there's no study of interpersonal curiosity.
Can you please just sort of—
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't quite believe it.
Yeah, I know, I know. Okay, so first of all—I'm exaggerating a little bit. There are a couple studies. There's a beautiful book called Hungry Minds that came out a couple of years ago, and she talks about social curiosity. She—and probably, I would say, maybe four or five other people in the history of developmental psychology that I am aware of—have looked at social curiosity.
So it's definitely been looked at in a sort of small group of studies that you can find. And everybody cites the same person. The person who wrote Hungry Minds is Susan Engel. Everybody cites her because she's the one that actually looked at what's called social curiosity.
However—right—so that's... but it's still a tiny group. It's a tiny group compared to looking at intellectual curiosity, or self-regulation, or all the other things we look at in childhood.
But what has not been done—we're hoping to do the first study ever—is a developmental study where you look at how interpersonal curiosity changes over time and how that is shaped by the context. That's never been done. And I'm just saying that because in developmental psychology, that's what we do. We look at things over time. We don't look at one-shot deals.
And so the whole point is: there's probably, out there—because you never say never in anything—there's probably a study out there that's done it over a few years that I've never heard of.
But the point is: given the importance of human connection to interpersonal curiosity, it is stunning to me that we don't have decades and decades of developmental research over time, looking at the development of that sense of wonder in each other.
How the context matters—because you know context matters. The home context, the school context, the peer context. If it's not happening with your peers or at your home, it's not going to be happening. It's going to be diminishing. And then—why is it that we start off at four or five—this is the big question, Peter—this is what I want to ask your audience.
Why at four and five is everybody raising their hand to ask questions of the little boy about how he got to school—meaning not about the moon, not about the stars, not about anything abstract—but just how that boy got to school, you know, in his little video?
And then you ask a question—or you ask if they have questions—very simple questions, not testing questions, very simple questions or asking for their questions about very fundamental issues... And nobody raises their hand, except the three students who always raise their hand, right? And you end up calling on them.
And when I told that to my kids, who are 22 and 24, they said, "Well, because everybody's afraid." And I said, exactly—that's my point. I don't think that my students are idiots—obviously not. I know that they have that five-year-old in them. But they become afraid.
What's made them so afraid? It's the anti-social culture that basically judges your curiosity. It makes a judgment about whether your curiosity is sophisticated, whether it reflects intelligence. And they think that asking, "What's your mother's name?" is a stupid question. It's not a stupid question—because actually, your mother's name— I love that the child asked it.
You know what my daughter said? This was so interesting. She's 22, and I was telling her about that story. And I was sort of thinking it was so sweet that the little girl wanted to know my mother's name.
And she said, "Well, Mom, you know why?"
And I was like, "No, I don't know why."
And she goes, "She's probably just realizing that her mom has a name.
You know, it's not just 'Mom.' And so because she is just recognizing that her mom has a name, she realizes that you probably have a mom with a name.
And so she wants to know what that name is."
And I said, "Chiara"—that's my daughter’s name—"Chiara, that is just so effing great." I said, "I think you got it spot on."
And I said, "You got it." And I would have never thought of that, because I still have an adult head. I was thinking it was like a way to connect to me—I mean, you know, whatever.
I wasn't thinking what she was thinking about it—worse from the four-year-old perspective. She was channeling the four-year-old and saying, "You just learned that 'Mom' is not a name." And so—don't you love that response? I mean, it's beautiful. But I'm just saying—what happens to us?
I think—honestly—I think we get traumatized by the culture. I think we're traumatized. We're fearful, we're traumatized. We don't want to ask questions. We're afraid of being judged. We don't share with our parents because we're afraid of being judged. We don't share anything because we're afraid of being judged in an anti-social culture that hates people. No, no, I'm serious.
I mean, you know.
I know, I know, I know. Think about how much we hate people.
Well, I'm also thinking—to the degree to which you have access to these insights into boys and into us—because you're having the conversations. But where are those conversations happening, in the absence of the research that gets done to create the conditions for it?
Yeah, on this podcast. I'm just saying—it doesn't happen. And that's the other thing we get from young people. I get this all the time—you must get this all the time. People get teary-eyed after I interview them. People get emotional. And so—I mean, I get it from little kids, from teenagers, from young adults, from grownups. I even asked—I remember asking an African-American man, probably in his late 40s—what he wants in his life most, and why. And he got all teary-eyed.
