If Books Could Kill - Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

00:00:00.000 The acoustics at your new place are different.

00:00:02.260 They're like tinier.

00:00:03.360 Well, I'm in the, I'm in a little booth.

00:00:07.200 Oh, you're in like a little Superman phone booth?

00:00:09.660 I'm in a little thing.

00:00:10.440 Yeah.

00:00:11.220 I'm talking into one at least.

00:00:13.020 Yeah.

00:00:13.120 You're missing the dulcet tones of your previous place.

00:00:15.160 We're not going to get those emails anymore asking about your status.

00:00:17.960 No, that's on, that's on you.

00:00:19.700 You gotta, you have to.

00:00:21.520 It's up to me to make one person on this podcast sound sexy.

00:00:25.020 Look, I, I don't tell you what to do with your own voice, but, but you gotta make mine

00:00:29.720 hot. All right. Michael. Peter. What do you know about the battle hymn of the tiger mother?

00:00:36.420 We already learned from Malcolm Gladwell that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at

00:00:40.320 something. But this was the book that taught Americans you can also become an expert by

00:00:44.260 someone else yelling at you for 10,000 hours.

00:00:59.720 All right. The book, Michael, is The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua.

00:01:06.180 Yes.

00:01:06.560 She was a Yale law professor and an author who had written a couple of relatively popular international affairs books.

00:01:13.820 But this was her first brush with like mainstream success and notoriety.

00:01:19.040 The book is styled as sort of a memoir where she is recalling raising her two daughters under a strict parenting regime that she calls tiger parenting or alternately Chinese parenting.

00:01:33.060 The book came out in 2011 and it caused a pretty big stir.

00:01:38.040 I will say as a basic methodological principle, I feel like if you're going to write a book about how being mean to your kids works, I do want to hear from the kids.

00:01:46.960 I will say one thing in defense of Amy.

00:01:48.940 Her kids seem to be supportive.

00:01:51.560 Oh, yeah.

00:01:51.820 They both seem to have turned out OK.

00:01:54.000 Well, then she's correct.

00:01:55.660 Who would have thought that two children raised by Yale law professors would end up becoming

00:02:01.280 American elites?

00:02:03.140 A little content warning for our listeners up top.

00:02:06.260 There aren't any descriptions of physical abuse, but there are definitely some things

00:02:10.980 that veer into or near abusive territory.

00:02:15.160 The thing is, I am triggered by this because I didn't have a strict upbringing and I turned 0.98

00:02:18.580 out hella shitty. 0.53

00:02:19.600 So it's actually, it's hard for me to listen to people, people who got it right the first 0.94

00:02:23.520 time.

00:02:24.060 I can't decide whether you are obviously successful and that's tongue in cheek or whether we

00:02:29.240 are both podcasters and in fact could have used some pretty aggressive discipline.

00:02:33.280 The latter, 100%.

00:02:34.440 Yeah, that's probably right.

00:02:35.340 Something has gone wrong.

00:02:37.680 So to give you a sense of the arc of this book, it covers Amy Chua raising her two daughters,

00:02:43.580 Sophia and Louisa, who she calls Lulu, under her strict parenting regime, which she nicknames

00:02:50.040 tiger parenting. And then Lulu becomes a teenager and increasingly resists the strict parenting

00:02:56.440 dynamic. So it's the clash between her and Lulu that inspires her to chronicle the whole ordeal

00:03:03.760 in a book. I want to go over some of what we see in the book, and then we can talk about what the

00:03:08.780 research says about this type of parenting yeah and then we will have a vote on which race we

00:03:15.440 think is the best at parenting it's about time we got into the ranking the races exercise that's

00:03:22.260 something we've both been on twitter long enough and that's basically 80 of what it is now so it

00:03:27.100 makes sense that we would engage in this exercise yeah and i i know you've told me privately that

00:03:31.420 you think that white people do it better but let's talk about the data before we draw any conclusions

00:03:37.540 That was based on the data, Peter.

00:03:39.280 You know me well enough to know.

00:03:40.580 To give you a sense of what the book is like, I am going to send you the very first paragraph.

00:03:45.660 She says,

00:03:46.600 A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids.

00:03:51.080 They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies,

00:03:55.540 what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too.

00:03:58.460 Well, I can tell them because I've done it.

00:04:00.460 Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do.

00:04:04.620 attend a sleepover have a play date be in a school play complain about not being in a school play

00:04:10.460 watch tv or play computer games choose their own extracurricular activities get any grade less than

00:04:16.320 an a not be the number one student in every subject except gym and drama play any instrument

00:04:21.720 other than the piano or violin not play the piano or violin oh harsh stuff on drama here

00:04:27.740 it's a real victim of this the theater kid is collateral damage throughout this book 0.99

00:04:32.520 amy trua thinks you are a fucking loser obviously this is a lot it's meant to jar you yeah and i 0.99

00:04:40.880 think i need to provide a bit of a caveat as we go on throughout the book she maintains a certain 1.00

00:04:47.900 level of self-awareness she knows that this is over the top it's not meant entirely literally

00:04:53.440 yeah i think that publicly she has taken advantage of that haziness to sort of alternately embrace

00:05:00.460 or distance herself from tiger parenting, depending on the situation.

00:05:04.960 This is the like Ann Coulter thing where sort of officially she's joking, but also she's

00:05:10.240 kind of not.

00:05:11.080 Uh-huh.

00:05:11.500 Like this is over the top.

00:05:13.240 It's like you're not allowed to not be the number one student.

00:05:16.640 Right. 0.78

00:05:16.920 Like that's obviously psychotic.

00:05:18.120 So it's like slightly tongue in cheek.

00:05:20.380 But then to what extent is this actually useful advice if you can't determine whether she's

00:05:25.060 joking or not?

00:05:25.880 Right.

00:05:26.140 And that's – I mean it's a rhetorical strategy often used by conservatives to sort of like maintain that like, oh, it's not entirely serious sort of posture.

00:05:38.240 But like then when people are like, no, I like this.

00:05:41.020 Yeah.

00:05:41.220 Then they're like, yeah, thanks.

00:05:43.100 Right, right, right.

00:05:44.820 They're not like, no, it was a joke.

00:05:46.840 You shouldn't like this.

00:05:47.980 This is like when I ask straight dudes, have you ever fooled around with a guy? 0.99

00:05:51.140 Have you ever had bisexual phones? 1.00

00:05:52.920 How is it like that? 1.00

00:05:56.140 I'm just doing this to troll you at this point.

00:05:59.480 I just want to make you as uncomfortable as possible right off the bat.

00:06:03.000 Oh, God.

00:06:03.800 It's working.

00:06:04.440 Remarkable that you can always draw a parallel between something and you sexually harassing

00:06:09.180 straight men.

00:06:11.080 So a big part of the controversy surrounding this book stems from a single piece of PR

00:06:17.740 by Chua's publisher.

00:06:19.180 In January 2011, the Wall Street Journal ran excerpts from the book with the headline, 0.64

00:06:25.160 Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior. 0.98

00:06:28.040 Oh, okay.

00:06:29.120 So I'm going to send you a few long excerpts here. 1.00

00:06:31.960 I'm ready to accuse her of anti-white racism.

00:06:34.020 It's time for us to finally get there.

00:06:35.440 So this is her description of the three big differences

00:06:39.580 between the Chinese and Western parental mindsets. 0.62

00:06:44.280 The white mind.

