You and Me and Mr. Self-Esteem

Most of us spend some part of our lives feeling bad about ourselves and wanting to feel better. But this preoccupation is a surprisingly new one in the history of the world, and can largely be traced back to one man: a rumpled, convertible-driving California state representative named John Vasconcellos who helped spark a movement that took over schools, board rooms, and social-service offices across America in the 1990s. This week, we look at the rise and fall of the self-esteem movement and ask: is it possible to raise your self-esteem? And is trying to do so even a good idea? Special thanks to big thank you to the University of California, Santa Barbara Library for use of audio material from their Humanistic Psychology Archives and to their staff for helping located so many audio recordings. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Heather Radke and Matt Kielty Produced by - Matt KietlyFlute performance and compositions by - Ben BatchelderVoiceover work by - Dann FinkFact-checking by - Anna Pujol-Mazzini and Angely Mercadoand Edited by - Pat Walters EPISODE CITATIONS: Articles - UCSB Humanistic Psychology Archive (https://zpr.io/HfVjUmvcVevE) Books - Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us (https://zpr.io/eGRyqz9zNQHu) by Will Storr. Counterpoint, 2018. A Liberating Vision (https://zpr.io/tJn7BR5m84fv) by Vasconcellos, John. Impact Publishers, Inc., 1979 The Therapeutic State (https://zpr.io/tJn7BR5m84fv) by Nolan, James, Jr. NYU Press, 1998 Sign up for our newsletter. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Wait, you're listening? Okay. Alright.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Alright.

• 0:08Speaker 02

  You're listening to Radiolab.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Radiolab.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  From...

• 0:12Speaker 00

  WNYC.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  C. See?

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Yup.

• 0:19Speaker 03

  Hello? Can you hear me?

• 0:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, we hear you. We're just ignoring you.

• 0:22Speaker 03

  Okay, that's fine.

• 0:23Speaker 04

  You were not. I was waiting until it was recording.

• 0:26Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. And today...

• 0:30Speaker 03

  Do you know what this is about at all, Latif?

• 0:32Speaker 05

  Only vaguely. Only two words. A story from a pair of friends. Producer Matt Kielty and contributing editor Heather Radke.

• 0:41Speaker 04

  You wanna say 'em?

• 0:42Speaker 05

  Self-esteem?

• 0:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Or maybe this is actually really, in fact, a story about Heather's need for constant validation and praise.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  Dang, man!

• 0:51Speaker 05

  Whoa!

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Coming in hot!

• 0:53Speaker 04

  What is the most sort of like honest explanation of how this came about? You were feeling bad.

• 0:58Speaker 03

  I think, okay, the most honest answer is sometimes, probably like, more than I like, to an embarrassing degree, I feel bad about myself. And I am a creative person in a profession that where there's lots of ways that you can, if you're so inclined, you can find to feel bad about yourselves. There's always a list you're not on, always a sales number you didn't reach, always a pitch that didn't get accepted.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  And...

• 1:28Speaker 05

  And Matt, is you're acting like you're an alien from another planet or something?

• 1:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally, I know.

• 1:33Speaker 04

  A few days ago, Heather asked me if I was proud that she jumped in Lake Michigan when it was cold.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  And he was like, "Nope, not proud, not interested. Bye!"

• 1:40Speaker 04

  It was jumping to a lake, that's it.

• 1:41Speaker 05

  Wait, Matt, but you don't, do you feel immune to all of these problems?

• 1:45Speaker 04

  I maybe like to kind of sit in my self-loathing a little bit more.

• 1:51Speaker 05

  I've been a party to that in the past, one time or another. Yeah, I've witnessed that.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  I just, I think, I think it's like the seeking out of a sort of affirmation and compliment feels like a means to maybe feeling good. And I don't necessarily believe in the kind of project of the sort of goal of... Trying to feel good.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  But I mean, I don't think it's like that weird that I wanna feel better about myself.

• 2:16Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Like, I think the question of like, how might I feel better about myself is pretty normal, like, kind of about as normal as it could be.

• 2:24Speaker 05

  It's like their whole industry is based on this question.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like everywhere. Like, you see it everywhere. Like, it's on reality TV, it's on Instagram. You know, it's like, everything about Instagram is like, how Instagram is giving us low self-esteem, like.

• 2:36Speaker 05

  But like, what are, why are, what, this, this just Matt Heather Therapy Hour? What, is there a story here?

• 2:42Speaker 03

  There's a little bit of that.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  It's a little bit of that throughout. No, no, no, no. We do, okay, no, we have a story, um, that Heather and I spent a long time working on.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Years, years.

• 2:52Speaker 04

  Years working on.

• 2:53Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  But it's about, it's about the fact that this idea, this thing that Heather's talking about, this, this pursuit of feeling good about yourself, how, sort of weirdly, it's not that old of an idea.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's not that old. It's kind of all based on a lie.

• 3:10Speaker 05

  Hmm, okay.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  And how so much of this, you can kind of really trace back to this one guy.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  How do you say his last name?

• 3:18Speaker 00

  I think, I think it's Vasconcellos. That's how I've always said it.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Vasconcellos, okay.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  I mean, I think.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  John Vasconcellos, or maybe Vasconcellos.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  We can call him, you call him Vasco in the book, right?

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Everyone calls him Vasco. I just feel like I.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Interesting, this is a weird thing. Robert Pattinson, the Hollywood actor.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, Twilight.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Bought the film rights. Did I tell you about this?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  No.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  I don't tell people this.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  He's the film rights?

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, he bought the film rights because he wanted to make the film of Vasco. And he spent, I spent, I had a three hour meeting with him about it. And he was like, who do you think should play Vasco? And I said, I think it should be the guy, Magnum P.I. And he was like.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  Tom Selleck?

• 3:51Speaker 00

  What? Tom Selleck, yeah. It was like, I said the wrong thing. I thought they'd be good.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Well, I can, I can see it. I can actually, because it's the mustache.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  It's the mustache.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  And the big, like, bear-like thing.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Okay, so John actually died back in 2014. And so, we ended up talking to the author, Will Storr.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  So, Will wrote a book about the self, like, how we think of ourselves, called Selfie.

• 4:14Speaker 05

  Selfie, alright, like it.

• 4:15Speaker 04

  Which has a whole chapter on John.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  And then we also spoke to.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I've got all kinds of curiosity. And questions, so.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Mitch Saunders.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  One of John's closest friends.

• 4:24Speaker 06

  But I think those will emerge as we get going, yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  And before we get started, I guess I just want to say, in reporting this story, I've always kind of thought of John as like an Icarus figure. He's a kind of modern day Icarus where he wanted so much to feel good. He wanted everyone in the whole world to feel good. But he did fly maybe a little too close to the sun.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  So what drew you to John initially?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Um, what I thought was so interesting about John in his early life was that he was born into a very strict Catholic family.

• 4:57Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. A big, big influence was the Catholicism that he grew up in.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  So if we back up a little bit, John was born in 1932.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  In San Jose.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  The oldest of three kids.

• 5:08Speaker 06

  His father was superintendent of schools in the East Bay.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  His mom mostly stayed at home.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  She could be pretty stern.

• 5:14Speaker 06

  She'd give my wife a hard time about the meal we had prepared, you know?

• 5:17Speaker 03

  And John, as a kid, he was clearly very bright.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  Never really got in trouble.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  And was also.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  A very strict Catholic.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  A good Catholic boy. And the kind of good Catholic.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  That kind of fetishized self-loathing.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Because this was a sort of Catholicism that was heavy on.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Original sin.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  And death through sin.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  The idea that we're all born sinners.

• 5:39Speaker 05

  And in this way, death came to all people because all sin.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  He was raised.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Behold.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Never to think well of himself.

• 5:48Speaker 05

  I was brought forth in iniquity.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  And never think about me, the I.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  And in sin did my mother conceive me.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  To not show pride, not show anger.

• 5:56Speaker 06

  That you are a horrible person if you touch yourself, if you engage with anybody else in any kind of sex whatsoever outside of marriage. It was this upbringing of being told so many times in so many ways that you're less than, not good enough, fundamentally flawed.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  He used to tell a story, who knows whether it's true, because it's such a great story, where he ran for class president in the eighth grade and he lost by one vote.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  And do you know whose vote it was?

• 6:23Speaker 05

  His own.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  His own vote.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  That one vote was his.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  Ah.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  He voted for the other person.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  He was so self-hating that he couldn't bring himself to vote for himself.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  God, the poor guy.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  But he believed in himself enough to run, but not enough to... What a puzzle there.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's a tangled web.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  When I was looking through his personal archives, I found a letter from an early girlfriend that actually said to him, "The thing I love most about you, John, is your absolute humility."

• 6:47Speaker 04

  But...

• 6:48Speaker 06

  You know, this was one of the things that animated him, was his own lack of confidence in himself.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  He would later become class president.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Attend at this fancy private school in the Bay.

• 6:57Speaker 06

  He was valedictorian.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  He got into Yale and Harvard.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  But he chose to stay in California.

