Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech

00:00:00.000 | If the goal is the project of human knowledge, which is to know the world as it is, you cannot

00:00:05.800 | know the world as it is without knowing what people really think.

00:00:10.560 | And what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know.

00:00:15.000 | So every time you're actually saying, "You can't say that," you're actually depriving

00:00:19.460 | yourself of the knowledge of what people really think.

00:00:21.880 | You're causing what Timur Kuran, who's on our board of advisors, calls preference falsification.

00:00:27.440 | You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world, which by the way, in a lot of cases,

00:00:32.600 | because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that

00:00:36.180 | people are more prejudiced than they might be.

00:00:38.480 | And actually, one very real practical way it makes things worse is when you censor people,

00:00:44.280 | it doesn't change their opinion.

00:00:46.560 | It just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble.

00:00:50.900 | So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with, and group polarization

00:00:55.440 | takes off.

00:00:58.680 | The following is a conversation with Greg Lukianoff, free speech advocate, First Amendment

00:01:03.480 | attorney, president and CEO of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

00:01:09.160 | And he's the author of Unleashing Liberty, co-author with Jonathan Haidt of Coddling

00:01:14.840 | of the American Mind, and co-author with Ricky Schlott of a new book coming out in October

00:01:21.040 | that you should definitely pre-order now called The Cancelling of the American Mind, which

00:01:26.600 | is a definitive accounting of the history, present and future of cancel culture, a term

00:01:31.840 | used and overused in public discourse, but rarely studied and understood with the depth

00:01:38.080 | and rigor that Greg and Ricky do in this book, and in part in this conversation.

00:01:45.200 | Freedom of speech is important, especially on college campuses, the very place that you

00:01:51.000 | should serve as the battleground of ideas, including weird and controversial ones, that

00:01:56.160 | should encourage bold risk-taking, not conformity.

00:02:01.680 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:02:03.400 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:02:06.800 | And now, dear friends, here's Greg Lukianoff.

00:02:11.280 | Let's start with the big question.

00:02:13.160 | What is cancel culture?

00:02:14.920 | Now you've said that you don't like the term as it's been, quote, "dragged through the

00:02:18.520 | mud and abused endlessly by a whole host of controversial figures."

00:02:22.400 | Nevertheless, we have the term.

00:02:24.640 | What is it?

00:02:25.640 | Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns, starting

00:02:30.920 | around 2014 to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, et cetera, for speech that would

00:02:39.120 | normally be protected by the First Amendment.

00:02:41.200 | And I say would be protected because we're talking about circumstances in which it isn't

00:02:46.400 | necessarily where the First Amendment applies.

00:02:48.420 | But what I mean is like as an analog to, say, things you couldn't lose your job as a public

00:02:54.160 | employee for, and also the climate of fear that's resulted from that phenomenon, the

00:03:00.840 | fact that you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion.

00:03:03.560 | And it wasn't subtle that there was an uptick in this, particularly on campus around 2014.

00:03:09.800 | John Ronson wrote a book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed that came out in 2015,

00:03:14.240 | already documenting this phenomena.

00:03:15.840 | I wrote a book called Freedom from Speech in 2014.

00:03:20.080 | But it really was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors.

00:03:24.520 | And when it comes to the number of professors that we've seen be targeted and lose their

00:03:29.760 | jobs, I've been doing this for 22 years and I've seen nothing like it.

00:03:34.160 | So, there's so many things I want to ask you here.

00:03:37.480 | One actually, just look at the organization of fire.

00:03:39.480 | Can you explain what the organization is?

00:03:41.360 | Because it's interconnected to this whole fight and the rise of cancel culture and the

00:03:46.600 | fight for freedom of speech since 2014 and before.

00:03:50.440 | So fire was founded in 1999 by Harvey Sloverglate.

00:03:54.560 | He is a famous civil liberties attorney.

00:03:56.960 | He's a bit on the show.

00:03:58.720 | He's the person who actually found me out in my very happy life out in San Francisco,

00:04:03.480 | but knew I was looking for a First Amendment job.

00:04:06.280 | I'd gone to law school specifically to do First Amendment.

00:04:10.640 | And he found me, which was pretty cool.

00:04:13.280 | His protege, Kathleen Sullivan, was the dean of Stanford Law School.

00:04:16.800 | And this remains the best compliment I ever got in my life is that she recommended me

00:04:22.440 | to Harvey.

00:04:24.120 | And since that's the whole reason why I went to law school, I was excited to be a part

00:04:27.320 | of this new organization.

00:04:29.040 | The other co-founder of fire is Alan Charles Kors.

00:04:32.880 | He's just an absolute genius.

00:04:34.860 | He is the one of the leading experts in the world on the enlightenment and particularly

00:04:39.560 | about Voltaire.

00:04:41.280 | And if any of your listeners do like the great courses, he has a lecture on Blaise Pascal.

00:04:48.120 | And Blaise, of course, is famous for the Pascal's wager.

00:04:51.760 | And I left it just so moved and impressed and with a depth of understanding of how important

00:04:57.440 | this person was.

00:04:59.840 | That's interesting.

00:05:00.840 | You mentioned to me offline connected to this that there is a, at least it runs in parallel,

00:05:06.840 | or there's a connection between the love of science and the love of the freedom of speech.

00:05:10.840 | Can you maybe elaborate where that connection is?

00:05:14.600 | Sure.

00:05:15.600 | I think that for those of us who are really, who've devoted our lives to freedom of speech,

00:05:20.800 | one thing that we are into, whether we know it or not, is epistemology, the study and

00:05:27.760 | philosophy of knowledge.

00:05:29.880 | Freedom of speech has lots of moral and philosophical dimensions, but from a pragmatic standpoint,

00:05:36.520 | it is necessary because we're creatures of incredibly limited knowledge.

00:05:41.000 | We are incredibly self-deceiving.

00:05:43.480 | I always love the fact that Yuval Harari refers to the enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance

00:05:49.600 | because that's exactly what it was.

00:05:51.560 | It was suddenly being like, "Wow, hold on a second.

00:05:55.280 | All of this incredibly interesting folk wisdom we got," which by the way, can be surprisingly

00:06:00.360 | reliable here and there, "when you start testing a lot of it is nonsense.

00:06:06.200 | It doesn't hold up.

00:06:07.760 | Even our ideas about the way things fall," as Galileo established, "even our intuitions,

00:06:13.520 | they're just wrong."

00:06:14.520 | A lot of the early history of freedom of speech, it was happening at the same time as the scientific

00:06:22.960 | revolution.

00:06:23.960 | A lot of the early debates about freedom of speech were tied in.

00:06:28.040 | Certainly, Galileo, I always point out like Kepler was probably the even more radical

00:06:34.640 | idea that there weren't even perfect spheres.

00:06:37.040 | But at the same time, largely because of the invention of the printing press, you also

00:06:41.400 | had all these political developments.

00:06:45.360 | I always talk about Jan Hus from the famous Czech hero who was burned at the stake and

00:06:54.160 | I think in 1419.

00:06:56.560 | But he was basically Luther before the printing press.

00:07:01.880 | Before Luther could get his word out, he didn't stand a chance and that was exactly what Jan

00:07:06.320 | Hus was.

00:07:07.320 | But a century later, thanks to the printing press, everyone could know what Luther thought

00:07:11.240 | and boy, did they.

00:07:13.240 | But it led to, of course, this completely crazy, hyper-disrupted period in European

00:07:19.440 | history.

00:07:20.440 | - Well, you mentioned to jump around a little bit, the First Amendment.

00:07:24.080 | First of all, what is the First Amendment and what is the connection to you between

00:07:28.760 | the First Amendment, the freedom of speech and cancel culture?

00:07:31.560 | - So I'm a First Amendment lawyer, as I mentioned, and that's what I—it's my passion.

00:07:37.040 | That's what I studied and I think American First Amendment law is incredibly interesting.

00:07:41.400 | In one sentence, the First Amendment is trying to get rid of basically all the reasons why

00:07:47.120 | humankind had been killing each other for its entire existence.

00:07:51.080 | That we weren't going to fight anymore over opinion.

00:07:53.440 | We weren't going to fight anymore over religion, that you have the right to approach your government

00:07:57.000 | for redress of grievances, that you have the freedom to associate.

00:08:00.760 | But all of these things in one sentence, we're like, "Nope, the government will no longer

00:08:05.720 | interfere with your right to have these fundamental human rights."

00:08:12.120 | And so one thing that makes FIRE a little different from other organizations is, however,

00:08:17.280 | we're not just a First Amendment organization.

00:08:20.140 | We are a free speech organization.

00:08:22.840 | And so—but at the same time, a lot of what I think free speech is can be well explained

00:08:31.360 | with reference to a lot of First Amendment law, partially because in American history,

00:08:36.440 | some of our smartest people have been thinking about what the parameters of freedom of speech

00:08:40.360 | are in relationship to the First Amendment.

00:08:43.400 | And a lot of those principles, they transfer very well just as pragmatic ideas.

00:08:48.440 | So the biggest sin in terms of censorship is called viewpoint discrimination, that essentially

00:08:53.440 | you allow freedom of speech except for that opinion.

00:08:56.760 | Now, and it's found to be kind of more defensible, and I think this makes sense, that if you

00:09:01.920 | set up a forum and we're only going to talk about economics to exclude people who want

00:09:05.980 | to talk about a different topic, but it's considered rightfully a bigger deal if you

00:09:11.600 | set up a forum for economics, but we're not going to let people talk about that kind of

00:09:15.280 | economics or have that opinion on economics, most particularly.

00:09:20.660 | So a lot of the principles from First Amendment law actually make a lot of philosophical sense

00:09:24.880 | as good principles for when—like what is protected and unprotected speech, what should

00:09:30.280 | get you in trouble, how you actually analyze it, which is why we actually try in our definition

00:09:35.640 | of cancel culture to work in some of the First Amendment norms just in the definition so

00:09:39.920 | we don't have to bog down on them as well.

00:09:41.640 | You're saying so many interesting things, but if you can linger on the viewpoint discrimination,

00:09:46.480 | is there any gray area of discussion there, like what is and isn't economics, for the

00:09:51.480 | example you gave?

00:09:53.000 | Yeah.

00:09:54.000 | Is there—I mean, is it a science or is it an art to draw lines of what is and isn't

00:09:59.600 | allowed?

00:10:00.600 | Yeah.

00:10:01.600 | You know, if you're saying that something is or is not economics, well, you can say

00:10:03.640 | everything's economics, and therefore I want to talk about poetry.

00:10:06.600 | There'd be some line drawing exercise in there.

00:10:08.720 | But let's say at once you decide to open up it to poetry even, it's a big difference

00:10:16.760 | between saying, "Okay, now we're open to poetry," but you can't say, you know,

00:10:20.840 | "Dante was bad."

00:10:22.880 | Like that's a forbidden opinion now officially in this otherwise open forum.

00:10:27.640 | That would immediately at an intuitive level strike people as a bigger problem than just

00:10:31.840 | saying that poetry isn't economics.

00:10:34.080 | Yeah, I mean, that intuitive level that you speak to, I hope that all of us have that

00:10:42.840 | kind of basic intuition when the line is crossed.

00:10:45.440 | It's the same thing for like pornography, right?

00:10:47.680 | You know, when you see it.

00:10:48.680 | I think there's the same level of intuition that should be applied across the board here.

00:10:55.720 | And it's when that intuition becomes deformed by whatever forces of society, that's when

00:11:00.600 | it starts to feel like censorship.

00:11:02.560 | Yeah, I mean, people find it a different thing.

