The Hot Tub Guy

“I gobble up COVID for breakfast. Had it 5 times already.” 

This is what I heard as I stepped into the welcoming warm waters of a way-too-small kids’ pool hot tub. We had taken a little family trip to Scottsdale and somehow my friend and I drew the straw that said “Take the kids swimming” while our wives got some much-needed personal time away. 

“I’m not getting no vaccine. No way! That’s what I call ‘natural immunity,” he continued. 

I thought silently to myself, “Oh no, what did I just get myself into!” I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that the hot tub guy was so engrossed in his existing conversation that he hadn’t taken much notice of me. 

What followed was the rather predictable anti-vaccine, anti-government diatribe. Nothing too surprising here or controversial. This is a sentiment I kind of get. While I originally got the vaccines and boosters, I found myself questioning things when it became so clear that they didn’t quite work as advertised. 

Anyway, I kept to myself, engaging with the kids quietly, desperately trying to avoid getting pulled into the conversation. But I couldn’t help but listen in. Because it was December and the desert sun not quite as warm as you’d think it would be, every single person at the pool was crammed into this 5 x 10 foot hot tub. 

For a while, the conversation was benign. My COVID-eating friend was traveling with his 14-year-old son, apparently quite a talented basketball prospect, and looking forward to drinking either tequila or vodka with his steak dinner later that day. As he went back and forth between the cold pool and the hot tub, he proceeded to lecture his son and his hot tub audience about all the health benefits of the cold plunge. Of course, he was completely out of shape and had no idea what he was talking about. 

It wasn’t long before things took a decidedly nastier turn. I don’t remember how it started but when the conversation turned to Pride Month, he exclaimed:  “Maaan, all this LGBTQ stuff. We ain’t down with all that, right son?” and raised his hand for a high-five. As he proceeded to make fun of the other dads at his son’s school who had the “audacity” to celebrate pride month with rainbow flags and colored clothes, I could tell he had lost his audience, who had mostly agreed with his earlier anti-government diatribes.

For a second, I contemplated saying something but just decided to let it go. 

But the experience really hit me, that’s for sure. In the moment, I remember thinking to myself “This is exactly how bad ideas spread and stay alive. From parent to kid, on and on, in an endless cycle.” I left the pool that afternoon feeling rather disturbed.  

Later that day I realized that I had to write an article about this, not to dunk on the hot tub guy, although he probably deserves something like that, but because this incident highlights a very serious societal problem. How do we ensure that our kids are being raised in the best possible way? Or being taught the right things? How do we structure society so that good ideas spread and bad ones do not? 

Just to be clear, I’m not sharing this story because I think I’m some superior parent but rather because it sparked in me this important reaction and line of thinking. For all I know he could be an excellent father. I happen to disagree vehemently with his decision to teach his son a message of exclusion, fear, and hate but my disagreement is not some wholesale judgment or condemnation.

There are two issues at play here—1. parenting and 2. cultural transmission. 

What was on display that day in the hot tub is an age-old thing. It’s no secret that parents have enormous autonomy and influence over how their kids are raised. This is true even in totalitarian states, just because of the raw logistics of childrearing. Kids spend way more time at home with their parents than anywhere else.

Interestingly though, in every Utopian ideal ever articulated, from Plato in “The Republic” to Huxley in “The Island,” the philosophers imagine a system where the children are taken away from their parents at a very young age to be properly raised and educated by the state or the broader community. Rather radical, right? What’s behind this? Well, philosophers are responding to something we all know is true: not all parents are created equal. 

In a way, the utopian idea makes sense. If you really care about things like leveling the playing field and ensuring the “right” ideas spread, you have to address this fundamental source of inequality in the system. The problem, of course, is that this is a crazy idea and something completely antithetical to the human experience. It’s not that it cannot work—just look at Ancient Sparta for instance—it’s just that it’s neither natural nor ideal. Plus, if we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that freedom must be protected and that includes the freedom to be a parent.

We’ve tried to address the parenting inequality problem in modern times with things like the public school system or, in extreme cases, child protective services, but these are blunt tools. In a very real sense then, parenting is a giant fountainhead of inequality in our system. There are no easy answers here.

To make things more complicated, there’s another force at play here—culture—that wields enormous shaping power, sometimes in support of parental influence and sometimes against. Culture is a force so strong that it can counteract even something like two decades of parental influence. Don’t believe me? Just ask the parents who raised kids in the 1950s and watched them be completely transformed by the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. 

What makes culture so special is that it has emergent properties, meaning it operates autonomously, like Nature. Outside of really messed-up places like Nazi Germany where diabolical leaders deliberately intervened in the processes of culture, it works on its own. There’s no director or overlord. No central planning authority. It’s more like magic. Somehow, from the stories we tell and the art and music we celebrate, culture imparts a complete value system on society. It tells us what we should care about and why. It tells us what is true and what is not. It even establishes our moral framework. Indeed, cultural transmission is a force that is at least as powerful as parental influence when it comes to the raising of kids and the spread of ideas.

The content and the character of the conversation I overheard that day made me realize a few things: 1. As much progress as we’ve made in rooting out messages of exclusion and hate, our work is clearly not done. It will probably never be done. We cannot forget that the price of progress and freedom is eternal vigilance. And 2. Technology seems to be messing up the process of cultural transmission in the world. Social media algorithms and echo-chamber effects are creating a situation where old, bad ideas are spreading with increasing ease.

I came across a fascinating article that covers this exact problem called “The Great Malformation” by Talbot Brewer—hat tip to my good friend Michael Kelly, who you all will be hearing from very soon on the podcast, for sending me the piece. Brewer argues eloquently why it’s problematic that the “[t]he work of cultural transmission is increasingly being conducted in such a way as to maximize the earnings of those who oversee it.” Citing some pretty staggering data—like the fact that 7 of the 10 most valuable companies are in the attention business, advertising is a $650B a year business (almost as much as the entire defense budget), and the average 6-year-old in America sees 40,000 commercial messages a year!—he warns us that this giant unplanned experiment isn’t going particularly well already and looks very likely to end badly. 

The article, well worth a read in its entirety, is a clarion call for all of us. Not only do we have to be careful and mindful about our engagement with the attention economy at the individual level but we have to work together to make sure that technology and the profit-motive don’t destroy the commons and reverse the course of history. 

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