• 7:00Speaker 06

  Santa Clara University, went on to Santa Clara Law, was valedictorian everywhere he went.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Graduates top of his law class.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Becomes this quite successful young man.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  Working at this law firm in the Bay.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Tall, broad-shouldered, clean-cut.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Black suit, black tie, neat hair.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  And in 1962... He needs no introduction to any Californian. He decides to join the reelection campaign of... Governor... Democratic governor. Pat Brown.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  And he would say this later in an interview, that it was like this moment on this campaign where politics became, quote, "etched in his heart."

• 7:31Speaker 04

  And so, in 1966, at the age of 34, he runs for a seat in the California State House.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  On November 8th, 1966.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  He wins.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  And then...

• 7:44Speaker 00

  Well, he has this spectacular nervous breakdown.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  He completely collapses.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  The way he describes it, he says, "I found myself and my identity in my life coming utterly apart."

• 7:55Speaker 05

  Was there something that precipitated this, or what? Like, what? Why?

• 7:58Speaker 03

  Well, at the time, no one knew what precipitated it.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Like, he never talked publicly about the details of what happened.

• 8:03Speaker 05

  Well...

• 8:04Speaker 04

  But the way that Mitch would describe it to us was, it was kind of as if John had felt like he'd been handed a script his whole life, like a script from his family, from his church, from society of like, "This is how you're supposed to dress, this is how you're supposed to behave." And he was suddenly kind of coming up against the idea that maybe he didn't want to live by that script.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  And it left him feeling like he had no place to go.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  And after that, John realizes, he says in his book, that he has to find some help. And so he finds this Catholic priest, who's also a therapist, who starts to ask him questions like-

• 8:42Speaker 06

  Tell me how you see the world, John. You know, what matters to you? When that happened, how did you experience that? What's the feeling for you? I'll bet you that was the first time he'd ever had that kind of encounter.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  The first time someone's relating to him.

• 8:55Speaker 06

  With genuine inquiry about who he really is.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  It was these therapy sessions with this Catholic priest that would kind of crack John open and send him down a new path that would eventually lead him to this place called Esalen.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  The Esalen Institute.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  I feel like this is a famous-

• 9:17Speaker 04

  It is.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, if you're a fan of Mad Men, that's where Donald Draper ends up at the end of Mad Men.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  Oh, that's where he is.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  Aha.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  That's where the future was born, really, Esalen.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  So the Esalen Institute-

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Is this place in Big Sur in California.

• 9:30Speaker 06

  With unbelievable natural beauty.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Mitch, like John, spent a lot of time there.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  And if you could just imagine, like, this big mid-century house on a cliff overlooking the ocean, that's Esalen.

• 9:42Speaker 06

  And there are these amazing hot mineral baths right on the edge of these cliffs.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  There were these baths that you had to get in naked.

• 9:49Speaker 06

  John said the first time he discovered that we're supposed to go into the tubs with no clothes on, he actually turned around and left.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  Ah. Because, like, he just has so much, sort of, shame around his body, discomfort around it.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  But Mitch says, like, this was the point of this place, of Esalen.

• 10:08Speaker 06

  It was a place where you could go to climb out of the, what I think John, and certainly I believe, was a dark pit of misguided beliefs. You know, there's something, you're fundamentally flawed at birth. There's something wrong with you.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  The promise of Esalen is that it was a place to help you finally kind of realize-

• 10:33Speaker 06

  You're true.

• 10:36Speaker 07

  Self.

• 10:37Speaker 04

  And that in doing so, you could find liberation, freedom, maybe even deep happiness.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  What a promise.

• 10:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. When you say it like that, I don't know if I want to meet my true self.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  I have, whenever people say that, the find my true self thing, there's a way that it's just sort of confounding because it's like, well, what are you talking about? Like my-

• 10:55Speaker 04

  How am I not myself?

• 10:56Speaker 03

  What is this self that's not-

• 10:57Speaker 05

  When I was taking out the garbage, was I not my true self?

• 11:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, don't worry. We got to the bottom of it.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  Indeed, we did.

• 11:04Speaker 07

  So, yeah, so no, this is-

• 11:05Speaker 03

  So we ended up talking to this guy, Michael.

• 11:07Speaker 07

  Michael Pettit, professor at York University in Toronto.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Where he studies the history of psychology.

• 11:12Speaker 07

  So-

• 11:13Speaker 04

  And Michael told us that what was going on at Esalen in the 60s is that it was sort of representative of this huge shift that was happening in psychology.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Because up until this point, a lot of what psychology was came from-

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Sigmund Freud.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  Freud.

• 11:28Speaker 07

  And Freud-

• 11:29Speaker 00

  Similar to Catholics, really.

• 11:30Speaker 07

  Famously had a very pessimistic view of human nature.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Which is the-

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Subterranean horrors of the subconscious.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  We are-

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Primal, inherited, ugly.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  Full of horrible, dark secrets.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Testering impulses and compulsions.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  That we are covering up from ourselves.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  And that even if you go and seek treatment, you seek help-

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Through therapy.

• 11:48Speaker 07

  You will still be left with everyday unhappiness.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  What he called ordinary unhappiness.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  Oh, I like that. I like Freud.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course you do.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  Oh, shut up, Heather.

• 11:58Speaker 05

  But, okay, so basically Freud is like, yeah, we're all suffering here. This is what we're doing together.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the best we could hope for-

• 12:05Speaker 07

  Is contentment, maybe?

• 12:07Speaker 03

  But a little bit after Freud and a little bit before Esalen.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  This is around like the 40s and the 50s.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  There come these new psychologists-

• 12:15Speaker 07

  Who think we can be happy.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Who think we can be free from our suffering.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  And one of those psychologists was this guy-

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Basically the anti-Freud.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Now, Dr. Rogers, something of yourself.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  Carl Rogers.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  I'm Carl Rogers.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  He's the second most influential psychotherapist ever after Sigmund Freud.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  And Rogers believed that, sure-

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Of course, for all of us, a little bit crazy, including me.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  People are messy, they're impulsive, but fundamentally-

• 12:42Speaker 07

  People are good.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  And the reason that people suffer, the reason that they feel pain and anxiety.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I have found the same yearning theme emerging time after time after time.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Is because-

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Person would be saying, I'm- Not really me.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  People aren't being themselves.

• 12:58Speaker 07

  Your true, authentic self.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Instead, people were suffering because they were trying to be.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Here's a rather typical statement.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Who they thought they were supposed to be.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  From a young woman. She says, I think that I began to lose me when I was in high school.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  There's the young woman who's always trying to please everybody.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Trying to make people feel at ease around me, or to make things go along smoothly.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Or the young man.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Why am I afraid of her?

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Who tries to never disappoint his mom.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  This is silly. I know it, but I can't seem to fight it.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Or the guy.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  I think that I've always loved people.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Who always buries his emotions.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  But I've never dared put it into words.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Rogers said, when he got down to it, patient after patient would tell him.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I feel like I've been just playing a sort of false role.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  And that is what causes our suffering.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  This picture you present to the outside world.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  Our pain.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  You can see how this was John. Yeah. Suit and tie, normie haircut, kind of playing the role of the good Catholic boy.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  And so for people like John, Rogers had developed this way out.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  To leave behind this false role.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  This type of therapy.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  And get closer to being one's real self.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  That would become this huge part of Esalen.

• 14:08Speaker 07

  And that was

• 14:11Speaker 07

  the encounter group.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  So could you just walk me through, like, what was an encounter group at Esalen?

• 14:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, so encounter groups, it would be kind of this break from the everyday.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  You would go to Esalen?

• 14:21Speaker 07

  You would be with a group of strangers.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  Maybe five people, maybe 15 people.

• 14:25Speaker 07

  Who don't know you.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Who have no expectations of you, so that you can maybe be.

• 14:30Speaker 07

  As vulnerable as one can be.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  The, um, the primary ideas in an encounter group are the things I mentioned this morning.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  So John went to a bunch of these.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  I think he went to eight encounter groups at Esalen.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  And how it worked was.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Be open and honest, and to talk about your feelings.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  This group of strangers would come together.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  For hours and hours, sometimes days and days and days on end.

• 14:53Speaker 04

  There would be a group leader.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  A therapist or a kind of a charismatic leader.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  To guide everybody.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  And what you're hearing now is a documentary that was filmed in 1972. It was a week-long encounter group at Esalen.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  And. How it starts is the group leader.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Things like, um, I can't do something.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  Lays out these kind of ground rules.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  It's usually just a way of not taking responsibility. Try to say I won't do it rather than I can't.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Also, don't ask questions.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  Instead, be direct, be honest.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And one other thing is that the most important thing you can do here, I think, is the thing you're most afraid of. That's the thing that will help you to grow most.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  And so these ten strangers are sitting in a room at Esalen in a circle on this carpeted floor.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  And they just sit there in silence.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Glancing at each other.

• 15:40Speaker 04

  We're not supposed to ask questions. I'm not sure what to say. And then things shift.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Hit this as hard as you can and keep going and scream at each other as you do it.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  And it is wild.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  Like, the group leader will get some of these people to punch pillows.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  To let out these primal screams.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  If they see conflict, they'll be like, hey, how about the two of you wrestle each other?

• 16:08Speaker 03

  They'll also do these exercises.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  It certainly bothers me about you.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  To try to get these people.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I think you're afraid to be real in feelings.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  I get the idea that so much of you is just...