00:11:05.640 | You know, if someone loses their job simply for their political opinion, even if that

00:11:09.360 | employer has every right in the world to fire you, I think Americans should still be like,

00:11:13.560 | "Well, it's true.

00:11:14.560 | They have every right in the world.

00:11:15.560 | And I'm not making a legal case that maybe you shouldn't fire someone for their political

00:11:20.280 | opinion."

00:11:21.280 | But think that through.

00:11:22.280 | Like what society do we want to—what kind of society do we want to live in?

00:11:26.140 | And it's been funny watching—you know, and I point this out.

00:11:30.540 | Yes, I will defend businesses' First Amendment rights of association to be able to have the

00:11:36.460 | legal right to decide, you know, who works for them.

00:11:40.300 | But from a moral or philosophical matter, if you think through the implications of if

00:11:44.820 | every business in America becomes an expressive association in addition to being a profit-maximizing

00:11:51.820 | organization, that would be a disaster for democracy.

00:11:55.180 | Because you would end up in a situation where people would actually be saying to themselves,

00:11:58.700 | "I don't think I can actually say what I really think and still believe I can keep

00:12:03.380 | my job."

00:12:04.380 | And that's where I was worried.

00:12:05.580 | I felt like we were headed because a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled

00:12:11.300 | was very simply, you know, "Oh, but they have the right to get rid of this person."

00:12:16.580 | And that's the end and beginning and end of the discussion.

00:12:20.820 | And I thought that was a dodge.

00:12:22.620 | I thought that wasn't actually a very serious way of—that if you care about both the First

00:12:27.060 | Amendment and freedom of speech, of thinking it through.

00:12:30.300 | To you, just to clarify, the First Amendment is kind of a legal embodiment of the ideal

00:12:38.820 | of freedom of speech.

00:12:39.820 | And then freedom of speech—

00:12:40.820 | As applied to government.

00:12:41.820 | And it's very specific—applied to government.

00:12:43.820 | And freedom of speech is the application of the principle to, like, everything, including,

00:12:50.060 | like, kind of the high-level philosophical ideal of what it—of the value of people

00:12:57.380 | being able to speak their mind.

00:12:59.180 | Yeah.

00:13:00.180 | It's an older, bolder, more expansive idea.

00:13:04.340 | And you can have a situation—and I talk about countries that have good free speech

00:13:08.060 | law but not necessarily great free speech culture.

00:13:11.220 | And I talk about how when we sometimes make this distinction between free speech law and

00:13:15.420 | free speech culture, we're thinking in a very cloudy kind of way.

00:13:20.380 | And what I mean by that is that law is generally—particularly in a common law country, it's the reflection

00:13:27.300 | of norms.

00:13:28.300 | Those, you know, judges are people too.

00:13:31.300 | And in a lot of cases, common law is supposed to actually take our intuitive ideas of fairness

00:13:35.380 | and place them, you know, into the law.

00:13:38.540 | So if you actually have a culture that doesn't appreciate free speech from a philosophical

00:13:42.820 | standpoint, it's not going to be able to protect free speech for the long haul, even

00:13:46.860 | in the law, because eventually—that's one of the reasons why I worry so much about

00:13:50.180 | some of these terrible cases coming out of law schools, because I fear that even though,

00:13:55.660 | sure, American First Amendment law is very strongly protective of First Amendment, for

00:13:59.820 | now, it's not going to stay that way if you have generations of law students graduating

00:14:05.700 | who actually think there's nothing—there's no higher goal than shouting down you're

00:14:09.460 | an opponent.

00:14:10.460 | Yeah, so that's why so much of your focus, or a large fraction of your focus, is on the

00:14:16.460 | higher education or education period, is because education is the foundation of culture.

00:14:22.820 | Yeah, you have this history, you know.

00:14:25.780 | '64, you have the free speech movement on Berkeley.

00:14:29.140 | And in '65, you have repressive tolerance by Herbert Marcuse, which was a declaration

00:14:33.940 | of, "By the way, we on the left, we shouldn't—we should have free speech, but we should have

00:14:39.900 | free speech for us."

00:14:41.260 | I mean, I went back and reread repressive tolerance, and how clear it is.

00:14:47.460 | I forgot—I had forgotten that it really is kind of like, "And these so-called conservatives

00:14:51.780 | and right-wingers, we need to repress them because they're regressive thinkers."

00:14:55.780 | It really doesn't come out to anything more sophisticated than the very old idea that

00:15:00.620 | "Our people are good.

00:15:02.260 | They get free speech.

00:15:04.040 | They should keep it."

00:15:05.960 | The other side, "Bad.

00:15:07.980 | We should not have—we have to retrain society."

00:15:10.980 | And of course, like, it ends up being another—he was also a fan of Mao, so it's not surprising

00:15:15.940 | that he—of course, the system would have to rely on some kind of totalitarian system.

00:15:22.600 | But that was a laughable position, you know, say, 30, 40 years ago.

00:15:30.220 | The idea that essentially, you know, "Free speech for me, not for thee," as the great,

00:15:34.860 | you know, free speech champion, Ned Hentoff, used to say, was something that you were supposed

00:15:39.340 | to be embarrassed by.

00:15:41.020 | But I saw this when I was in law school in '97.

00:15:44.740 | I saw this when I was interning at the ACLU in '99, that there was a slow-motion train

00:15:51.040 | wreck coming, that essentially there was these bad ideas from campus that had been taking

00:15:57.400 | on more and more steam of basically, "No free speech for my opponent."

00:16:02.060 | We're actually becoming more and more accepted as—and partially because academia was becoming

00:16:08.240 | less and less viewpoint-diverse.

00:16:09.720 | I think that, as my co-author Jonathan Haidt points out, that when you have low viewpoint

00:16:15.260 | diversity, people start thinking in a very kind of tribal way.

00:16:18.840 | And if you don't have the respected dissenters, you don't have the people that you can point

00:16:22.660 | to that are like, "Hey, this is a smart person.

00:16:25.180 | This is like—this is a smart, reasonable, decent person that I disagree with.

00:16:29.140 | So I guess not everyone thinks alike on this issue."

00:16:32.240 | You start getting much more kind of like, only bad people, only heretics, only blasphemers,

00:16:38.840 | only right-wingers can actually think in this way.

00:16:42.740 | Every time you say something, I always have a million thoughts and a million questions

00:16:47.040 | that pop up.

00:16:48.040 | But since you mentioned there's a kind of drift, as you write about in the book, and

00:16:52.100 | you mentioned now there's a drift towards the left in academia, which will also maybe

00:16:57.360 | draw a distinction here between the left and the right and the cancel culture, as you present

00:17:01.520 | in your book, is not necessarily associated with any one political viewpoint, that there's

00:17:06.880 | mechanisms on both sides that result in cancellation and censorship in violation of freedom of

00:17:13.400 | speech.

00:17:14.400 | So one thing I want to be really clear about is the book takes on both right and left cancel

00:17:17.760 | culture.

00:17:18.760 | They're different in a lot of ways.

00:17:20.520 | And definitely, you know, cancel culture from the left is more important in academia, where

00:17:24.920 | the left dominates.

00:17:28.240 | But we talk a lot about cancel culture coming from legislatures.

00:17:31.420 | We talk a lot about cancel culture on campus as well, because even though most of the attempts

00:17:38.920 | that come from on campus to get people canceled are still from the left, there are a lot of

00:17:43.420 | attacks that come from the right, that come from, you know, attempts by different organizations

00:17:48.760 | and sometimes when there are stories in Fox News, you know, like they'll go after professors.

00:17:54.460 | And about one-third of the attempts to get professors punished that are successful actually

00:17:59.220 | do come from the right.

00:18:00.720 | And we talk about attempts to get books banned in the book.

00:18:05.400 | We talk about suing the Florida legislature.

00:18:10.720 | Ron DeSantis had something called the Stop Woke Act, which we told everyone this is laughably

00:18:16.280 | unconstitutional.

00:18:18.220 | They tried to ban, you know, particular topics in higher ed.

00:18:21.240 | And we're like, "No, this is a joke.

00:18:24.040 | This will be laughed out of court."

00:18:26.840 | And they didn't listen to us and they brought it, they passed it and we sued and we won.

00:18:33.100 | Now they're trying again with something that's equally as unconstitutional and we will sue

00:18:37.360 | again and we will win.

00:18:39.040 | Yeah.

00:18:40.040 | Can you elaborate on the Stop Woke Act?

00:18:41.600 | So this is presumably trying to limit certain topics from being taught in school?

00:18:46.520 | Yeah.

00:18:47.520 | Basically woke topics.

00:18:48.520 | You know, it came out of the sort of attempt to get at critical race theory.

00:18:53.420 | So it's topics related to race, gender, et cetera.

00:18:57.160 | I don't remember exactly how they tried to cabinet to CRT.

00:19:02.840 | But when you actually – the law is really well established that you can't tell higher

00:19:07.400 | education what they're allowed to teach without violating the First Amendment.

00:19:13.380 | And when this got in front of a judge, it was exactly as – he was exactly as skeptical

00:19:19.320 | of it as we thought he'd be.

00:19:20.560 | I think he called this dystopian.

00:19:23.040 | And it wasn't a close call.

00:19:24.800 | So if you're against that kind of teaching, the right way to fight it is by making the

00:19:29.880 | case that it's not a good idea as part of the curriculum as opposed to banning it from

00:19:34.080 | the curriculum.

00:19:35.080 | Yeah.

00:19:36.080 | It just – the state doesn't have the power to simply say – to ban, you know, what teachers

00:19:40.560 | – what professors in higher education teach.

00:19:43.060 | Now it gets a little more complicated when you talk about K-12 because the state has

00:19:47.840 | a role in deciding what public K-12 teaches because they're your kids.

00:19:52.960 | It's taxpayer funded.

00:19:55.040 | And generally the legislature is involved.

00:19:57.920 | There is democratic oversight of that process.

00:20:00.680 | So for K-12, is there also a lean towards the left in terms of the administration that

00:20:05.040 | manages the curriculum?

00:20:06.480 | Yeah.

00:20:07.480 | There definitely is in K-12.

00:20:10.560 | I mean my kids go to public school.

00:20:13.840 | I have a five and a seven-year-old.

00:20:17.320 | And they have lovely teachers.

00:20:20.600 | But we have run into a lot of problems with education schools at fire.

00:20:24.640 | And a lot of the graduates of education school end up being the administrators who clamp

00:20:28.280 | down on free speech in higher education.

00:20:31.240 | And so I've been trying to think of positive ways to take on some of the problems that

00:20:36.200 | I see in K-12.

00:20:37.480 | I thought that the attempt to just dictate you won't teach the following 10 books, you

00:20:43.240 | know, or 20 books or 200 books was the wrong way to do it.

00:20:46.600 | Now when it comes to deciding what books are in the curriculum, again, that's something

00:20:49.840 | the legislature actually can't have some say in.

00:20:52.720 | And that's pretty uncontroversial in terms of the law.

00:20:56.280 | But when it comes to how you fight it, I had something that since I'm kind of stuck with

00:20:59.720 | a formula, I called empowering of the American mind.

00:21:03.240 | I gave principles that were inconsistent with the sort of group think and heavy emphasis

00:21:09.440 | on identity politics that, you know, some of the critics are rightfully complaining

00:21:15.600 | about in K-12.

00:21:17.800 | And that is actually in cancelling of the American mind.

00:21:22.040 | But I have a more detailed explanation of it that I'm going to be putting up on my blog,

00:21:26.200 | the eternally radical idea.

00:21:27.720 | Is it possible to legally, this is a silly question perhaps, create an extra protection

00:21:33.280 | for certain kinds of literature, 1984 or something, to remain in the curriculum?

