Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech | Lex Fridman Podcast #397

if the goal is the project of human knowledge which is to know the world it is you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think and what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know so every time you're actually saying you can't say that you're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think you're causing what Tim Quran who's on our Board of advisors calls preference falsification you end up with an inaccurate picture of the wor

ld which by the way in a lot of cases um because there are activists who want to restrict more speech they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced than they might be and actually one very real practical way it makes things worse is when you censor people it doesn't change their opinion it just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble so it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with and group polarization takes off the following is a co

nversation with Greg glucianov Free Speech Advocate First Amendment attorney president and CEO of fire the foundation for individual rights and expression and he's the author of unleashing Liberty co-author with Jonathan height of coddling of the American mind and co-author with Ricky schlot of a new book coming out in October that you should definitely pre-order now called the canceling of the American mind which is a definitive accounting of the history present and future of cancel culture a t

erm used and overused in public discourse but rarely studied and understood with the depth and rigor that Greg and Ricky do in this book and in part in this conversation freedom of speech is important the especially on college campuses the very place that should serve as the battleground of ideas including weird and controversial ones that should encourage bold risk-taking not conformity this is Alex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear fri

ends here's Greg Luciano let's start with a big question what is cancel culture now you've said that you don't like the term as it's been quote dragged through the mud and abused endlessly by a whole host of controversial figures nevertheless we have the term what is it cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns especially successful campaigns starting around 2014 to get people fired expelled de-platformed Etc um for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment and I say would b

e protected because we're talking about circumstances in which it isn't necessarily where the first amendment applies but what I mean is like as an analog to uh say things you couldn't lose your job as a Public Employee for and also the climate of fear that's resulted from uh from that phenomena the fact you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion and it wasn't subtle that this there was an uptick in this particularly on on campus around 2014. um John Ronson wrote a book called so you've

been publicly shamed they came out in 2015 already documenting this phenomena I wrote a book called freedom from speech in 2014. and but in but it really was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors and when it comes to the number of professors that we've seen you know be targeted and lose their jobs I've been doing this for 22 years and I've seen nothing like it so there's so many things I want to ask you here but one actually just look at the organization of fire can you

explain what the organization is because it's interconnected to this whole fight and the rise of cancer culture and the fight for freedom of speech since 2014 and before so uh fire was founded in 1999 by Harvey sliverglade he is a famous civil liberties attorney he's a bit on the show he's the person who actually found me out in my very happy life out in San Francisco but knew I was looking for a First Amendment job um I'd gone to law school specifically to do first amendment um and he he found

me which was pretty cool his Protege Kathleen Sullivan was the dean of Stanford law school and this Remains the best compliment I ever got in my life is that she recommended me uh to Harvey and since that's the whole reason why I went to law school I was excited to be a part of this new organization uh the other co-founder of a fire is Alan Charles Coors he's just an absolute genius um he is the one of the leading experts in the world on the Enlightenment and particularly about Voltaire and if a

ny of your listeners do like the Great Courses um he has a lecture on Blaze Pascal and blaze of course is famous for the Pascal's wager and I left it just so moved and impressed and with a depth of understanding of how important this person was that's interesting uh you mentioned to me offline connected to this that there is a that at least it runs in parallel or there's a connection between the love of Science and the love of the freedom of speech Yes um can you maybe elaborate where that conne

ction is sure um I think that for those of us who are really you know who've devoted Our Lives to freedom of speech one thing that we are into whether we know it or not is epistemology um you know the the study and philosophy of knowledge you know freedom speech has lots of um moral and philosophical Dimensions but from a pragmatic standpoint it is necessary because we're creatures of incredibly limited knowledge we are incredibly self-deceiving I always love the fact that Yuval Harare uh refers

to the enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance because that's exactly what it was it was suddenly being like wow hold on a second all this incredibly interesting folk wisdom we got which by the way is can be can be surprisingly reliable here and there uh when you start testing a lot of it is nonsense um and it doesn't hold up even our even our ideas about the way things fall you know as you know Galileo established like even our intuitions they're just wrong and so a lot of the early histor

y of freedom of speech um it was happening at the same time as sort of the Scientific Revolution uh so a lot of the early debates about freedom of speech um were tied in so certainly Galileo uh certain you know um I always point out like Kepler was probably like the even more radical idea that there weren't even perfect spheres but but at the same time largely because of the invention of the printing press you also had all these political developments um and uh you know I always talk about yanhu

s you know from the uh a famous Czech um uh the hero who was a um who was burned at the stake and I think in 1419 um but uh he was basically Luther before the printing press uh before Luther could get his word out you know he didn't stand a chance and that was exactly what Janos was but a century later thanks for the printing press everyone could know Luther thought and boy did did they but it led to of course this completely crazy hyper disrupted period in in European history well you mentioned

uh to jump around a little bit the First Amendment first of all what is the first amendment and what is the connection to you between the First Amendment the freedom of speech and cancer culture sure so I'm a First Amendment lawyer as I mentioned and that's what I uh that's my passion that's what I studied and I think American First Amendment law is incredibly interesting in one sentence the first amendment is trying to get rid of basically all the reasons why humankind had been killing each ot

her for its entire existence that we weren't going to fight anymore over opinion we weren't going to fight any more of religion that you have the right to approach your government for redressing grievances um that you you have the freedom to associate that all of these things in one sentence were like nope the government will no longer interfere with you with uh with your right to have these have these fundamental human uh human rights and so one thing that makes fire a little different from oth

er organizations is is however we're not just a First Amendment organization we are a free speech organization and so uh and and but at the same time a lot of what I think free speech is can be well explained with reference to a lot of First Amendment law partially because in in American history some of our smartest people have been thinking about what the parameters of freedom of speech are um in relationship to the First Amendment and a lot of those principles they transfer very well just as a

s pragmatic ideas so like the biggest sin in terms of censorship is called Viewpoint discrimination that essentially you allow freedom of speech except for that opinion now it's and it's found to be kind of more defensible and I think this makes sense that if if you set up a forum and like we're only going to talk about economics to exclude people who want to talk about a different topic but it's considered rightfully um a bigger deal if you've set up a forum from economics but we're not going t

o let people talk about that kind of Economics or have that opinion on economics what most most particularly so a lot of the principles from First Amendment law actually make a lot of philosophical sense as good principles for when like what is protected and unprotected speech what should get you in trouble how you actually analyze it which is why we actually try and our definition of cancel culture to work in some of the First Amendment Norms just in the definition so we don't have to bog down

on them as well you're saying so many interesting things but if you can link on the Viewpoint discrimination is there any gray area of discussion there like what isn't isn't economics for the example you gave yeah is it is there uh I mean is it a science does it or is it an R to draw lines of what is and isn't allowed yeah you know if you're saying that something is or is not economics well you can say everything's economics and therefore I want to talk about poetry there'd be some line drawing

exercise in there but let's say you at once you decide to open up um uh it's a poetry even um it's a big difference between saying okay now we're open to poetry uh but you can't say you know Dante was bad um like that's a that's a forbidden opinion now officially in in this otherwise open Forum that would immediately at an intuitive level strike people as a bigger problem than just saying that poetry isn't economics yeah I mean that intuitive level that you speak to I hope that all of us have th

at kind of basic intuition when the line is crossed it's the same thing for like pornography yeah you know when you see it I I think there's the same level of intuition that should be applied across the board here um and it's when that intuition becomes deformed by whatever forces of society that's when it starts to feel like censorship yeah I mean people find it a different thing um you know if someone loses their job simply for their political opinion even if that employer has every right in t

he world to fire you I think Americans should still be like well it's true they have every right in the world and I'm not making a legal case that maybe you shouldn't fire someone for their political opinion but think that through like what what Society do we want to what kind of society do we want to live in and it's been funny watching um you know and I I point this out yes I will defend businesses uh First Amendment rights of Association to be able to have the legal right to decide you know w

ho works for them um but from a moral or philosophical matter if you think through the implications of if every business in America becomes an expressive Association in addition to being a profit maximizing organization that would be a disaster for democracy because you would end up in a situation where people would actually be saying to themselves I don't think I can actually say what I really think and and still believe I can keep my job and that's where I was worried I felt like we were heade

d because a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled um was uh very simply um you know oh but they have the right to get rid of this person um and that and and that's that's the end and be beginning and end of the discussion and I thought that was a Dodge I thought that wasn't actually a very serious way of that if you care about both the First Amendment and freedom of speech of thinking it through so to you just uh clarify the first amendment is kind of a legal embodiment of the i

deal of freedom of speech and then Freedom satisfied the government in this very specific applied to government and freedom of speech is the application of the principle to like everything including like kind of the high level philosophical ideal of what it of the value of uh people being able to speak their mind yeah it's an older Bolder more expansive idea and you can have a situation uh and I talk about countries that have good free speech law but not necessarily great Free Speech culture and

I talk about how when we sometimes make this distinction between Free Speech law and Free Speech culture we're thinking in a very cloudy kind of way um and what I mean by that is that laws generally particularly in a common law country it's the reflection of norms those you know judges are people too and in a lot of cases common law is supposed to actually take our intuitive ideas of fairness and and place them you know into the law so if you actually have a culture that doesn't appreciate free

sweet from a philosophical standpoint um it's not going to be able to protect free speech for the Long Haul even in the law because eventually that's one of the reasons why I worry so much about some of these terrible cases coming out of law schools um because I I fear that even though sure American First Amendment law is very strongly protective of First Amendment for now it's not going to stay that way if you have generations of law students um graduating who actually think there's nothing th

ere's no higher goal than shouting down you're an opponent yeah so that's why so much of your focus uh or a large fraction of your focus is on the higher education or education period is because education is the foundation of culture yeah you have this history you know uh 64. you have the free speech movement on Berkeley and in uh 65 you have repressive tolerance by Herbert Marcus which was a declaration of by the way um we on the left we shouldn't we should have Free Speech but we should have f

ree speech for us I mean I I went went back and reread um uh repressive tolerance and how clear it is I I forgot I had forgotten that it really is kind of like um and these so-called conservatives and right-wingers we need to repress them because they're regressive thinkers it really doesn't come out to anything more sophisticated than the very old idea um that our people are good they get free speech we should they should keep it other side bad um we should not have and we have to retrain socie

ty and of course like it it ends up being another he was also a fan of Mao so it's not surprising that he that of course the system would have to rely on some kind of totalitarian uh system but that was a laughable um uh position you know uh say 30 40 years ago the I the idea that essentially you know free speech for me not for the uh as the great you know Free Speech Champion that hentov used to say was something that you were supposed to be embarrassed by but I saw this when I was in in law sc

hool in 97 I saw this when I was interning at the ACLU in 99 um that there was a slow motion train wreck coming that essentially there was um these bad ideas from campus that had been taking on more and more steam of basically no free speech for my opponent we're actually becoming more more and more accepted as and partially because Academia was becoming less and less Viewpoint diverse I think that as my co-author Jonathan height points out that when you have low Viewpoint diversity people start

thinking in a very kind of tribal way and if you don't have the respected dissenters you don't have the people that you can point to that I'm like hey this is a smart person um this is like this is a smart reasonable decent person that I that I disagree with so I guess not everyone thinks alike on this issue you start getting much more kind of like only you know only bad people only Heretics only blasphemers only right Wingers you know um can actually think in this way every time you say someth

ing I always have a million thoughts and a million questions that pop up but since you mentioned there's a kind of drift as you write about in the book and you mentioned now there's a drift towards the left in Academia which we were also maybe draw a distinction here between the left and the right and the cancel culture as you present in your book sure is not necessarily associated with any one political Viewpoint that there's mechanisms on both sides that result in cancellation and censorship u

h in violation of freedom of speech so one thing I want to be really clear about is the book takes on both right and left cancer culture they're different in a lot of ways and definitely you know Council culture from the left is more important in Academia where the left is what dominates but we talk a lot about cancel culture coming from legislatures we talk a lot about Council culture on campus as well because even though um most of the attempts that come from on campus to get People canceled a

re still from the left there are a lot of attacks that come from the right that come from you know uh attempts by different organizations and sometimes when there are stories in Fox News you know like they'll go after professors and about one-third of the attempts to get at professors punished that are successful actually do come from the right and and we talk about attempts to get Books banned um in in the in the book we talk about um and uh I talk about suing the Florida legislature Ron DeSant

is had something called the stop woke act um which we told everyone this is laughably unconstitutional um they tried to ban you know particular Topics in higher ed and we're like no this is a joke like like this will this will be laughed out of court um and they didn't listen to us and they brought it they passed it and we sued and we won now they're trying again with something that's equally as unconstitutional and we will sue again and we will and we will win can you elaborate and stop woke X

this is presumably trying to limit certain topics from being taught in school yeah it basically woke topics um you know it's more it came out of the sort of attempt to get at a critical race Theory um so it's topics related to race gender Etc um I don't remember exactly how they tried the cabinet to um uh to CRT um but when you actually the law is really well established that you can't tell higher education what they're allowed to teach without violating uh without violating the First Amendment

and when this got in front of a judge it was exactly as uh he was exactly as uh skeptical of it as we thought he'd be I think he called this dystopian um and it wasn't a close call so if you're against that kind of teaching the right way to fight it is by making the case that it's not a good idea as part of the curriculum as opposed to Banning it from the Creator yeah it just the state doesn't have the power to Simply say to ban um you know what what teacher what professors in higher education t

each now it gets a little more complicated when you talk about K-12 because the state has a role in deciding what public K-12 teaches because they're your kids they it's taxpayer funded um and generally the legislature is involved there is democratic oversight of that process so for K-12 is there also lean towards the left in terms of the administration that manages the curriculum yeah um there there definitely is um in K-12 the the I mean my kids go to public school um I have a five and a seven

