Matt Kielty

And how did he respond to that?

He'd take it in.

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

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

Mitch said that with John.

There are many things that you can't shake loose.

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.

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.

Like you weren't watching TV.

The one person that we talked to was this researcher named Jennifer Crocker.

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.

And Jennifer told us about how in 2003, there were these psychologists and a bunch of other researchers who pulled together a very long and, I think, really excellent overview of what is the value, what is the benefit of self-esteem.

They went through decades of whatever research was published, hundreds of studies to look at what are the differences between high and low self-esteem people.