00:21:38.520 | I mean, it's already, it's all protected, I guess.

00:21:41.080 | I guess to protect against administrators from fiddling too much with the curriculum,

00:21:47.960 | like stabilizing the curriculum.

00:21:49.480 | I don't know what the machinery of the K-12 public school.

00:21:54.000 | In K-12, you know, state legislatures, you know-

00:21:57.000 | They're part of that.

00:21:58.000 | They're part of that.

00:21:59.000 | And they can say like, "You should teach the following books."

00:22:01.080 | Now, of course, people are always a little bit worried that if you, if they were to recommend,

00:22:06.560 | you know, teach the Declaration of Independence, you know, that it will end up being, well,

00:22:11.320 | they're going to teach the Declaration of Independence was just to protect slavery,

00:22:14.360 | which it wasn't.

00:22:15.360 | Yeah.

00:22:16.360 | So teaching a particular topic matters, which textbooks you choose, which perspective you

00:22:19.920 | take, all that kind of stuff.

00:22:20.920 | Yeah.

00:22:21.920 | Of course, there's like, religion starts to creep into the whole question of like, how,

00:22:25.040 | you know, is the Bible, are you allowed to teach, incorporate that into education?

00:22:29.400 | Don't, yeah.

00:22:30.600 | I mean, I'm an atheist with an intense interest in religion.

00:22:35.160 | I actually read the entire Bible this year just because I do stuff like that.

00:22:38.480 | And I never actually had read it from beginning to end.

00:22:40.680 | Then I read the Quran because, you know, and I'm going to try to do the Book of Mormon,

00:22:44.040 | but you know.

00:22:45.040 | Well, I started to, you're so fascinating.

00:22:47.120 | Do you recommend doing that?

00:22:48.600 | I think you should, just to know, because it's such a touchstone in the way people talk

00:22:55.000 | about things.

00:22:56.440 | It can get pretty tedious, but I even made myself read through all of the very specific

00:23:02.380 | instructions on how tall the different parts of the temple need to be and how long the

00:23:07.200 | garbs need to be and what shape they need to be and what, like, and those go on a lot.

00:23:13.720 | That surprisingly, surprisingly big chunk of Exodus.

00:23:17.960 | I thought that was more like in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

00:23:20.880 | But then you get to books like Job, you know, wow.

00:23:24.200 | I mean, Job is such a read and no way Job originally had that ending.

00:23:28.480 | Like Job is basically, it starts out as this perverse bet between God and Satan about whether

00:23:36.300 | or not they can actually make a good man renounce God.

00:23:39.120 | And initially they can't, it's all going very predictably.

00:23:42.040 | And then they finally really torture Job and he turns into the best, why is God cruel?

00:23:49.180 | How could God possibly exist?

00:23:50.680 | How could a kind God do these things?

00:23:52.400 | And he beats, he turns into like the best lawyer in the entire world and he defeats

00:23:55.980 | everyone.

00:23:57.160 | All the people who come to argue with him, he argues the pants off of them.

00:24:01.040 | And then suddenly at the end, God shows up and he's like, well, you know, I am everywhere.

00:24:08.880 | And it's a very confusing answer.

00:24:12.000 | He gives an answer kind of like, I am there when lionesses give birth and I am there.

00:24:16.880 | And by the way, there's this giant monster Leviathan that's very big and it's very scary

00:24:21.300 | and I have to manage the universe.

00:24:23.600 | And I'm kind of like, God, are you saying that you're very busy?

00:24:26.920 | Is that essentially your argument to Job?

00:24:31.160 | And you don't mention the whole kind of like, that I have a bet that's why I was torturing

00:24:37.200 | you.

00:24:38.200 | That doesn't come up.

00:24:39.200 | And then at the end, God decides, Job's like, oh no, you're totally right.

00:24:42.520 | I was totally wrong.

00:24:43.920 | Sorry.

00:24:44.920 | And God says, I'm going to punish those people who tried to argue with you and didn't win.

00:24:50.480 | So he gets rid of the, I don't know exactly what he does to them, I don't remember.

00:24:54.520 | And then he gives Job all his money back and it makes him super prosperous.

00:24:58.680 | And I'm like, no way that was the original ending of that book.

00:25:03.040 | Because this was clearly a beloved novel that they were like, but it can't have that ending.

00:25:08.360 | So it's a long way of saying, I actually think it's worthwhile.

00:25:12.040 | Some of it was, you're always kind of surprised when you end up in the part.

00:25:17.160 | There are parts of it that will sneak up on you.

00:25:19.320 | Kind of like Isaiah's a trip.

00:25:21.240 | Ecclesiastes, Depeche Mode.

00:25:23.240 | And you said you also love the Qur'an.

00:25:26.360 | Yeah, which was fascinating.

00:25:28.040 | So what, it'd be interesting to ask, is there a tension between the study of religious texts

00:25:35.160 | or the following of religion and just believing in God and following the various aspects of

00:25:41.880 | religion with freedom of speech?

00:25:44.960 | In the First Amendment, we have something that we call the religion clause.

00:25:48.960 | And I've never liked calling it just that because it's two brilliant things right next

00:25:52.920 | to each other.

00:25:54.160 | The state may not establish an official religion, but it cannot interfere with your right to

00:25:58.960 | practice your religion.

00:25:59.960 | It's beautiful.

00:26:00.960 | Two things at the same time.

00:26:03.440 | And I think they're both exactly right.

00:26:06.120 | And I think sometimes the right gets very excited of the free exercise clause and the

00:26:09.960 | left gets very excited about establishment.

00:26:12.200 | And I like the fact that we have both of them together.

00:26:15.240 | Now how does this relate to freedom of speech?

00:26:17.720 | And how does it relate to the curriculum like we were talking about?

00:26:21.720 | I actually think it would be great if public schools could teach the Bible, like in the

00:26:27.360 | sense of like read it as a historical document.

00:26:30.200 | But back when I was at the ACLU, every time I saw people trying this, it always turned

00:26:34.160 | into them actually advocating for, you know, a Catholic or a Protestant or some, or Orthodox

00:26:40.040 | even kind of like read on religion.

00:26:43.320 | So if you actually make it into something advocating for a particular view on religion,

00:26:47.640 | then it crosses into the establishment clause side.

00:26:50.700 | So Americans haven't figured out a way to actually teach it.

00:26:53.460 | So it's probably better that you, you know, learn outside of a public school class.

00:26:57.480 | Do you think it's possible to teach religion from like a world religions kind of course

00:27:06.840 | without disrespecting the religions?

00:27:09.640 | I think the answer is it depends on from whose perspective.

00:27:12.400 | Well, like the practitioners say you're like an Orthodox follower of a particular religion.

00:27:19.280 | Is it possible to not piss you off in teaching like all the major religions of the world?

00:27:25.160 | For some people, the bottom line is you have to teach it as true.

00:27:31.800 | And with that, under those conditions, then the answer is no, you can't teach it without

00:27:36.440 | offending someone at least.

00:27:38.280 | Can't you say these people believe it's true?

00:27:40.960 | Can you inform?

00:27:41.960 | So you have to walk on eggshells, essentially.

00:27:44.400 | You can try really hard and you will still make some people angry, but serious people

00:27:49.320 | will be like, "Oh no, you actually tried to be fair to the beliefs here."

00:27:53.400 | And I try to be respectful as much as I can about a lot of this.

00:27:58.400 | I still find myself much more drawn to both Buddhism and Stoicism though.

00:28:05.200 | Where do I go?

00:28:08.200 | One interesting thing to get back to college campuses is FIRE keeps the college free speech

00:28:13.800 | rankings at rankings.thefire.org.

00:28:16.960 | I'm very proud of them.

00:28:17.960 | I highly recommend it because forget even just the ranking, you get to learn a lot about

00:28:21.840 | the universities from this entirely different perspective than people are used to when they

00:28:26.160 | go to pick whatever university they want to go to.

00:28:29.560 | It just gives another perspective on the whole thing.

00:28:32.320 | And it gives quotes from people that are students there and so on about their experiences.

00:28:37.440 | And it gives different, maybe you could speak to the various measures here before we talk

00:28:42.240 | about who's in the top five and who's in the bottom five.

00:28:45.720 | What are the different parameters that contribute to the evaluation?

00:28:50.320 | So people have been asking me since day one to do a ranking of schools according to freedom

00:28:54.840 | of speech.

00:28:55.840 | And even though we have the best database in existence of campus speech codes, policies

00:29:03.240 | that universities have that violate First Amendment or First Amendment norms, we also

00:29:07.400 | have the best database of what we call the disinvitation database.

00:29:12.240 | But it's actually the, it's better named the deplatforming database, which is what we're

00:29:16.160 | going to call it.

00:29:17.760 | And these are all cases where somebody was invited as a speaker to campus and they were

00:29:22.880 | disinvited.

00:29:23.880 | Disinvited or deplatforming also includes shouting down.

00:29:27.280 | So they showed up and they couldn't really speak.

00:29:30.600 | Yeah, exactly.

00:29:33.800 | And so having that, what we really needed in order to have some serious social science

00:29:38.200 | to really make a serious argument about what the ranking was, was to be able to one, get

00:29:43.760 | a better sense of how many professors were actually getting punished during this time.

00:29:49.120 | And then the biggest missing element was to be able to ask students directly what the

00:29:55.800 | environment was like on that campus for freedom of speech.

00:29:58.920 | Are you comfortable disagreeing with each other?

00:30:00.820 | Are you comfortable disagreeing with your professors?

00:30:03.920 | Do you think violence is acceptable in response to a speaker?

00:30:07.360 | Do you think shouting down is okay?

00:30:09.920 | Do you think blocking people's access to a speaker is okay?

00:30:14.960 | And once we were able to get all those elements together, we first did a test run, I think

00:30:20.400 | in 2019 of about 50.

00:30:22.720 | And we've been doing it for four years now, always trying to make the methodology more

00:30:26.980 | and more precise to better reflect the actual environment at particular schools.

00:30:32.780 | And this year, the number one school was Michigan Technological University, which was a nice

00:30:37.840 | surprise.

00:30:38.840 | The number two school was actually Auburn University, which was nice to see.

00:30:44.720 | In the top 10, the most well-known prestigious school is actually UVA, which did really well

00:30:49.360 | this year.

00:30:50.360 | University of Chicago was not happy that they weren't number one, but University of Chicago

00:30:54.880 | was 13, and they had been number one or in the top three for years prior to that.

00:31:00.200 | Really?

00:31:01.200 | So can you explain?

00:31:02.200 | It's almost surprising.

00:31:03.200 | Is it because of the really strong economics departments and things like this or why?

00:31:07.320 | They had a case involving a student.

00:31:09.340 | They wouldn't recognize a chapter of Turning Point USA.

00:31:12.640 | And they made a very classic argument that we, and classic in the bad way, that we hear

00:31:18.120 | campuses across the country, "Oh, we have a campus Republicans, so we don't need this

00:31:22.480 | additional conservative group."

00:31:23.880 | And we're like, "No, I'm sorry."

00:31:26.160 | We've seen dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of attempts to get this one particular conservative

00:31:32.000 | student group derecognized or not recognized.

00:31:36.720 | And so we told them, like, "Listen, we told them at FIRE that we consider this serious,"

00:31:43.760 | and they wouldn't recognize the group.

00:31:45.420 | So that's a point down in our ranking, and it was enough to knock them from—they probably

00:31:51.400 | would have been number two in the rankings.

00:31:53.620 | But now they're 13 out of 248.

00:31:56.080 | They're still one of the best schools in the country.

00:31:57.720 | I have no problem saying that.