-year-old uh and they have lovely teachers um but we have run into a lot of problems with with education schools at fire um and a lot of the graduates of Education school end up being the administrators who clamp down on Free Speech in higher education and so I've been trying to think of positive ways to take on some of the some of the problems that I see in K-12 I thought that the attempt to just dictate you you won't teach the following 10 books you know or 20 books or 200 books was the wrong

way to do it now when it comes to deciding what books are in the curriculum again that's something the legislature actually you know can have some say in and that's pretty uncontroversial um in terms of the law but when it comes to how you fight it I had something that since I'm kind of stuck with the formula I called empowering of the American mind I gave principles that were inconsistent um with the sort of group think and heavy emphasis on uh identity politics uh that um you know some of the

critics are rightfully complaining about in K-12 uh and we we that is actually in canceling of the American mind but I have a more detailed explanation of it that I'm going to be putting up on my blog the eternally radical idea is it possible to legally this is a silly question perhaps create an extra protection for certain kinds of literature 1984 or something to remain in the curriculum I mean it's already it's all protected I guess yeah I I guess to protect against administrators from fiddlin

g too much with the curriculum like stabilizing the curriculum I don't I don't know what the Machinery of the K-12 Public School in K-12 you know the state legislatures you know um they're part of that they're part of that and they can say like you should teach the following books right now of course people are always a little bit worried that um if you uh if they were to recommend you know teach uh teach the Declaration of Independence you know that it will end up being well they're going to te

ach the Declaration of Independence was just to protect slavery which yeah it wasn't yeah so teaching a particular topic matters which textbooks you choose which perspective you take all that kind of stuff yes there's like religion starts to creep into the whole question of like how you know is the Bible are you allowed to teach into incorporate that into education uh don't yeah I mean mean I'm I'm an atheist uh with an intense interest in religion I actually read the entire Bible this year just

because I do stuff like that and I never actually had read it begin from beginning to end um then I read the Quran because you know and I'm going to try to do the Book of Mormon but you know well they started hey you're so fascinating um do you recommend doing that I think you should um just to know because it's such a touchstone um in in the way people talk about things it can get pretty tedious but I even made myself read through all of the very specific instructions on how tall the different

parts of the temple need to be and how long the garbs need to be and what shape they need to be and what like and those go on a lot um there that surprisingly surprisingly big chunk of Exodus um I thought that was more like in Leviticus and Deuteronomy um but then you get to books like job you know wow I mean job is such a read and no way job originally had that ending like job is basically you it starts out as this perverse bet between god um and Satan about whether or not they can actually ma

ke a good man renounce God and initially they can't it's all going very predictably and then they finally really tortured job and he turns into the best why is God cruel how could God possibly exist How could a kind God do these things and he beats he turns into like the best lawyer in the entire world and he defeats everyone all the people who come to argue with him he he argues the pants off of them and then suddenly at the end God shows up and he's like um well you know uh I am everywhere and

uh it's a very confusing answer he gives an answer kind of like I am there when when when lionesses give birth and I am there and by the way there's this giant monster Leviathan that's very big and it's very scary and I and I have to manage the universe and I'm kind of like God are you saying that you're very busy is that it it it it it is that essentially your argument to job and you don't mention the whole you don't mention the whole kind of like that I I have a bet that's why I was torturing

you that doesn't come up and then at the end he decided God decides like job's like Oh no you're totally right I was totally wrong uh sorry um and I and God says I'm going to punish those people who tried to argue with you and didn't didn't win so um so he gets rid of the I don't know exactly what he does to them I don't remember um and then he gives job all his money back and all and it makes him super prosperous and I'm like no way that was the original ending of that book like because this w

ould like this was clearly beloved novel that they were like but I can't have that happening okay so so yeah it's a long way of saying I actually think it's worthwhile uh some of it was you're always kind of surprised when you end up in the part like um there are parts of it that will sneak up on you kind of like Isaiah has a trip um Ecclesiastes Depeche Mode you did you said you also uh the qurans yeah which was fascinating so what is there it'd be interesting to ask is there a tension between

the study of religious texts or the the following of religion and just believing in God and following the the various aspects of religion with the freedom of speech um in the First Amendment uh we we have something that we call the religion clause that I've never liked calling it just that because it's two brilliant things right next to each other the state may not establish an official religion but it cannot interfere with your right to practice your religion that's beautiful two things at the

same time and I think they're and I think they're both exactly right and I think sometimes the right gets very excited of the free exercise clause and the left gets very excited about establishment and I like the fact that we have we have both of them together now how does this relate to freedom of speech and I was right to the curriculum like we were talking about um I actually think it would be great if Public Schools Could Teach the Bible like in the sense of like read it as a historical docu

ment but back when I was at the ACLU every time I saw people trying this it always turned into them actually advocating for you know a Catholic or a Protestant or some Orthodox even kind of like read on religion um so if you actually make it into something advocating for a particular view on religion then it crosses Into The Establishment Clause side so Americans haven't figured out a way to actually teach it so it's probably better that you you know learn learn about outside of a public school

class do you think it's possible to teach religion um from like uh world religions kind of force without disrespecting the religions I think the answer is it depends on from whose perspective um well like the practitioners say you're like an orthodox follower of a particular religion yeah is it possible to not piss you off in teaching like all the major religions of the world for some people it the bottom line is you have to teach it as true ah um and with that under those conditions then the an

swer is no you can't teach it about without offending someone at least don't you say these people believe it's true can you reform so you have to walk on eggshells essentially you you can try really hard and you will still make some people angry but serious people will be like oh no you actually tried to be fair to to the beliefs here um and I I and I try to be respectful um as much as I can about um a lot of this I still find myself much more drawn to both Buddhism and stoicism though where do

I go okay let's one interesting thing to get back to college campuses is uh the fire keeps the college free speech rankings yes at rankings.thefire.org I'm very proud of them I highly recommend because forget that even just the ranking you get to learn a lot about the universities from this entirely different perspective than people are used to when they go to pick whatever University they want to go to it just gives another perspective on the whole thing and it gives quotes from people that are

students there and so on like about their experiences and and it gives different maybe you could speak to the various measures here before we talk about who's in the top five and who's in the bottom five what what what are the different uh parameters that contribute to the evaluation so people have been asking me since day one to do a ranking of schools according to freedom of speech and even though we had we had the best database in existence of Campus speech codes policies that universities h

ave that violate the First Amendment or First Amendment Norms we all also have the best database of we call the disinvitation database but it's actually the it's better named the D platforming database which is what we're going to call it and these are all cases where somebody was invited as a speaker to campus and they were disinvited disinvited or D platforming also includes shouting down um so they showed up and they couldn't really speak yeah exactly um and and uh and so having that what we

really needed in order to have some serious social science to really make a serious argument about what the ranking was um was to be able to one get a better sense of how many professors were actually getting punished during this time and then the the biggest missing element was to be able to ask students directly what the environment was like on that campus for freedom of speech are you comfortable disagreeing with each other are you comfortable disagreeing with your uh with your professors do

you think violence is acceptable in response to a speaker do you think shouting uh do you think shouting down is okay do you think blocking people's access to a speaker is okay um and once we were able to get all those elements together we uh first did a test run I think in 2019 about 50 and we've been doing it for four years now always trying to make the methodology more and more precise to better reflect the actual environment at particular schools and this year the number one school is Michig

an Technological University which was a a nice surprise the number two school was actually Auburn University which was nice to see in the top 10 the most well-known prestigious school is actually UVA which did really well this year University of Chicago was not happy that they weren't number one but University of Chicago is 13 and they had been number one or in the top three three years prior to that really so can you explain it's almost surprising is it because of uh like the really strong econ

omics departments and things like this or what why they had a case involving a student they wouldn't recognize a chapter of Turning Point USA and they made a very classic argument um that we and classic in the bad way that we hear campuses across the country oh we have a campus Republicans so we don't need this additional conservative group and we're like no I'm sorry like we've seen dozens and dozens if not hundreds of attempts to get this one particular um conservative student uh student group

uh de-recognized or not recognized and so we told them like listen this like we told them at fire that uh you know we consider this serious and they wouldn't recognize the group so that that's a that that's a point down in our ranking and it was enough to knock them from they probably would have been number two in the rankings uh but now they're 13 out of 248 they're still one of the best schools in the country I have no problem uh saying that the school that did not do so well um at a negative

10.69 and negative 10.69 and we rounded up to zero was Harvard and Harvard uh has been not very happy with that result the only school to receive the abysmal ranking yeah and there are a couple oh Harvard oh Harvard and there are a couple people who have actually been really I think making a mistake by getting very Harvard um sounding by being like I've had statisticians look at this and they they think your methodology is a joke and uh and like pointing out in this case wasn't that important a

nd that scholar wasn't that scholar like one of the arguments against one of the scholars that we counted against them for uh punishing was that that wasn't a very you know famous or influential scholar and I'm kind of like so your argument seems to be snobbery like essentially that like you you're not understanding our methodology for one thing and then you're saying that actually that scholar wasn't important enough to count and by the way Harvard by the way Harvard um if we yeah if we even if

we took all of your arguments as true even if we decided to get rid of those two professors um you would still be in negative numbers you would still be dead last you would still be after Georgetown and Penn and neither of those schools are good for freedom of speech I should say the the bottom five is the University of Pennsylvania thank you said Penn uh the University of South Carolina Georgetown University and Fordham University all very well earned that they have so many bad cases at all of

those schools what's the best way to find yourself in the bottom five if you're a university what's what's the fastest way to that negative to that zero a lot of de-platforming um that uh when we looked at the bottom five uh 81 of attempts to get speakers de-platformed were successful at the bottom five um there were a couple schools I think Penn included where every single attempt every time a student like objected a student group objected to that speaker coming they canceled this the speech a

nd I think I think Georgetown was 100 success right I think Penn had 100 success rate I think Harvard did stand up for a couple but mostly uh people got D platform there as well so how do you push back on de-platforming well who who would do it is it other students is it faculty is it the administration what's the Dynamics of uh pushing back of basically because I imagine some of it is culture but imagine every university has a bunch of students who will protest basically every speaker and it's

a question of how you respond to that protest well here's here's the dirty little secret about like the big change in 2014. um and and fire and me and height um have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus was that for most of my career students were great um on freedom of speech they were the best constituency for free speech absolutely unambiguously until about 2013 2014. and it was only in 2014 where we had these very you know kind of sad for us experience where suddenly stu

dents were the ones advocating for de-platforming and new speech codes kind of in a similar way that they had been doing in say like the mid-80s uh for example but here's the Dirty Little Secret it's not this it's just the students it's students and administrators some sometimes only a handful of them though working together to make uh to create some of these problems and this was exactly what happened at Stanford when Kyle Duncan uh a fifth Circuit Judge tried to speak at my alma mater and a fi

fth of the class showed up to shout them down it was a real showing of The of what was what was going on that 10 minutes into the shout down of a fifth Circuit Judge and I keep on emphasizing that because I'm a constitutional lawyer if historical judges are big deals they're one level below the Supreme Court um you know about a fifth of the school shows up to shut them down after 10 minutes of shouting him down an administrator a Dei administrator gets up with a prepared speech that she that she