• 16:16Speaker 03

  To tell each other.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  You're so cool.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  And act.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  I get bored when you talk to me.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  How they really feel about each other. Yeah, there's just no question I'm fucked up. How they feel about themselves.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I'm jealous of that.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  As Will puts it, the whole point of all of this.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Was to create an atmosphere of radical authenticity. And actually, what we need to do is sort of dig down deep into the core of who we are.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  And this is the whole idea behind Roger's philosophy.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  I hope you can appreciate the fact.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  That if you can feel accepted.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  That I feel an acceptance of you as you are.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  For who you really are, flaws and all. We're born absolutely right, perfect, divine. Then you can find a way. And I pound on a pillow and I get it straightened up a little bit and I found...

• 17:04Speaker 04

  I found out that what I always thought was true is true. I am good. To begin to love yourself. I'm not really sure of that. I want to be married to the man I'm married to. For example, in the doc, there's this woman, probably in her late twenties, long, dark hair. I allow myself to believe everything he tells me about me. He says, "You're too, you're too heavy. You need to lose weight." And I buy that as being so. Who tells the group how she often feels fat, unattractive. I'm pretty. That's very hard for me to say. And the group leader. The risk of this reputation, would you take your clothes off? Yeah. Asked if she would stand in front of the group naked, and so she does. Do you look at your body and feel it for a moment? Totally naked in front of these ten strangers. And tell us how you feel about it. It feels very soft.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  I like the curves in my body.

• 17:59Speaker 04

  I don't feel embarrassed about standing here and I like that. And they have her look at herself in this mirror. Take a look. What do you see there? What about the girl you see there?

• 18:10Speaker 04

  I like her.

• 18:12Speaker 04

  And I like you.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  I love you.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  And what all was John learning about himself back then?

• 18:27Speaker 06

  Well, one of the things that first happened for him was he realized that there was all this deep-seated rage, that he didn't like the way he was raised, that he felt it was, you know, that did him in, that he was dealt a bad deck of cards, and he was raging about it.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  And Mitch said that John told him one of the first times he went to an encounter group.

• 18:46Speaker 06

  The leader just sat there cross-legged for the longest time, didn't say anything, and apparently, John's way of dealing with the tension was to go over and sort of attack him.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  Attack him? Whoa.

• 18:58Speaker 06

  They ended up in a wrestling match or whatever, and, you know, John felt fulfilled at the end of whatever that experience was.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  He began to realize that he was angry, and that it was okay to feel angry.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Mitch says that a lot of what John was going through just kind of came down to...

• 19:15Speaker 06

  Just being seen, being heard, being held as he was, as he is.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  And what happened is, John went from...

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Buttoned up, black suit, black tie.

• 19:24Speaker 04

  Neat hair kind of guy. To someone entirely different.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Or, as Carl Rogers would probably say, he recovered someone who he already was.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Wild and free, like he grew his hair. He'd have medallions. He had his shirt half unbuttoned with all his hair coming out of it.

• 19:42Speaker 06

  He was always rumpled. People used to say he looked like an unmade bed.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  He drove around in this mustard-colored convertible.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  With the top down. Even when it was raining, he'd have the top down.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  He could be brash, blustery, angry.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  But also very sweet.

• 19:53Speaker 06

  People in his office had these stacks of what we called vascograms.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  These little handwritten notes from John on a newspaper article he read.

• 20:00Speaker 06

  I'm just thinking about you.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  Here's something you might find interesting.

• 20:02Speaker 06

  Literally, hundreds of people would get these vascograms. My god, I got mountains and mountains of them.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  He was big, he was expressive.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Everything in his being was suddenly liberated. He felt free for the first time in his life.

• 20:18Speaker 06

  And there are some crazy people who, when they discover something that has a lot of power and meaning and makes a real difference in one's life, their first and almost natural instinct is to find some way to share it.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  But before we get to that, we'll actually have to leave it here because Heather

• 20:40Speaker 03

  I have to go to therapy.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Is off to therapy where maybe she'll punch some pillows or...

• 20:45Speaker 05

  Have some kind of breakthrough, you know?

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe I'll have some breakthrough.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  I'm sure it's going to be life-changing.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  I've only been telling you to go for the last five years.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Okay, well, when we come back, I will still have not gone and we'll pick back up with the story.

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Great.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Let's not make a fetish out of impeachment. Let's not make a taboo out of impeachment. We understand it's not a panacea, but it is an essential tool in the constitutional toolbox that's always there.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 21:54Speaker 05

  But then, but there are mysteries that are not to do with murder.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm done. I'm done with this.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  But you're the one who was eating a Cliff bar the whole time. We just had to talk about something.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  No, you don't. I can take bites in between this. I did it yesterday.

• 22:06Speaker 05

  Okay, both of you. Okay, Luthiff Radiolab back with Heather and Matt.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Matt's in a spicy mood, just so everybody knows.

• 22:13Speaker 05

  Where were we? We were.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  Blow my lid today.

• 22:16Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Embracing my true self.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  You know what I actually hear you saying? Love me, love me.

• 22:23Speaker 04

  Okay, so we left off.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  John goes through this complete transformation through therapy, through esalen, through reading books about psychology.

• 22:30Speaker 05

  And is he still an elected official?

• 22:32Speaker 04

  He is.

• 22:33Speaker 06

  He used to say I was the most therapized politician to ever live. He's probably right. You know, he probably was the most therapized politician ever.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  And Mitch said it was actually back in 1978 when he first encountered John.

• 22:44Speaker 06

  At a conference in Santa Barbara.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  He was the keynote speaker.

• 22:47Speaker 06

  This disheveled keynote speaker who got up to speak. John Vaskins Ellis. He was wearing a sport coat, shirt and tie, but obviously underneath the white shirt was some really funky t-shirt that had some strange design on it.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Is this broadcasting? Okay. You'll hear me? Okay, thank you.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  This, obviously, is John.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  First, I want to welcome you. I'm the legislator for this district. I'm in California Legislature. I want to say welcome to California. And second, I want to acknowledge the significance of our being here.

• 23:23Speaker 06

  And stuff that was coming out of his mouth.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Hopefully, our being here is meant to be and we carry away with it some sense of meaning that serves to illuminate our lives and that of those around us.

• 23:33Speaker 06

  Really surprised me.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  The most we can ever do really is tell each other who we are and let me tell you who I am.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  In his speeches, John would talk about growing up Catholic.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Very steeped in the traditional, I'm a sinner Catholic tradition and was raised or lowered, really more raised, lowered than raised.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  He would talk about therapy.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  The asylum for encounter groups to forget my feelings as a man.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  About Esalen, about Carl Rogers.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Odyssey for my own self-discovery as a person.

• 23:57Speaker 06

  I'd never heard a politician talk that way.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  And eventually Mitch actually got to meet John.

• 24:02Speaker 06

  In his funky little condo in Santa Clara. And I don't remember exactly what we talked about, but towards the end of that conversation, I asked him, I said, would you be willing to be my mentor? I've just not had exposure to anybody as wonderfully strange as you. He agreed, and that became the beginning of quite a partnership over, you know, that was, that must have been 82, I guess. And, you know, from then to the time he died in 2014.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  And I guess what exactly was it about what he was saying that made you kind of like want him to be a mentor?

• 24:37Speaker 06

  It was his way of articulating the through line from psychology and how we are formed as human beings, you know, through family, religious and, you know, all the various influences that come, come in to influence who we are and how that plays out in the world. And then the thing that really intrigued me was how he was applying that or extending his philosophy to the world of politics. Because for him, everything began, all, all policy, if you really unpack it, is based on some really fundamental assumptions.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  The politics we do is who we are. That my values and my vision, my sense of myself informs what I do socially and relationally, institutionally and publicly. And that really is at the heart of the struggle in the nation and the state now. It's not just about money or privilege or power. It's about those, but it's about visions of human nature.

• 25:31Speaker 06

  And John's message was this, the title of his talk at that time was The Liberating Vision.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  And our visions of human nature inform our parenting, our politics, our pedagogy, our intimacy, our dying and all the rest of it.

• 25:43Speaker 06

  That if we think about human nature differently, if we dare to imagine that

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Old, cynical, traditional people are basically evil and ugly and dangerous.

• 25:51Speaker 06

  We people creatures aren't ruined by original sin.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  And need to be contained and repressed and ashamed and guilt ridden and locked away.

• 25:58Speaker 06

  Then. We would approach policy, you know, really important social institutions and how they're run very differently.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  That's one view of human nature.

• 26:07Speaker 06

  For John.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  If we are to have a people-first culture, and if we are to ask people to grow.

• 26:12Speaker 06

  We need to orient all our policies, all our efforts.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  It must have at their very heart as its very foundation.

• 26:19Speaker 06

  With the beginning view that humans are at the root.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  That positive.

• 26:24Speaker 06

  Good.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Hopeful, helpful, growthful, positive human nature and potential. Assume that within us is that spark of life and hope and health and wholeness that ought to be nurtured.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  He really embraced Carl Rogers' view of humans being like plants. That given the right conditions, they'll almost always orient to the sun. That humans will, you know, if they're not screwed up, will orient to what's positive for them and those around them.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  But the problem here is.