00:06:45.320 The white mind.

00:06:46.520 She says,

00:06:47.180 First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem.

00:06:51.460 They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something,

00:06:54.200 and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are,

00:06:57.580 notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital.

00:07:01.180 In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. 0.77

00:07:04.860 Chinese parents aren't. 0.98

00:07:06.480 They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result, they behave very differently. 0.99

00:07:11.200 For example, if a child comes home with an A- on a test,

00:07:14.400 a Western parent will most likely praise the child. 0.81

00:07:17.160 The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. 0.52

00:07:20.680 If the child comes home with a B on a test, 0.87

00:07:22.760 some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their

00:07:26.780 child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel 0.99

00:07:31.120 inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child stupid, worthless, or a disgrace. 0.98

00:07:36.220 Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude 0.98

00:07:40.600 in a subject, or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and probably the whole school.

00:07:45.000 You can see several big thematic elements here. One, she believes that this sort of like

00:07:52.580 coddling is counterproductive to this is pretty consistent she will often sort of suggest that

00:07:59.680 western parents are secretly doubting their parenting style right yeah so she's not just

00:08:05.320 saying there are these cultural differences she's making this sort of affirmative case that one

00:08:11.100 is worse at least in some regards right yeah it's very similar to the previous airport bestseller

00:08:15.980 white people dial a phone like this basically what she's doing i'm about to send you the second

00:08:22.560 big difference between Chinese and Western parents. She says, Chinese parents believe that

00:08:28.320 their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a

00:08:32.840 combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much

00:08:37.540 for their children. And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, pulling in long, 0.97

00:08:41.520 grueling hours, personally tutoring, training, interrogating, and spying on their kids. 0.98

00:08:45.780 Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by 0.80

00:08:50.260 obeying them and making them proud. By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view

00:08:54.780 of children being permanently indebted to their parents. Jed actually has the opposite view.

00:08:59.100 Children don't choose their parents, he once said to me. They don't even choose to be born.

00:09:03.060 It's their parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide

00:09:06.800 for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids. This

00:09:11.440 strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent. Who's Jed?

00:09:14.980 That is her husband, Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld. Wikipedia, scroll down to controversies. We'll talk about it later.

00:09:27.020 But this is, I mean, friends of mine who are like second generation immigrants, this does actually sound fairly familiar to me from like their upbringing.

00:09:35.020 Yeah, I think that she's touching on something that has a truth to it.

00:09:41.000 And now I'm going to send you the third difference between Western and Chinese parents. 0.96

00:09:46.900 Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore 0.99

00:09:50.900 override all their children's own desires and preferences. 1.00

00:09:54.500 That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to 1.00

00:09:58.460 sleepaway camp. 1.00

00:09:59.440 It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother,

00:10:02.640 I got a part in the school play.

00:10:04.320 I'm villager number six.

00:10:05.900 I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from three to seven.

00:10:09.040 And I'll also need a ride on weekends. 1.00

00:10:11.000 God help any Chinese kid who tried that one. 1.00

00:10:13.840 Oh, she's really coming for the theater kids. 1.00

00:10:16.180 She hates them. 1.00

00:10:18.100 Every time she's looking for an example of some dumb bullshit that students do, she thinks of theater. 0.99

00:10:26.700 It's very funny when you contrast it with like her love of classical music. 0.99

00:10:31.960 Like she makes one child play piano and one play violin.

00:10:35.180 And to me, I'm going to be honest, as someone who just didn't do extracurriculars, these

00:10:41.240 are the same thing.

00:10:42.220 It's just nerd stuff you do after school.

00:10:46.020 It's also indicative of how much advice like this, it's not virtue signaling, but it's

00:10:52.180 something like elite signaling.

00:10:53.900 The reason you want your kids to play piano or violin is because those are coded as something 0.87

00:11:00.640 the upper castes do. 1.00

00:11:03.240 Right.

00:11:03.280 That's not really about the creative expression of your kids or like sort of self-actualization or that your kids enjoy it.

00:11:10.040 It's showing to other elites, like, look, my kid is one of you.

00:11:13.860 Like violin and piano require just as much talent as singing or dancing or performing or speed running.

00:11:22.380 I threw it in so you wouldn't notice.

00:11:24.100 So a lot of critics and readers were concerned that all of this veered into abuse or at the very least was misguided parenting. 1.00

00:11:31.920 Of all people, David Brooks wrote a fairly withering review titled Amy Chua is a Wimp.

00:11:38.480 Okay.

00:11:38.900 Where he basically made this tongue-in-cheek argument that tiger parenting makes kids weak, not strong, because it doesn't prepare them to navigate like social dynamics, right?

00:11:47.900 That feels like he's responding to the fact that like this is an Asian lady saying that she's better than whites. 0.86

00:11:51.780 I feel like if a conservative Christian made exactly these arguments, he'd be cool with it. 0.85

00:11:55.660 Well, his original title was In Defense of Whites.

00:11:58.280 that's every column could actually be retitled out i love the idea of uh of david brooks uh

00:12:06.720 submitting his column and every single week the title is in defense of whites and the editor just

00:12:10.540 changes it to something more on topic so chua defends herself across various platforms she

00:12:22.040 took to the pages of the wall street journal to say like look this is a memoir not a how-to guide

00:12:27.180 In the same breath, in that Wall Street Journal defense, she pivots to advocating for and defending tiger parenting.

00:12:34.640 The journal piece is like her answering reader questions.

00:12:37.920 She says that tiger parenting can, quote, absolutely lead to children leading happy lives as adults as long as high expectations are coupled with love, understanding, and parental involvement.

00:12:48.480 This is a gift my parents gave to me and what I hope I'm giving my daughters.

00:12:52.640 She also gives some advice to someone who wants to apply her strategies to toddlers.

00:12:57.740 Oh, God.

00:12:58.080 One of the most unhinged things I've ever read in my life.

00:13:00.860 Are you lazing around in your crib right now?

00:13:03.000 Get to the piano.

00:13:04.740 Sippy cups are for closers.

00:13:06.480 So, again, sort of unclear what exactly is being endorsed by her here, right?

00:13:13.280 It seems like when she receives criticism, she says that her work is being misunderstood.

00:13:17.660 But when people like what she's saying, she never corrects them.

00:13:20.740 She just runs with it. 0.55

00:13:21.780 Have you had bisexual thoughts? 0.97

00:13:23.580 The more you ignore me, the more I'm going to do it. 0.99

00:13:25.360 A couple of years ago, she was a guest on Barry Weiss's podcast.

00:13:29.720 Oh, my God.

00:13:30.660 Did you listen to it, Peter?

00:13:31.760 I am one of the greatest journalists of all time.

00:13:35.140 And so I did this.

00:13:37.760 This is basically reporting from the war zone for me.

00:13:41.800 Yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:13:42.260 I would have rather been in Baghdad in 03 than listening to this fucking podcast. 0.83

00:13:48.960 I'm going to spare your algorithm and I like – I did a screen recording of the relevant elements here. 0.99

00:13:55.660 Oh, you're going to send me a fucking clip right now? 0.83

00:13:57.500 I'm going to send you a clip. 1.00

00:13:58.920 Oh, fuck. 1.00

00:13:59.660 It's Barry and Amy. 1.00

00:14:04.940 I think I was just a catalyst.

00:14:08.500 I think that at that moment a lot of Western parents maybe subconsciously – you know when a pendulum swings too far?