's written that's a seven minute long speech where she talks about uh Free Speech maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze and we we we're at this law school where people could learn to challenge these norms so it's clear that there was coordination you know amongst some of these administrators and from talking to students there they were in meetings extensive meetings for a long time they show up do a shout down then they take an additional seven minutes to to to lecture the speaker on Free Spee

ch not being not the juice of free speech not being worth the squeeze um and then for the rest of it it's just constant heckling um after she after she leaves this is clearly and this and something very similar you know happened a number of times at Yale where it was very clearly administrators were helping along with a lot of these disruptions so I think every time there is a shout down at a university the investigation should be first and foremost did administrators help create this problem di

d they do anything to stop it because I think a lot of what's really going on here is the hyper bureaucratization of universities with a lot more ideological people who think of their primary job as basically like policing speech more or less they're encouraging students sorry they're encouraging students who have opinions they like um to do shout Downs um and that's why they really need to investigate this and it is uh at Stanford the administrator who who gave the prepared remarks um about the

juice not being worth the squeeze she has not been invited back to Stanford but she's one of the only examples I can think of when these things happen a lot where an administrator clearly facilitated something that was a shout down or de-platforming or resulted in a professor getting fired or resulted in a student getting expelled where the administrator has got off scot-free or probably in some cases even gotten a promotion and so a small number of Administrators maybe even a single administra

tor could participate in the encouraging and the organization and thereby empower the whole process and that's something I've seen throughout my entire career and the only thing is kind of hard to catch this sort of in the act so to speak and that's one of the reasons why it's helpful for people to know about this you know uh because there was this amazing case this was at University of Washington um and we actually featured this in a documentary he made in 2015 20 that came out in 2015 2016. ca

lled can we take a joke um and this was when we started noticing something was changing on campus we also heard that comedians were saying that they couldn't use their Good Humor anymore this was right around the time that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock said that they couldn't uh they didn't want to play on campuses because they they could they they couldn't be funny uh but we featured a case of a comedian who wanted to do a musical called The Passion of the musical making fun of The Passion of t

he Christ with the stated goal of offending everyone every group equally it was very very much a South Park Mission um and it's an unusual case because we actually got documentation of Administrators buying tickets for angry students and holding an event where they where they trained them to to jump up in the middle of it and Shout I'm offended like they they bought them tickets they sent them to this this thing with the goal of shouting it down now unsurprisingly when you send an angry group of

students to shut down a play it's it's not going to end at just I'm offended um and it got heated there were death threats being thrown the um and the and then the Pullman Washington police told uh Chris uh Chris Lee the guy who made the play that he they wouldn't actually protect him now it's not every day you're gonna have that kind of hard evidence that that that of actually seeing the administrators be so uh so Brazen that they recorded the fact that they bought them tickets and sent them b

ut I think a lot of that stuff is is going on and I think it's the it's a good excuse to cut down on one of the big problems in higher education today which is hyper bureaucratization the new experience does their distinction between administrators and faculty in terms of uh perpetrators of this of these kinds of things so if if we got rid of all like Harvey's talked about uh getting rid of a large percentage of the administration does that help fix the problem or is the faculty also yeah small

percent of the faculty also part of the encouraging in the organization of these kind of cancel yeah and and that's something that has been profoundly disappointing um is that when you look at the huge uptick in attempts to get professors fired that we've seen over the last 10 years and actually over the last 22 years as far back as our records go um at first they were overwhelmingly led by administrators attempts to get professors punished um and that was most you know I'd say that was my caree

r up until 2013 was was fighting back at administrative excesses um then you start having the problem in 2014 of students trying to get people canceled um and that really accelerated in 2017 and the number so one way that one one thing that makes it easier to document is are the petitions to get professors fired or punished and how disproportionately that those actually do come from students but another big uptick has been fellow professors demanding that their fellow professors get punished and

that to me really sad it's kind of shameful you you shouldn't be proud of signing the petition to get your fellow professor and what's what's even more more shameful is that we get store this this is a this has almost become a cliche within fire when someone is facing one of these cancellation campaigns as a professor I would get letters from some of my friends saying I am so sorry this has happened to you and these were the same people who publicly signed the petition to get them fired yeah ye

ah yeah integrity Integrity is an important thing in this world and I think some of it I'm so surprised people don't stand up more for this because there's so much hunger for it and if you have the guts as a faculty or an administrator to really stand stand up uh with eloquence with rigor with Integrity I feel like it's impossible for anyone to do anything because there's such a hunger it's so refreshing yeah I think everybody agrees that freedom of speech is a good thing oh I don't I don't well

okay sorry to say I don't agree the majority of people even at the universities that there's a hunger but it's almost like uh this kind of nervousness around it because there's a small number of loud voices yeah they're doing the shouting so I mean again that's the where great leadership comes in and so you know presence of University should probably be making clear Declarations of like this is not this is a place where we value the freedom of expression when it and this was oh this all through

out my career um a president a university president who puts their foot down early and says Nope you know we are not entertaining fire English Professor we are not expelling the student it ends the issue often very fast although sometimes and this is where you can really tell the administrative involvement students will do things like take over the president's office and then that takeover will be catered by the university people will point this out sometimes as being kind of like oh it's clearl

y like um my friend Sam Abrams when they tried to get uh tried to get him fired at uh Sarah Lawrence College um and uh that was one of the times that it was used as kind of like oh this was hostile to the university because they the students took over the president's office and I'm like no they let them take over the president's office and I don't know if that was one of the cases in which the the Takeover was catered but if there was ever sort of like a sign that's kind of like yes this isn't t

his is actually really quite friendly well in some sense like protesting and having really strong opinions even like ridiculous crazy wild opinions it's a good thing it's just it shouldn't lead to actual firing or de-platforming of people like it's good to protest it's just not good to for the University to support that and take action based on it and this is one of one of those like um tensions in in first amendment that actually I think has a pretty easy release essentially you have app you ab

solutely have the right to uh devote your life to ending freedom of speech and ridiculing as a concept and and there are people who who really are can come off as very contemptible about even the philosophy of freedom a speech and we will defend your right to do that we will also disagree with you and if you try to get a professor fired we will be on the other side of that now I think he had Randy Kennedy Who I Really I love him I think I think he's a great guy but he's he criticized us for our

de-platforming database as saying this is saying that that students can't protest speakers I'm like okay that's silly um we fire as an organization have defended the right to protest all the time we are constantly defending the rights of the rights of protesters not believing the protesters have the right to say this would like basically that would be punishing the speakers we're not calling for punishing um uh the protesters but what we are saying is you can't let the protesters win if they're

demanding someone be fired for their freedom of speech so the line there is between protesters protesting in the University taking action based on the protest yeah exactly and of course shout Downs that that's just mob censorship um and that's something where the university the way that the way you actually you deal with that tension in First Amendment law is essentially kind of like the one positive Duty that the government has the the first the negative due to the thing that it's not allowed t

o do is censor you um but it's positive duty is that if if I want to say awful things or for that matter great things that aren't popular in a public park um you can't let the crowd just shout me down um you can't allow what's called a heckler's veto that's so interesting because I feel like that comes into play on social media somehow because you know there's this whole discussion about censorship and freedom of speech but to me the the carrot question is almost more interesting once the freedo

m of speech is established is how do you incentivize high quality debate and disagreement I'm thinking a lot about that and that's one of the things we talk about in counseling of the American mind is arguing towards truth and that cancel culture is cruel it's merciless it's anti-intellectual but it also will never get you anywhere near truth and you are going to waste so much time destroying your opponents um in in something that can actually never get you to True through the process of course

of you never actually get directly at truth you just chip away at falsity yeah but everybody having a megaphone on the internet with anonymity it seems like it's better than censorship but it feels like there's incentives on top of that you can construct to um yeah to incentivize better discourse yeah it's like to incentivize somebody who puts a huge amount of effort to make even the most ridiculous arguments but basically ones that don't include any of the things you highlight in terms of all t

he rhetorical tricks yeah to shut down conversations just make really good Arguments for whatever it doesn't matter if it's uh communism for fascism whatever the heck you want to say yeah but do it with scale with historical context with uh uh with steel man in the other side all those kind of elements we try to make three major points on the book one is just simply cancel culture is real it's a it's a historic era and it's on a historic scale the second one is you should think of cancel culture

as part of a um rhetorical as a larger lazy rhetorical uh approach to what what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments and we mean that in two senses without having winning arguments or well have actually having one arguments and we talk about all the different what we call rhetorical fortresses that both the left and the right have that prevent you from that allow you to just dismiss the person or Dodge the argument without actually ever getting to the substance of the argu

ment third part is just you know how do we fix it but the rhetorical Fortress stuff is actually something I've been I'm very passionate about because it it interferes with our ability to get at truth and it wastes time and and frankly it also kind of since Castle culture is part of that rhetorical tactic it can also ruin lives it would actually be really fun to talk about this particular aspect of the book and I highly recommend if you're listening to this go pre-order the book now uh when does

it come out October 17th okay the canceling of the American mind okay so in uh in the book you also have a list of cheap rhetorical tactics that both the left and the right use and then you have a list of tactics that left uses and the right uses yeah there's the rhetorical the perfect rhetorical Fortress that the left uses and the efficient rhetorical Fortress that the right uses yeah first one is what aboutism yeah maybe we can go through a few of them that capture your heart in this particula

r moment as we talk about it and if if you can describe examples of it or with uh there's aspects of it that you see they're especially effective effective so uh what aboutism is defending against criticism of your side by bringing up the other side's alleged wrongdoing I want to make little cards of these of all of these tactics and start using them on X all the time because they are so commonly deployed and what aboutism I put first for a reason you know it'd be an interesting idea to actually

integrate that into Twitter X where people you know instead of clicking heart they can click which of the uh uh which of the rhetorical tactics this is and then because you know there's actually Community notes I don't know if you've seen on X there you people can contribute notes and it's quite fascinating it works really really well but to give it a little more structure yeah that's a really interesting method actually yeah I actually when I was thinking about ways that X could be used for to

argue towards truth I wouldn't want to have it so that you know everybody would be bound to that but I think that I imagine almost being like a stream within X that was truth focused that that agrees to some additional rules on how they would argue man I would love that where like there's in terms of streams that intersect and can be separated the talking one where people just enjoy talking oh okay go for it and then there's like truth and then uh I mean there like then there's humor then there

's like Good Vibes like you know I'm not like somebody who absolutely needs Good Vibes all the time but sometimes it's nice to have it's nice to just log in and not have to see like the drama the fighting the bickering the the cancellations the moms all of this it's good to just see uh that's why I go to Reddit r ah or like uh one of the cute animals ones whether there's cute puppies and kittens and it's like I just want to see Ryan Reynolds singing with Will Ferrell I mean like sometimes that's

all you I need that in my heart yeah not all the time just a little bit then right back to the the Battle For Truth okay so what aboutism what about Islam yeah that's everywhere um when you look at it uh when you look at Twitter when you look at social media in general um and the first like what we call the obstacle course is basically time tested old-fashioned you know argumentative Dodges that everybody uses and what about ism is just bringing up something uh you know like someone makes an ar

gument like Biden has corrupt and and then someone says well Trump was worse you know like and that's not an illegitimate you know argument to make back but it does it seems to happen every time someone makes an assertion someone just points out some other thing that was going on and it can get increasingly attenuated from from what you're actually trying to argue and when you and that you see this all the time on social media and it's kind of you know I was a big fan of Jon Stewart's Daily Show

but an awful lot of what the humor was and what the tactic was for arguing was this thing over here it's like oh I'm making this argument at this important problem oh actually you know there's this other problem over here that I'm more concerned about and it was it you know and on the you know let's let's pick on the right here so January 6 you know watching Everybody arguing about um chop you know like the um uh the the occupied part of Seattle or the occupied part of Portland and so and basic

ally trying to like oh you're bringing up the the riot on January 6. um and by the way I live on Capitol Hill so believe me I was very aware of like how scary and bad it was um you know like if that just my dad grew up in Yugoslavia and that was a night where we all ate dinner in the basement because I'm like oh when the ship goes down eat in the basement it was it was it was genuinely scary and people would try to deflect from January 6 being serious by actually be making the argument that oh w

ell there are crazy horrible things happening in all over the country uh you know riots that came from some of the social justice protests and of course the answer is you can be concerned about both of these things and and find them both problems but you know if I'm arguing about chop you know someone bringing up January 6th isn't super relevant to it or if I'm arguing about January 6th someone uh bringing up the riots in 2020 isn't that helpful we took a long dark Journey from what aboutism yea

h and uh related to that is straw Manning and and steel Manning so misrepresenting the the the the the perspective of the the opposing perspective and this is something also uh I I guess it's very prevalent and it's difficult to do the reverse of that which is still Manning requires empathy it requires eloquence it requires understanding actually doing the research and understanding the the alternative perspective my uh wonderful employee Angel Eduardo has something that he calls star Manning an

d and I find myself doing this a lot it's nice to have you know two immigrant parents um because I remember being in San Francisco uh you know uh in the weird kind of like ACLU slash Burning Man kind of cohort and having a friend there who was an artist who would talk about hating Kansas and that was his metaphor for Middle America is what he meant by it and but he was kind of proud of the fact that he hated Kansas and I'm like you gotta understand I still see all of you a little bit as foreigne

rs and think about like change the name of Kansas to Croatia you know change the name of Kansas to to some that's what it sounds like to me and the star Manning idea which I which I like is is the idea being like so you're saying that you really hate your dominant religious minority like and that's when you start actually detaching yourself a little bit from it how typical America is exceptional in a number of ways but some of our Dynamics are incredibly typical it's one of the reasons why like

when people start reading Thomas soul for example they start getting hooked because one of the things he does is he does comparative analysis of country's problems and points out that some of these things that we think are just unique to the United States exist in you know 75 of the rest of the countries in the world Francis fukiyamas um the book that I'm reading right now origins of the political order actually does this wonderful job of pointing out how we're not special in a variety of ways t

his is actually something that's very much on my mind and uh fukuyama of course uh it's a it's a it's a great book it's not it's stilted a little bit in its writing because his term for one of the things he's concerned about what destroys societies is re-patrimonialization which is the reversion to Societies in which you favor your family and friends and I actually think a lot of what I'm seeing in sort of um uh in the United States it makes me worried that we might be going through a little bit