• 26:52Speaker 06

  He's espousing this liberating vision for, for everybody.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  Like, what does any of this actually mean in terms of public policy?

• 27:00Speaker 05

  It's like this hairy fairy pie in the sky kind of thing.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 27:03Speaker 05

  What is, what is this use to anybody?

• 27:04Speaker 04

  He doesn't have anything that he can actually put all of that in that might actually affect policy.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  Until something shows up, can you guess what that might be, Lotte?

• 27:16Speaker 05

  Um.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Two little words with a little hyphen.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  Self-esteem.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  There it is. Because it was in the 1980s.

• 27:26Speaker 06

  When self-esteem emerges.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  This phrase, this idea, self-esteem.

• 27:31Speaker 06

  A person's perception of their own worth.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Starts becoming a part of the public consciousness.

• 27:37Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  And I think, I want to just kind of talk a little bit about where that phrase comes from.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  Because it becomes so.

• 27:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, I do. I didn't question where that came from. Where did that phrase come from?

• 27:48Speaker 04

  So Michael Pettit, our history professor, explained that in psychology, self-esteem goes back.

• 27:53Speaker 06

  To 1890.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  With a book.

• 27:56Speaker 06

  Called The Principles of Psychology.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Which basically says that self-esteem is this thing, this self-worth that you have, based on the things that you do, the things that you care about doing.

• 28:07Speaker 06

  For example.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  A famous. Psychologist back then wrote.

• 28:10Speaker 07

  I don't think I'm the best boxer in the world. So if someone's a better boxer than me, eh, no biggie.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  But instead of boxing, let's say this other person.

• 28:17Speaker 07

  Is a better, more famous, higher achieving psychologist. That does hurt my self-worth. That does hurt my self-image.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  And the way that Michael explained it was, this was at a time in psychology where the self was not a unified thing. It was just kind of like parts. You had different parts, different aspects of a self. And then you had these different things where you might find worth or value in.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  It's like you almost stake your territory where your identity and value lie. And it's like, and, and other places, it's like you've ceded that territory. Like, it's okay, it's fine.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  But then in the 30s and the 40s, the very idea of the self changes.

• 28:58Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Psychologists come with this idea of a personality, which is your unified whole self.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  And so self-esteem becomes.

• 29:04Speaker 07

  A more global, basic attribute of the person.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  It's no longer like how you feel about these individual things you're good at.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Now it's just about how you feel about you.

• 29:13Speaker 07

  That one either had high self-esteem or low self-esteem.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  So for psychologists, it starts to become this really important measure of a person's entire well-being. Like their whole mental health.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  And one of the things that we found fascinating was that in the pivotal 1954 Brown v. Board segregation case, one of the crucial arguments made by the opponents of segregation was.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  The dolls. It is a super famous study, yeah.

• 29:38Speaker 07

  On how black children prefer a white doll over a black doll. And this shows how they've internalized society's negative attitudes towards themselves.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  The theory being that they'd sort of been given low self-esteem by society.

• 29:53Speaker 07

  So I think.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  And Michael says it's also right around here that you get Maslow.

• 29:57Speaker 07

  And his famous hierarchy.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  Hierarchy of needs.

• 30:01Speaker 04

  You got it.

• 30:02Speaker 07

  Although whether it's actually a hierarchy or not is a bit of a controversy.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  I always see it, it's a pyramid.

• 30:07Speaker 07

  It's a pyramid, but Maslow himself never drew it as a pyramid. That comes from a management textbook a couple of decades later that tried to popularize him. But anyway.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  So Maslow's whole thing is that you have all these different needs and they all need to be fulfilled in order to become the best version of yourself.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Needs like food, water, sleep.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Security, stability.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Friendship, intimacy.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  And a positive self-esteem.

• 30:32Speaker 07

  A feeling of self-worth.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  And so through the 70s.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Hopeful, helpful, growthful, visited of human nature and potential.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  While John is giving these speeches, self-esteem is becoming a bigger part of psychology.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  And it was in the early 80s that these two things, self-esteem and John Vasconcellos's, start to circle each other and become this much bigger thing.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  Because what was going on in the 80s was-

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Good evening. We're coming off the bloodiest year in the history of New York.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  This panic-

• 31:00Speaker 02

  The statistics this year are really grim.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  About rising violence and crime. Dramatic evidence tonight that crack use is spreading wider. There was the crack epidemic.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Look at a very serious matter, the incidence of teenage pregnancy.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Teen pregnancy.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  The prisons are bulging. 90,000 Californians are in prison and the crime rate's still going up.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  And for John, in California-

• 31:20Speaker 01

  We keep escalating the drug war, the drug use goes up.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  These became the issues of the day.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  And what happened was-

• 31:26Speaker 01

  In the course of about a five-week period, some kind of things came together.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  John said, one day he was reading an article-

• 31:32Speaker 01

  An article that said, "Education, kids who drop out of school or don't make it, the lack of self-esteem."

• 31:38Speaker 04

  That self-esteem was connected to how well kids do in school.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Then I read, "Folks who get addicted to drugs probably are lacking enough sense of self and reach for something to get high on, or get the pain dulled on, or get down on. Self-esteem might be a way to prevent drug abuse."

• 31:51Speaker 03

  That maybe self-esteem was a key component in why people were using drugs.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Then a guy came to San Jose, did a speech on teen pregnancy.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  He was this popular psychologist, sex educator.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  And I heard him say, "Teen pregnancy is probably a result of a lack of self-esteem."

• 32:04Speaker 03

  That kids were maybe having sex at an early age so that they could feel better about themselves.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  So those three, education, drugs, teen pregnancy, the pattern just kind of loomed up.

• 32:13Speaker 06

  And he latches on to self-esteem as a focal point.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  I thought, we gotta look at this.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  Because what all of this was telling John, what self-esteem was telling John-

• 32:23Speaker 06

  Was that at the root of most of our social ills were people who didn't believe in their fundamental value.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  So by 1984-

• 32:34Speaker 06

  He was the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  John controlled the budget of California.

• 32:38Speaker 06

  The fifth or sixth biggest economy in the world.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  And he goes to the governor of California and he says, "Look, I need to spend money on a task force. A task force to promote self-esteem."

• 32:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  So what was the initial reaction to this idea?

• 32:51Speaker 04

  The initial reaction was massive skepticism to this idea.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  So writer Will Storr explained that the governor at the time-

• 32:58Speaker 04

  He was a no-nonsense Republican. He had a reputation of being very hard-nosed.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  But why spend taxpayers- Money. I said, well, look at this way. If we can save three folks from going to prison for life, or 10 folks from dropping out of school, or seven drug addicts that cost the treatment, we'll save taxpayers billions of dollars.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Like, possibly, this is a really cheap way.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  To make society better in all kinds of ways.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Certainly a cheaper way than, like,

• 33:23Speaker 05

  Right.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  raising the minimum wage or something, you know?

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  But the other thing he tells the governor is that this will also promote personal and social responsibility.

• 33:33Speaker 05

  Ah, so this is the, like, kind of 80s part that's coming in here.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  The way he thinks about it, he talks about this a lot in speeches, is like, if you pay a lot of money for something, you value something, you tend to take care of it, you know?

• 33:45Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  And so, he's just applying this basic logic of like, if you value yourself, you'll take care of yourself. And then it actually might lead to all these societal changes because of it.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  That makes sense. That makes sense.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  And so,

• 34:00Speaker 04

  in 1987, the governor says, okay.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  And John creates.

• 34:03Speaker 07

  The Self-Esteem Task Force.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  The task force to promote self-esteem.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  You knew John before you were invited in?

• 34:10Speaker 07

  Oh, no, I hadn't known him.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  This is Emmett Miller, former member of the task force.

• 34:15Speaker 07

  I'm not sure how he discovered me, except I was widely known locally for having invented the concept of mind-body medicine and holistic treatment of my patients.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  And there were people like Emmett.

• 34:27Speaker 07

  The godmother of family therapy.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  Chicken noodle soup for the soul guy. Remember that guy?

• 34:31Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Some other people from Esalen, but also.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Others, black, brown, white, straight, gay, Asian, cops, therapists, business persons, teachers.

• 34:39Speaker 07

  It was not a small thing.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  This is tape number one in a proposal meeting.

• 34:43Speaker 07

  This was not a small thing at all.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  So, 1987, this big group of people would get together.

• 34:47Speaker 07

  Big roundtable kind of setting.

• 34:49Speaker 04

  At like a library or something.

• 34:51Speaker 07

  And.

• 34:53Speaker 07

  The group would find.

• 34:56Speaker 07

  Therapists, psychologists.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  They'd read anything they had published, interview them about their therapy practices.

• 35:03Speaker 07

  To put together the principles of what we might call healthy.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Self-esteem.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  The interview is being recorded at Brooklyn, California. They even hired researchers at Berkeley.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  To devise studies.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Looking at self-esteem.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  In six major areas of social concern.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Crime and violence.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Alcohol and drug abuse.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  Teenage pregnancy.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Child abuse.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  Welfare dependency.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  And educational failure or success.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  To try to answer this question, does having high self-esteem actually lead people to?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Being a better citizen, being more successful.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Now, while that's going on, do you know about Doonesbury Latif?