00:14:16.660 Yeah.

00:14:16.800 It's like, I think a lot of people were starting to worry, like, wait, have we gone too far?

00:14:21.100 Are, you know, everybody's getting a trophy.

00:14:24.280 Right.

00:14:24.680 Too indulgent.

00:14:25.540 Right.

00:14:27.560 Oh, Barry Weiss is like, wow, tell me more about this.

00:14:31.100 The kids are coddled.

00:14:32.340 Interesting.

00:14:33.040 Wow.

00:14:33.780 Something I've never heard before.

00:14:35.260 Totally new stuff.

00:14:36.320 Right.

00:14:36.660 Let's dive in.

00:14:37.440 I'm searching in my vast mind space for a metaphor.

00:14:40.180 Are you familiar with pendulums?

00:14:42.900 This is her talking about why she thinks her book hit a nerve.

00:14:45.860 And this is something you hear from advocates of stricter parenting all the time, that permissive parenting is too common and has gone too far, right?

00:14:56.200 I have not found, and this might just be my inability to do this research, but I asked a bunch of people.

00:15:03.200 I dug around.

00:15:04.100 I have not found any real solid indication that permissive parenting has gotten drastically more popular.

00:15:10.740 It is true that certain like harsh forms of discipline like corporal punishment have drastically declined.

00:15:18.300 That is true.

00:15:19.320 But that's not exactly the same thing.

00:15:22.380 Polls show that permissive parenting is less popular than harsh parenting.

00:15:27.220 So this sort of just comes off like fear mongering to me.

00:15:30.900 I'm not sure that there's any real basis.

00:15:32.720 In fact, it feels like it's based around, you know, anecdotes about certain types of overprotective parents or something.

00:15:40.740 She's essentially making an empirical argument, but pretending that it's just like you can throw it out there and using her own experience as the only evidence of it.

00:15:48.540 I'm going to send you another clip.

00:15:49.980 Oh, God.

00:15:50.540 You think I was going to listen to the whole thing and not make you listen to the whole thing? 1.00

00:15:53.240 Fuck. 1.00

00:15:56.600 After about two months, everyone said, this is when it dies down. 1.00

00:16:00.860 And it just didn't.

00:16:01.940 It went on for like six months.

00:16:04.960 And I've really changed a lot.

00:16:07.020 I mean, I remember being in England and everywhere I went, I was defensive and it's a memoir.

00:16:12.320 I didn't really mean it.

00:16:13.460 And at one point somebody said, you know, I think you should just own this.

00:16:17.680 And I remember thinking, oh my God, that's going to make things so much easier, you know?

00:16:23.460 And I just learned, I just stopped trying to say it was all a misunderstanding, which

00:16:27.420 it actually was.

00:16:28.240 But I just thought, you know what?

00:16:29.900 There are aspects of this way that I parented that I, I made some mistakes, but I am proud

00:16:35.580 of it.

00:16:35.840 I stand by it.

00:16:37.020 I do think that self-esteem is not something that you could just gift your children.

00:16:41.620 So, yeah, it's been interesting.

00:16:45.880 Oh, such Barry bait, too, to be like, I was canceled by the left.

00:16:49.580 Barry loves it.

00:16:50.400 And Barry's saying, wow, tell me more.

00:16:52.160 So even here, it's hard to gauge where exactly she stands on any of this, right?

00:16:56.960 Yeah.

00:16:57.120 Like she's saying it was a misunderstanding, but that she stands by it.

00:17:00.320 Yeah.

00:17:00.640 On top of that, a lot of people who embrace strict discipline start praising her when

00:17:06.140 the book comes out right right charles murray writes a blog post titled amy chua bludgeon's

00:17:12.720 entire generation of sensitive parents bless her he brushes aside the cruelty of tiger parenting

00:17:19.140 and then he immediately gets into the role of genetics you know how we do shocking twists

00:17:25.760 that's that charles murray special you want that you want that murray sauce on top what if the kids

00:17:30.820 are just baked wrong. Then you have like conservative publications praising her. The

00:17:36.200 Daily Telegraph writes favorable reviews because they endorse the harsh parenting style in the

00:17:42.280 book. Right. So intent aside, people are generally reading it as if it is an endorsement of the

00:17:48.940 parenting style and the way that it's sort of digested into our culture is as an endorsement.

00:17:55.100 Yeah. People are reading it correctly. I think so, too. I think so, too. I think that

00:17:58.980 generally speaking it appears to endorse large chunks of the parenting style that it describes

00:18:06.380 she does sort of hit a wall with lulu and then like alter up her style toward the end of the

00:18:14.580 book where she gives lulu a little more free reign to decide what her interests will be she

00:18:19.820 lets her pursue tennis instead of violin but i want to be clear i was aware of the arc of the

00:18:27.780 narrative arc of the book before I read it. And I was expecting that the final third of the book

00:18:32.200 would be about like what I think about parenting now. Instead, she just sort of like vaguely

00:18:38.440 changes the parenting style a little bit toward the end. And then the book ends immediately.

00:18:43.160 Right. There's no like lessons to be drawn. Right. It's not a good ending to the book,

00:18:47.860 like objectively, like it doesn't tie anything together narratively. But it also just it's also

00:18:54.080 written to like maximize your confusion about where she actually stands on all this.

00:18:58.560 Right. Because it's a refutation of her thesis. The whole point of the book is that tiger parenting

00:19:02.420 is better. And then at the end, she's like, oh, well, some of this Western stuff is fine, too.

00:19:06.960 It's like the Mars and Venus guy saying, oh, yeah, I guess men and women are the same.

00:19:10.900 Right. 0.99

00:19:11.320 Or the rules, ladies being like, yeah, act like a normal person. 0.99

00:19:13.720 So, all right, let's talk data. Can this type of parenting be defined? Can it be measured? 0.85

00:19:21.080 what are the results of this type of parenting.

00:19:24.660 On a spectrum, how tiger is your parenting?

00:19:27.040 So a lot of the modern research about parenting styles stems from the work of Diana Baumrind,

00:19:32.320 who published multiple articles about this in the 60s and 70s.

00:19:36.400 She identified three general styles of parenting, authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive.

00:19:45.460 In very simple terms, authoritarian parents try to control and direct their children's behavior and their children's attitude in accordance with a set of like rigid, absolute standards.

00:19:59.000 They use coercion rather than reasoning.

00:20:01.940 They prioritize obedience and they punish disobedience harshly.

00:20:06.200 Research from Baumbrand and others shows that these children tend to be good at following instructions, but also have lower self-esteem, are less socially adept, are worse at making independent decisions, and have higher levels of aggression and depression.

00:20:21.660 Then you have permissive parents on the other end of the spectrum.

00:20:25.720 These parents make few demands of their children.

00:20:28.360 They allow them to regulate their own behavior.

00:20:31.180 They implement very little structure.

00:20:32.880 These children have better self-esteem, better social skills, but they struggle with self-regulation and bad habits.

00:20:38.840 They perform worse academically.

00:20:41.080 They're more impulsive.

00:20:42.840 They're often more demanding.

00:20:44.580 It's a me.

00:20:46.080 And then you have authoritative parents, which are sort of in between.

00:20:51.720 These parents establish clear guidelines, but they will generally explain to their children the reasons behind those guidelines.

00:20:59.620 Disciplinary measures exist, but they tend to be less punitive.