of a process of re-patrimonialization and I think that's one of the reasons why people are so angry I think having a I think that the prospect that we you know we very we very nearly seen um to have an election that was going to be you know Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton it's like are we a dynastic Country Now is is that what's kind of happening but also it's one of the reasons why people are getting so angry about the about legacy admissions about like how much you know certain families seem

to be able to keep their people in the upper classes of the United States perpetually and believe me like I I was poor when I was a kid and I went and I got to go to I got to go to one of the fancies I got to go to Stanford um and I got to see how people they treat you differently in a way that's almost insulting like basically like suddenly to a certain kind of person I was a legitimate person and I look at how much America relies on Harvard on Yale to produce its I'm going to use it very marks

the sounding term ruling class and that's one of the reasons why you have to be particularly worried about what goes on at these Elite colleges and these Elite colleges with the exception University of Chicago and and UVA do really badly regarding freedom of speech and that has all sorts of problems um it doesn't bode well for the future of the protection of freedom of speech for the rest of the society so can you also empathize there with the folks who voted for Donald Trump um because as prec

isely that as a resistance to this kind of uh momentum of the ruling class this uh this royalty that passes on the uh the rule from generation to generation I try really hard to empathize with to a degree everybody and and try to really see where they're coming from um and the anger on the right I get it I mean like I I feel like the um the book so coddling the American mind was a book that I that could be sort of a crowd pleaser to a degree partially because we really meant what we said in the

subtitle that these are uh good intentions and bad ideas that are hurting people um and if you understand it and read the book you can say it's like okay this isn't anybody being malicious you know this is people trying to protect their kids they're just doing it in a way that actually can actually lead to Greater anxiety depression and strangely eventually posed a threat to freedom of speech but in this one we can't be quite uh me and my uh oh I haven't even mentioned my brilliant co-author Ric

ky schlatt the 23 year old genius she's she's amazing I started working with the one she was 20. who's my co-author on this book um so when I'm saying we I'm talking about me and Ricky he's a Libertarian libertarian journalist and a journalist he has a brilliant mind yeah and but we can't actually write this in a way that's too kind because cancers aren't kind that there's a cruelty and a mercilessness about it I mean I start getting really depressed this past year when I was writing it and I di

dn't even want to tell my staff why I was getting so anxious and depressed it's partially because I'm talking about people who will you know in some of the cases we're talking about let me go to your house Target your kids um so so that's a long winter way of saying the um I I kind of can get what sort of drives the right nuts to a degree in this I feel like they're constantly feeling like they're being gaslit um Elite Education is really insulting to the working class um like it part of the ide

ology that's dominant right now kind of treats almost 70 of the American public like they're we talked we developed this a little bit in the perfect rhetorical Fortress like there to some some way illegitimate um and not worthy of respect or compassion yeah the the general elitism that radiates self-fueling elitism that radiates from the people that go to these institutions and what's funny is the the the elitism has been repackaged as a kind of it masquerades this kind of infinite compassion th

at essentially it's based in a sort of a very to be frank overly simple ideology and over some believe a simple explanation of the world and breaking people into groups and um judging people on how oppressed they are on their on the intersection of their various identities um and it came to that I think initially with with an appeal from a compassionate core but it gets used in a way that is can be very cruel very dismissive compassion less and allows you to not take seriously most of your fello

w human beings it's really weird how that happened maybe you can explore why a thing that has kind of sounds good at first yeah can be can creates can become such a cruel weapon of canceling and hurting people and ignoring people I mean this is what you describe with the perfect rhetorical Fortress Yeah which is a set of questions maybe you can um elaborate I want the perfect rhetorical fortresses yeah so the perfect rhetorical Fortress is the way um that's been developed uh on the left to not e

ver get to someone's actual argument um I want to make a chart like a flow chart of this about like here's the argument and here is this perfect Fortress that will deflect you every time from getting to the argument um and I started to notice this certainly when I when I was in law school that there were lots of different ways you could dismiss people and perfect rhetorical Fortress step one and I can attest to this because I was guilty of this as well that you can dismiss people if you can argu

e that they're conservative they don't have to be conservative to be clear you just have to say that they are um so I never read Thomas Soul because he was the right winger yeah I didn't read Camille Paglia because I was I'd someone had convinced me she was a right winger there were lots of authors that um and when I was in law school it among a lot of very bright people it really was already an intellectual habit that if you could designate something Conservative then you didn't really have to

think about it very much anymore or take it particularly seriously that's a childish way of arguing but nonetheless I engaged in it it was a common tactic and I even mentioned in the book there was a time when a um uh a a gay activist friend who's I think decided to leave to my left but nonetheless had that pragmatic experience of actually being an activist said something like well just because someone's conservative doesn't mean they're wrong and I remember feeling kind of scandalized at some l

evel of just being like well that's kind of it's not the whole thing what we're saying is that they're just kind of bad people with bad ideas you can just throw uh oh that guy's a right-winger you can just throw that don't have to think about you anymore yeah and then it can um if you're popular enough it can be those it can be kind of sticky yeah like and it's weird because because it's effective that's why it keeps on getting used it essentially it it should have hit someone's because because

I you know I have a great liberal pedigree you know everything from working at the ACLU to doing Refugee law in Eastern Europe I was part of an environmental mentoring program for inner city high school kids in DC you know I've been I've been I I I I can ex you know defend myself as being on the left but I hate doing that because there's also part of me that's like okay so what like are you really saying that if you can magically make me argue or convince yourself that that I'm on the right that

you don't have to listen to me anymore and again that's arguing like children and the reason why this has become so popular is because even among or maybe maybe especially among Elites that it works so effectively as a perfect weapon that you can use uncritically if I can just prove you're on the right I don't have to I don't have to think about you it's no wonder that suddenly you start seeing people calling the ACLU right wing and calling the New York Times right wing because it's been such a

n effective way to delegitimize people as thinkers you know um Stephen Pinker who's on our Board of advisors he refers to Academia as being the left pole um that essentially it's it's a position that from uh from that point of view everything looks to its right it looks as if it's on the right um but once it becomes a tactic that we um accept it and that's one of the reasons why I you know I'm I'm more on the left I'm but I think I'm left of center Liberal uh Ricky is you know more conservative

libertarian and initially I was kind of like should I be really be writing something with with someone who's more on the right and I'm like absolutely I should be I I have to actually live up to what I believe on this stuff because it's ridiculous that we have this primitive idea that you can dismiss someone as soon as you claim rightly or wrongly that they're on the right well uh I feel correct me if I'm wrong but I I feel like you were recently called right wing uh fire maybe you by associatio

n because of the debate the LA Times oh fun let's talk about the LA Times so yes there's an article there's a debate I can't wait to watch it because I don't think it's available yet to watch on video you can attend in person I can't wait to see it uh but fire wasn't part supporting and then LA Times wrote um a scathing article about uh that everybody in the debate was basically right leaning right okay uh so much that I'm back there you know Barry Weiss has this you know great great project the

Free Press I've been very impressed it's covering stories that the that a lot of the media right or left isn't willing to cover um and we did a uh we hosted a debate with her um uh and we wanted to make it as fun and controversial as possible uh so firing the the Free Press hosted a debate did the sexual Revolution fail so the debate was really exciting really fun the side that said that sexual Revolution wasn't a failure that that Grimes and Sarah hater were on one um it was you know a nice me

aty thoughtful night and we got a re there was a review of it that was just sort of scathing about the whole thing and it included a line saying that uh fire which claims to believe in free speech but only defends viewpoints or degrees with I can't believe that I even made it into the magazine because it's not just calling us because of course you know the implication of horses that we're right-wing um which were not actually the staff liens decidedly more to the left and to the right um but we

also defend people all over the Spectrum all the time like that's something that that even the most minimal Google search would have solved so like we've been giving LA Times some heat on this because it's like yeah if you said in my opinion the right wing we would have argued back you know um saying Well here here's the following 50 000 examples of of of us not being but when you actually make the factual claim that we only defend opinions we agree with first of all there's no way for us to agr

ee with opinions because we actually have a politically diverse staff who won't even agree on which opinions are good and what opinions we have but yeah I I had at one time when someone did something like this and they were just being a little bit flippant about kind of like free speech being fine I did a 70 tweet long uh thread you know just being like hey do you really think this is fine I decided not to do that um on this particular one um but the nice thing about it is it demonstrated two pa

rts of the book uh canceling of the American mind if not more one of them is dismissing someone because they're conservative and because that was the implication don't have to listen to fire because they're conservative but the other one is something a termite uh that I that I invented specifically for the way people argue on Twitter which is hypocrisy projection hi I'm person who only cares about one side of the political fence and I think everyone else is a hypocrite um and by the way I haven'

t done any actual research on this but I assume everyone else is a hypocrite and you see this happen all the time the the and this happens to fire a lot where someone where is fire on this case and we're like we are literally quoted in the link you just sent but didn't actually read or it's like where is fire on this it's like here's a here's our lawsuit about it from six months ago um so it's a favorite thing and also Jon Stewart Daily Show like the the the the the the the the um what about ISM

and the kind of like idea that these people must be Hypocrites is something that greatest comedy but as far is actually a rhetorical tactic that will get you to truth just assuming that your opponent or just accusing your opponent of always being a hypocrite is not a good tactic for truth but by the way it tends to always come from people who aren't actually consistent on Free Speech themselves so that hence the projection but basically not doing the research about whether the person is or isn'

t a hypocrite and assuming others are a large fraction of others reading it uh will also not do the research and therefore this kind of statement becomes a kind of truthiness without a grounding in actual reality yeah it breaks down that barrier between what isn't isn't true because if if the mob says something is true it takes too much effort to correct it and there are three ways I want like you know I want to respond to this which is just giving an example after example of of times where we j

ust defended people on both sides of every major ish basically every major issue whether it's Israel Palestine whether it's terrorism whether it's gay marriage we have been abortion we have defended both sides of that argument the the other part and I call these the Orphans of the culture War I really want to urge the media to start caring about Free Speech cases that actually don't have a political valence that are actually just about good old-fashioned exercise of power against the little guy

or little girl or little group um on campus or off campus for that matter because these cases happen a lot of our litigation are just little people there's regular people being told that they can't protest that they can't hold signs and then the last part of the argument that I want people to really get is like yeah and by the way uh right Wingers get in trouble too um and there are attacks from the left and you should take those seriously too um you should care when Republicans get in trouble y

ou should care when California has a Dei uh program that requires this on the California community colleges has a Dei program a policy that actually requires even chemistry professors to work in uh different Dei ideas from intersectionality to anti-racism into their classroom into their syllabus Etc this is a gross violation of academic freedom it it it it is as bad as it is to tell professors what they can't say like we fought and defeated in in Florida it's even worse to tell them what they mu

st say that's downright totalitarian and we're suing against this and what I'm what I'm saying is that it when you're dismissing someone for just being on the other other side of the political fence you are also kind of claiming making a claim that none of these cases matter as well and I want people to care about censorship when it even is people against people they hate because censorship of censorship uh if we can't take that tangent briefly with Dei diversity equity and inclusion what is the

good and what is the harm of such programs d i I know people are a DI Consultants or some the actually I have a dear friend who I love very much um who does Dei absolutely decent people what they want to do is create bonds of understanding friendship compassion among people people who are different unfortunately the research on what a lot of di actually does is often has the opposite of that and I think that it's partially a problem with some of the ideology that comes from uh critical race The

ory which is a real thing by the way um that that informs a lot of Dei that actually makes it something more likely to divide than unite well we talk about this in coddling the American mind as the difference between common Humanity identity politics and common enemy identity politics and I think that I know some of the people that I know who who do di they really want it to be common Humanity identity politics but some of the actual ideological assumptions that are baked in can actually cause p

eople to feel more alienated from each other now when I started at fire my first cases involved 911. um and it was bad uh professors were getting targeted professors were losing their jobs for saying insensitive things about 911 and both from from the right and the left actually in that case actually sometimes more a lot more from the right um and it was really bad and about five professors lost their jobs that's bad five professors are over a relatively short period of time being fired for a po

litical opinion that's something that you know would get written up in any previous decades we're now evaluating like how many professors have been uh targeted for cancellation between 2014 and uh middle of this year July of of 2023. we're at about well well over a thousand attempts to get professors uh fired or punished usually driven by students and administrators often driven by professors unfortunately as well about two-thirds of those result in the professor being punished in some way every

thing from you know having their article removed to suspension Etc about one-fifth of those result in professors being fired so right now we're it's our it's almost 200 it's 190 um professors being fired um so I want to give some context here uh the the Red Scare is generally considered to have been from 1947 to 1957. it ended by the way in 57 when it finally became clear um thanks to the first amendment that you couldn't actually fire people for their ideologies prior to that a lot of universit