00:32:00.080 | The school that did not do so well at a negative 10.69, negative 10.69, and we rounded up to

00:32:09.920 | zero, was Harvard.

00:32:11.520 | And Harvard has been not very happy with that result.

00:32:15.400 | The only school to receive the abysmal ranking.

00:32:18.000 | Yeah.

00:32:19.000 | And there are a couple people—

00:32:20.000 | Oh, Harvard.

00:32:21.000 | Oh, Harvard.

00:32:22.000 | There are a couple people who have actually been really, I think, making a mistake by

00:32:25.360 | getting very Harvard-sounding, by being like, "I've had statisticians look at this, and

00:32:31.120 | they think your methodology is a joke," and pointing out, "And this case wasn't that

00:32:35.200 | important, and that scholar wasn't—that scholar—"

00:32:37.640 | Like one of the arguments against one of the scholars that we counted against them for

00:32:40.920 | punishing, was that that wasn't a very famous or influential scholar.

00:32:46.360 | So your argument seems to be snobbery, like essentially that you're not understanding

00:32:54.400 | our methodology, for one thing.

00:32:56.240 | And then you're saying that actually that scholar wasn't important enough to count.

00:33:00.240 | And by the way, Harvard—by the way, Harvard—

00:33:04.960 | If we—

00:33:05.960 | It's the Harvard account, right?

00:33:08.960 | Even if we took all of your arguments as true, even if we decided to get rid of those two

00:33:13.760 | professors, you would still be in negative numbers.

00:33:17.360 | You would still be dead last.

00:33:18.880 | You would still be after Georgetown and Penn, and neither of those schools are good for

00:33:22.520 | freedom of speech.

00:33:23.520 | We should say the bottom five is the University of Pennsylvania, like you said, Penn, the

00:33:28.360 | University of South Carolina, Georgetown University, and Fordham University.

00:33:32.680 | All very well-earned.

00:33:33.920 | They have so many bad cases at all of those schools.

00:33:36.720 | What's the best way to find yourself in the bottom five if you're a university?

00:33:41.120 | What's the fastest way to that negative, to that zero?

00:33:43.560 | A lot of deplatforming.

00:33:47.120 | When we looked at the bottom five, 81% of attempts to get speakers deplatformed were

00:33:52.480 | successful at the bottom five.

00:33:55.120 | There were a couple of schools, I think Penn included, where every single attempt, every

00:33:59.160 | time a student objected, a student group objected to that speaker coming, they canceled the

00:34:04.480 | speech.

00:34:05.480 | And I think Georgetown was 100% successful.

00:34:07.400 | I think Penn had 100% success rate.

00:34:10.080 | I think Harvard did stand up for a couple, but mostly people got deplatformed there as

00:34:15.320 | well.

00:34:16.320 | - So how do you push back on deplatforming?

00:34:19.000 | Who would do it?

00:34:20.000 | Is it other students?

00:34:21.600 | Is it faculty?

00:34:22.600 | Is it the administration?

00:34:23.760 | What's the dynamics of pushing back of, basically, 'cause I imagine some of it is culture, but

00:34:33.240 | I imagine every university has a bunch of students who will protest basically every

00:34:37.360 | speaker.

00:34:38.360 | How do you respond to that protest?

00:34:40.320 | - Well, here's the dirty little secret about the big change in 2014.

00:34:46.000 | And Fire and me and Hite have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus

00:34:51.000 | was that for most of my career, students were great on freedom of speech.

00:34:55.520 | They were the best constituency for free speech, absolutely unambiguously, until about 2013,

00:35:01.480 | 2014.

00:35:02.600 | And it was only in 2014 where we had this very kind of sad for us experience where suddenly

00:35:07.200 | students were the ones advocating for deplatforming and new speech codes, kind of in a similar

00:35:12.360 | way that they had been doing in, say, like the mid '80s, for example.

00:35:16.340 | But here's the dirty little secret.

00:35:18.200 | It's not just the students.

00:35:20.720 | It's students and administrators, sometimes only a handful of them, though, working together

00:35:25.560 | to create some of these problems.

00:35:28.280 | And this was exactly what happened at Stanford when Kyle Duncan, a Fifth Circuit judge, tried

00:35:33.340 | to speak at my alma mater and a fifth of the class showed up to shout him down.

00:35:38.740 | It was a real showing of what was going on that 10 minutes into the shout down of a Fifth

00:35:45.400 | Circuit judge, and I keep on emphasizing that because I'm a constitutional lawyer.

00:35:48.240 | Fifth Circuit judges are big deals.

00:35:50.680 | They're one level below the Supreme Court.

00:35:53.600 | You know, about a fifth of the school shows up to shout him down.

00:35:56.760 | After 10 minutes of shouting him down, an administrator, a DEI administrator, gets up

00:36:00.760 | with a prepared speech that she's written.

00:36:03.440 | That's a seven-minute long speech where she talks about free speech.

00:36:07.800 | Maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

00:36:09.920 | And we're at this law school where people could learn to challenge these norms.

00:36:15.020 | So it's clear that there was coordination, you know, amongst some of these administrators.

00:36:19.280 | And from talking to students there, they were in meetings, extensive meetings for a long

00:36:23.360 | time.

00:36:24.360 | They show up, do a shout down.

00:36:25.720 | Then they take additional seven minutes to lecture the speaker on free speech not being

00:36:32.440 | – the juice of free speech not being worth the squeeze.

00:36:36.520 | And then for the rest of it, it's just constant heckling after she leaves.

00:36:42.040 | This is clearly – and something very similar, you know, happened a number of times at Yale

00:36:46.280 | where it was very clearly administrators were helping along with a lot of these disruptions.

00:36:51.440 | So I think every time there is a shout down at a university, the investigation should

00:36:56.780 | be first and foremost, did administrators help create this problem?

00:37:03.080 | Did they do anything to stop it?

00:37:05.320 | Because I think a lot of what's really going on here is the hyper-bureaucratization of

00:37:08.560 | universities with a lot more ideological people who think of their primary job as basically

00:37:13.840 | like policing speech more or less.

00:37:16.200 | They're encouraging students – sorry, they're encouraging students who have opinions they

00:37:20.000 | like to do shout downs.

00:37:23.200 | And that's why they really need to investigate this.

00:37:26.600 | And it is at Stanford, the administrator who gave the prepared remarks about the juice

00:37:32.840 | not being worth the squeeze, she has not been invited back to Stanford.

00:37:36.260 | But she's one of the only examples I can think of when these things happen a lot where

00:37:40.440 | an administrator clearly facilitated something that was a shout down or a deplatforming or

00:37:45.580 | resulted in a professor getting fired or resulted in a student getting expelled, where the administrator

00:37:51.120 | has got off scot-free or probably in some cases even got a promotion.

00:37:55.560 | And so a small number of administrators, maybe even a single administrator, could participate

00:38:01.960 | in the encouraging and the organization and thereby empower the whole process.

00:38:06.360 | And that's something I've seen throughout my entire career.

00:38:08.520 | And the only thing is it's kind of hard to catch this sort of in the act, so to speak.

00:38:12.040 | And that's one of the reasons why it's helpful for people to know about this, you

00:38:14.680 | know, because there was this amazing case.

00:38:19.380 | This was at University of Washington.

00:38:21.240 | And we actually featured this in a documentary made in 2015, that came out in 2015, 2016,

00:38:27.400 | called Can We Take a Joke?

00:38:29.520 | And this was when we started noticing something was changing on campus.

00:38:32.560 | We also heard that comedians were saying that they couldn't use their good humor anymore.

00:38:36.460 | This was right around the time that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock said that they couldn't

00:38:40.320 | – they didn't want to play on campuses because they couldn't be funny.

00:38:45.480 | But we featured a case of a comedian who wanted to do a musical called The Passion of the

00:38:50.600 | Musical, making fun of the Passion of the Christ, with the stated goal of offending

00:38:54.800 | everyone, every group equally.

00:38:56.520 | It was very much a South Park mission.

00:39:00.640 | And it's an unusual case because we actually got documentation of administrators buying

00:39:07.040 | tickets for angry students and holding an event where they trained them to jump up in

00:39:14.160 | the middle of it and shout, "I'm offended!"

00:39:16.080 | Like they bought them tickets, they sent them to this thing with the goal of shouting it

00:39:21.440 | down.

00:39:22.440 | Now unsurprisingly, when you send an angry group of students to shut down a play, it's

00:39:28.080 | not going to end at just, "I'm offended."

00:39:31.640 | And it got heated.

00:39:32.640 | There were death threats being thrown.

00:39:36.320 | And then the Pullman, Washington police told Chris Lee, the guy who made the play, that

00:39:42.400 | they wouldn't actually protect him.

00:39:43.800 | Now, it's not every day you're going to have that kind of hard evidence that – of

00:39:47.960 | actually seeing the administrators be so brazen that they recorded the fact that they bought

00:39:53.520 | them tickets and sent them.

00:39:55.120 | But I think a lot of that stuff is going on.

00:39:58.400 | And I think it's a good excuse to cut down on one of the big problems in higher education

00:40:03.240 | today, which is hyper-bureaucratization.

00:40:04.240 | In your experience, is there a distinction between administrators and faculty in terms

00:40:09.240 | of perpetrators of these kinds of things?

00:40:13.240 | So if we got rid of all – like Harvey's talked about getting rid of a large percentage

00:40:18.440 | of the administration, does that help fix the problem or is the faculty also – small

00:40:25.200 | percent of the faculty also part of the encouraging and the organization of these kind of cancel

00:40:29.480 | models?

00:40:30.480 | Yeah.

00:40:31.480 | And that's something that has been profoundly disappointing, is that when you look at the

00:40:35.400 | huge uptick in attempts to get professors fired that we've seen over the last 10 years,

00:40:41.160 | and actually over the last 22 years, as far back as our records go, at first, they were

00:40:48.080 | overwhelmingly led by administrators, attempts to get professors punished.

00:40:53.680 | And that was most – I'd say that was my career up until 2013 was fighting back at

00:40:58.200 | administrative excesses.

00:41:00.400 | Then you start having the problem in 2014 of students trying to get people canceled.

00:41:05.000 | And that really accelerated in 2017.

00:41:07.240 | And the number – so one way that – one thing that makes it easier to document are

00:41:11.560 | the petitions to get professors fired or punished and how disproportionately that those actually

00:41:16.920 | do come from students.

00:41:18.240 | But another big uptick has been fellow professors demanding that their fellow professors get

00:41:24.240 | punished.

00:41:25.240 | And that to me –

00:41:26.240 | It makes me really sad.

00:41:27.240 | It's kind of shameful.

00:41:28.240 | You shouldn't be proud of signing the petition to get your fellow professor.

00:41:32.720 | And what's even more shameful is that we get – this has almost become a cliche within

00:41:39.960 | FIRE.

00:41:40.960 | When someone is facing one of these cancellation campaigns as a professor, I would get letters

00:41:45.320 | from some of my friends saying, "I am so sorry this has happened to you."

00:41:50.440 | And these were the same people who publicly signed the petition to get them fired.

00:41:54.920 | Yeah.

00:41:56.360 | Yeah.

00:41:57.760 | Yeah, integrity.

00:42:00.360 | Integrity is an important thing in this world.

00:42:02.640 | And I think some of it – I'm so surprised people don't stand up more for this.

00:42:09.200 | Because there's so much hunger for it.

00:42:11.560 | And if you have the guts as a faculty or an administrator to really stand up with eloquence,

00:42:21.040 | with rigor, with integrity, I feel like it's impossible for anyone to do anything.

00:42:28.120 | Because there's such a hunger – it's so refreshing.