00:21:02.880 The children have more autonomy to establish their own goals.

00:21:06.640 There's more dialogue with the child.

00:21:09.000 Research has shown very consistently that these children have the best results in almost

00:21:14.700 every category.

00:21:15.440 They tend to be responsible, have better self-regulation, higher self-esteem, better social

00:21:22.540 outcomes, and better academic outcomes than any type of parenting.

00:21:27.040 Right.

00:21:27.320 But there's also a big correlation causation thing here too.

00:21:30.820 that maybe those kids are kind of more high functioning, which makes it easier to be that

00:21:34.820 kind of parent, like a little bit more collaborative. Whereas if you have a kid that's

00:21:38.700 like fiercely independent, you might kind of be forced to take a permissive stance or your kid

00:21:44.520 might be like acting out a ton and that kind of pushes you in the more authoritarian direction.

00:21:50.000 Like I think so much of this stuff is just really hard to measure.

00:21:52.520 It is. There's, there is a ton of noise here. I think it's much harder to like point out where

00:21:58.880 you were as a child or as a parent on the spectrum than you'd think, right? It's also very hard to

00:22:04.660 gauge. It's hard to remember exactly what your day-to-day was as a child decades later. It's

00:22:11.540 hard to know what an appropriate amount of discipline was. I was a misbehaving kid, right?

00:22:17.680 So if you're a kid who's misbehaving all the time, wouldn't you expect to see a little more

00:22:22.980 discipline, right? It's very hard to do anecdotal analysis of these things.

00:22:28.360 I think my parents were permissive with me and authoritarian with my brother because we just, like, needed different styles.

00:22:34.080 And I was, like, straight-A student.

00:22:35.820 I would just sit in class and read Stephen King books.

00:22:37.880 I was, like – I just, like, didn't need very much watering.

00:22:41.060 Yeah.

00:22:41.240 If you see your young child reading Stephen King while everyone else is socializing, just leave it be.

00:22:47.840 No correction needed, folks.

00:22:50.200 Well, I turned out – well, okay.

00:22:54.340 With one early intervention, you are working in marketing.

00:22:58.000 That's true. If my parents had grounded me a single time, I would be married to Pete Buttigieg.

00:23:02.880 I could get to the top because of my general vacuousness.

00:23:08.620 Your lack of interest in deep knowledge of things. It's your best asset.

00:23:12.000 When Bruce Lee said, be like water, what he meant was do whatever your boss thinks is good.

00:23:18.300 So we will talk in a minute about where tiger parenting fits into this parenting style framework.

00:23:26.500 But I want to pause because even at a glance, you can see that some of these findings undercut Chua's central principles.

00:23:35.020 One very prominent element of the book, something that she has stood by over time, something that she talked about in that clip with Barry Weiss, is that you cannot gift your child self-esteem.

00:23:45.900 They have to earn it.

00:23:47.000 And so the point of forcing your kid to practice an instrument for hours on end every day, which she did, is that after they do it, they will be great at that instrument and being great will give them self-esteem.

00:24:00.980 There is a story where she is attempting to force a seven-year-old Lulu to learn a certain piece titled The Little White Donkey and Lulu is resisting aggressively.

00:24:12.440 I'm going to send you that.

00:24:13.780 She says, back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. 0.95

00:24:17.000 She punched, thrashed, and kicked. 0.99

00:24:19.000 She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds.

00:24:21.580 I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never

00:24:25.260 be destroyed again.

00:24:26.420 Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation 0.97

00:24:30.120 Army piece by piece if she didn't have the little white donkey perfect by the next day. 0.88

00:24:34.480 When Lulu said, I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here? 0.90

00:24:38.140 I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday

00:24:42.600 parties for two, three, four years. 0.53

00:24:44.980 When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into

00:24:48.780 a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. 1.00

00:24:51.760 I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent, and pathetic. 1.00

00:24:56.120 Okay, now we get into the borderline abuse stuff. 1.00

00:24:58.480 Yeah.

00:24:58.780 Like, no food? 1.00

00:24:59.860 This is fucked. 1.00

00:25:00.540 So this ultimately leads to Lulu getting it right. 1.00

00:25:03.360 And then Shua says, quote, Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem.

00:25:08.100 But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to

00:25:11.680 let them give up.

00:25:12.480 On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

00:25:18.200 She goes on to say that, quote, Western parents try to respect their children's individuality.

00:25:22.260 By contrast, the Chinese parent believes the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future.

00:25:28.300 So this is a big theme throughout the book.

00:25:30.340 You can't just praise your child and expect them to have self-esteem as a result.

00:25:35.140 They need to root their self-esteem in their objective successes.

00:25:39.260 That seems true as like in a vacuum principle.

00:25:42.540 Sure.

00:25:42.820 Like, yeah, they should achieve stuff.

00:25:44.220 But the way that she's going about it is deranged.

00:25:46.440 You're just like parenting by fear.

00:25:47.860 It's like Stalinistic parenting.

00:25:49.620 Yeah.

00:25:49.840 I actually thought that this was like as a principle compelling intuitively.

00:25:54.200 But the research pretty plainly shows that authoritarian parenting tends to produce lower

00:25:59.800 self-esteem, not higher.

00:26:01.820 And that's true even compared to permissive parenting.

00:26:05.900 In fact, some studies have shown that children in permissive households have the highest self-esteem out of the parenting styles.

00:26:13.800 Not every study shows that, but some do, which really throws cold water on the idea that you build your self-esteem by like setting objective standards and then pressing the child to meet those standards, right? 0.90

00:26:26.400 And also on the idea that like our culture of participation trophies is undermining self-esteem or whatever the fuck she believes, right?

00:26:33.400 This is why we read stuff for the show, Peter, because sometimes we learn things.

00:26:36.640 I spoke with Iris Chen, who wrote a book a few years ago called Untigering, about her journey like away from tiger parenting.

00:26:44.840 I asked her about this because this was sort of an interesting topic to me, like where does self-esteem come from?

00:26:49.520 And her explanation was essentially if you set up these strict objectives for your children, they will only feel good about themselves if they are able to meet those objectives, right?

00:26:58.540 If you are teaching your children that they are worthy if they achieve X, Y, and Z rather than teaching them to have independent, freestanding self-worth, that can backfire very easily.

00:27:12.560 And so it could be that some of these kids end up with high self-esteem because they are like hitting the metrics that their parents set out for them, right?

00:27:23.920 Right.

00:27:24.140 But that's a dangerous game to play with your child.

00:27:26.000 Not every child will hit them and eventually your child will fail to meet some goal or

00:27:31.780 another and then what, right?

00:27:33.160 Then where does their self-esteem come from?

00:27:35.640 I have friends who are like basically professional sports people partly because of like encouragement

00:27:41.460 slash cajoling from their parents and they've kind of come to resent it.

00:27:45.680 It's hard to derive self-esteem from that because it feels like their parents' achievement

00:27:49.240 more than their own.

00:27:50.880 I've never been good at anything and I have no self-esteem so I'm speaking not from the

00:27:54.060 experience here.

00:27:54.820 A lot of these folks seem to believe that like childhood doesn't count, that the only utility that childhood has is preparing you for adulthood.

00:28:05.140 And so if you are yelling and shaming your child and there's five hour a day mandatory practice schedules, as long as that leads to better academic performance or something, you're good, right?

00:28:17.440 Because it doesn't count.