ies thought they could this guy is a very doc uh doctrinaire communist uh you know they can't be just waited I'm gonna fire them um they thought they actually could do that um and it was only 57 when the law was established so like right now these are happening in an environment where freedom of speech academic freedom are clearly protected um at public colleges in in the United States and we're still seeing these kind of numbers um during during the the Red Scare the biggest study that was done

of what was going on is I think this came out in like 55 and the evaluation was that there was about 62 professors fired for for being communists and about 90 something professors fired for political views overall um that usually is it is reported as being about 100. um so 60 90 100 depending on how you look at it I think the number is actually higher um but that's only because of hindsight like what I mean by hindsight is we can look back and we actually find there are more professors who who

were fired as time reveals we're at 190 professors fired and I still have to put up with people saying this isn't even happening and I'm like in the nine and a half years of Castle culture 190 professors fired in the 11 years of uh of the Red Scare probably you know somewhere around 100 maybe probably more it's got the number is going to keep going up um but unlike during the Red Scare where people could clearly tell something was happening the craziest thing about cancer culture is so I'm still

dealing with people who are saying this isn't happening at all and it hasn't been subtle on campus and we know that's a wild undercount by the way because when we when we surveyed professors Seventeen percent of them said that they had been threatened with uh threatened with investigation or actually investigated for what they taught said or or their research and one-third of them said that they were told by administrators not to take on controversial research so like extrapolating that out tha

t's a huge number and the reason why you're not going to hear about a lot of these cases is because there are so many different Conformity inducing mechanisms in the whole thing yeah and that's one of the reasons why the idea that you'd add something like a d like requiring a Dei statement to be hired or to get into a school Under the current environment is so completely nuts we have had a genuine crisis of academic freedom over the last you know particularly since 2017 on campuses we have very

low Viewpoint diversity to begin with and under these circumstances administrators to start saying you know what the problem is we have too much heterogeneous thought we have we're not homogeneous enough we actually need in we need another political litmus test which is nuts and that's what a Dei statement effectively is because there's no way to actually fill out a dais statement without someone evaluating you on your politics it's CR it's Crystal Clear we even did an experiment on this uh Nate

Honeycutt he got something like almost like 3 000 professors to participate evaluating different kinds of Dei statements um and one was basically like the standard kind of identity politics intersectionality one one was about Viewpoint diversity one was about religious diversity and one was about socioeconomic diversity as far as where my heart really is it's that we have too little socioeconomic diversity particularly in Elite higher ed but also in education period so we the experiment was a l

arge participation really interestingly set up and it tried to model the way a lot of these Dei policies were actually implemented and one of the ways these have been implemented and I think in some of the California schools is that administrators and go through the Dei statements before anyone else looks at them and then eliminates people off the top depending on how they feel about their Dei statements and the one on um Viewpoint diversity I think like half of the people who reviewed it would

eliminate it right out um and I think it was basically the same for religious diversity it was slightly better like 40 um for socioeconomic diversity but that kills me like the idea that kind of like yeah that actually is the kind of diversity that I think we need a great deal more of in in higher education you can agree with it's not hostile to the other kinds by the way um but the idea that we need more people from the bottom you know of three quarters of American society like in uh higher edu

cation I think should be something we could all get around that the only one that really succeeded was the one that's that sprouted back exactly the kind of you know of ideology that that they thought the readers would like which is like okay there's no way this couldn't be a political litmus test we've proved that it's a political litmus test and still school after school it is adding these to its application process to make schools still more ideologically homogeneous why does that have a nega

tive effect is it because it enforces a kind of group think where people are afraid start becoming afraid to sort of think and speak freely liberally about whatever but one it selects for people who tend to be you know farther to the left um in a situation where you already have uh people a situation where universities do lean decidedly that way but it also establishes essentially a set of sacred ideas that if you're being quizzed on whether or you know what you've done to advance anti-racism um

inter uh uh how you've been conscious of intersectionality it's unlikely that you'd actually get in if you said by the way I actually think these are dubious Concepts I think they're thin I think they're philosophically not very defensible basically like if if your position was I actually I actually reject um these Concepts as being over simple um you're not you're not going to get in and and I think that um the person that I always think of that wasn't a right-winger that would be like go to h

ell if you if you made him fill one of these things out it's fine man I feel like if you get if you give one of these things to Richard Feynman he'd be like he would tear it to pieces yeah then not get the job [Music] yeah there's some element of it that creates this hard to pin down fear so you said like the firing the thing I wanted to say is firing a hundred people or 200 people the point is even firing one person I've just seen it it can create this quiet ripple effect of fear of course that

single firing of a fact oh absolutely has a ripple effect across tens of thousands of people of educators of of uh who's hired what kind of conversations are being had had what kind of textbooks are chosen what kind of sell censorship and different flavors of that is happening it's hard to measure that yeah I mean when you ask professors about you know are they intimidated under the current environment um the answer is yes and particularly conservative professors you know already you know repor

ting that they're you know afraid for their jobs in a lot of different cases you have a lot of good statistics in the book things like self-censorship one provided with a definition of self-censorship at least a quarter students that they self-censor fairly often or very often during conversations with other students with professors and doing classroom discussions 25 27 and 28 respectively a quarter of students also said that they are more likely to self-censor on campus now at the time they wer

e surveyed then they were when they first started college so sort of college is kind of instilling this idea of of censorship of self-censorship and back to the Red Square comparison and this is one of the interesting things about the data as well is that that same study that I was talking about the most comprehensive study of the of the Red Scare there was polling about whether or not professors were self-censoring due to the fear of the environment and nine percent of professors said that they

were self-censoring their research and what they were saying nine percent is really bad um that's almost a tenth of professors saying that they were actually their speech was chilled when we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey when you factor together if they're we ask them are they self-censoring in their research are they self-centering in class are they still censoring online Etc it's 90 of professors so the the idea that we're actually in an environment that is his

toric um in terms of like how scared people are actually of expressing controversial views I think that it's it's the reason why we're going to actually be studying this in 50 years the same the the same way we study the Red Scare um it's not the idea that this isn't happening is will just be correctly viewed as insane so maybe we can just uh discuss the Leaning the current leaning of Academia towards the left which you describe in various different perspectives so one there's a voter registrati

on ratio chart that you have by Department which I think is interesting can you explain this chart and can you explain what it shows yeah when I started fire in 2001 I didn't take the Viewpoint diversity issue as seriously I thought it was just something that right Wingers complained about um but I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low um with low uh Viewpoint diversity and actually a lot of the research that I got most interested in was uh done in conjunction wit

h the great cast sunstein um who writes a lot about group polarization um because as and the research on this is very strong that essentially when you have groups with um political diversity and you can see this actually in judges for example it tends to produce you know reliably more moderate you know outcomes whereas groups that are that have low political diversity tend to sort of spiral Spiral off in their own Direction and when you have a super majority of people from just one political per

spective that's a problem for the production of ideas it creates a situation where there are sacred ideas um and when you look at some of the Departments um you know I think the ask the estimate from the Crimson is that Harvard is has three percent conservatives but when you look at different departments there are Elite departments that have literally no um uh conservatives uh in them and I think that's that's on a healthy intellectual uh environment the problem is definitely worse um as you get

more Elite uh we definitely see more cases of uh Lefty professors getting canceled at less Elite schools it it gets worse as you as you get down from the the elite schools that's where a lot of the one-third of attempts to get uh professors punished that are successful you know do do come from the right and largely from off campus uh off-campus sources and we spend a lot of time talking about that in in the book as well um it's something that I do think is underappreciated but when it comes to

the low Viewpoint diversity it's you know it works out kind of like you'd expect to a degree you know economics is what four to one or something like that it's not as bad but then when you start getting into some of the humanities you know like there are departments that they're literally none is there a good why to why did the universities University faculty Administration move to the left yeah I don't love and this is an argument that you'll sometimes run into on the left uh just the argument

that well people on the left are just smarter right and it's like okay it's interesting because at least the research as of 10 years ago was indicating that if you dig a little bit deeper into that a lot of the people who do consider themselves on the left tend to be a little bit more libertarian there's something that Pinker you know wrote a fair amount about the idea that we're just smarter it it it is not an opinion I I'm at least bit comfortable with um I do think that that uh it that depart

ments take on um momentum when they become a place where you're like wow it'd be really unpleasant for me to work in this department if I'm the token conservative and I think that takes on a life of its own there are also departments where a lot of the ideologies kind of explicitly leftist um you look at education schools a lot of the a lot of the stuff that is actually left over from what is correctly called critical race theories it is present and you end up having that in in a number of the D

epartments um and it would be very strange to be a in many departments a you know a conservative social worker Professor I'm sure they exist but it there's a lot of pressure to shut up if you are so the process on the left of cancellation as you started to talk about with the perfect rhetorical Fortress the the first step is dismiss a person if they're just if you can put a label of conservative on them you can dismiss them in that way what what other efficient or what other effective uh dismiss

al symptoms are there we have a little bit of fun with uh with demographic numbers but I run this by height and I remember him being kind of like I don't don't include the actual percentage I'm like no we need to include the actual percentages because people are really bad at estimating what what the demographics of the US actually looks like both the right and the left in different ways um so we put in the numbers and we talk about you know being dismissed for being white or being dismissed for

uh being straight or being dismissed for being male um and we uh and you can already dismiss people for being conservative and we so we we give examples in the book of of these being used to dismiss people and oftentimes on topics not related to the fact that they are male or whether or not they're minority and then we get to I think it's like layer six and we're like surprise guess what you're down to point four percent of the population and none of it mattered because if you have the wrong op

inion even if you're in that point four percent of the most intersectional person I've ever lived lived and you have the wrong opinion you're a heretic and you actually probably will be hated even more and the most interesting part of the research we did for this was just asking every prominent uh black conservative and moderate that that we knew personally have you been told that you're not really black for an opinion you had every single one of them was like oh yeah no and it's kind of funny b

ecause it's like oftentimes white lefties telling them that's like oh do you consider yourself black John McWhorter talked about having a reporter um when he talked about when he showed that he dissented from some of uh what he'd described as kind of like woke racism in his book woke ideas the reporter actually is like so do you consider yourself black he's like he's like what are you crazy of course I do and Coleman Hughes had one of the best quotes on it he said I'm constantly being told that

the most important thing uh to the how legitimate my opinion is is whether uh whether or not I'm black but then when I have a dissenting opinion I get told I'm not really black so perfect like there's no way to falsify uh this argument um that one really that investigation really really struck me so and you lay this out really nicely in the book that there is this process of saying are you conservative yes you can dismiss the person are you white this Mr person are you male you can dismiss the p

erson there's these categories that make it easier for you to dismiss a person's ideas based on that and like you said you end up in that tiny percentage and you can still dismiss and it's not just dismissed we talk about this from a from a practical standpoint the way the limitations on you know reality and one of them is time um and a lot of cancel culture um as as cultural norms as this way of winning arguments without winning arguments is about running out the clock because by the time you g

et down to the bottom of the uh of the or actually even to get a couple steps into the perfect rhetorical Fortress and you know where has the time gone you know like it you're you you probably just give up uh trying to uh you know trying to actually have the argument and you never get to the argument in the first place and all of these things are pretty sticky on social media social media and practically invented the perfect rhetorical Fortress so the each one of those stages has a virality to i

t yeah so it can it could stick and it can get people really excited it allows you feel outraged and superiority yeah because of that that at the scale of the virality allows you to never get to the actual discussion of the point um so but you know it's not just the left it's the right sure also so the efficient rhetorical Fortress uh so there something to be proud of on the right it's more efficient yeah uh so you don't have to listen to liberals and anyone can be labeled the liberal if if they

have a wrong opinion I've seen liberal and left and leftists all used as a in the same kind of way yeah that's leftist nonsense you don't have to listen to experts yep even conservative experts if they have the wrong opinion you don't have to listen to journalists even conservative journalists if they have the wrong opinion and among the mega Wing there's a fourth proposition there's a fourth provision you don't need to listen to anyone who isn't pro-trump yeah and we call it efficient because

it it eliminates a lot of people you probably should listen to at least sometimes you know like we we point out sometimes like how cancel culture can interfere with faith and expertise so we get kind of being a little suspicious of experts but at the same time if you follow that and you follow it mechanically and I definitely you know I think everybody in the US probably has some older Uncle who exercises some of these it is a really efficient way to sort of saw your uh to wall yourself off from

the rest of the world and dismiss you know at least some people you really should be listening to the way you laid it out it made me realize that we just take up so much of our brain power these things it's literally time we could be solving things and you get like you kind of exhaust yourself through this process of being outraged based on these labels and you never get to actually there's almost not enough time for empathy for like looking at a person thinking well maybe they're right because

you're so busy categorizing them and it's what's the fun and empathy and I mean what's so interesting about this is that so much um societal energy seems to be spent on these nasty Primal desires where essentially a lot of it's like please tell me who I'm allowed to hate where can I legitimately be cruel where can I actually exercise some aggression against somebody um and it seems to sometimes be just finding new justifications for that and it's an understandable you know human failing um that