00:42:31.240 | I think everybody agrees that freedom of speech is a good thing.

00:42:36.240 | Oh, I don't –

00:42:37.240 | Okay, sorry, sorry.

00:42:38.240 | I don't agree.

00:42:39.920 | I think the majority of people, even at the universities, that there's a hunger, but

00:42:43.440 | it's almost like this kind of nervousness around it because there's a small number

00:42:48.400 | of loud voices that are doing the shouting.

00:42:51.440 | So I mean, again, that's where great leadership comes in.

00:42:54.640 | And so presidents of universities should probably be making clear declarations of like, "This

00:43:01.160 | is a place where we value the freedom of expression."

00:43:05.920 | And this was all throughout my career.

00:43:08.160 | A president, a university president who puts their foot down early and says, "Nope.

00:43:14.120 | We are not entertaining firing this professor.

00:43:16.940 | We are not expelling this student."

00:43:18.620 | It ends the issue often, very fast.

00:43:21.920 | Although sometimes – and this is where you can really tell the administrative involvement

00:43:24.760 | – students will do things like take over the president's office, and then that takeover

00:43:29.960 | will be catered by the university.

00:43:32.420 | People point this out sometimes as being kind of like, "Oh, it's clearly –" like

00:43:36.340 | my friend Sam Abrams when they tried to get him fired at Sarah Lawrence College.

00:43:42.740 | And that was one of the times that it was used as kind of like, "Oh, this was hostile

00:43:47.600 | to the university because the students took over the president's office."

00:43:51.380 | And I'm like, "No, they let them take over the president's office."

00:43:54.020 | And I don't know if that was one of the cases in which the takeover was catered, but

00:43:58.020 | if there was ever sort of like a sign that's kind of like, "Yes, this is actually really

00:44:02.500 | quite friendly."

00:44:03.500 | Yeah.

00:44:04.500 | Well, in some sense, like protesting and having really strong opinions, even like ridiculous,

00:44:07.580 | crazy, wild opinions is a good thing.

00:44:09.900 | It's just it shouldn't lead to actual firing or deplatforming of people.

00:44:14.100 | Like it's good to protest.

00:44:15.100 | It's just not good for a university to support that and take action based on it.

00:44:20.100 | And this is one of those like tensions in First Amendment that actually I think has

00:44:24.260 | a pretty easy release, essentially.

00:44:26.780 | You absolutely have the right to devote your life to ending freedom of speech and ridiculing

00:44:34.540 | it as a concept.

00:44:36.380 | And there are people who really can come off as very contemptible about even the philosophy

00:44:41.420 | of freedom of speech.

00:44:43.260 | And we will defend your right to do that.

00:44:45.120 | We will also disagree with you.

00:44:47.820 | And if you try to get a professor fired, we will be on the other side of that.

00:44:50.980 | Now, I think you had Randy Kennedy, who I really love him.

00:44:54.740 | I think he's a great guy.

00:44:56.220 | But he criticized us for our deplatforming database as saying, "This is saying that

00:45:02.620 | students can't protest speakers."

00:45:04.780 | I'm like, "Okay, that's silly."

00:45:07.420 | We at FIRE as an organization have defended the right to protest all the time.

00:45:11.700 | We are constantly defending the rights of protesters.

00:45:15.100 | Not believing the protesters have the right to say this would—basically, that would

00:45:19.700 | be punishing the speakers.

00:45:21.740 | We're not calling for punishing the protesters.

00:45:25.340 | But what we are saying is you can't let the protesters win if they're demanding someone

00:45:29.060 | be fired for their freedom of speech.

00:45:31.260 | So, the line there is between protesters protesting and the university taking action based on

00:45:39.580 | the protest.

00:45:40.580 | Yeah, exactly.

00:45:41.580 | And of course, shout downs.

00:45:42.580 | That's just mob censorship.

00:45:44.660 | And that's something where the university—the way you deal with that tension in First Amendment

00:45:49.700 | law is essentially kind of like the one positive duty that the government has.

00:45:53.900 | First, the negative duty, the thing that it's not allowed to do is censor you.

00:45:58.460 | But its positive duty is that if I want to say awful things or, for that matter, great

00:46:03.300 | things that aren't popular in a public park, you can't let the crowd just shout me down.

00:46:09.420 | You can't allow what's called a heckler's veto.

00:46:12.380 | Heckler's veto.

00:46:14.260 | That's so interesting because I feel like that comes into play on social media as well.

00:46:19.620 | There's this whole discussion about censorship and freedom of speech, but to me, the carrot

00:46:25.140 | question is almost more interesting once the freedom of speech is established is how do

00:46:30.860 | you incentivize high-quality debate and disagreement?

00:46:33.700 | I'm thinking a lot about that.

00:46:35.940 | And that's one of the things we talk about in Canceling the American Mind is arguing

00:46:38.620 | towards truth and that cancel culture is cruel, it's merciless, it's anti-intellectual, but

00:46:46.260 | it also will never get you anywhere near truth and you are going to waste so much time destroying

00:46:50.980 | your opponents in something that can actually never get you to truth through the process,

00:46:56.100 | of course, of you never actually get directly at truth.

00:46:58.500 | You just chip away at falsity.

00:47:00.180 | Yeah.

00:47:01.180 | But everybody having a megaphone on the internet with anonymity, it seems like it's better

00:47:07.620 | than censorship, but it feels like there's incentives on top of that you can construct

00:47:15.860 | to incentivize better discourse.

00:47:19.940 | Yeah.

00:47:20.940 | To incentivize somebody who puts a huge amount of effort to make even the most ridiculous

00:47:25.140 | arguments, but basically ones that don't include any of the things you highlight in terms of

00:47:30.620 | all the rhetorical tricks to shut down conversations.

00:47:35.260 | Just make really good arguments for whatever, it doesn't matter if it's communism, for fascism,

00:47:41.220 | whatever the heck you want to say, but do it with scale, with historical context, with

00:47:48.100 | steel man on the other side, all those kind of elements.

00:47:50.500 | We try to make three major points in the book.

00:47:53.340 | One is just simply cancel culture is real, it's a historic era, and it's on a historic

00:47:59.340 | scale.

00:48:00.420 | The second one is you should think of cancel culture as part of a rhetorical, as a larger

00:48:06.740 | lazy rhetorical approach to what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments.

00:48:14.300 | We mean that in two senses, without having winning arguments or actually having won arguments.

00:48:19.580 | We talk about all the different what we call rhetorical fortresses that both the left and

00:48:23.740 | the right have that prevent you from, that allow you to just dismiss the person or dodge

00:48:30.540 | the argument without actually ever getting to the substance of the argument.

00:48:33.980 | Third part is just how do we fix it.

00:48:36.300 | But the rhetorical fortress stuff is actually something I've been very passionate about

00:48:40.100 | because it interferes with our ability to get at truth and it wastes time and frankly

00:48:45.580 | it also, since cancel culture is part of that rhetorical tactic, it can also ruin lives.

00:48:50.580 | - It would actually be really fun to talk about this particular aspect of the book and

00:48:54.580 | I highly recommend if you're listening to this, go pre-order the book now.

00:49:00.700 | When does it come out?

00:49:01.700 | - October 17th.

00:49:02.700 | - Okay, The Cancelling of the American Mind.

00:49:04.100 | Okay, so in the book you also have a list of cheap rhetorical tactics that both the

00:49:11.660 | left and the right use and then you have a list of tactics that the left uses and the

00:49:18.620 | right uses.

00:49:19.620 | So there's the rhetorical, the perfect rhetorical fortress that the left uses and the efficient

00:49:24.700 | rhetorical fortress that the right uses.

00:49:27.560 | First one is whataboutism.

00:49:29.860 | Maybe we can go through a few of them that capture your heart in this particular moment

00:49:33.620 | as we talk about it and if you can describe examples of it or if there's aspects of it

00:49:41.220 | that you see that are especially effective.

00:49:44.220 | So whataboutism is defending against criticism of your side by bringing up the other side's

00:49:49.180 | alleged wrongdoing.

00:49:51.540 | - I want to make little cards of these, of all of these tactics and start using them

00:49:56.620 | on X all the time because they are so commonly deployed and whataboutism I put first for

00:50:02.260 | a reason.

00:50:03.260 | - You know, it'd be an interesting idea to actually integrate that into Twitter/X where

00:50:07.900 | people instead of clicking heart, they can click which of the rhetorical tactics this

00:50:14.900 | is and then, because you know there's actually community notes.

00:50:18.180 | I don't know if you've seen on X that people can contribute notes and it's quite fascinating.

00:50:24.540 | It works really, really well.

00:50:26.300 | But to give it a little more structure, that's a really interesting method actually.

00:50:30.460 | - Yeah, I actually, when I was thinking about ways that X could be used to argue towards

00:50:35.180 | truth, I wouldn't want to have it so that everybody would be bound to that, but I think

00:50:40.100 | that, I imagine it almost being like a stream within X that was truth-focused that agrees

00:50:46.300 | to some additional rules on how they would argue.

00:50:48.860 | - Man, I would love that.

00:50:50.980 | Where like there's, in terms of streams that intersect and can be separated, the shit-talking

00:50:56.660 | one where people just enjoy talking shit.

00:50:59.260 | - Go for it, man.

00:51:00.260 | - And then there's like truth and then there's humor, then there's like good vibes.

00:51:09.500 | I'm not like somebody who absolutely needs good vibes all the time, but sometimes it's

00:51:14.460 | nice to just log in and not have to see the drama, the fighting, the bickering, the cancellations,

00:51:22.260 | the moms, all of this.

00:51:23.260 | It's good to just see.

00:51:24.260 | That's why I go to Reddit, R-AW, or like one of the cute animals ones where there's cute

00:51:31.100 | puppies and kittens and it's like--

00:51:32.500 | - I just want to see Ryan Reynolds singing with Will Ferrell.

00:51:36.420 | Sometimes that's all you need.

00:51:37.420 | - I need that in my heart.

00:51:38.420 | - Yeah.

00:51:39.420 | Not all the time, just a little bit.

00:51:40.420 | And then right back to the battle for truth.

00:51:43.700 | - Okay, so whataboutism.

00:51:45.260 | - Whataboutism, yeah, that's everywhere when you look at it, when you look at Twitter,

00:51:49.620 | when you look at social media in general.

00:51:52.060 | And the first, what we call the obstacle course is basically time-tested, old-fashioned, argumentative

00:51:59.620 | dodges that everybody uses.

00:52:01.420 | And whataboutism is just bringing up something, like someone makes an argument like Biden

00:52:06.100 | is corrupt and then someone says, well, Trump was worse.

00:52:10.140 | And that's not an illegitimate argument to make back, but it does, it seems to happen

00:52:16.740 | every time someone makes an assertion, someone just points out some other thing that was

00:52:19.460 | going on.

00:52:20.460 | And it can get increasingly attenuated from what you're actually trying to argue.

00:52:24.900 | And you see this all the time on social media.

00:52:28.260 | And it's kind of, I was a big fan of Jon Stewart's Daily Show, but an awful lot of what the humor

00:52:33.740 | was and what the tactic was for arguing was this thing over here.

00:52:37.100 | It's like, oh, I'm making this argument about this important problem.

00:52:39.580 | Oh, actually, there's this other problem over here that I'm more concerned about.

00:52:44.500 | And let's pick on the right here.

00:52:48.260 | So January 6, watching everybody arguing about CHOP, like the occupied part of Seattle or

00:52:56.940 | the occupied part of Portland, and basically trying to like, oh, you're bringing up the

00:53:02.380 | riot on January 6.

00:53:03.380 | And by the way, I live on Capitol Hill, so believe me, I was very aware of how scary

00:53:08.300 | and bad it was.