• 35:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  It's hard to understand today.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  How influential this comic strip was.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  It is huge.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  The power that these Doonesbury strips can have.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  It was in almost every newspaper. Everybody read it.

• 35:52Speaker 05

  Is that Gary Trudeau? Is that it?

• 35:53Speaker 03

  It's Gary Trudeau.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Well, Gary Trudeau with his very clever Doonesbury cartoon.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  In 1987, he found out about the task force.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  And decided to make jokes about it.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  He created a new character, Barbara Bupsy Ann Bupstein, who was an LA actress and a spiritual medium, who had been invited onto the task force on the basis of her 20 years of feeling good about myself and out-of-body experiences.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  And it's just like joke after joke about this task force and it's woo-woo nonsense.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  And this goes on.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  A two-week run.

• 36:25Speaker 04

  Day after day.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Just making fun of the self-esteem task force.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Two weeks of satire with me, you know, this California goofy legislator with this California goofy idea, spending goofy money.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  And.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  The whole nation.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Absolute ridicule is what happens.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Laughed.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  So there's a quote from the Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch, who said, "California is the state that produced Jerry Brown, the People's Temple, Sister Boom Boom," whatever that is, "drive-in churches, Charles Manson, the Esalen Institute, and now a governmental task force to promote self-esteem. Now there's one more California joke to tell at cocktail parties around the nation."

• 36:58Speaker 04

  And John.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Roundly scorned by the press. Editorial writers always need someone to pick upon to make themselves feel esteemed.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  He was hurt. He was angry.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  But the thing is, that Doonesbury strip about the task force.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  When he did that, everybody else paid attention.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Is how everyone found out about it.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  That is what made it famous.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  And we spent?

• 37:17Speaker 07

  Three years at it. And at the end of the three years.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  1990.

• 37:21Speaker 07

  The results were that when we compared people who live their lives with real self-esteem did so much better.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  People with high self-esteem did better in school. They were less welfare dependent. They were less prone to crime and violence, substance abuse.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  So they put together this report.

• 37:38Speaker 07

  Really fat report.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  That, yes, self-esteem does indeed cause all these amazing effects.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  They publish it.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  And there's a complete 180.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  Max, our call-in guest is John Vaskinsellis.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  All of a sudden.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  John Vaskinsellis.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Nobody's laughing.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  People want self-esteem.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Time Magazine, Newsweek, BBC, London Economist, talk show in Australia, National CBS Morning out of New York one day.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  John's giving speeches.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  Nicknamed the Johnny apple seed of self-esteem. The Johnny apple seed of self-esteem.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  All across the country.

• 38:08Speaker 04

  Please welcome the distinguished Mr. John Vaskinsellis.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  California Assemblyman John Vaskinsellis. He's on Oprah. Has turned self-esteem into a virtual crusade. Telling the nation.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Self-esteem is a social vaccine.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  That we have a cure for all that's wrong in society.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Yes, Assemblyman, I really feel that you are on to something here. Beautiful, and it's wonderful. And I want to say this about John Vaskinsellis. The wonderful thing that you're doing. I'm thrilled that we've got a man like that.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  The Philadelphia Inquirer said, it looks like John Vaskinsellis may have had the last laugh. Time Magazine, the sneers are turning to cheers.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Really like what you're doing. I think you're right on pace. I'm so excited.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  And this pretty long, very dry task force report.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  This report has sold 50,000 copies.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Everyone.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  It's all over the state.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Is.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Over the nation, all over the world.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Psyched about self-esteem.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  Did anything change in the interim, like in those three years, that would make them more receptive to the idea?

• 39:09Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  I feel that it was just one of those ideas that the culture was ready for.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  I think there's a couple of ways to understand it.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  For me, the economy actually plays a big part in all this.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Will says that in the 80s, across the West, you see anti-union politics, increasing privatization, the end of social safety nets.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  And like calls for personal responsibility.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  And that had a sort of a huge impact on who we were and how we understood the world as a people. I mean, the best way to sum it up is if you think about who we were in 1965 versus 1985. We went from hippies, collectivists, sort of screw the man, anti-materialistic people to greed is good and material girl and Whitney Houston singing, "The greatest love of all is yourself."

• 39:53Speaker 04

  And also, right around the same time, you have the self-help movement.

• 39:56Speaker 07

  See You At The Top is the program that gives a checkup from the neck up.

• 40:00Speaker 04

  Which was becoming.

• 40:01Speaker 07

  To eliminate stinking thinking and avoid hardening of the attitudes.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  This huge industry.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  So what do you really want? Better relationships, financial independence?

• 40:10Speaker 00

  So these ideas were already kind of out there in the culture. And I think if you'd have tried to launch the self-esteem movement in 1975, it wouldn't have got anywhere. But by the mid 80s, this idea of I'm amazing is the answer to all my problems. I just feel like the culture was ready for it.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  And also, I think it's worth realizing.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  How many of us have been in counseling and therapy? I read somewhere 60 million Americans have been in therapy.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  That therapy was also becoming this huge thing. And there's this book from the 80s that basically says that now the modern equivalent to salvation, to heaven, was mental health.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  We've all been in counseling and knowing more about our own identity and sense of self and the desire to be authentic and open and whole. At that kind of convergent point in time, our task force came on the scene.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  It's like all of these things came together in this exact right moment for John to step onto the scene and just be like, hey, I have something powerful, this social vaccine, self-esteem, that could help all of us.

• 41:09Speaker 06

  But what does that look like when you translate that into real work in the world? Because he wasn't happy, he was never content with just shooting the shit, as he used to say, just talking. It had to result in something that made a difference.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  The challenge that you truly carry yourselves back into your schools and families.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  So if you have low self-image, you can do something to change it.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  It's a beacon of self-esteem.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  She has high self-esteem.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  High what?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  It's a beacon of faith.

• 41:34Speaker 04

  Self-esteem, it's the way we feel about ourselves.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  And ourselves. This is a very special day here at Rainbow.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  When a person feels good about themselves, their self-esteem is high.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  We are having a self-esteem day. It's a beacon of love. Self-esteem is something. Every kid, everybody here.

• 41:57Speaker 05

  That's coming up, right after this short break.

• 42:16Speaker 05

  Radiolab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder that Capital One Bank Guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also

• 42:26Speaker 02

  talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/BankGuy. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC. After some actual fake polls came to light, pollsters are in the hot seat. But they say, don't be too quick to dismiss the entire industry. People want to raise taxes on the rich. I can tell you that definitively because we know it from polling. And if we lose trust in polls, we have no way to understand what Americans want to be done. On this week's On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  Okay, Lathif, Radiolab, back with Heather and Matt and self-esteem.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Okay, so John's got a social vaccine.

• 43:21Speaker 05

  Right.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Question, of course, is like, well, how do you inoculate society? Like, what do you, how do you actually even, how do you do this?

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Like, how do you teach people to feel good about themselves?

• 43:32Speaker 04

  And for John.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  From my Latin prep school days, education comes from the Latin word educari.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  The answer was?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean to stuff in, or sit still and shut up.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  The schools.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Education, educari, means to draw out, to draw forth, to evoke, to call for.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  You start with kids. And so, in the late 80s, early 90s, there was this huge push to get self-esteem into the classroom. And suddenly, there were all these, like, workbooks, textbooks.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  So like, here's one called Esteem Builders, a K through 8 self-esteem curriculum.

• 44:05Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 44:06Speaker 04

  Or the best self-esteem activities for the elementary grades.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  Building self-esteem in the secondary school, teachers' manual and instructional materials.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  And how this worked was... Let's say you got a class of kids.

• 44:18Speaker 07

  Everybody, good morning, good morning, good morning. Hello back there, everybody. Yeah, bring it down.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  Could be whatever grade. And the teacher would have one of these workbooks, which in it would contain these worksheets.

• 44:30Speaker 07

  Today we are gonna do, um, today we're gonna talk about yourself.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  And how a lot of these begin is.

• 44:36Speaker 07

  Imagine that you're looking in the mirror.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  By trying to get the kids to answer this really basic question.

• 44:41Speaker 07

  What do you see?

• 44:42Speaker 04

  Who am I?

• 44:44Speaker 03

  I look like brownie or brown eyes. Oh, nothing. I have long hair.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Long hair. Dark hair. I think I look beautiful, kind of. Long brown hair. Or there's prompts like. Three things I wanna say about myself. What makes you different from other people? My first thing I would tell a new friend. What makes you you? I love listening to music.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  I like chemistry. Basically, who is this person that is the self?

• 45:08Speaker 07

  Okay, good.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  Can't have self-esteem without a self.

• 45:13Speaker 07

  Now, think of some of the things that you like about yourself and that you wouldn't wanna change.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  And then, of course, there's just a ton of stuff about.

• 45:21Speaker 07

  What are those things?

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Um.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Liking yourself. Being confident in who I am.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  How my style is. That my hair is the right length. Or something like.

• 45:30Speaker 07

  Now, let's imagine that every person at the school gets a gold medal for something that they are really great at.