sometimes can be used to defend justice but again it will never get you anywhere near the truth uh one interesting case that you cover about expertises with covid yeah so how did cancer culture come into play on the topic of covid yeah I think that covid was a big blow to people's faith and expertise and cancel culture played a big role in that um I think one of the best examples of this is Jennifer say at Levi's um she is a lovely woman she was a vice president of Levi's she talked about actua

lly potentially could be the president of Levi's jeans and she was a big advocate for kids and when they started shutting down the schools she started saying this is going to be a disaster this is going to hurt the poor and disadvantaged kids the most um we have to figure out a way to open the schools back up and that was such a heretical point of view and the typical kind of cancel culture uh wave took over is he had all sorts of you know petitions for her to be fired and that she needed to apo

logize and all this kind of stuff and you know she was offered I think like in a million dollar Severance which you wouldn't take because she wanted to tell the world what she thought about this and and that she wanted to continue saying um that she hadn't changed her mind that this was a disaster for young people and now that's kind of the conventional wisdom and the research is pretty it is quite clear that this was devastating to to particularly disadvantaged youth like people understand this

now as being okay and she was probably right but one of the one of the really sad aspects of cancel culture is people forget why you were canceled and they just know they hate you um there's this lingering kind of like well I don't have to take them seriously anymore but by the way did you notice they happen to be right on something very important now one funny thing about freedom of speech freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you didn't also have the the right to say things that were wrong beca

use if you can't you know engage an idea for you if you can't actually speculate you'll never actually get to something that's right in the first place but it's especially galling when people who are right were censored and you uh and never actually get the credit that they deserve well this might be a good place to ask a little bit more about the freedom of speech and so you said that included in the freedom of speech is to say things that are wrong yep um what is your perspective on hate speec

h hate speech is the best marketing campaign for censorship um and it came from Academia um of the of the 20th century and that when I talked about the anti-free speech movement uh that was one of their first inventions um there was a lot of talk about critical race Theory um and and being against critical race Theory and fire will sue if you say that people can't advocate for it or teach it or research it because you do absolutely have the right to to pursue it academically however every time s

omeone mentions CRT they should also say the very first project of the people who founded CRT Richard Delgado Mary metzuda Etc was to go was to create this new category of unprotected speech called hate speech and to get it banned the person who enabled this drift of course was Herbert Marcus in 1965 you know basically questioning whether or not free speech should be a sacred value on the left and he was on the losing side for a really long time the Liberals you know the way I grew up that was b

asically being pro-free speech was synonymous with being a liberal but that started to be etched away on campus and the way it was was with with the idea of hate speech that essentially oh but you should um we can designate particularly bad speech as uh not protected um and and who's going to enforce it who's going to decide what hate speech actually is well it's usually overwhelmingly can only happen in an environment of really low Viewpoint diversity because you have to actually agree on on wh

at the most hateful and wrong things are and there's a Bedrock principle um it's referred to this in a great case about flag burning in in the first amendment that I think all the world could benefit from You Can't Ban speech just because it's offensive it's too subjective it basically it's one of the reasons why the these uh kind of codes have been more happily adopted in places like Europe where they have a sense that there's like a modal German or a modal Englishman um and I think this is off

ensive and therefore I can say that this is this is wrong in a more Multicultural and in a genuinely more diverse country that's never actually had an honest thought that there is a single kind of American there's never been like we had the idea of Uncle Sam but that was always kind of a joke um Boston always knew it wasn't Richmond always knew it wasn't George I always knew it wasn't you know Alaska like we've always been a hodgepodge and we get in a society that diverse that You Can't Ban thin

gs simply because they're offensive um and that's that's one of the reasons why I hate speech is not an unprotected category of speech and I and I go further my theory on freedom of speech is slightly different than most other constitutional lawyers um and I think and I think that's partially because some of the ways some of these theories although a lot of them are really good are inadequate they're not expansive enough and I sometimes call my theory the pure informational theory of freedom of

speech um or sometimes when I want to be fancy the lab and the Looking Glass Theory and its most important tenant is that there is that if the goal is the project of human knowledge which is to know the world it is you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think and what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know so every time you're actually saying you can't say that you're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think you'

re causing what Timmer Quran who's on our Board of advisors called preference falsification you end up with an inaccurate picture of the world which by the way in a lot of cases um because there are activists who want to restrict more speech they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced than they uh than they might be and actually these kind of restrictions there was a book called racial paranoia um that came out in about 15 years ago that was making the point that the imposition o

f some of these codes can sometimes make people think that the only thing holding you back from being a raging racist are these codes so it must be really really bad it can actually make all these things worse and one which we talk about in the book one very real practical way it makes things worse is when you censor people it doesn't change their opinion it just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble so it leads them to talk to people who they already agree wit

h and group polarization takes off so we have some interesting data in the book um about how driving people off of Twitter for example um you know in 2017 and then again I think in 2020 driving people to gab led to you know greater radicalization among those people it's a very predictable Force sensorship doesn't actually change people's minds and it pushes them in directions that actually by very you know solid research will actually make them more radicalized so yeah I think that the I think t

hat the attempt to ban hate speech it doesn't really protect us from it but it gives the government such a vast uh weapon to use against us that we will regret giving them is there a ways to sort of to look at extreme cases to test this idea out a little bit so if you look on campus yeah what's your view about allowing say white supremacists on campus to do to do speeches okay KKK I think you should be able to study what people think and I think it's important that we actually do so I think that

you know um let's take for example Q Anon yeah Q anon's wrong um but where did it come from why did they think that what's the motivation who taught them it who came up with these ideas this is important to understand history that's under important to understand modern American politics and so if you put your act if you put your scholar hat on and which you should be curious about kind of everyone about where they're coming from Daryl Davis who I'm sure you're familiar with part of his goal was

just simply to get to know where people were coming from and in the process he actually de-radicalized a number of Clans members when they actually realized that this black man who would befriended them actually was compassionate was a decent person they realized all their preconceptions were wrong so it can have a de-radicalizing factor by the way but even when it doesn't it's still really important to know what the bad people in your Society think honestly in some ways it's for for your own s

afety it's probably more important to know what the bad people in your Society actually think I personally I don't know what you think about that but I personally think that freedom of speech in cases like that like KKK and campus can do more harm in the short term but much more benefit in the long term because you can sometimes argue for like this is going to hurt yeah in the short term but I mean Harvey said this is like consider the alternative yeah because you've just kind of made the case f

or like this potentially would be a good thing even in the short term and it often is I think especially in a stable Society like ours uh with a strong middle class all these kinds of things where people have like the Comforts The Reason through things yeah um but you know to me it's like even if it hurts in the short term even if it does create more hate in the short term the freedom of speech has this really beneficial thing which is it helps you move towards the truth the entirety of society

towards a deeper more accurate understanding of life on Earth of society of how people function of ethics of metaphysics of everything yeah and that in the long term is a huge benefit it gets rid of the Nazis in the long term even if it adds to the number of Nazis in the short term yeah well and meanwhile just for for and the reality check part of this is people always bring up what about the clan on campus I'm like they're never invited um the the the I haven't seen a case where they've been in

vited um usually this the the clan argument gets thrown out when people are trying to excuse and that's why we shouted down Ben Shapiro right and that's why you can't have Bill Maher on campus that's why you know and it's like okay um you know and it's a it's a little bit of that what about ISM again about being like well that thing over there is terrible and therefore this comedian shouldn't come uh so I do have a question Maybe by way of advice sure you know interviewing folks and seeing this

like like a podcast is a platform in deciding who to talk to or not that's something I have to come face to face with on occasion my natural inclination before I started the podcast was I would talk to anyone and including people which I'm still interested in who are you know the current members of the KKK and to me there's a responsibility to do that with skill yeah um and that responsibility has been weighing heavier and heavier on me because you realize how much skill it actually takes becaus

e you have to know to understand so much because I've I've come to understand that the devil is always going to be charismatic yeah um the devil's not gonna look like the devil and so you have to realize you have to you can't always come to the table with a deep compassion for another human being you have to have you know like 90 compassion and and another 90 percent deep historical knowledge about the context of the battles around this particular issue and that takes just a huge amount of effor

t but I don't know if there's thoughts you have about this how to handle speech um in a way without censoring bringing it to the surface but in a way that creates more love in the world I remember um Steve Bannon got disinvited from The New Yorker festival and Jim Carrey freaked out and all sorts of other people freaked out and he got disinvited um from from the and and I got invited to speak on Smerconish about this and I was saying like listen he you don't have people to your conference becaus

e you agree with them um like that's the the we have to get out of this idea that that's because they were trying to make it sound like that's an endorsement of Steve Bannon like that's nonsense like if you actually look at the opinions of all the people who are there you can't possibly endorse all the opinions that all these other people who are going to be there actually have and in the in the process of making that argument I got um and and also of course my the the very classic it's very val

uable to know what someone's deep end thinks you should be curious about that and I remember someone arguing back saying well what would you want someone to interview a Jihadi and I'm like because we're at the moment like it was at the time when when Isis was really and going going for it um and I was like would you not want to go to a talk where someone was trying to figure out what makes some of these people tick um because and but that changes your framing that essentially it's like no it's c

uriosity it it is the is a cure for a lot of this stuff and we need a great deal more curiosity and a lot less unwarranted certainty and there's a question of like how do you conduct such conversations and um I feel deeply under qualified who do you think are especially good at that I feel like documentary filmmakers yeah usually do a much better job and the best job is usually done by biographers yeah so the more time you give to a particular conversation like really deep thought and historical

context and studying the people how they think looking at all different perspectives looking at the psychology of the person yeah upbringing their parents their grandparents all of this the more time you spend with that uh the better the better the quality of the conversation is because you get to understand the you get to really empathize with the person with the people he or she represents yeah um and you get to see the common Humanity all of this and interviewers are often don't do that work

yeah um so like the best stuff I've seen is interviews that are part of a documentary yeah but even now documentaries are like there's a huge incentive to do as quickly as possible yeah there's not an incentive to really spend time with the person there's a great new documentary about Floyd Abrams that I really recommend we did a documentary about Ira Glasser called Mighty Ira which was my video team and my protege Nico Perino and Chris Malby and Aaron Reese put it together and it just follows

The Life and Times of um of Ira Glasser the former head of the ACLU he's uh if you could just Linger on that that's a fascinating story oh yeah amazing um Ira he wasn't a lawyer um he started working at the nyclu the New York civil liberties Union back in I think the 60s he was I think Robert Kennedy recommended that he go in that direction um and he became the president of the ACLU right at the time that they were um suffering from uh defending the Nazis at Skokie and Nico uh and and Aaron and

Chris put together this and they'd never done a documentary before and it came out so so well um and it tells the story of the Nazis in Skokie it tells the story of the case around it tells the story of the ACLU at the time and what a great leader Ira Glasser was and what's one of the things that's so great is like when you get to see the Nazis at skogi they come off like the idiots that you would expect them to there's a moment when the when the Rally's not going very well and and the the leade

r gets uh flustered and it almost seems like he's gonna like shout out kind of like you're you're you're making this Nazi rally into a mockery and so it showed how actually allowing the Nazis to speak it's Skokie kind of took the wind out of their sails like if they had they the whole movement like everybody was kind of it all kind of dissolved after that because they looked like racist fools that they were they were you know even Blues Brothers made joke you know jokes about them and and it did

n't turn into the disaster that people thought it was going to be just by letting them speak and Ira Glasser okay so he has this wonderful story about how Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and how there was a moment when it was seeing someone an African-American as on there literally on their team and how that really got them excited about the cause of racial equality and and that became a big part of what his life was and I just think of that such a great metaphor is expanding your ci

rcle and seeing more people as being quite literally on your team is the solution to so many of these problems and I worry that one that one of the things that is absolutely just a fact of life in America is like we do see each other more as enemy camps as opposed to people on the same team and that was actually something in the early days like me and will creely the legal director of fire wrote about the forthcoming Free Speech challenges of everyone being on Facebook and one thing that I was h

oping was that as more people were exposing more of their lives we'd realize a lot of these things we knew intellectually like kids go to the bar and get drunk and do stupid things um that uh that when we started seeing the evidence of them doing stupid things that we might be shocked at first but then eventually get more sophisticated and be like well come on people are like that that never actually really seemed to happen um that that I don't think that I think that there are plenty of things

we know about human nature and we know about dumb things people say uh and we've we've made it into an environment where there's just someone out there waiting to be kind of like oh remember that dumb thing you said we were 14. well I'm going to make sure that you don't get into the to your dream school because of that that's offense archeology yeah that's not my term though oh it's a great job that's a great term we steal from the best digging through someone's past comments to find a speech th

at hasn't aged well and that one's tactical like that that one isn't just someone not being empathetic they're like I'm gonna punish you uh for this or and that's one of the reasons why I got depressed writing this book because you know it's already there's already people who don't love me because of God like the American mind usually based on a misunderstanding of what we actually said in coddling in the American mind but nonetheless uh but on this one you know like I'm calling out people for b