00:53:09.860 | You know, like I just, my dad grew up in Yugoslavia and that was a night where we all ate dinner

00:53:14.700 | in the basement because I'm like, oh, when the shit goes down, eat in the basement.

00:53:18.740 | It was genuinely scary.

00:53:20.940 | And people would try to deflect from January 6 being serious by actually making the argument

00:53:26.220 | that, oh, well, there are crazy, horrible things happening in all over the country,

00:53:30.820 | you know, riots that came from some of the social justice protests.

00:53:35.980 | And of course, the answer is you can be concerned about both of these things and find them both

00:53:40.340 | problems.

00:53:41.380 | But you know, if I'm arguing about CHOP, you know, someone bringing up January 6 isn't

00:53:46.380 | super relevant to it.

00:53:47.860 | Or if I'm arguing about January 6, someone bringing up the riots in 2020 isn't that helpful.

00:53:53.260 | We took a long, dark journey from whataboutism.

00:53:56.580 | And related to that is strawmanning and steelmanning.

00:53:59.740 | So misrepresenting the perspective of the opposing perspective.

00:54:05.660 | And this is something also, I guess, it's very prevalent.

00:54:10.460 | And it's difficult to do the reverse of that, which is steelmanning.

00:54:14.260 | It requires empathy, it requires eloquence, it requires understanding, actually doing

00:54:18.980 | the research and understanding the alternative perspective.

00:54:23.260 | - My wonderful employee, Angel Andorado, has something that he calls starmanning.

00:54:27.940 | And I find myself doing this a lot.

00:54:29.940 | It's nice to have, you know, two immigrant parents, because I remember being in San Francisco,

00:54:36.500 | in the weird kind of like, ACLU slash Burning Man kind of cohort.

00:54:43.060 | And having a friend there who was an artist who would talk about hating Kansas.

00:54:48.820 | And that was his metaphor for middle America, is what he meant by it.

00:54:53.380 | And but he was kind of proud of the fact that he hated Kansas.

00:54:57.060 | And I'm like, you gotta understand, I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners.

00:55:02.180 | And think about like, change the name of Kansas to Croatia, you know, change the name of Kansas

00:55:08.620 | to some, that's what it sounds like to me.

00:55:12.100 | And the starmanning idea, which I like, is the idea of being like, so you're saying that

00:55:16.820 | you really hate your dominant religious minority.

00:55:20.700 | And that's when you start actually detaching yourself a little bit from it.

00:55:24.300 | How typical?

00:55:26.340 | America is exceptional in a number of ways.

00:55:28.140 | But some of our dynamics are incredibly typical.

00:55:31.400 | It's one of the reasons why like, when people start reading Thomas Sowell, for example,

00:55:34.940 | they start getting hooked.

00:55:35.940 | Because one of the things he does, is he does comparative analysis of countries problems

00:55:40.220 | and points out that some of these things that we think are just unique to the United States

00:55:43.700 | exist in, you know, 75% of the rest of the countries in the world.

00:55:48.500 | Francis Fukuyama's, the book that I'm reading right now, Origins of the Political Order,

00:55:52.980 | actually does this wonderful job of pointing out how we're not special in a variety of

00:55:56.940 | ways.

00:55:57.940 | This is actually something that's very much on my mind.

00:56:00.300 | And Fukuyama, of course, it's a great book.

00:56:05.180 | It's not, it's stilted a little bit in its writing.

00:56:09.140 | Because his term for one of the things he's concerned about what destroys societies is

00:56:12.900 | repatriomonialization, which is the reversion to societies in which you favor your family

00:56:22.620 | and friends.

00:56:24.540 | And I actually think a lot of what I'm seeing in sort of in the United States, it makes

00:56:30.100 | me worried that we might be going through a little bit of a process of repatriomonialization.

00:56:34.100 | And I think that's one of the reasons why people are so angry.

00:56:35.940 | I think having, I think the prospect that we, you know, we very nearly seem to have

00:56:42.380 | an election that was going to be, you know, Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton.

00:56:46.300 | It's like, are we a dynastic country now?

00:56:48.940 | Is that what's kind of happening?

00:56:50.860 | But also it's one of the reasons why people are getting so angry about legacy admissions,

00:56:54.620 | about like how much, you know, certain families seem to be able to keep their people in the

00:56:59.940 | upper classes of the United States perpetually.

00:57:02.780 | And believe me, like I was poor when I was a kid and I went to, and I got to go to, I

00:57:07.580 | got to go to one of the fancies.

00:57:08.820 | I got to go to Stanford.

00:57:12.060 | And I got to see how people, they treat you differently in a way that's almost insulting.

00:57:20.140 | Like basically like suddenly to a certain kind of person, I was a legitimate person.

00:57:25.620 | And I look at how much America relies on Harvard, on Yale to produce its, I'm going to use a

00:57:32.380 | very Marxist sounding term, ruling class.

00:57:35.500 | And that's one of the reasons why you have to be particularly worried about what goes

00:57:38.940 | on at these elite colleges.

00:57:40.900 | And these elite colleges with the exception of University of Chicago and UVA do really

00:57:46.020 | badly regarding freedom of speech.

00:57:48.980 | And that has all sorts of problems.

00:57:52.740 | It doesn't bode well for the future of the protection of freedom of speech for the rest

00:57:56.240 | of the society.

00:57:57.240 | So can you also empathize there with the folks who voted for Donald Trump?

00:58:04.700 | Because as precisely that as a resistance to this kind of momentum of the ruling class,

00:58:14.780 | this royalty that passes on the rule from generation to generation.

00:58:20.020 | I try really hard to empathize with to a degree everybody and try to really see where they're

00:58:25.680 | coming from.

00:58:27.640 | And the anger on the right, I get it.

00:58:30.500 | I mean like I feel like the book, so "Coddling the American Mind" was a book that could be

00:58:38.020 | sort of a crowd pleaser to a degree, partially because we really meant what we said in the

00:58:43.780 | subtitle that these are good intentions and bad ideas that are hurting people.

00:58:50.440 | And if you understand it and read the book, you can say it's like, "Okay, this isn't anybody

00:58:53.940 | being malicious.

00:58:57.180 | This is people trying to protect their kids.

00:58:58.740 | They're just doing it in a way that actually can actually lead to greater anxiety, depression,

00:59:03.380 | and strangely, eventually pose a threat to freedom of speech."

00:59:08.280 | But in this one, we can't be quite—me and my—oh, I haven't even mentioned my brilliant

00:59:13.020 | co-author, Rikki Schlatt, a 23-year-old genius.

00:59:18.100 | She's amazing.

00:59:19.100 | I started working with her when she was 20, who's my co-author on this book.

00:59:22.300 | So when I'm saying we, I'm talking about me and Rikki.

00:59:24.620 | She's a libertarian.

00:59:25.620 | A libertarian journalist.

00:59:27.300 | And a journalist, yeah, a brilliant mind.

00:59:30.740 | But we can't actually write this in a way that's too kind because counselors aren't kind.

00:59:35.620 | There's a cruelty and a mercilessness about it.

00:59:38.060 | I mean, I started getting really depressed this past year when I was writing it, and

00:59:41.940 | I didn't even want to tell my staff why I was getting so anxious and depressed.

00:59:45.220 | It's partially because I'm talking about people who will, you know, in some of the cases we're

00:59:50.100 | talking about, go to your house, target your kids.

00:59:54.500 | So that's a long-winded way of saying the—I kind of can get what sort of drives the right

01:00:01.780 | nuts to a degree in this.

01:00:03.220 | I feel like they're constantly feeling like they're being gaslit.

01:00:08.180 | Elite education is really insulting to the working class.

01:00:12.780 | Like part of the ideology that is dominant right now kind of treats almost 70% of the

01:00:18.660 | American public like they're—we developed this a little bit in The Perfect Rhetorical

01:00:22.580 | Fortress—like they're to some way illegitimate and not worthy of respect or compassion.

01:00:30.220 | Yeah, the general elitism that radiates, self-fueling elitism that radiates from the people that

01:00:38.140 | go to these institutions.

01:00:40.420 | And what's funny is the elitism has been repackaged as a kind of—it masquerades as

01:00:49.340 | kind of infinite compassion, that essentially it's based in a sort of very, to be frank,

01:00:56.100 | overly simple ideology, an oversimplified explanation of the world, breaking people

01:01:01.820 | into groups and judging people on how oppressed they are on the intersection of their various

01:01:08.540 | identities.

01:01:10.540 | And it came to that, I think, initially with an added appeal from a compassionate core,

01:01:17.140 | but it gets used in a way that can be very cruel, very dismissive, compassionless, and

01:01:24.860 | allows you to not take seriously most of your fellow human beings.

01:01:28.860 | It's really weird how that happened.

01:01:30.820 | Maybe you can explore why a thing that has—kind of sounds good at first—can be, can create,

01:01:41.500 | can become such a cruel weapon of canceling and hurting people and ignoring people.

01:01:46.660 | I mean, this is what you described with the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, which is a set

01:01:50.780 | of questions.

01:01:51.780 | Maybe you can elaborate on what the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress is.

01:01:55.100 | Yeah, so the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress is the way that's been developed on the left

01:02:01.780 | to not ever get to someone's actual argument.

01:02:05.180 | I want to make a chart, like a flow chart of this, about like, "Here's the argument

01:02:08.660 | and here is this perfect fortress that will deflect you every time from getting to the

01:02:13.700 | argument."

01:02:14.700 | And I started to notice this, certainly, when I was in law school, that there were lots

01:02:18.620 | of different ways you could dismiss people.

01:02:20.660 | And Perfect Rhetorical Fortress step one—and I can attest to this because I was guilty

01:02:26.300 | of this as well—that you can dismiss people if you can argue that they're conservative.

01:02:31.740 | They don't have to be conservative, to be clear.

01:02:34.600 | You just have to say that they are.

01:02:36.860 | So I never read Thomas Sowell because he was a right-winger.

01:02:40.940 | I didn't read Camille Paglia because I was—someone had convinced me she was a right-winger.

01:02:46.020 | There were lots of authors that—and when I was in law school, among a lot of very bright

01:02:51.940 | people, it really was already an intellectual habit that if you could designate something

01:02:57.880 | conservative, then you didn't really have to think about it very much anymore or take

01:03:01.020 | it particularly seriously.

01:03:02.020 | This is a childish way of arguing, but nonetheless, I engaged in it.

01:03:07.100 | It was a common tactic.

01:03:08.100 | I even mentioned in the book there was a time when a gay activist friend who was, I think,

01:03:14.980 | steadily to my left, but nonetheless had that pragmatic experience of actually being an

01:03:18.980 | activist said something like, "Well, just because someone's conservative doesn't mean

01:03:22.140 | they're wrong."

01:03:23.140 | And I remember feeling kind of scandalized at some level, just being like, "Whoa, that's

01:03:27.540 | kind of—isn't that the whole thing we're saying, is that they're just kind of bad people

01:03:30.540 | with bad ideas?"

01:03:31.540 | You can just throw, "Oh, that guy's a right-winger."

01:03:34.380 | You can just throw that.

01:03:35.380 | Boop.

01:03:36.380 | Don't have to think about you anymore.

01:03:37.380 | Yeah, and then it can—if you're popular enough, it can be kind of sticky.

01:03:43.820 | It's weird because it's effective.

01:03:46.640 | That's why it keeps on getting used.

01:03:48.460 | Essentially, it should have hit someone's—because I have a great liberal pedigree, everything

01:03:56.160 | from working at the ACLU to doing refugee law in Eastern Europe.

