Ep. 1050 How State and Society Invented Adolescence, and Screwed Up Young People
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 November 2017
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
According to Dr. Robert Epstein, adolescence is an artificial construct of recent vintage, unknown in earlier times or indeed in many parts of the world today. The creation of this category, and the assumptions that inform it (by state and society alike) have harmed young people, he argues, and are responsible for the anxiety and angst we associate with the teenage years. These problems are not evident in cultures that lack this category. We explore Dr. Epstein's thesis and book in today's episode.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Tom Woods Show, episode 150. |
| 0:03.4 | Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. |
| 0:08.0 | Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show. |
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| 0:31.9 | Hi everybody. Tom Woods here. Dr. Robert Epstein is with us today. We're going to be talking about one of his 15 books, |
| 0:39.6 | and that is Teen 2.0, Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence. |
| 0:46.0 | He has a very provocative thesis about the artificiality of adolescence as a category, |
| 0:53.5 | and how helpful or unhelpful it is. So very, very good stuff. |
| 0:57.7 | He holds a PhD in psychology from Harvard. He is former editor-in-chief of psychology today. |
| 1:05.3 | He's the founder and director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in |
| 1:09.4 | Massachusetts, and he is currently senior research psychologist at the American Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts, and he is currently senior |
| 1:11.6 | research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. Dr. Epstein, |
| 1:17.4 | welcome to the show. Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it. This is obviously quite a controversial |
| 1:22.5 | set of claims you're making here, and what's very interesting about it is that the endorsements |
| 1:27.3 | that you've |
| 1:28.2 | received are extremely diverse in terms of the ideology of the people offering them. So you've |
| 1:34.4 | hit on something that has wide appeal, even though what you're saying is extremely |
| 1:39.4 | countercultural. And it has to do with the way we deal with the, I think what you would say, the manufactured |
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