00:28:19.180 I just feel like that's not the case.

00:28:21.620 Like childhood counts.

00:28:23.020 your enjoyment of your life as a child still counts. And parents should think about trying

00:28:28.800 to maximize that a little bit. It should at least be a factor in what's driving you.

00:28:33.120 I can hear Amy Chua responding, but what if they want to be in theater, Peter?

00:28:36.700 Have you thought about that from your ivory podcasting booth?

00:28:40.080 The other thing that we should talk about is punishment, right? Harsh punishments and

00:28:45.120 aggressive confrontation of your children don't really seem to work. The anecdote that you just

00:28:52.700 read is pretty illustrative here right amy jua very frequently describes screaming matches with 1.00

00:28:59.660 her kids over various things and 95 of the time it's just like but then she finally caved and

00:29:05.700 practiced her violin and it was great there's this like idea that she seems to subscribe to

00:29:10.100 that a lot of authoritarian parents seem to subscribe to is like yeah this is unsavory but

00:29:15.100 it gets results right that's just not really backed up by the research not not only are these

00:29:19.780 children not performing at the same level academically as children with more supportive

00:29:25.900 parents, but it also leads to all sorts of bad behaviors. You see this over and over again in

00:29:31.280 the literature. The children of authoritarian parents have more problems with aggression and

00:29:36.620 bullying, for example. They struggle with self-regulation. They are twice as likely as

00:29:42.220 the children of authoritative parents to be heavy drinkers. Permissive parents, by the way,

00:29:47.220 tend to produce the heaviest drinkers. So it does get even worse. If you've ever heard a parent

00:29:52.300 who's like, well, I just like to, I let my kid drink in my home because I like, you know, I just,

00:29:56.960 that way I'm keeping tabs on them. It does not work, folks. Don't be a cool mom. Don't be a cool

00:30:01.980 mom. There's also research about the neurobiology of children that supports this. Aggressive

00:30:08.560 confrontation can trigger what's basically a fight or flight response in a child where they

00:30:13.680 feel threatened. And so their brain gets a sort of tunnel vision. They're just trying to address

00:30:18.220 this immediate problem, the immediate threat posed by their parents. And a lot of psychologists

00:30:23.260 argue that when their brain is in this mode, they are not really able to learn, right? Their ability

00:30:31.000 to learn is inhibited. So they're not absorbing lessons like they would if you were engaging with

00:30:36.040 them more substantively. Yeah. I guess if you're afraid of like not getting dinner, you might play

00:30:42.020 the piece, but you're in like a stress state while you're doing it. And the lesson that you

00:30:47.080 are learning about why you are doing this thing is probably a little bit fucked, right? Like what 0.99

00:30:54.200 you are becoming good at is avoiding discipline, right? That is what the child is sort of learning

00:31:00.760 to do. That's the environment that they're adapting to. I have not looked into the parenting

00:31:04.420 research, but I have seen this in other places where this kind of scared straight approach to

00:31:09.880 getting people to stop drugs or like stop, you know, hanging out with juvenile delinquents or

00:31:13.500 whatever is like the lowest and worst form of motivation. Like those videos where like you're

00:31:18.620 going to go to jail and get like raped forever. Like those kids are motivated to sort of straighten

00:31:23.040 up for like six hours and then they forget about it and then they move on. It's just like this sort

00:31:27.720 of habit via terror approach. It doesn't work in like other contexts either. It's very interesting

00:31:34.580 to me how many people just intuitively assume that this stuff works. A lot of these discussions

00:31:40.520 happen where people are basically imagining that it works and they're saying, but is it bad for

00:31:45.900 the children too? It's like, whoa, whoa, it doesn't work at all. It's actually quite bad

00:31:51.020 at doing the things that it claims to be good at doing. Well, they have to defend it that way

00:31:54.660 because there's no other defense of it. Because any moral defense would fall down like, yeah,

00:31:58.340 I'm shitty to my kid. So before we get into tiger parenting specifically, I want to provide a bit

00:32:03.860 of a caveat, which is that some research indicates that these parenting style frameworks do not show

00:32:09.460 the same results across cultures. There is a study in 1994 by Ruth Chow that found that these

00:32:15.460 parenting styles don't have the same predictive power for Chinese Americans, at least first

00:32:20.840 generation immigrants. For example, authoritarian Chinese parents were producing better academic 0.59

00:32:27.460 outcomes than you'd expect, even where Western parents were not. So there is this lingering

00:32:34.260 question here of whether and how much this applies to Chinese families. Like maybe Chua is on to 1.00

00:32:41.740 something here, right? A couple of years after the book comes out, the Asian American Journal

00:32:46.760 of Psychology published a special issue that addressed tiger parenting. One article by Su

00:32:53.780 Yong Kim, a psychologist at UT Austin, was titled, Does Tiger Parenting Exist?

00:32:59.800 And the research surveyed hundreds of Chinese American families in California.

00:33:03.840 And they did, in fact, identify a group of people who seemed to fit the tiger parenting 0.94

00:33:09.520 type, higher on hostility and control and shaming and punishment, but also higher on

00:33:15.060 the positive traits like warmth.

00:33:17.340 What they found, first of all, was that tiger parenting was not the most common parenting

00:33:22.280 style in these communities. The most common style was just more supportive parenting. That was about

00:33:27.020 45% of the population. And then you had about 28% doing tiger parenting. So the claim that this

00:33:33.480 style of parenting is correlated with Chinese culture might have some merit, but it's not the

00:33:38.520 dominant mode of Chinese parenting by first immigration immigrants in America, right?

00:33:43.480 And then more importantly, tiger parenting did not result in the best outcomes. Supportive

00:33:50.480 parenting, which was high in the positive traits but lower in the negative ones, was associated

00:33:55.600 with higher GPAs, higher educational attainment, lower levels of academic pressure, lower levels

00:34:01.360 of depressive symptoms, lower levels of parental alienation, and stronger feelings of family

00:34:06.900 obligation.

00:34:08.060 So basically in every single category that tiger parenting claims to be targeting, it

00:34:14.460 performs worse than just being more supportive and less harsh, including in the precise

00:34:20.140 demographic that Amy Chua is talking about. I like that we've taken like the longest imaginable way

00:34:26.560 to the conclusion that being nice to your kids is good. You should be nice to your kids. We did

00:34:32.900 these episodes by conferring an amount of good faith on the authors and also the people who

00:34:38.880 believe this stuff. And so when you're thinking about this, you often have to remember that some

00:34:44.440 people don't really place much importance on being nice to your kids. They feel that the

00:34:51.340 relationship should be a little more adversarial than that. And so I'm trying to talk in more

00:34:56.160 research terms, but I do personally feel, and I want to say it on a podcast, that you should be

00:35:01.260 nice to your kids. You should be nice to your kids. I also, I have to say, my parents compared

00:35:06.660 to this were chill as hell. And I didn't quite get into Harvard and Yale, but I got close enough

00:35:13.500 that Amy should be worried.

00:35:14.960 You know what I mean?

00:35:17.220 That's the thing.

00:35:17.780 Everybody has these like broad universal rules

00:35:21.400 about parenting based on their own experience.

00:35:23.800 And so much of the way you turn out as an adult

00:35:25.600 is just total coincidence and like serendipity.

00:35:28.120 Well, it's my raw talent.

00:35:29.840 I didn't need it.