01:03:59.380 | I was part of an environmental mentoring program for inner-city high school kids in DC.

01:04:07.500 | I can defend myself as being on the left, but I hate doing that because there's also

01:04:13.620 | part of me that's like, "Okay, so what?

01:04:17.740 | Are you really saying that if you can magically make me argue or convince yourself that I'm

01:04:23.660 | on the right that you don't have to listen to me anymore?"

01:04:26.340 | And again, that's arguing like children.

01:04:28.540 | The reason why this has become so popular is because even among—or maybe especially

01:04:33.380 | among elites that it works so effectively as a perfect weapon that you can use uncritically.

01:04:38.580 | If I can just prove you're on the right, I don't have to think about you.

01:04:42.100 | It's no wonder that suddenly you start seeing people calling the ACLU right wing and calling

01:04:47.100 | the New York Times right wing because it's been such an effective way to delegitimize

01:04:52.100 | people as thinkers.

01:04:55.580 | Steven Pinker, who's on our board of advisors, he refers to academia as being the left pole,

01:05:01.980 | that essentially it's a position that from that point of view, everything looks as if

01:05:07.500 | it's on the right.

01:05:09.260 | But once it becomes a tactic that we accept, and it's one of the reasons why I'm more

01:05:16.460 | on the left, but I think I'm left of center liberal.

01:05:20.380 | Ricky is more conservative, libertarian.

01:05:23.740 | And initially I was kind of like, "Should I really be writing something with someone

01:05:26.540 | who's more on the right?"

01:05:27.540 | And I'm like, "Absolutely, I should be.

01:05:29.500 | I have to actually live up to what I believe on this stuff because it's ridiculous that

01:05:33.620 | we have this primitive idea that you can dismiss someone as soon as you claim rightly or wrongly

01:05:38.900 | that they're on the right."

01:05:39.900 | Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like you were recently called right wing.

01:05:46.340 | FIRE, maybe you by association because of that debate.

01:05:50.220 | Oh, the LA Times.

01:05:51.220 | The LA Times.

01:05:52.220 | Oh, fun.

01:05:53.220 | Let's talk about the LA Times.

01:05:54.220 | So, yes, there's an article, there's a debate.

01:05:57.020 | I can't wait to watch it because I don't think it's available yet to watch on video.

01:06:01.580 | You have to attend in person.

01:06:02.700 | I can't wait to see it.

01:06:04.220 | But FIRE was in part supporting and then LA Times wrote a scathing article about that

01:06:10.820 | everybody in the debate was basically leaning right.

01:06:15.460 | Okay.

01:06:16.460 | So much to unpack there.

01:06:17.460 | You know, Barry Weist has this great project, The Free Press.

01:06:21.100 | I've been very impressed.

01:06:22.540 | It's covering stories that a lot of the media, right or left, isn't willing to cover.

01:06:28.420 | And we did a, we hosted a debate with her and we wanted to make it as fun and controversial

01:06:35.940 | as possible.

01:06:37.500 | So FIRE and The Free Press hosted a debate, "Did the Sexual Revolution Fail?"

01:06:42.400 | So the debate was really exciting, really fun.

01:06:45.060 | The side that said the sexual revolution wasn't a failure that Grimes and Sarah Hader were

01:06:49.820 | on won.

01:06:52.060 | It was, you know, a nice, meaty, thoughtful night.

01:06:56.180 | And we got a, there was a review of it that was just sort of scathing about the whole

01:06:59.820 | thing and it included a line saying that FIRE, which claims to believe in free speech but

01:07:05.180 | only defends viewpoints it agrees with, I can't believe that even made it into the magazine.

01:07:09.900 | Because it's not just calling us, because of course, you know, the implication of course

01:07:12.460 | is that we're right wing, which we're not.

01:07:15.220 | Actually, the staff leans decidedly more to the left than to the right.

01:07:19.940 | But we also defend people all over the spectrum all the time.

01:07:24.180 | Like that's something that even the most minimal Google search would have solved.

01:07:27.740 | So like we've been giving LA Times some heat on this because it's like, yeah, if you said

01:07:32.340 | in my opinion, they're right wing, we would have argued back, you know, saying, "Well,

01:07:37.500 | here's the following 50,000 examples of us not being."

01:07:41.940 | But when you actually make the factual claim that we only defend opinions we agree with,

01:07:46.340 | first of all, there's no way for us to agree with opinions because we actually have a politically

01:07:50.820 | diverse staff who won't even agree on which opinions are good and what opinions we have.

01:07:56.740 | But yeah, I had one time when someone did something like this, and they were just being

01:08:01.780 | a little bit flippant about kind of like free speech being fine.

01:08:04.660 | I did a 70 tweet long thread, you know, just being like, "Hey, do you really think this

01:08:09.260 | is fine?"

01:08:10.260 | I decided not to do that on this particular one.

01:08:13.900 | But the nice thing about it is it demonstrated two parts of the book, "Canceling of the American

01:08:19.660 | Mind," if not more.

01:08:21.200 | One of them is dismissing someone because they're conservative, because that was the

01:08:24.700 | implication, don't have to listen to fire because they're conservative.

01:08:27.380 | But the other one is something, a term that I invented specifically for the way people

01:08:32.420 | argue on Twitter, which is hypocrisy projection.

01:08:35.460 | "Hi, I'm a person who only cares about one side of the political fence, and I think everyone

01:08:40.980 | else is a hypocrite.

01:08:43.300 | And by the way, I haven't done any actual research on this, but I assume everyone else

01:08:47.400 | is a hypocrite."

01:08:48.620 | And you see this happen all the time.

01:08:50.980 | And this happens to fire a lot where someone will be like, "Where is fire on this case?"

01:08:54.220 | And we're like, "We are literally quoted in the link you just sent but didn't actually

01:08:59.940 | read."

01:09:00.940 | Or it's like, "Where is fire on this?"

01:09:02.540 | It's like, "Here's our lawsuit about it from six months ago."

01:09:07.940 | So it's a favorite thing and also, Jon Stewart, Daily Show, like the whataboutism and the

01:09:15.700 | kind of like idea that these people must be hypocrites is something that great as comedy,

01:09:20.320 | but as far as actually a rhetorical tactic that will get you to truth, just assuming

01:09:24.260 | that your opponent or just accusing your opponent of always being a hypocrite is not a good

01:09:30.160 | tactic for truth.

01:09:31.160 | But by the way, it tends to always come from people who aren't actually consistent on free

01:09:35.220 | speech themselves.

01:09:36.220 | Yeah.

01:09:37.220 | So that hands the projection, but basically not doing the research about whether the person

01:09:42.020 | is or isn't a hypocrite and assuming others or a large fraction of others reading it will

01:09:48.660 | also not do the research.

01:09:50.420 | And therefore, this kind of statement becomes a kind of truthiness without a grounding in

01:09:55.720 | actual reality.

01:09:57.180 | It breaks down that barrier between what is and isn't true because if the mob says something

01:10:01.900 | is true, it takes too much effort to correct it.

01:10:04.980 | And there are three ways I want to respond to this, which is just giving example after

01:10:10.180 | example of times where we defended people on both sides of every major issue, basically

01:10:15.460 | every major issue, whether it's Israel-Palestine, whether it's terrorism, whether it's gay marriage,

01:10:20.340 | we have been, abortion, we have defended both sides of that argument.

01:10:25.460 | The other part, and I call these the orphans of the culture war, I really want to urge

01:10:30.500 | the media to start caring about free speech cases that actually don't have a political

01:10:35.860 | valence, that are actually just about good old-fashioned exercise of power against the

01:10:40.740 | little guy or little girl or little group on campus or off campus for that matter.

01:10:46.540 | Because these cases happen, a lot of our litigation are just little people, just regular people

01:10:51.420 | being told that they can't protest, that they can't hold signs.

01:10:54.500 | And then the last part of the argument that I want people to really get is like, "Yeah,

01:10:58.100 | and by the way, right-wingers get in trouble too, and there are attacks from the left,

01:11:03.680 | and you should take those seriously too.

01:11:05.940 | You should care when Republicans get in trouble.

01:11:08.560 | You should care when California has a DEI program that requires this, California Community

01:11:15.420 | Colleges has a DEI program, a policy that actually requires even chemistry professors

01:11:21.180 | to work in different DEI ideas from intersectionality to anti-racism into their classroom, into

01:11:28.020 | their syllabus, et cetera.

01:11:29.740 | This is a gross violation of academic freedom.

01:11:33.720 | It is as bad as it is to tell professors what they can't say, like we fought and defeated

01:11:38.020 | in Florida.

01:11:39.020 | It's even worse to tell them what they must say.

01:11:41.680 | That's downright totalitarian, and we're suing against this.

01:11:45.160 | And what I'm saying is that when you're dismissing someone for just being on the other side of

01:11:52.160 | the political fence, you are also kind of claiming, making a claim that none of these

01:11:57.020 | cases matter as well.

01:11:58.600 | And I want people to care about censorship when it even is against people they hate.

01:12:03.960 | >>Corey: Censorship is censorship.

01:12:09.680 | If we can take that tangent briefly with DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, what is

01:12:17.600 | the good and what is the harm of such programs?

01:12:20.360 | >>William: DEI, I know people who are DEI consultants.

01:12:24.280 | Actually, I have a dear friend who I love very much who does DEI, absolutely decent

01:12:30.960 | people.

01:12:32.400 | What they want to do is create bonds of understanding, friendship, compassion among people who are

01:12:40.480 | different.

01:12:41.480 | Unfortunately, the research on what a lot of DEI actually does is oftentimes the opposite

01:12:46.000 | of that.

01:12:47.060 | And I think that it's partially a problem with some of the ideology that comes from

01:12:52.040 | critical race theory, which is a real thing, by the way, that informs a lot of DEI that

01:12:57.320 | actually makes it something more likely to divide than unite.

01:13:00.600 | We talk about this in Coddling the American Mind as the difference between common humanity

01:13:05.460 | identity politics and common enemy identity politics.

01:13:09.680 | And I think that I know some of the people that I know who do DEI, they really want it

01:13:14.840 | to be common humanity identity politics, but some of the actual ideological assumptions

01:13:20.440 | that are baked in can actually cause people to feel more alienated from each other.

01:13:25.720 | Now, when I started at FIRE, my first cases involved 9/11, and it was bad.

01:13:33.680 | Professors were getting targeted, professors were losing their jobs for saying insensitive

01:13:37.800 | things about 9/11, and both from the right and the left.

01:13:41.600 | Actually, in that case, actually, sometimes a lot more from the right.

01:13:46.120 | And it was really bad, and about five professors lost their jobs.

01:13:50.880 | That's bad.

01:13:51.880 | Five professors over a relatively short period of time being fired for a political opinion,

01:13:56.240 | that's something that would get written up in any previous decades.

01:14:00.760 | We're now evaluating how many professors have been targeted for cancellation between 2014

01:14:07.040 | and middle of this year, July of 2023.

01:14:12.280 | We're at about well over 1,000 attempts to get professors fired or punished, usually

01:14:18.520 | driven by students and administrators, often driven by professors, unfortunately, as well.

01:14:24.200 | About two-thirds of those result in the professor being punished in some way, everything from

01:14:30.440 | having their article removed to suspension, et cetera.

01:14:35.200 | About one-fifth of those result in professors being fired.

01:14:39.500 | So right now, it's almost 200, it's around 190 professors being fired.

01:14:44.760 | So I want to give some context here.

01:14:47.840 | The Red Scare is generally considered to have been from 1947 to 1957.

01:14:52.520 | It ended, by the way, in '57 when it finally became clear, thanks to the First Amendment,

01:14:57.880 | that you couldn't actually fire people for their ideologies.