He said, "Nobody asks Black men that." He said, "Nobody. I've never been asked that in my entire life—what do I want, and why?" He said, "I've never been asked that." And he started to get all teary-eyed.
And I thought, that's the tragedy of an antisocial culture. We don't think what you want is relevant. We don't think what you want is relevant unless it's about money and unless it's helping us get what we want.
There's so much. I mean, I feel like the gendered aspect of questions and listening—
So I've been a researcher and I've operated in the commercial sphere. And very often I'm interacting with what feels like sort of the feminine part of a corporation—the part that does research and listens to people. Somebody called me—they described me as the most masculine researcher they'd met. And I found it so—it's like, it gives me vertigo. I don't know what to do with that description because it sort of turns expectations. What does that mean exactly? I don't quite understand it.
Yeah, yeah, neither do I.
But there was another thought that I had about—oh, that answers—we prioritize answers. The hierarchy, right?
Oh, totally.
To have a question is a complete weakness. It's a complete failure.
I'm going to make it more blunt. We privilege knowing over not knowing. And so ultimately, that is our ultimate hierarchy. That—what you know. What do you know. And not, "What do you not know?""What are your questions?"
And I want to create a revolution. I really—I'm serious about this. I want to—we've been trying to do this in middle and high schools for the last decade. I want to create a revolution to celebrate our capacity to not know, and to know what we don't know, and to ask questions. Right? And I just—I remember, that's so obvious to me. It hit me about two years ago. That's what it is. We privilege knowing over not knowing.
And so everybody wants to share what they know, rather than—"What's your question? What's your question?" And they're like, "Well, I don't have any questions." Like—how can you have no questions? You know? Yeah, well—yeah, we are. We're traumatized.
Like you say—you can't generate a question when you're terrified.
Exactly. I literally think we are traumatized. There's a beautiful concept—which we don't have time to talk about—but at some point, I want to recommend a book, Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, talks about a concept called moral injury.
And he talks about essentially living—he's talking about the military—but it's applied to our culture. When people in authority do things that you know is not right, but you are forced to do it anyway. And I think we are all experiencing moral injury, right?
We know this anti-social culture is toxic.
Right.
We know it. We know it in our bodies. And yet we produce it. We continually produce it. And I think it's causing a serious trauma—more trauma for certain people than other people. But the point is—that's why we're getting the mass shooters, the rising suicides. I mean, it's causing serious, serious problems.
And I do have to say—because people forget—it's not natural to kill ourselves and to kill each other. That's not a natural thing. We may have done it throughout our history, but I'm just saying—it's not natural to our species. It's just something that happens. Why does it happen so much? Why is it happening more in terms of suicide? (Not in terms of homicide, but in terms of suicide.)
Anyway.
Last question. What do you love about your work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?
You know what? To live a life—you’re going to relate to this— to live a life where I get to have questions and then pursue the answers to them— you can't get better than that.
I mean, I live a life of purpose, of passion, of asking my own questions, and then going out into the world and trying to answer it sitting in pre-K classrooms, interviewing teenagers, doing studies with amazing college students, teaching classes on topics that I love.
I mean, I am the most lucky person in the whole world. I'm the most lucky person in the whole world. I mean, think about it. You must feel the same way. That's what I do. That's what I do for a living. I get paid for it. I get paid.
I'm right there with you. I feel like it's amazing. To be given the permission to ask questions and then listen and explore is just an unbelievable gift.
Exactly. And we need to use a beautiful phrase—which I'm going to repeat back because it's important. I think it's important for the two of us also to really encourage that: giving permission to ask. You know, like creating structures—I try to do it in my classrooms—giving the permission to ask.
Yes.
Oftentimes people think asking is rude—and it's the opposite of rude.
Well, I'm really landing in this. It feels a little bit too academic or too explicit for some reason, but you've used this term over and over again. that if we are in agreement that we live in an anti-social culture, then we need to create pro-social— A pro-social culture.
Yeah.