• 45:35Speaker 05

  Everybody gets a trophy.

• 45:36Speaker 07

  What would your gold medal be for?

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Reading. Baseball. Screaming the loudest. Or.

• 45:41Speaker 07

  Everybody get together.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  There were things called sharing circles.

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Kinda like encounter groups, but for kids.

• 45:46Speaker 05

  Oh, that's sweet, so they can all yell at each other.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  No, it'd be like.

• 45:49Speaker 07

  What makes you really happy?

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Tell us about when you felt good.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  What's one of the best things that's ever happened to you?

• 45:55Speaker 07

  Okay, now, everybody knows what a sparkle statement is, right?

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Um.

• 46:00Speaker 05

  What are sparkle statements?

• 46:01Speaker 04

  So, this comes from the book, Esteem Builders, and they are a long list of statements you can make to a classmate.

• 46:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 04

  So, you're cool. I like knowing you. Let's play together.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Hope today is super for ya.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  You're my friend.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  You're a good buddy.

• 46:15Speaker 05

  Matt, I'm gonna print this out and put it, stick it next to your desk.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know, somebody could use a few more sparkle statements in his life.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Nah, maybe we should be a little bit less sparkly.

• 46:23Speaker 05

  And would this have been like, like, what class does this slot into?

• 46:28Speaker 04

  They'd work this sort of stuff into like, kind of, your regular class.

• 46:31Speaker 05

  Like homeroom kinda thing?

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it runs through, I mean, this is like, programming that is available K through 12.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Wow. Yeah, and I will say, I had it every year I can remember.

• 46:42Speaker 05

  What do you remember?

• 46:43Speaker 03

  I mean, I remember, I remember Do So the Dolphin.

• 46:46Speaker 05

  Never heard of Do So the Dolphin.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  Which is this dolphin puppet who taught us to feel good about ourselves using song. Hey, okay, wait, I'm trying my. But I also did this call out on Instagram to see if anyone else remembered similar things. Yeah, well, so I guess. And my friend, Leslie Jamison, who grew up in LA in the early 90s. We always called them put ups and put downs. That was like the name for, you know, saying something nice to somebody or saying something mean. And she said that her teacher, this was like maybe third grade, had this policy that if someone received a put down. The thing was that you had to like go to this little patio, this back patio, and the person who gave you the put down had to give you five put ups.

• 47:30Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  So like counter the put down.

• 47:32Speaker 05

  It's like doing pushups or pull ups.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, punishment to praise.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Hey. Oh, hey, how are you? Good, how are you? I'm good. I also heard from this woman, Peg. Peg Keiner from Chicago. Who had this wild story. It was like 1995 is when I was in eighth grade. About how there was this teacher who every morning. After the pledge of allegiance and the announcements, she had a handwritten sheet of paper that had two stanzas of I Have Confidence from The Sound of Music, and she had the bold gusto.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  To make a whole eighth grade class sing these two stanzas.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  And sometimes twice, and she's like, that wasn't loud enough. One more time.

• 48:18Speaker 05

  It really, it's like the anthem, the self-esteem anthem.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  We had this thing called Star Attraction. Another friend of mine, Jane Marchant, she was a 90s kid in Northern California. And I still have this poster, which is insanely large. It's this big poster with Jane's second grade picture right in the center. I have these like horrible bangs. And all around the picture are these stars where her classmates had written something. Jane is nice and fair. Jane is loving.

• 48:44Speaker 04

  Funny. Here, Jane is nice, funny, smart and good. Mmm. There you go. Trifecta.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  We got take home slips of paper to write home and post.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  There was Amy Kugler in Wichita, Kansas.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  Other affirmations?

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Other affirmations.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  To just post around your bedroom?

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Yep, just post around my bedroom. I am a smart and kind student. I respect all.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  There's my friend Gina Pensiero. I grew up in Verona, New Jersey. Who remembered learning about? IALAC. I A L A C. I am lovable and capable. I mean, even our writer, Will Storr.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  I remember being at school, we had to go around in a circle and everybody had to say something good about themselves.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  He got this stuff over in the UK.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  There's like an Education Week article from 1991 that lays out that at this point already thousands of schools are starting to participate in the self-esteem curriculum. There are over a hundred workbooks to promote self-esteem in the classroom.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  So it just became embraced by the educational system in a major way.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Throughout the 90s, self-esteem became the dominant language that people in the West were using to talk about themselves. They used self-esteem to talk about their childhoods, their successes, their failures, their ambitions, just how they thought about who they were.

• 49:56Speaker 04

  And for John. This is more than just a personal venture and odyssey. This is like kind of everything he dreamed of. It's more than just something for the classroom. It seems to me that self-esteem is the vision, the heart of a new culture, a new way of being, a new way of living, a new way of educating and politicking and living and working and all the rest. And may you have in your own lives ever more freedom to be esteeming, to be public, to be political, and to have good times for yourselves. Thank you.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  But should I talk about the lie a bit?

• 50:35Speaker 04

  So this is the part in the story which we had, we told you at the beginning.

• 50:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, you promised this was all a fraud. I'm waiting for the fraud.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, the lie.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Okay, so.

• 50:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is like Will's whole thing is that one of the things he discovered when he was reporting his book is that.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  In the archives, I managed to find an audio cassette recording of the actual meeting.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  Where the Cal Berkeley researcher hired by the task force.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Presented his findings.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  And he told the task force back in 1989 that yes, they had found some compelling correlations between self-esteem and education.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  But in other areas, the correlations don't seem to be so great, and we're not quite sure why. And we're not sure when we have correlations, what the causes might be. Let's take, for example, one of the areas where the findings are a little bit loose, which has to do with self-esteem and alcoholic abuse. By and large, there are positive correlations here, but what does that mean in terms of cause? Do these people go to drinking because of an earlier history of self-doubt, self-degradation, worthlessness and so on? Or is it the other way around? Does the involvement in alcohol for years or decades constitute the causal basis for the feelings of worthlessness that we discovered in people who have been involved in that? So he was basically saying to them, we have some okay correlational links.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  And of course, as we all know, correlation isn't causation. And he was saying, but other, but, but other links are not at all correlational. And we do have correlational links. You've got to ask that basic question, what is causing what? So and he, and he warns them later in the recording, you know, he says, you've got to be careful about correlation and causation.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  And he said, you've got to avoid the sin of overselling. He said, nobody can want to do that. You don't want to do that, and certainly we don't want to do that.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  And yet, that's exactly what they did.

• 52:22Speaker 05

  Literally what happened.

• 52:24Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, we, we had many, many conversations.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  And we talked to Mitch, John's friend, about all this.

• 52:29Speaker 06

  Arguments, if you will, like what's the actual nature of the research that's going to happen here?

• 52:35Speaker 04

  They'd argue about the research, how John interpreted it.

• 52:37Speaker 06

  And constantly challenged whatever he was looking at, you know?

• 52:40Speaker 04

  And how did he respond to that?

• 52:41Speaker 06

  He'd, he'd take it in.

• 52:43Speaker 04

  Would he get defensive or would he just kind of like nod along?

• 52:46Speaker 06

  He would just kind of nod along, just do his, he'd, he'd listen, take it in, but then go ahead and do whatever he wanted to do.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  Mitch said that with John.

• 52:53Speaker 06

  There are many things that you can't shake loose. And, you know, that was part of John's genius and shadow.

• 53:02Speaker 04

  And so through the 90s, when John was going around saying that self-esteem was this social vaccine, he was doing it seemingly knowingly on the basis of nothing.

• 53:14Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  And so what would happen was that in the early 2000s, the very shaky foundation of the self-esteem movement started to collapse. You know, I was more or less oblivious to the self-esteem movement.

• 53:27Speaker 04

  You're like, you weren't watching TV.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  So one person that we talked to was this researcher named Jennifer Crocker. But I knew that people worried about it. People would say, well, yeah, low self-esteem really is a problem because you can't do anything about your situation until your self-esteem is high. And I'm like, I don't think the data are consistent with that idea. So Jennifer basically spent her entire academic career. My first publication on self-esteem. Studying self-esteem. Probably 1983, around there.

• 53:58Speaker 04

  And Jennifer told us about how in 2003, there were these psychologists and a bunch of other researchers.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Who pulled together a very long and I think really excellent overview of what is the value, what is the benefit of self-esteem.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  They went through decades of whatever research was published, hundreds of studies.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  To look at what are the differences between high and low self-esteem people. And what you see is that, you know, self-esteem is correlated with grades in school.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  It's correlated with how attractive people find you.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  But these are tiny associations. So basically, it turned out a lot of what had been claimed in that task force report was just really not true. Like, all the claims that they were making about self-esteem being a social vaccine, that it was a cure for drug use, alcohol use, crime, violence, teen pregnancy, poor academic performance. This research showed that whether you had high or low self-esteem, it wasn't causing these problems. Right.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 55:02Speaker 05

  Huh.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  And so like-

• 55:03Speaker 05

  It's weird, because like, even though you're telling me the science of this, and that it's like this huge study, like, as I'm hearing this, I'm like, it, like, the story logic of it holds so hard.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  It ma- it makes such intuitive sense.