00:35:30.520 I didn't need to get bullied.

00:35:32.580 You were a born podcaster.

00:35:34.880 Did you get like grounded a lot as a kid?

00:35:37.160 Did you get like a lot of like parental punishment?

00:35:38.780 I almost never got punished.

00:35:39.780 I would say I got an appropriate amount

00:35:41.420 given my disposition.

00:35:42.400 Given your behavior.

00:35:43.760 I was punished quite a bit at school.

00:35:45.720 You can't put me in a school setting where there's an audience for my shenanigans and expect good things.

00:35:52.700 That's where I was a real danger.

00:35:54.580 When you put me in a room with 30 kids who were trying to learn.

00:35:58.960 At all times, I was like, what would be the funniest thing I could say right now?

00:36:04.240 And now that's your job.

00:36:05.580 And now it's my job.

00:36:06.880 The biggest trouble I ever got in in middle school was we had a teacher who wanted us to like silently journal for the first 10 minutes of class.

00:36:14.180 And he said, like, I won't read them, but like, I think it's good to get in the habit of these diaries. 0.99

00:36:17.960 And I was like, this fucker is going to read our fucking diaries. 1.00

00:36:20.500 I don't trust this guy. 1.00

00:36:21.640 Michael, we have the same story.

00:36:22.920 OK, go on.

00:36:23.520 Wait, really?

00:36:23.940 OK.

00:36:24.280 So, well, maybe yours had the same outcome as mine.

00:36:26.480 So to test this guy.

00:36:28.500 Oh, my God, Michael, we're the same person. 0.52

00:36:30.960 I started writing extremely explicit pornography, like erotica.

00:36:34.840 This is not the avenue I took, but we're in the same mind space here.

00:36:39.140 And then I did this days and days and days in a row.

00:36:41.420 And the following week, I was called into the principal's office.

00:36:44.380 Oh, my God.

00:36:44.920 And I walk in there and there's the principal, my teacher and my mom.

00:36:49.300 Oh, my God.

00:36:49.900 And then they're immediately like, we're really disturbed by the things that you've been writing. 0.96

00:36:54.260 And I was like, I did this to fucking test you because I don't trust you not to read them. 0.97

00:36:57.720 And I was fucking right. 0.98

00:36:58.880 And there's like this silence in the room. 0.98

00:37:01.480 And my mom was like, why did you lie to my son?

00:37:04.840 And she like completely took my side and I was like, yes.

00:37:07.800 A full turn.

00:37:08.840 Mom.

00:37:09.760 How old were you there?

00:37:12.080 Sixth or seventh grade.

00:37:13.180 So like I guess 11 or 12, I think.

00:37:14.880 Oh, Jesus.

00:37:15.420 That's pretty young to be writing the explicit pornography, I have to say. 0.93

00:37:18.160 But it was also, to be clear, I was like a 12-year-old gay kid.

00:37:22.320 So I think it was probably not particularly competent. 0.99

00:37:24.820 I think it was like he poked her boobs. 0.96

00:37:29.140 But you did the same thing? 0.99

00:37:30.780 Almost.

00:37:31.100 So when I was a little bit older, I was in like 10th grade maybe, teacher and I hated

00:37:37.120 each other and same thing.

00:37:39.900 She had this journaling practice and she was like, if you fold the page over, I won't read

00:37:45.080 it.

00:37:45.460 Come on.

00:37:45.860 It was an open secret that she read them.

00:37:47.980 Yeah, of course.

00:37:48.560 Multiple students would write like personal things about their families and what was happening

00:37:53.600 and then she would ask them about it later.

00:37:55.660 Oh my gosh.

00:37:56.320 Knowing this, right toward the end of the school year, I just wrote a thing about how

00:38:01.440 much I hated her.

00:38:02.800 I thought that this was going to sit in the air between us and I was going to smirk at

00:38:06.140 her and she was going to scowl at me and that's how it was going to go.

00:38:09.820 Instead, she called that bluff immediately and I found myself in the assistant principal's

00:38:13.600 office and she's like, why would anyone write this to their teacher?

00:38:20.720 And I was like, oh my God, like she has always said that it was private if he folded it over.

00:38:26.040 So I was venting and the entire demeanor of the meeting changes.

00:38:31.380 And all of a sudden, it's about this gross violation of student privacy by the teacher.

00:38:38.120 And I'm like, you know, now that I think about it, I've heard other students say this too.

00:38:45.880 So she ended up getting in trouble instead of you?

00:38:48.240 I'm sitting in like the waiting room of the principal's office after this.

00:38:50.840 And five minutes later, she gets perp walked in front of me.

00:38:54.460 Hell yeah.

00:38:54.960 to the office and we make eye contact and i she has like pure terror in her eyes because it's very

00:39:00.900 clear based on my face that i'm not in trouble like something has changed this all ends with her

00:39:08.020 being forced to apologize to me nice and invite me back into the class which and it was like

00:39:14.840 presented as a choice to me and i was like yes i will i was also i was also hoping you would take

00:39:22.180 the same tack as me so that we could have a bonus episode where we do dramatic readings of our

00:39:26.280 12-year-old erotica. I can't believe you have this same basic story. I love that we were just

00:39:32.140 talking about how different we were as children. And then you find this like synthesis. We probably

00:39:37.040 both had like a libertarian phase. I was like, this is like government surveillance. That was

00:39:40.880 like my angle. Nope, nope, nope. Delete this from the episode. I never had a libertarian phase,

00:39:45.040 listeners. Was I an asshole in various ways? Yes, but it never manifested in libertarianism. 0.98

00:39:52.180 Let's move on to the meta phase of this episode because I think the research is pretty devastating for the advocacy of tiger parenting, right?

00:40:03.820 It's very clear that this type of parenting is correlated with bad outcomes.

00:40:10.360 So her book is just straightforwardly wrong.

00:40:12.080 This advice is bad.

00:40:13.760 There's another level to why this is disconcerting to me and it's about political science.

00:40:18.660 In 2016, a bunch of political scientists looked at the population of people who supported Donald Trump and they found that the best predictor of Trump support wasn't race or gender or income or anything like that.

00:40:33.720 It was the person's level of authoritarianism, how favorably they viewed authoritarian behavior.

00:40:40.640 Do you know how political scientists measure authoritarianism?

00:40:44.300 They do it by measuring views of authoritarian parenting.

00:40:47.540 Oh, really?

00:40:48.300 So Matthew McWilliams, a political scientist, asked people four binary questions, and these are the standard questions in a lot of these studies.

00:40:56.940 Would you rather have a child who is independent or respectful, self-reliant or obedient, considerate or well-behaved, curious or well-mannered?

00:41:06.620 For each one of those that you answer on the more authoritarian side, you're about 7% more likely to support Donald Trump.

00:41:14.720 Wow.

00:41:15.060 By political science standards, that is extremely impressive predictive power.

00:41:20.800 It's important to understand that when you hear people talk about how like parents are too soft these days or how children need discipline, that's not just about parenting per se.

00:41:30.860 This is also something we've come across on the show so many times that these advice books aren't really advice.

00:41:35.920 They're the expression of a worldview.

00:41:37.980 Yeah.

00:41:38.200 We're back to one book, Peter.

00:41:39.280 We are back to one book. 0.99

00:41:40.160 We're fucking back. 0.98

00:41:40.560 Parenting stuff often gets expressed as like a cultural grievance about us growing weak, right? 0.99

00:41:47.020 That's not rooted in data or anything.