And that is in the book I'm working on now for Harvard, called Our Social Nature in an Anti-Social Culture: A Five-Part Story. And the last chapter is all about how to create a pro-social culture. And what I'm arguing here is the importance of interpersonal curiosity.
Yeah, it's amazing. Why is that word—I feel like this is a phrase, pro-social, that I hadn't really—I've only encountered it in the last, I don't know, couple of years. I heard it once three years ago, and it was around deliberative democracy and a wonkish kind of way of bringing people together and community engagement and civic engagement.
And it was like—if we're fragmenting in all these different ways, and all of our spaces that we have for coming together around community decisions or interpersonal decisions aren't working—then what do we do? We have to model new forms of behavior, right? And this idea of pro-social is all over for me now.
Yeah, no, but also—I would just want to remind you as a developmental psychologist—because there's not enough developmental psychologists in these conversations, by the way. They always get social psychologists. It's like—social psychologists don't listen to children.
Developmental psychology—no, I'm serious. I mean, if we listened to children, we wouldn't be so obsessed with social psychology. So developmentals remind us that we already have the skills within us. We're born with it. It's natural. It's not—we don't have to teach it. We don't have to, right? We just have to nurture it.
And so to me, that's the radical optimistic message I'm saying. I'm deeply optimistic because we are born with these skills. Young people reveal them all the time. It's just a matter of nurturing them rather than shutting them down. So the solution is not to teach it. The solution is to nurture it. That's a much easier thing to do, right?
And so the idea is that if we listened to young people—which nobody's doing—and nobody's listening to developmental psychologists—we would understand. See, we don't think we can learn something from young people, Peter. We really don't.
We think we know, and they don't know. And we don't value not knowing.
So they're not going to teach us anything. We have to reverse that whole hierarchy of adults over children. We actually should see them equally.
We all have—I always say this—we all have something to teach and something to learn. Everybody, regardless of your age. You have something to teach and something to learn.
If we understood that naturally—and we understood we have the capacity to answer our own questions, right, through investigating it with other people—
we would just be inherently a pro-social culture.
Because it's about looking at you, Peter, and saying, What can I learn from you, not just about you, but about me, through you, right? And then once that happens—Toni Morrison talks about that—once that happens, that's when a connection happens. When we do it both ways. That we see ourselves in the other, and then we're connected.
I feel like we're slipping into the geeking out phase, which I'm enjoying very much. One last thought. Did you ever encounter Ursula Le Guin's Listening and Telling?
Do you know that essay?
I think I do, because the name is super familiar.
But she describes—she uses these analogies for communication. The conventional idea is like boxes transmitting units of information through a tube, but anybody who has actually had a conversation knows that's not true. And she uses the analogy of amoeba sex as being the metaphor for communication—because it's intersubjective and it's reciprocal, and they become one. They come together in conversation.
Yeah, but it has to have curiosity in it. Because what I would say—in a neoliberal, crazy environment—where our conversation is just parallel play, it's actually not doing that, because there's no curiosity in it. So it's just parallel play, where each person is talking but nobody's listening.
I love it.
And so to me, you have to have the curiosity in there, right? To be like an amoeba, right? I mean, it has to—
Yeah, you have to want, right?
You have to want it. You have to be curious. You have to wonder about the other person. And if you don't have that, you get this isolating, horrible parallel play—where we think just by revealing my private information, we're going to create a relationship. And that doesn't create a relationship—to just reveal vulnerable stuff.
I know we're over time, but I'm amazed at how many people will think that the key to closeness is being vulnerable. Right. Like, no, no, no, no, no. The key to closeness is curiosity.
Yeah.
You know—be curious about the person you're talking to. Who are they?You have to be curious. The vulnerability is so overrated to me.
Yeah. I remember somebody saying that the key to a good interview is love.
What do you make of that?
I mean, if love is curiosity. But I would say again—it's like, if you're not curious—as so many people know, especially when it goes one way, you're curious about the person and they're not curious about you, it leads to deep alienation when someone's not curious about you.
You know, when you're talking and they're blabbing on and blabbing on and blabbing on—and then, you know, for a lot of people, it leads to real anger. You know—how can you not be curious in me, and I'm curious in you?
We have come to the end of our time. Thank you so much!
Thank you, thank you.
All right.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
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