• 55:18Speaker 05

  It makes such intuitive sense, that it's like, it's, like, why wouldn't a kid be better if they, why wouldn't my relationships be better? Like, I, I, it's so hard to, like, dislodge it, even when you're literally telling me it's wrong.

• 55:32Speaker 04

  Okay, well, I can tell you one thing, that the research showed about a meaningful difference between people with high self-esteem and people with low self-esteem. Which is that high self-esteem people think they're smarter, more successful, more attractive, better liked, more popular, than low self-esteem people think they are. In spite of the fact that they're not really any different from low self-esteem people in these objective ways. So basically, for people with high self-esteem- Life feels good to them. They're generally happier.

• 56:04Speaker 05

  That seems good! That's like the biggest tuna of all of them. That's like, the most important thing of everything.

• 56:10Speaker 04

  Well, okay, what Jennifer would say is- Right, there's, I think there's nothing wrong with being happy. Yeah, like, of course, sure. Being happy, that's meaningful. Right, our emotions are central to how we experience our lives. But that's not all there is to the story. Because there is a downside to high self-esteem.

• 56:30Speaker 05

  Which is what?

• 56:31Speaker 04

  Well, the research shows that people with really high self-esteem tend to- Defend their positive views of themselves. And so you see high self-esteem associated with things like- Defensiveness, aggression.

• 56:44Speaker 05

  Ah, okay, that makes sense.

• 56:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally. Um, they found that in education, sometimes self-esteem programs produce actually, like, complacency, reduced effort, resistance to any sort of critical negative feedback. And then there's Jennifer's work- For, I don't know, 10 or 15 years, I was really interested in what people base their self-

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Self-esteem on. And we found that pretty much everybody based their self-esteem on something.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  So Jennifer did this study at the University of Michigan with students who were

• 57:12Speaker 01

  intending to apply to graduate school.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  And what they found was that for the students who tied their self-worth to high academic achievement, when they got rejected from a grad school, their self-esteem obviously went down.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  And it would, for some of the students, it would actually stay down for several days until something happened to kind of shake them out of that funk.

• 57:35Speaker 04

  And for many of these students, they were showing more signs of depression.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  Whereas the kids who weren't tying their self-esteem to that academic achievement, then when they didn't get into the programs, they like could weather the storm.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  And then the other thing that was really interesting to me is that the students whose self-esteem was really based on their academic success, when we asked them, well, what would it mean for you or about you to get into graduate school? They would write things like, oh, it would prove once and for all that I am brilliant. I am great, that I am successful. It would prove something about me.

• 58:15Speaker 04

  And Jennifer, this kind of like shows you the fatal flaw of self-esteem.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just that if I have earned high self-esteem today by having some success in my life, then have I earned low self-esteem tomorrow if I have a failure?

• 58:33Speaker 04

  Like if I don't succeed at something, does that actually mean that I am worthless? That I don't have value?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and

• 58:40Speaker 04

  And she told us there was this prominent psychologist in the 90s and 2000s who went so far as to say

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Self-esteem is the worst sickness known to humankind. Because when you succeed

• 58:53Speaker 04

  Feed, you're great, but when you fail, you're shit.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  And so in 2004, there's this big New York Times Sunday Magazine piece called "The Trouble With Self-Esteem", kind of tearing down John and the task force and the promise and dream of self-esteem. In 2005, there is an op-ed piece in the LA Times, basically doing the same thing. There's also this big Scientific American article called "Exploding The Self-Esteem Myth".

• 59:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is like when self-esteem becomes joke.

• 59:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, like the sort of every kid gets a trophy, participation medals.

• 59:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  This is when all of that starts to become like very prevalent in how we think about self-esteem.

• 59:33Speaker 04

  And there's actually, online, there's all these published emails that John and some of his friends in the movement were sending to one another in the wake

• 59:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  of all of this.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  It's kind of heartbreaking.

• 59:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like John is sending these emails, they're written in all caps, and he's saying like there needs to be like a point-by-point rebuttal of the Times piece, and that they needed to fight back and quote, "take on this enormous historic lifesaving task."

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  But that just makes John seem like he's really fighting alone on an island. Like, he's like the Japanese soldier fighting on the island, like after the war is over, kind of thing.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  I think that's fair.

• 1:00:16Speaker 04

  I mean, he never really, um...

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Never stopped fighting?

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, he never really stops fighting. I mean, there's a 2009 interview with San Jose Inside, which is, you know, his birthplace, San Jose.

• 1:00:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  And in it, he's quoted as saying, "So now, all over the world, the role of self-esteem is widely recognized and valued. I think it's really proven to be all we thought it was and more", which feels so, like, it feels delusional to read that.

• 1:00:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, that does sound delusional.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  And I think Heather and I, reporting this story and like learning more and more about John, is the sort of, like, it almost...

• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  It feels sort of desperate in a way, and I think it's because for John, who grew up in this very strict Catholic family, whose Catholicism felt like this enormous sort of weight, this constraint, this thing that made him feel fundamentally flawed and broken and bad, like to shed all of that through these ideas of self-esteem was like so vital and important to his sense of self, to his sort of well-being.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  I mean, do you feel like you were his good friend? Do you feel like he, like, I don't know, like he was a person very committed to personal growth? Do you feel like he ended up being the man he wanted to be?

• 1:01:36Speaker 06

  I'd say yes and no. I think there was a lot that he was proud of, and rightly so, and yet there was a lot that he would have said is undone.

• 1:01:49Speaker 06

  And I'm pretty sure he was disappointed that he never realized some of the levels that he's, I think he thought he was capable of. I mean, he got to hang out with Bobby Kennedy, you know?

• 1:02:04Speaker 06

  I think he, he thought he, his life should be something like that, you know? That level of influence.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Do you think he had high self-esteem?

• 1:02:14Speaker 06

  I think his own self-esteem and, and the fragility of it was, you know, one of his struggles for his entire life. He's got all this power, all this influence, all this accomplishment under, you know, twice valedictorian, just constantly amassing successes, and yet there are always being more to do.

• 1:02:42Speaker 06

  Then every time he'd see his mom, you know, she'd treat him the same way I bet she did when he was five.

• 1:02:49Speaker 04

  And he'd come crumbling down?

• 1:02:51Speaker 06

  No, but he'd just be annoyed and, you know, frustrated.

• 1:02:56Speaker 06

  His most common trigger would be to get angry. Each of us get triggered in different ways and his would, boy, he could erupt in no time.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  How do you think he felt about how he was treating the people around him when he was angry like that?

• 1:03:11Speaker 06

  Oh, big blind spots.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 1:03:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. He'd feel bad about it, especially if somebody would say something. He was very, very good at cleaning up his messes, but he could be very embarrassing. He'd go out to dinner and kind of post-heart attack. He was very concerned about what he was eating. And if somebody brought a dish that was full of cream or something like that, he'd rage at the waiter or waitress. You trying to kill me or something? Just, you know, he'd lose it at times. And again, I think a lot of that was due to him being on this journey of trying to be his real self, but also being in the public eye all the time.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  And Mitch told us about how another thing that John really struggled with throughout his life was just with relationships.

• 1:03:56Speaker 06

  He never really, I don't even need to add the word really. He never developed an intimate one-to-one relationship that was just his. And every so once in a while, I'd get a call from him that he was just, you know, almost suicidal just because he longed for intimacy, closeness, and the best he could get were these one-night stands.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  That's so sad.

• 1:04:26Speaker 04

  And Mitch said there was this point in their friendship where Mitch told him, like, look.

• 1:04:32Speaker 06

  How about you become a member of our family? And that was our contract.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Huh, what did that look like?

• 1:04:39Speaker 06

  Oh, my, you know, my kids grew up with Uncle John around all the time. We did a lot of things together, vacationed. He would be at our house, God, two, if not three, weekends a month, especially when the session was out. But even when session was in, he'd prioritize spending time with our family. His experience of being loved and being close to people came from these extended family relations. There were three families that he would sort of cycle through, but he never had his own. Intimate, one-on-one relationship. There were very few opportunities for him just to be seen and appreciated for just being alive, not being an instrument.

• 1:05:23Speaker 06

  When he got sick, he'd come stay with us. Towards the end of his life, he actually stayed in our spare bedroom for several weeks before I could, you know, before I found an appropriate place for him when he was really, really on the way out.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Mitch says this was 2014, and it was when John was diagnosed with a really aggressive form of cancer.

• 1:05:43Speaker 06

  And he wanted to be back home, so we got him back home, got him on hospice.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  And would you go over to his house to see him, like, often?

• 1:05:50Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, every day. I was with him every day, basically.

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  And what was that like, just to be there every day with him?

• 1:05:57Speaker 06

  Well, I don't know if you've ever been with a person who's dying, but it's...

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  I haven't, not that intimately.

• 1:06:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. You know, he spent most of the time just being there, sleeping, you know? Not a lot of energy. The last few days of his life, the thing that we worked on together was he let me know that he was afraid. He'd given a lot of thought to the actual dying experience. And he was deathly afraid of dying by asphyxiation. When people take their last breath, especially if they're conscious, it can be very hard to actually let go and not take another breath. He was terrified. So we would, we'd practice. We'd take like five or 10 minutes of just him practicing how to

• 1:06:46Speaker 06

  let there be longer and longer periods before he would take an inhale. And to have the sort of, to be, in his words, to stay in charge of his own reactions so fear didn't take over.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  And Mitch says it was in late May of 2014.