eing very cruel in a lot of cases but put but one thing that was really scary about studying a lot of these cases is that once you have that Target on your back what they're going to try to cancel you for could be anything you know they might go back into your old uh your your old boats find something that you said in 1995 you know you know do something um where essentially it looks like it's this entire other thing but really what they're what's going on is they didn't like your opinion they di

dn't like your point of view on something and they're gonna find a find a way that from now on anytime your name comes up it's like oh remember this this thing I didn't like about them and it's again it's cruel it doesn't get you anywhere closer to the truth and but it is a little scary to stick your neck out okay in terms of solutions yeah I'm gonna ask you a few things so one uh parenting yeah five and seven year old so I'm sure you've figured it all out then oh God no from a free speech persp

ective yeah from a free speech culture perspective how to be a good parent yeah I think the First Quality you should be cultivating in your children if you want to have a free speech culture is curiosity and an awareness of the vastness that will always be unknown and getting my kids excited about the idea that's like and it's fast siding and endless and will never make a big dent in it but the journey will be amazing but only fools think they know everything um and sometimes dangerous fools at

that so giving the sense of intellectual humility early on being also you know saying things that actually do sound kind of old-fashioned like but I say things to my kids like listen if you enjoy study and work both things that I very much enjoy I do for fun um your life is going to feel great and it's going to feel easy um so some some you know some of those old-fashioned virtues are things I try to preach um counterintuitive stuff like outdoor time playing having time that are not intermediate

d experiences is really is really important and little things like I talk about in the book about when my kids are watching something that's scary and I'm not talking about like zombie movies you know I'm talking about like you know a cartoon that has kind of a scary moment and saying that they want to turn the TV off and I and I talk to them and I say listen I'm gonna sit next to you and we're gonna finish this show and I want you to tell me what you think of of this afterwards and I sat next t

o my sons um and by the end of it every single time I you know when I asked them was it as scary as you thought it was going to be and there was like no daddy that was fine and I'm like that's one of the great lessons in life the fear that you don't go through becomes much bigger in your head than actually simply facing it that's one of the reasons why I'm fighting back against this culture I love you know for all of our kids to be able to grow up in an environment where people give you Grace an

d you know accept the fact that sometimes people are going to say things that piss you off take seriously the possibility be wrong and and uh be curious well I'm I have hope that the thing you mentioned which is because so much of young people's stuff is on the internet that they're going to give each other a break because then everybody's kids are worthy Generation Z hates cancel culture the most and that's another reason why it's like people still claiming this is even happening it's kind of l

ike no you actually can ask you know kids what they think of cancer culture and they hate it yeah well I kind of think of them as like the immune system that's like that's the culture waking up to like that this is not a good thing I I am glad though I mean I I I'm one of those kids who you know is really glad that I was a little kid in the 80s and a teenager in the 90s because having everything potentially online uh it's it's not a an upbringing a Envy well I because you can also do the absolut

e free speech I like leaning into it yeah where I hope her future where a lot of our insecurities flaws everything's out there yeah and to be raw honest with it uh I think that leads to a better world because the flaws are beautiful I mean that's the flaws as the uh the basic ingredients of human connection uh Robert Wright he wrote a book on on Buddhism um and I talked about trying to use social media from a from a Buddhist perspective and like as if you're as if it's the collective unconscious

meditating and seeing those little like Angry bits that are trying to cancel you or get you to shut up and just kind of like letting them go the same way you're supposed to watch your thoughts kind of Trail off I would love to see that like visualized whatever the whatever the drama going on going on just seeing the Sea of it of the collective Consciousness just processing this and having a little like panic attack it's just kind of like yeah breathing it in look look at the little sort of hate

ful angry voices kind of pop up and be like okay there you are and I'm still focused on on that thing because that is that that is one of the things is okay yeah actually this is probably late in the game to be to giving my grand theory on this stuff um but uh never too late so so what I was studying um in law school when I ran out of First Amendment classes um I decided to study censorship during the tutor Dynasty uh because that's where we get our ideas of prior restraint uh that come from the

licensing of the printing press which was something that Henry VIII was the first to do where basically um the idea was that if you can't print anything in England unless it's with these uh your majesty approved printers um it will prevent heretical work and anti-henry VII stuff from coming out yeah pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty um efficient idea of nothing else um and I always and so he started getting angry at the printing press around 1521 and then passed something um that requir

ed prince prince to be along with parliament in in 1538 uh and I always think of that as kind of like where we are now um because we have this we have the back then we had the original disruptive technology you know writing was probably really bad but the next one which which was the printing press which was absolutely calamitous and I mean and I and I say calamitous on purpose because in the short term the witch hunts went up like crazy because the printing press allowed you to get that manual

and how to find witches um that the religious wars went crazy um it led to all sorts of distress misinformation nastiness and Henry VII was trying to put the genie back in the bottle you know he was kind of like I I can I can I want to use this for good like uh like I feel like it could it could be used but he was in an unavoidable period of epistemic Anarchy there's nothing you can do to make the period after the printing press come uh came out to be a non-disruptive non-crazy period other than

like absolute totalitarianism and destroy all the print presses which would simply was not possible in Europe so I feel like that's kind of like where we are now that disruption came from adding I think you know several million people to the European conversation and then eventually the global conversation but eventually it became the best tool for discomformation um for getting rid of falsity for spotting bad ideas and it's the benefits the long-term benefits of the printing press are incalcul

ally great um and that's what gives me some optimism for where we are now with social media because we are in that unavoidably anarchical period And I do worry that that there um uh that there are attempts and states to pass things to try to put the genie back in the bottle like if we ban a tick tock or we uh say that um nobody under 18 can be on on the internet unless they have parental permission we're going at something that no amount of sort of top down is going to be able to fix it we have

to culturally adapt to the fact of it in ways that make us wiser that actually um and allow it potentially to be that wonderful engine for disconfirmation that we're nowhere near yet by the way but think about it additional millions of eyes on problems um thanks to the printing press helped create the Scientific Revolution the enlightenment the discovery of ignorance um we now have added billions of eyes and voices to solving problems and we're just we're using them for cat videos and canceling

but that those are just the early days of the printing press it all starts with the cats and the canceling is there something about X about Twitter which is perhaps the most uh energetic source of cats and canceling it seems like the collective unconscious of the species I mean like it's one of these things where the tendency to want to see patterns in history sometimes can limit the actual batshit crazy experience of what history actually is because yes we we have these nice comforting ideas th

at it's going to be like last time we don't know it it it it hasn't happened yet and I think how unusual Twitter is because I think of it as like the uh because because people talk about you know writing and mass communications and uh as being expanding the size of our Collective brain but now we're kind of looking at our Collective brain in real time and it's filled just like our own brains with all sorts of like little crazy things that pop up and and and appear like virtual particles kind of

all over the place of people um you know reacting in real time to things there's never been anything even vaguely like it and it can be at its worst awful to see at its best sometimes seeing people like just getting euphoric over something going on and cracking absolutely brilliant immediate jokes you know at the same time it can be it can't even be a joyful experience um I I feel like uh and uh I live in a neighborhood now on X where I I mostly deal with people that I I think are actually thoug

htful even if I disagree with them um and and it's not such a bad experience I occasionally run into those other sort of what I call neighborhoods on X where it's just all canceling all nastiness and it's always kind of an unpleasant visit to those places I'm not saying the whole thing needs to be uh like like my experience but I do think that the reason why people keep on coming back to it is it reveals raw aspects of humanity that sometimes we prefer to pretend don't exist yeah but also it's t

otally new like you said yeah it's just the virality the speed the news travels that opinions travel that the battle over ideas travels the battle over information too yeah of what is true and not lies travel the little Mark Twain thing pretty fast on the thing yeah and then it changes your understanding of how to interpret information it could also stress you out you know and I remember to get off it sometimes the stats are pretty bad on Mental Health uh with with young people and I'm definitel

y in the camp of people who think that social media is part of that I understand you know the debate but I'm pretty persuaded that one of the things that is hasn't been great for mental health I mean of people is is just constantly being exposed yeah absolutely I I think it's possible to create social media that makes a huge amount of money makes people happy to me like it's possible to align yeah the the incentives so in terms of yeah making teenagers making uh every stage of life giving you lo

ng-term fulfillment and happiness with your physical existence outside of the social media and on social media helping you grow as a human being helping challenge you just in the right amount and just the right amount of cat videos whatever gives this full Rich Human Experience I think it's just a machine learning problem it's like it's not easy to create a feed so the easiest feed you could do is like maximize engagement yeah but that's just like a really dumb algorithm yeah it's like for the f

or the algorithm to learn enough about you to understand what will make you truly happy as a human being to grow long term that's just a very difficult problem to solve you ever watch fleabag it's absolutely brilliant uh British show um and it sets you up one of the reasons why like people love it so much is it sets you up that you're watching like a a raunchy British Sex in the City except the main character is the the most promiscuous one um it's like okay and you kind of roll your eyes a litt

le bit it's kind of funny and it's kind of cute and kind of spicy and then you realize that the person is actually kind of suffering and having a hard time and it gets deeper and deeper as the show goes on and she will do these incredible speeches about tell me what to do like I just I know there's experts out there I know there's knowledge out there I know there's an optimal way to live my life so why can't someone just tell me what to do and and it's this wonderfully like um accurate I think u

h aspect of human desire that what if something could actually tell me the optimal way to go because I think there is a desire to give up some amount of your own freedom and discretion in order to be told to do the optimally right thing but that path scares me to death yeah we see the way you phrase it that's it miscares me too so there's several things one you could be constantly distracted in a tick tock Way by things that keep you engaged yeah so removing that and giving you a bunch of option

s constantly and learning from long term what results in your actual long-term happiness so like which amounts of challenging ideas are good for you uh that you know for somebody like me just for but there is a number like that for you yeah Greg like for me that number is pretty high I love debate I love I I love the feeling of like realizing holy I've been wrong yes but like you know and I would love for the algorithm to know that about me and to help me but always giving me options if I want t

o descend into cat videos and so on well the educational aspect of it yes educational yes like the idea of kind of like both going the speed that you need to and running as fast as you can yeah you know I mean there's that you know the whole flow thing I just feel it YouTube recommendation for for better or worse if used correctly it feels like it does a pretty good job whenever I just refuse to click on stuff that's just dopamine based and click on only educational things yeah the recommendatio

n provides are really damn good so I feel like it's a solvable problem at least in this in the space of Education of challenging yourself but also expanding your realm of knowledge and all this kind of stuff and I'm definitely more in the we're an inescapably anarchical period and it will require big cultural adjustments and there's gonna there's no way that this isn't going to be difficult transition is there any specific little or big things that you would like to see X do Twitter do I have lo

ts of thoughts on that with the printing press and extra millions of eyes on any problem can tear down any institution any any person or any idea and that's good in some ways because a lot of medievals Institutions needed to be torn down and some people did too and a lot of ideas need to be torn down same thing is true now and extra billions of eyes on every problem can tear down any person ID or institution um and some again some of those things needed to be torn down but it can't build yet we

are not at the stage that can build yet but it has shown us how thin our knowledge was it's one of the reasons why we're also aware of the replication crisis it's one of the reasons why we're also aware of how kind of shoddy our research is how much our expert class is arrogant in many cases but people don't want to live in a world where they don't have uh people that they respect and they can look at and I think what's happening uh possibly now um but we'll we'll continue to happen as people ar

e going to establish themselves as being high integrity that they will always be honest I think you are establishing yourself as someone who who is high integrity where that where they can trust that person a fire wants to be um you know the institution that people can come to us like if it's free speech we will defend it period And I think that people need new uh need to have authorities that they can actually trust and I think that if you actually had a stream that maybe people can watch in ac

tion but not flood with you know stupid cancel culture stuff or or dumb cat means where it is actually a serious discussion bounded around rules no perfect Patrol Fortress no efficient rhetorical Fortress none of the the BS ways we debate I think you could start to actually create something that could actually be a major Improvement in the in the in the speed with which we come up with new better ideas and establish and and separate truth from falsity yeah if it's done well it can inspire a larg

e number of people to become higher and higher integrity and it can create Integrity as a value to strive for yeah and like you know there's been projects throughout the internet that have done an incredible job of that but have been also very flawed like Wikipedia is an example of a big leap forward in doing that it's pretty damn impressive what's your overall take I mean I I'm mostly impressed so there's a few really powerful ideas for the people who edit Wikipedia one of which is each editor

kind of for themselves declares you know I'm into politics and I really kind of a left-leaning guy so I really shouldn't be editing political articles because I have bias so they're great they declare their biases and they often do a good job of actually declaring the biases but there will still like they'll find a way to justify themselves like something will piss them off yeah and they want to correct it because they they love correcting untruth into truth but the perspective of what is true o

r not is affected by their bias Ruth is hard to know and I and and it is true that there is a left-leaning bias on the editors of Wikipedia so for that what happens is on articles which I mostly appreciate that don't have a political aspect to them you know um scientific articles or uh technical articles they can be really strong even history just describing the facts of history that don't have a subjective element a strong also just using my own brain I can kind of filter out if it's uh you kno