00:41:49.560 It's about their normative belief that society should be harsher.

00:41:53.320 Right.

00:41:53.540 They tell themselves that it's because people need that harshness to like improve themselves.

00:41:58.940 But we basically just know that's not true, at least in the case of parenting, right?

00:42:02.660 What they really want is a world where, yeah, children don't get to choose what exactly their life is like, that gets dictated to them, but also a world where adults don't really choose what their life is like, where they're dictated to them by authoritarian figures.

00:42:20.680 You know, it's one thing that like this lady believes this, but I think part of what caused

00:42:29.800 this to be such a firestorm is that it taps into this debate, right?

00:42:34.680 Yeah.

00:42:35.000 It's not just parenting.

00:42:36.480 It's about like how society should be structured, right?

00:42:40.100 What's your view of hierarchy?

00:42:42.720 How does power justify itself?

00:42:45.040 Is obedience something that has like merit in and of itself, right?

00:42:49.980 Right.

00:42:50.380 These are all things that like weigh on the type of government we want as much as they

00:42:55.760 weigh on how we raise our kids.

00:42:58.060 And also you can see it in the Barry Weiss interview where she mentions like, oh, these

00:43:01.920 kids have participation trophies now, which is a very widespread conservative urban legend

00:43:06.620 essentially.

00:43:07.600 And it's like, that's not really about your individual parenting style.

00:43:11.040 That's analysis of the kind of society we are.

00:43:13.800 Right. 1.00

00:43:14.060 And she's basically resorting to this kind of kids these days are too coddled stuff,

00:43:17.460 which is an extremely conservative and extremely pervasive myth.

00:43:20.920 You can see that she's not just like, I want my children to be the best that they can be,

00:43:27.360 right? It's this broad complaint about like parenting these days. And that in and of itself

00:43:33.540 is like, feels like a broad complaint about how people are. We've grown to coddle our children,

00:43:40.420 but we ourselves are too coddled. We are too weak. People complain too much. You know,

00:43:45.820 we've sort of lost our edge. Those are all opinions that lead to dangerous places.

00:43:51.360 Yeah, they also lead to Barry Weiss's podcast.

00:43:53.780 The worst result. So, you know, knowing that, knowing that there's this like authoritarian

00:43:58.340 personality type, and it's something that stretches beyond parenting, you can sort of

00:44:03.340 glean something about Amy Chua herself and her disciples. Her public statements about politics

00:44:09.920 place her very much in that reactionary centrist camp. A few years ago, she wrote a book about

00:44:15.800 how tribalism on both sides is the problem in America.

00:44:20.540 Scorching stuff.

00:44:21.460 Scorching.

00:44:22.000 That's the opinion that people who don't have the energy

00:44:24.380 to come up with a real opinion have.

00:44:26.800 They're just like, oh, everything's just so heated.

00:44:29.220 Yeah.

00:44:30.360 Everyone like believes all this stuff.

00:44:32.960 Now, since the battle hymn of the tiger mother came out,

00:44:36.160 she has made headlines for three main reasons,

00:44:39.380 which I will go through in roughly chronological order.

00:44:43.000 First, when Brett Kavanaugh was up for the Supreme Court, she wrote an op-ed in support

00:44:50.280 of his nomination titled, Brett Kavanaugh is a mentor to women.

00:44:55.340 Then the sexual assault allegations came out.

00:44:58.980 Amy refuses to retract her piece despite a lot of pressure, despite a lot of people

00:45:02.960 who wrote out in support of him initially retracting their pieces.

00:45:06.940 Is he anything else to women, Amy?

00:45:08.740 Has he ever been anything else to women?

00:45:10.940 Are there nouns?

00:45:11.860 She talked to Barry Weiss about this and the justification she provided was, quote, I stand by my friends.

00:45:18.420 Oh, what?

00:45:19.100 OK.

00:45:19.680 What?

00:45:20.760 I guess the loyalty paid off because Sophia, her oldest, was hired by Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court clerk about a year later.

00:45:28.800 So congrats.

00:45:29.800 Well, happy ending to all of this.

00:45:31.500 I'm not going to Google any further, but things have gone great since then.

00:45:35.700 At about the same time, various complaints and allegations start to swirl around Chua

00:45:40.960 and her husband, again, Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld. 0.98

00:45:44.900 First, there were reports that Chua advised female students to dress like models when 1.00

00:45:50.860 applying for clerkships with Brett Kavanaugh. 1.00

00:45:53.520 He's going to want to see your hip bones.

00:45:54.920 He's going to want to see those. 1.00

00:45:56.100 Get the pelvis out. 1.00

00:45:56.920 She denies this.

00:45:58.420 Then Rubenfeld ends up suspended from Yale for two years following an investigation into

00:46:04.960 alleged sexual harassment of students.

00:46:07.540 Cancelled.

00:46:07.740 I believe you mean cancelled.

00:46:08.740 He was cancelled from Yale.

00:46:10.260 And then there is what is colloquially referred to as dinner party gate.

00:46:15.040 Yeah.

00:46:16.420 This one I kind of know about.

00:46:18.080 Yeah.

00:46:18.840 This made a shocking amount of headlines and it obviously would have made none if she wasn't

00:46:24.020 a public figure of some kind, but whatever.

00:46:26.920 Basically, there was an investigation by Yale in Tachua and her socialization with students.

00:46:33.400 It turns out that due to allegations of inappropriate or excessive fraternizing, perhaps heavy drinking, Chua had agreed in 2019 not to host any students at her home.

00:46:46.820 This gets out when the Yale Daily News writes about it and rumors are swirling that Chua was hosting soirees that included federal judges during like early COVID.

00:46:58.520 Yeah.

00:46:58.740 There's basically no good evidence for this.

00:47:00.920 Oh, really?

00:47:01.560 Really.

00:47:01.860 I didn't know that.

00:47:02.620 Okay. 0.94

00:47:02.680 But Chua does admit to hosting at least a couple of students at her home in what she

00:47:08.640 described as like a mentorship capacity.

00:47:11.420 She also says that they brought wine.

00:47:13.460 She did not ask for wine.

00:47:14.600 She says that she drank Fresca.

00:47:16.460 It appears that this happened more than once.

00:47:18.720 The dean and Chua tell very different stories about how their private conversations about

00:47:23.740 this went.

00:47:25.020 This has all resulted in a lot of conflict between her and administration, a lot of public

00:47:30.380 criticism.

00:47:30.940 It has sort of pushed her into the favor of the fake centrist grifting types like Barry Weiss, right?

00:47:38.760 I've seen her on the sort of canceled people's list.

00:47:41.020 That's how I know about this, yeah.

00:47:42.300 So I will send you one more clip from the Barry Weiss podcast where they are discussing this.

00:47:49.400 Here we go.

00:47:51.380 You were involved in a controversy this past year during COVID that honestly I couldn't even totally follow.