• 1:07:04Speaker 06

  There were a group of his closest friends who were present around. We all knew it was getting close to the time.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  And John...

• 1:07:11Speaker 06

  He insisted that he be naked.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  This is the guy who, in his 30s, when he went to Esalen, was terrified of being naked. When everyone was going into those pools, turned around and left because he just felt so ashamed and humiliated about his body.

• 1:07:27Speaker 06

  He wanted to go out, finally. Everybody seeing and holding and blessing him naked.

• 1:07:37Speaker 06

  And so the morning he died, I was right there, holding his hands, holding one hand, his friend, doctor, also friend of mine, holding the other hand. And as he took his last breath, I, you know, reached down into his ear and said, "You can do it."

• 1:08:00Speaker 06

  He took that last breath and that was, that was it.

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  That was May 24th, 2014. And I, I have found myself thinking, just sort of thinking about what John did and what parts of it are still with us now.

• 1:08:39Speaker 07

  I do think the self-esteem movement has had a cultural effect, right?

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  Again, Professor Michael Pettit.

• 1:08:44Speaker 07

  I definitely think a kind of psychologized self-talk is much more prevalent and available now than before. My employer sends emails all the time about my mental well-being and offering, you know, you know, here's a meditation class on campus, this type of thing. So the language of mental health and mental wellness is even more prominent than ever before.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think the deeper idea is that everything or feeling is valid.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  Author Will Storr.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  I always sort of think about this stuff, Carl Rogers and Vasco, when I'm watching, because I, you know, one of my guilty pleasures is reality television. And when you're watching reality TV, like when you're watching like a Below Deck or Big Brother, and somebody behaves terribly, their excuse very often is, "Well, I'm just being myself. I'm just saying what I think. I'm just, you know..."

• 1:09:30Speaker 04

  Living my truth.

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, living my truth. And that's still a very powerful idea in our culture in the West.

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  But I think maybe the biggest, maybe even the most important legacy of John's work is actually...

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  in the schools.

• 1:09:52Speaker 04

  So last year, Heather and I went to school in Queens, PS 229. I feel like I should also say hello.

• 1:10:00Speaker 04

  To see how psychology gets used in classrooms today.

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  And today, if self-esteem is taught in classrooms at all, it's pretty tiny. And instead...

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  Ready to do some SEO?

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  Yes! What's in the classrooms across the country is this thing called SEL, Social Emotional Learning.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  All right, boys and girls, today we're gonna be doing a lesson called, "Let's Make It Fair." Does anyone know what the word "fair" means?

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  We were in a class of first graders.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  To be nice. Say it again. To be nice. You wanna be nice to people? Okay, good. What else? To share. You wanna share with people? Absolutely, yes.

• 1:10:40Speaker 04

  And so, when we were there with these first graders...

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  So we're going to be looking at all different situations on "fair" and what it means to be fair.

• 1:10:48Speaker 04

  They were being asked to answer questions like... It's not fair because the older kid is not sharing with the swings. When do you feel like something isn't fair? I was like, "Can I have some tips?" And then she was like, "No." How does it feel? Being like fair to other people. When someone's being fair.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Is what? Tell me about it.

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  It's kind. How's it feel when someone's not being fair? How should we talk about these feelings?

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  Or like... One time when I was at the mall. We also visited a classroom of fifth graders. I saw people like kicking a boy. Who were doing a lesson on bullying.

• 1:11:18Speaker 04

  How do you recognize bullying? How do you call out bullying? What do you do when you see bullying?

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  You know, there's this thing now they call like... An upstander is someone who actually helps the situation. Upstander.

• 1:11:27Speaker 04

  Upstand, oh my gosh, that's like, they talk about that nonstop.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  I know, they totally invented that since we were kids.

• 1:11:32Speaker 04

  But I think what this is, is a continuation of what John was trying to do by pulling psychology into education. It does feel like a continuation, yeah. But whereas John was focused on the self, like self-value, self-worth, self-esteem, what's happening now is focused on the other.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  And now, this is fair because everyone will be getting what they...

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  Need.

• 1:11:55Speaker 04

  It's about understanding other people's needs.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  The things you need. The things you need.

• 1:12:00Speaker 04

  Communicating your own needs.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  What else could he say?

• 1:12:02Speaker 04

  Stop being mean to him. It's about identifying emotions, communicating emotions. Or just... Just walk away. It's group morning meetings, it's conflict resolution, it's learning how to make I-statements, like, I feel blank.

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  It's also like, don't bully, what is fairness? Like, there's a kind of like, we're in a community of people element of it.

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  I like that.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  But so.

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  One of the kind of amazing things about this is how weirdly Jennifer.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  Well, we have, should be careful about the kind of praise that we give.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  The researcher who spent her entire career looking at self-esteem. Kind of wound up in the same place for herself as like the schools have.

• 1:12:40Speaker 04

  What do you mean?

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  So then what is, I mean, well, so I asked Jennifer, I was like, you know, being a kid in the 90s, I still have this question of like, but how do you feel good? It is good to feel good about yourself, so then how does one find self-worth in a way that's healthy?

• 1:12:59Speaker 04

  I think by not worrying about it.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  What does that look like?

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  So, am I a person of worth and value? It's just, it's not a helpful question. It just doesn't do anything for you to ask that question, or for other people. And a much better or more helpful question is, how do I want to be right now? What, how might I support other people, for example? But really, what contribution, what thing that's larger than me is important to me?

• 1:13:39Speaker 03

  So she told us about one of the studies she did, it was looking at roommates.

• 1:13:42Speaker 04

  College roommates.

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  Two roommates who didn't know each other.

• 1:13:45Speaker 04

  Before the start of their first year in college. And we asked each roommate a whole bunch of questions about their relationship over time and their self-esteem. And what we found was that when roommates were responsive to the, so I'm going to call them roommate A and roommate B because they're same-sex, it gets confusing. So when roommate A is responsive to roommate B's needs.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  Roommate B notices and is responsive in return. And then roommate A is responsive again to roommate B. And then roommate B is responsive again to roommate A. So you can get this virtuous cycle going on in relationships where when people are focused not on their own needs, but on being responsive to other people's needs. Other people notice it, they appreciate it, their esteem for the other person goes up. And that ends up having, it's not a huge impact, but nonetheless, having a significant impact on the self-esteem of the person who was responsive in the first place.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  So, so the way to boost your self-esteem in a way that, in my view, is sustainable over time and good for the world is to focus on the wellbeing of other people or to organizations or institutions or things you really care about.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  It's so funny because I think like that's basically what John was after.

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  I know.

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  Like if you could get people to understand they had self-worth, self-value, raise their self-esteem, they would do all these things for each other.

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just that self-esteem is the wrong place to focus because you don't have to have high self-esteem to make a difference.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  And with that, I feel that I have clearly been vindicated and validated.

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  No, you haven't, Matt.

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, the whole point is not to try and feel good about yourself.

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  That is not what she's saying.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's talking about needs, seeing needs.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, other people's needs, like.

• 1:15:58Speaker 04

  Well, needing to be told that you did a great job jumping in a total lake.

• 1:16:00Speaker 05

  Wow, we're still here. So you both now have interpreted this Rorschach thing that she said as meaning that you're right and you've been right all along. And what was the point of any of this?

• 1:16:15Speaker 03

  I mean, Jen's convinced me. I just feel like you're being incredibly, you're, you're being very resistant to just sort of a basic level of human kindness.

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  Okay, fine. Then I will suggest that we end this episode on a positive note.

• 1:16:29Speaker 05

  And what's the positive note?

• 1:16:32Speaker 04

  Great job, everybody.

• 1:16:46Speaker 05

  This episode was reported by Heather Radke and Matt Kielty. It was produced by Matt Kielty with additional sound design by Jeremy Bloom and edited by Pat Walters. Original music by Ben Batchelder, voice acting by David Gabel and Dan Fink, and fact-checking by Angeli Mercado and Anna Pujol-Mazzini. It was mixed by Jeremy Bloom. Special thanks to Charlotte Engrav, as well as the teachers and students at PS229 in Queens, and our self-esteem of the 90s kids. My name is Noah and I'm five.

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  My name is Fivela. I'm from Los Angeles, California. I'm Teddy, and I'm 10 years old. Gus, I am eight years old. My name is Arlo and I'm six years old. My name is Eleanor and I'm six years old. My name's Fee and I have, and I'm five years old. My name is Huck. My age is five. I'm eight. My name is William and I am eight years old. Is there anything else you'd get a gold medal for, bud? Among your friends? Among your classmates and stuff? What else? Hiding. Hiding? Yeah. I'm like a really good hider and hiding other things.

• 1:18:00Speaker 05

  That's it from us. And listening and responding to listeners' needs, we are gonna post another episode in this feed next week. Catch you then. Bye, bye, bye.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Alyssa Mahoney from Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sambak is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona MacKaker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitza, Ariane Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angeli Mercado, and Sophie Sami.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.