w if it's something about January 6th or something like this I know I'm going to be like I'm not whatever's going on here I'm gonna kinda read it but most I'm gonna look to other source I'm going to look to a bunch of different perspectives on it's going to be very tense there's probably going to be some kind of bias maybe some wording will be such which is one where this is where Wikipedia does its thing the way they word stuff uh will be biased the choice of words but the what Wikipedia editor

s themselves are so self-reflective they literally have articles describing these very effects of how you can use words to inject bias yeah in in all the ways that you talk about it that's not healthier than most environments it's incredibly healthy but I think you could do better one of the big flaws of Wikipedia to me that Community uh notes on X does better is the accessibility of becoming an editor um is it's difficult to become an editor and it's not as visible the process of editing so I w

ould love like you said a stream yeah everyone to be able to observe this debate between people with Integrity of when they discuss things like January Stakes a very controversial topics to see how the processes the debate goes as opposed to being hidden in the shadows which currently is in Wikipedia you can access that it's just hard to access but and I've also seen how they will use certain articles like on certain people like articles about people have learned to trust less and less yeah beca

use they'll literally will use those to make personal attacks and this is something you write about they'll use uh descriptions of different controversies to paint a picture of a person that's that doesn't to me at least feel like an accurate representation of the person it's like writing an article about Einstein mentioning something about uh theory of relativity and saying that he was a womanizer and abuser and a like controversy you know yeah he is Feynman also you know not you know was that

you know they're not exactly the perfect human in terms of women but like there's other aspects to this human and to capture that human properly there's a certain way to do it I think Wikipedia will often lean they really try to be self-reflective and try to stop this but they will lean into the drama if it matches the bias yeah but again much better than the world I believe is much better uh because Wikipedia exists but now that we're in these adolescent stages we're growing and trying to come

up with different Technologies the idea of a stream yeah is really really interesting as you get more and more people into this discourse that where the value is let's try to get the truth yeah yeah and that basically you know you get the little cards for nope wrong nope wrong and the different the different rhetorical techniques that are being used to avoid actually discussing yeah and I think I actually can make it a little bit Fun by you get a limited number of them um you know it's kind of l

ike you get three what about some cards it's a gamifying the whole thing uh absolutely yeah uh let me ask you about uh so you mentioned going to some difficult moments in your life or um what what has been your experience with uh with depression what has been your experience getting out of it overcoming it yeah I mean the whole thing the whole journey um uh with coddling the American mind began with me um in the at the Belmont psychiatric facility in Philadelphia back in 2007. I had called 9-1-1

In a Moment of clarity because I'd gone to the uh the hardware store to um make sure that when I killed myself that I it stuck I wanted to make sure that I you know had my head wrapped and everything so like if all the drugs I was planning to take didn't work that I wouldn't be able to you know claw my way out it'd been a really rough year and I always had issues with depression um but they were getting worse and frankly one of the reasons why this cancel culture stuff is so um important to me

is that the thing that I didn't emphasize as much in cuddling the American mind which by the way that description that I give of trying to kill myself was the first time I'd ever written it down nobody in my family was aware um of how of it being like that my wife had never seen it and basically the only way I was able to write that was by by doing you know how you can kind of trick yourself if um and I was like I'm going to convince myself that this is just between me and my computer and nobody

will see it it's probably not the most public thing I've ever written um but what I didn't emphasize in that was how much the culture War played into how depressed I got because I was originally legal director of fire then I became president of fire in 2005 moved to Philadelphia is where I get depressed um and uh and just I don't have family there there's something about the town they don't seem to like me very much um but the main thing was being in the culture world all the time um there was

a girl that I was dating um I remember you know she didn't seem to really approve what I did and a lot of people didn't really seem to and meanwhile like I was defending people on the left all the time and they'd be like oh that's good that you're finding someone on the left but they still would never forgive me for defending someone on the right and I remember saying at one point I'm like listen I'm like I'm I'm a True Believer in this stuff I'm willing to defend Nazis I'm certainly willing to

defend Republicans and she actually said I think Republicans might be worse um and that didn't that really shouldn't go very well and then I nearly gotten fist fights a couple times with with people on the right um because they found out I defended people who crack jokes about 9 11. like this happened more than once I'm not you know by that time I'm in my 20s I'm not fist fighting again um but yeah it was always like that you you see how hypocritical people people compete you can see how friends

can turn on you if they don't like your politics so I got an early preview of this of of of what the culture we're heading into by being the president of fire and it was exhausting um and that was one of the main things that led me to be you know suicidally depressed uh at the Belmont Center if you told me that that would be the beginning of a new and better life for me I would have laughed if I could have but I would you know I don't I you can tell I'm okay if I'm still laughing and I wasn't l

aughing um at that point so um I got a doctor and I started doing cognitive behavioral therapy I started having all these voices in my head that were catastrophizing and um you know engaging over over generalization and um uh fortune telling you know uh mind reading all of these things that they teach you not to do and it and what that what you do when CBT is essentially you you have something makes you upset and then you just write down what the thought was um and you know something minor could

happen in your response was you know like um well the date didn't seem to go very well um and that's because I'm broken and will die alone and you're like okay okay what what are what are the following you know uh that's catastrophizing that's mind reading that's a fortune telling that's all the stuff um and you have to do this several times a day forever I actually need to brush up on it at the moment um and it slowly over time voices in my head that have been saying horrible you know horrible

internal talk it just didn't sound as convincing anymore which was a really kind of like subtle effect like it was just kind of like oh wait I don't buy that I'm broken you know like that doesn't sound true that doesn't sound like truth from God like like it used to and nine months after I was planning to kill myself I was probably happier than I'd been in a decade um and that was one of the things that you know that the CBT is what led me to notice this in my own work that it felt like adminis

trators were kind of selling cognitive distortions but students weren't buying yet and then when I started noticing that they seemed to come in actually already believing in a lot of this stuff that would be very dangerous and that led to calling the American mind and all that stuff but the thing that was rough about writing enhancing the American mind I'd have mentioned this already a couple of times I got really depressed this past year um because I was studying you know there's a friend in th

ere that I talk about who killed himself um after being canceled I talked to him a week before he killed himself and I hadn't actually um I hadn't actually checked in with him because he seemed so confident I thought it would be totally fine because he he had an insensitive tweet in June of 2020 and uh you know got got forced out uh in a way that didn't actually sound as bad as a lot of the other professors he actually at least got a severance package but they knew he'd Sue and win um because he

had before and so I waited to check in on him because we were so overwhelmed with the requester helps and he was saying people were coming to his house still and then he shot himself the next week and I I definitely and because everyone knows I'm so public about you know my struggles with this stuff everybody um who fights this stuff comes to me when they're having a hard time and this is a very hard psychologically taxing business to be in and even admitting this right now like I think about l

ike all the all the vultures out there if they'll have fun with it just like the same way when my friend Mike Adams killed himself there were people like celebrating on Twitter um that that a man was dead uh because they didn't like his tweets and but somehow that made them compassionate for some abstract other person so I was getting a little depressed and anxious and the thing that really helped me more than anything else um was confessing to my staff that I you know I I books take a lot of en

ergy so I knew they didn't want to hear that Not only was this taking a lot of the boss's time this was making him depressed and anxious but when I finally told my the leadership of my staff um you know people that even though I try to maintain a lot of distance from I love very very much um it made such a difference you know because I could be open about that and the other thing was if you're at this conference dialogue oh yes it's like an invite-only thing it's Oren Hoffman um runs it um it in

tentionally tries to get people over the political Spectrum to come together uh and have off the record conversations about big issues and it was nice to be in a room where liberal conservative none of the above were all like oh thank God someone's taking on Council culture and where it felt like it felt like maybe this won't be the the disaster for me and my family that I was that I was starting to be afraid of it would be that taking the stuff on might actually have a happy ending well one thi

ng I just stands out from that is the the pain of cancellation can be really intense and that doesn't necessarily mean losing your job but just even you can call it bullying you can call whatever name but just some number of people on the internet and that number can be small kind of saying bad things to you yeah that can be a pretty powerful force to the human psyche which is was very surprising and then the flip side also of that uh it really makes me sad how cruel people can be yeah it's such

a thinking that your your cause is social justice in many cases can lead people to think I can be as cruel as I want in pursuit of this when it a lot of times it's you know just a way to sort of vent some aggression on on a person that you think of only as an abstraction so I think it's important for people to realize that they're whatever like whatever negative energy whatever negativity you want to put out there like there's real people that can get hurt like you can really get people um to o

ne be the worst version of themselves or two possibly take their own life and it's not as real yeah well that's one of the things that we do in the book um to really kind of address people who still try to claim this you know isn't real is we just quote we quote the pope we call Obama we call James Carville we quote Taylor Swift on cancel culture like um and Taylor Swift's quote is is essentially about like how behind all of this there's when it gets particularly nasty there's this very clear yo

u know kill yourself kind of undercurrent to it um and it's it's cruel and the problem is that in an environment so wide open there's always going to be someone who wants to be so transgressive and say the most hurtful you know terrible thing but then you have to remember the misrepresentation getting back to the old idioms sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never never hurt me has been re-imagined in campus debates in the most asinine way people will literally say stuff like b

ut now we know words can hurt and it's like now we know words can hurt guys you didn't have to come up with a special little thing that you teach children to make her words hurt less if they never hurt in the first place it wouldn't even make sense the saying it's a saying that you repeat to yourself to give yourself strength when the bullies have noticed you're a little weird might be a little personal um the uh and it helps it really does help to be like listen Okay are going to say things um

and I can't let them have that kind of power over me yeah yeah it still is a learning experience because it does it does it does hurt but for the good people out there who actually you know just sometimes think think that they're venting you know they think about it remember that there are people on either side of it yeah for me it hurts my kind of faith in humanity um I know it shouldn't but it does sometimes when I just see people being cruel to each other it kind of it's uh it floats a cloud

over my perspective of the world that don't I wish didn't have to be there yeah that was always my sort of flipping but uh answer to that if if mankind is basically good or basically evil being like the biggest debate in in in in in philosophy and being like well the problem with uh with the first is there's nothing basic about Humanity yeah what gives you hope about this whole thing about about this dark state that we're in as you describe how can we get out what gives you hope that we will get

out I think that people are sick of it um I think people are sick of not being able to be authentic um and that's really you know what censorship is it's basically telling you don't be yourself don't actually be to say what you think um don't show your personality don't dissent don't be weird don't be wrong um and that's not sustainable I think that people have kind of had enough of it uh but one thing I definitely want to say to your audience is oh it can't just be up to us our viewers to try

to fix this um we and I think that and this may sound like it's an unrelated problem I think if there were highly respected let's say extremely difficult ways to prove that you're extremely smart and hardworking that cost little or nothing that actually can give the harvards and the yales of the world to run for their money I think that might be the most positive thing we could do to to deal with a lot of these problems and why I think the fact that we have become a weird America with a great an

ti-elitist tradition has become weirdly elitist in this in in the respect that we not only again are our leadership coming from these few fancy schools we actually have like great admiration for them we kind of look up to them but I think we'd have a lot healthier of a society If people could prove you know their excellence in ways that are coming from completely different streams and and that that are highly respected I sometimes talk about there should be a test that anyone who passes it gets

like a you know a ba in the humanities that it is like a super ba like some something like someone not a GED that's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about something that like you know one out of only a couple like a hundred people can pass some other way of actually um uh of not going through these massive bloated expensive institutions that people can raise their hands and say I'm smart and hardworking I think that could be an incredibly healthy uh way I think we need additional streams f

or Creative people to be solving problems whether that's on X or someplace else um I think that there's lots of things that technology could do to really help with this I think some of the stuff that Sal Khan is working on uh at Khan Academy could really help um so I think there's a lot of ways but they exist largely around coming up with new ways of doing things not just expecting the old things that have say 40 billion dollars in the bank that they're going to reform themselves and and here an

d here's my you know I've been picking on Harvard a lot but I'm going to pick on a little bit more um the and one and uh I talk a lot about class again and you know there's a great book called Poison Ivy um by Evan mandry which I recommend to everybody it's outrageous it sounds like me on a rant at Stanford um which was uh and I and I think the stat is you know Elite higher education has more kids from the top one percent than they have from the bottom 50 or 60 depending on the school um and whe

n you look at how much they actually like replicate class privilege it's it's really distressing so everybody should read poison ivy and above all else uh if you're weird continue being weird and you're one of the most interesting one of the weirdest in the most beautiful way people have ever met Greg uh thank you for the really important work you do this was this is let me watch kid Cosby I appreciate the class the hilarity that you brought here today man um this is an amazing conversation than

k you for the work you do thank you thank you and for me who deeply cares about education higher education thank you for uh holding the mits and the harvards accountable uh for um doing right by the people that walk their Halls so thank you so much for talking today thanks for listening to this conversation with Greg lucianov to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Noam Chomsky if you believe in freedom of speech you

believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like Gables was in favor of freedom of speech reviews he liked so was Stalin if you're in favor of freedom of speech that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise thank you for listening and hope to see you next time