00:47:58.940 it seemed like you were getting accused of hosting two students at your home. And to be honest,

00:48:06.600 reading it from afar, here's how I read it. Amy has a target on her back and has since 2018, 0.97

00:48:12.740 but really maybe for the past decade, because she is unorthodox, because she doesn't fall in line, 0.92

00:48:19.060 because she refuses to ascribe to every aspect of this new ideology. And because of that,

00:48:24.440 her enemies are looking to bring her down in any possible way they can, including by

00:48:31.900 accusing her of like having chicken pox parties for COVID. That's how I read it. Is that pretty

00:48:38.580 accurate? It's pretty accurate. It's actually even more Kafka-esque than that because it

00:48:44.440 involves secret recordings. So the original accusation was that I was having drunken

00:48:49.820 dinner parties with tons of secret students and federal judges. That was actually the original

00:48:56.480 accusation that the dean herself made and said this to the entire faculty. And so the only reason

00:49:01.960 I fought back was because my daughter, Lulu, my rebel daughter said, mom, in this day and age,

00:49:06.960 we get our truth from social media. If it's not true, you have to fight back. So I did something

00:49:13.160 I have never done. This is what a younger generation would do. I told the truth. I wrote

00:49:17.860 a letter to my entire faculty, and I tweeted it. And I never believed that it would end up being

00:49:24.180 covered by the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker. But I fought back. It was so

00:49:29.140 unpleasant. Like 80% of the faculty stopped talking to me. But I feel vindicated that in the

00:49:34.300 end, the version that you're getting now is what finally came out. Okay, there were no dinner

00:49:39.120 parties. There were no drunken things. There were no federal judges. Two students came over and left

00:49:45.060 after an hour and a half, and Amy Chua had a fresca. 0.99

00:49:48.120 That's what happened.

00:49:51.720 I love that Barry is like, okay, so what I think happened is like,

00:49:56.040 you're the victim of a witch hunt.

00:49:57.660 Is that true? 0.56

00:49:59.440 You're actually in trouble, and tell me if I'm getting this right,

00:50:02.700 because you're so brave.

00:50:05.060 Here's the thing.

00:50:06.460 Chua gets a ton of mileage on this out of the fact that the early rumors 0.99

00:50:10.660 about her hosting federal judges and like big parties were false, which allows her to paint 0.99

00:50:17.300 the whole thing as sort of bullshit. But what actually happened was that she had agreed with 0.81

00:50:23.080 administration not to host students. Right. And then she hosted students. Right. Extremely cut

00:50:28.760 and dry. She admits to hosting two students. From what I've seen, it seems more likely that she

00:50:32.900 consistently hosted two or three students at different times. She calls it a mentorship

00:50:37.960 sort of thing whatever this she's like the students brought wine themselves who i was like i don't

00:50:43.100 know i feel like if i was going over to a professor's house to get mentored about the law i'm

00:50:48.400 probably not bringing a bottle of wine but who knows right yeah i don't i don't know how it's 0.97

00:50:52.440 kafka-esque it's also it seems like the actual scandal is whatever the fuck she did to have her 0.98

00:50:57.460 privileges of hosting students taken away so that's the thing what the fuck is that again 0.98

00:51:00.980 there were allegations of her having basically partying with like hosting a lot of students 0.97

00:51:06.520 part like you know parting a little too much with them to the point where administration felt like 0.98

00:51:11.960 they should step in yeah and they did and that's why chua agreed not to host students yeah that

00:51:18.780 all predates this and then she violates the agreement right and then because it gets like

00:51:23.920 mischaracterized by either the dean or the press or uh or both chua gets to latch onto that and be

00:51:30.340 like they're slandering me right it's like okay but you still basically did the thing i what the 0.99

00:51:35.840 fuck. And also she's like, I never thought some minor scandal at an elite school would end up in 0.99

00:51:41.380 the New York Times. Have you read the New York Times lately? That's like 40% of the front page

00:51:46.740 is some low stakes bullshit at Oberlin. Yeah. I don't want to read too much into this sort of 0.99

00:51:52.400 shit, but you can see perhaps how a somewhat narcissistic philosophy regarding power and 0.99

00:52:00.140 control can bleed into other aspects of your life, right? Someone who views herself perhaps 1.00

00:52:06.400 as a power broker at Yale Law and lets that get a little bit out of control when it comes to like 0.86

00:52:12.860 partying with the students, right? I blame her parents. I think her parents were too permissive.

00:52:16.780 Unfortunately, she's been allowed to run wild. She wasn't tiger-mommed enough.

00:52:19.880 Again, I don't want to overstep in my analysis here, but it's hard not to see a little bit

00:52:27.600 bit of narrative flow, shall we say, from the way she talks about her parenting and then the way she

00:52:34.040 sort of conducts herself when she's in a position of authority at a law school, right? Very little

00:52:39.700 concern with whether or not she might have done something wrong. Very willing to just do something

00:52:45.080 and then justify it after the fact. And I will say, I don't know that I care that much about

00:52:50.600 the fact that she had two students over or that she broke an administrative rule. 0.99

00:52:54.440 Truly who gives a shit. 1.00

00:52:55.480 Yeah. 0.99

00:52:55.720 I guess it's just indicative of somebody who is not telling their own story with a lot

00:53:00.640 of accuracy.

00:53:02.260 Now, the last major piece of Amy News popped up recently, but it's actually a story from

00:53:07.840 2017.

00:53:09.100 I'm going to share a headline with you.

00:53:11.720 It says, how the tiger mom convinced the author of Hillbilly Elegy to write his story.

00:53:17.780 And then sub-headline, when J.D. Vance was in law school, his mentor Amy Chua gave him

00:53:22.520 the confidence to take a different path. I forgot she made a cameo in our Hillbilly Elegy episode.

00:53:28.420 That's right. That's right. She did. It is truly one book. And I mean, a couple of things about

00:53:34.260 this. Yeah. You think it's not so bad that she had two students over to provide them with mentorship?

00:53:39.100 What if I told you that some of those students end up being JD Vance? Now, how do you feel about it?

00:53:45.320 Look, he did drink the blood of three virgin tradwives, but I had a fresca. 0.64

00:53:50.840 So Amy Chua mentored J.D. Vance and convinced him to write Hillbilly Elegy in order to launch his career as a public figure and then ultimately a senator and possibly vice president.

00:54:03.640 So Amy Chua, again, politically, she talks with empathy for the viewpoints that come from the left very frequently.

00:54:13.380 She will often say the left has gotten out of control, but she'll be like, they have a point about this, this and this.

00:54:16.860 She's very willing to give credit to leftist activists on campus, for example.

00:54:22.780 She's like, I disagree with their tactics, but they are fundamentally making, you know,

00:54:25.760 these accurate observations, et cetera.

00:54:28.280 Publicly, she is trying to cultivate a persona where she is very reasonable, liberal, fair

00:54:34.560 minded, someone who is sort of above the fray.

00:54:38.880 And yet, every time she engages with the political world, you get a Brett Kavanaugh and a J.D.

00:54:44.840 Vance.

00:54:45.460 Yeah.

00:54:45.580 The question isn't whether she was a good mom. 0.96

00:54:47.620 The question is whether she tiger-mommed a fascist into the White House.

00:54:51.440 Who have you tiger-mommed into power?

00:54:53.760 So when I think about who she is politically, I think it's probably a little more valuable 0.98

00:55:00.040 to look at who she's actually materially connected to rather than the bullshit she 0.99

00:55:06.380 says on podcasts or whatever. 0.97

00:55:08.120 I would be fine with this entire book if she had treated J.D. Vance as badly as she treated

00:55:12.080 her kids revoke his dinner call him a piece of shit i will read an entire book about someone 1.00

00:55:18.280 screaming at jd vance to play the piano 1.00

If Books Could Kill - September 24, 2024

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

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