01:15:00.800 | Prior to that, a lot of universities thought they could.

01:15:03.960 | This guy is a very doctrinaire communist.

01:15:06.240 | He can't be dissuaded.

01:15:08.040 | I'm going to fire them.

01:15:09.960 | They thought they actually could do that.

01:15:12.680 | It was only '57 when the law was established.

01:15:14.680 | So right now, these are happening in an environment where freedom of speech, academic freedom

01:15:18.800 | are clearly protected at public colleges in the United States, and we're still seeing

01:15:24.000 | these kind of numbers.

01:15:27.040 | During the Red Scare, the biggest study that was done of what was going on, I think this

01:15:31.720 | came out in '55, and the evaluation was that there was about 62 professors fired for being

01:15:40.440 | communists and about 90-something professors fired for political views overall.

01:15:47.080 | That usually is reported as being about 100.

01:15:52.120 | So 60, 90, 100, depending on how you look at it.

01:15:55.080 | I think the number is actually higher, but that's only because of hindsight.

01:16:00.420 | What I mean by hindsight is we can look back and we actually find there were more professors

01:16:03.760 | who were fired as time reveals.

01:16:07.520 | We're at 190 professors fired, and I still have to put up with people saying this isn't

01:16:12.320 | even happening.

01:16:13.320 | I'm like, "In the nine and a half years of cancel culture, 190 professors fired.

01:16:17.360 | In the 11 years of the Red Scare, probably somewhere around 100, probably more."

01:16:25.560 | The number is going to keep going up, but unlike during the Red Scare where people could

01:16:29.600 | clearly tell something was happening, the craziest thing about cancel culture is I'm

01:16:33.040 | still dealing with people who are saying this isn't happening at all, and it hasn't been

01:16:36.960 | subtle on campus.

01:16:38.800 | We know that's a wild undercount, by the way, because when we surveyed professors, 17% of

01:16:44.240 | them said that they had been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for

01:16:50.960 | what they taught or their research.

01:16:54.720 | One third of them said that they were told by administrators not to take on controversial

01:17:00.240 | research.

01:17:01.240 | Extrapolating that out, that's a huge number.

01:17:04.000 | The reason why you're not going to hear about a lot of these cases is because there are

01:17:07.400 | so many different conformity-inducing mechanisms in the whole thing.

01:17:11.960 | That's one of the reasons why the idea that you'd add something requiring a DEI statement

01:17:16.880 | to be hired or to get into a school under the current environment is so completely nuts.

01:17:22.680 | We have had a genuine crisis of academic freedom over the last, particularly since 2017 on

01:17:28.520 | campuses.

01:17:29.520 | We have very low viewpoint diversity to begin with.

01:17:33.040 | Under these circumstances, administrators just start saying, "You know what the problem

01:17:36.560 | is?

01:17:37.560 | We have too much heterogeneous thought.

01:17:40.600 | We're not homogeneous enough.

01:17:43.800 | We need another political litmus test," which is nuts.

01:17:47.440 | That's what a DEI statement effectively is because there's no way to actually fill out

01:17:51.200 | a DEI statement without someone evaluating you on your politics.

01:17:55.840 | It's crystal clear.

01:17:56.840 | We even did an experiment on this.

01:17:59.160 | Nate Honeycutt, he got something like almost like 3,000 professors to participate evaluating

01:18:05.480 | different kinds of DEI statements.

01:18:09.760 | One was basically like the standard kind of identity politics intersectionality one.

01:18:15.080 | One was about viewpoint diversity.

01:18:17.560 | One was about religious diversity.

01:18:19.560 | One was about socioeconomic diversity.

01:18:21.680 | As far as where my heart really is, it's that we have too little socioeconomic diversity,

01:18:26.320 | particularly in elite higher ed, but also in education period.

01:18:30.800 | The experiment had large participation, really interestingly set up.

01:18:35.840 | It tried to model the way a lot of these DEI policies were actually implemented.

01:18:40.280 | One of the ways these have been implemented, and I think in some of the California schools,

01:18:43.960 | is that administrators go through the DEI statements before anyone else looks at them

01:18:50.720 | and then eliminates people off the top depending on how they feel about their DEI statements.

01:18:57.800 | The one on viewpoint diversity, I think like half of the people who reviewed it would eliminate

01:19:04.640 | it right out.

01:19:06.440 | I think it was basically the same for religious diversity.

01:19:09.520 | It was slightly better, like 40% for socioeconomic diversity, but that kills me.

01:19:16.040 | The idea that kind of like, "Yeah, that actually is the kind of diversity that I think we need

01:19:19.200 | a great deal more of in higher education."

01:19:21.320 | You can agree with it.

01:19:22.320 | It's not hostile to the other kinds, by the way, but the idea that we need more people

01:19:27.160 | from the bottom three quarters of American society in higher education, I think should

01:19:33.000 | be something we could all get around.

01:19:34.680 | The only one that really succeeded was the one that sprouted back exactly the kind of

01:19:38.840 | ideology that they thought the reviewers would like, which is like, "Okay, there's no way

01:19:45.000 | this couldn't be a political litmus test.

01:19:47.240 | We've proved that it's a political litmus test and still school after school is adding

01:19:51.960 | these to its application process to make schools still more ideologically homogenous."

01:19:57.440 | Why does that have a negative effect?

01:19:59.400 | Is it because it enforces a kind of group think where people are afraid, start becoming

01:20:08.760 | afraid to sort of think and speak freely, liberally about whatever?

01:20:15.640 | Well, one, it selects for people who tend to be farther to the left in a situation where

01:20:21.320 | you already have people, a situation where universities do lean decidedly that way.

01:20:26.840 | But it also establishes essentially a set of sacred ideas that if you're being quizzed

01:20:33.040 | on what you've done to advance anti-racism, how you've been conscious of intersectionality,

01:20:42.680 | it's unlikely that you'd actually get in if you said, "By the way, I actually think these

01:20:45.760 | are dubious concepts.

01:20:47.800 | I think they're thin.

01:20:48.800 | I think they're philosophically not very defensible."

01:20:51.040 | Basically, if your position was, "I actually reject these concepts as being over simple,"

01:20:59.880 | you're not going to get in.

01:21:01.440 | I think that the person that I always think of that wasn't a right winger that would be

01:21:06.160 | like, "Go to hell," if you made him fill one of these things out, it's Feynman.

01:21:11.360 | I feel like if you gave one of these things to Richard Feynman, he'd be like, he would

01:21:15.440 | tear it to pieces.

01:21:16.440 | He'd then not get the job.

01:21:17.440 | - Yeah, there's some element of it that creates this hard to pin down fear.

01:21:28.120 | So you said like the firing, the thing I wanted to say is firing 100 people or 200 people,

01:21:34.080 | the point is even firing one person, I've just seen it, it can create this quiet ripple

01:21:39.400 | effect of fear.

01:21:41.120 | - Of course.

01:21:42.120 | - That single firing of a faculty has a ripple effect across tens of thousands of people,

01:21:49.520 | of educators, of who is hired, what kind of conversations are being had, what kind of

01:21:55.600 | textbooks are chosen, what kind of self-censorship and different flavors of that is happening.

01:22:01.000 | It's hard to measure that.

01:22:02.200 | - Yeah, I mean, when you ask professors about, "Are they intimidated under the current environment?"

01:22:10.160 | The answer is yes, and particularly conservative professors already reporting that they're

01:22:16.680 | afraid for their jobs in a lot of different cases.

01:22:18.760 | - You have a lot of good statistics in the book, things like self-censorship, one provided

01:22:22.920 | with a definition of self-censorship, at least a quarter of students said they self-censor

01:22:27.160 | fairly often or very often during conversations with other students, with professors and during

01:22:31.520 | classroom discussions, 25%, 27%, and 28% respectively.

01:22:37.440 | A quarter of students also said that they are more likely to self-censor on campus now

01:22:43.240 | at the time they were surveyed than they were when they first started college.

01:22:47.800 | So sort of college is kind of instilling this idea of censorship, self-censorship.

01:22:54.360 | - And back to the Red Scare comparison, and this is one of the interesting things about

01:22:57.400 | the data as well, is that that same study that I was talking about, the most comprehensive

01:23:02.000 | study of the Red Scare, there was polling about whether or not professors were self-censoring

01:23:06.760 | due to the fear of the environment.

01:23:09.440 | And 9% of professors said that they were self-censoring their research and what they were saying.

01:23:14.920 | 9% is really bad.

01:23:18.120 | That's almost a tenth of professors saying that their speech was chilled.

01:23:23.120 | When we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey, when you factor

01:23:28.780 | together if they're, we asked them are they self-censoring in their research, are they

01:23:32.240 | self-censoring in class, are they self-censoring online, et cetera, it was 90% of professors.

01:23:38.200 | So the idea that we're actually in an environment that is historic in terms of how scared people

01:23:44.400 | are actually of expressing controversial views, I think that it's the reason why we're gonna

01:23:49.540 | actually be studying this in 50 years, the same way we studied the Red Scare.

01:23:55.320 | It's not, the idea that this isn't happening will just be correctly viewed as insane.

01:23:59.640 | - So maybe we can just discuss the leaning, the current leaning of academia towards the

01:24:05.720 | left which you describe in various different perspectives.

01:24:08.840 | So one, there's a voter registration ratio chart that you have by department which I

01:24:14.000 | think is interesting.

01:24:15.000 | Can you explain this chart and can you explain what it shows?

01:24:18.920 | - Yeah, when I started FIRE in 2001, I didn't take the viewpoint diversity issue as seriously.

01:24:24.760 | I thought it was just something that right-wingers complained about.

01:24:28.120 | But I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low viewpoint diversity.

01:24:36.800 | And actually a lot of the research that I got most interested in was done in conjunction

01:24:42.040 | with the great Cass Sunstein who writes a lot about group polarization.

01:24:47.800 | And the research on this is very strong.

01:24:49.920 | But essentially when you have groups with political diversity, and you can see this

01:24:55.000 | actually in judges for example, it tends to produce reliably more moderate outcomes.

01:25:01.040 | Whereas groups that have low political diversity tend to sort of spiral off in their own direction.

01:25:07.680 | And when you have a super majority of people from just one political perspective, that's

01:25:12.360 | a problem for the production of ideas.

01:25:13.880 | It creates a situation where there are sacred ideas.

01:25:17.400 | And when you look at some of the departments, I think the estimate from the Crimson is that

01:25:22.840 | Harvard has 3% conservatives.

01:25:25.540 | But when you look at different departments, there are elite departments that have literally

01:25:28.840 | no conservatives in them.

01:25:31.760 | And I think that's in a healthy intellectual environment.

01:25:35.760 | The problem is definitely worse as you get more elite.

01:25:39.560 | We definitely see more cases of lefty professors getting canceled at less elite schools.

01:25:44.920 | It gets worse as you get down from the elite schools.

01:25:48.400 | Where a lot of the one third of attempts to get professors punished that are successful

01:25:54.320 | do come from the right and largely from off campus sources.

01:25:58.520 | And we spend a lot of time talking about that in the book as well.

01:26:01.840 | It's something that I do think is underappreciated.

01:26:05.200 | But when it comes to the low viewpoint diversity, it works out kind of like you'd expect to

01:26:10.080 | a degree.

01:26:11.080 | Economics is what, four to one or something like that.

01:26:14.160 | It's not as bad.

01:26:15.920 | But then when you start getting into some of the humanities, there are departments that

01:26:19.760 | there are literally none.

01:26:22.280 | Is there a good why to why did the university's faculty administration move to the left?

01:26:30.000 | Yeah.

01:26:31.000 | I don't love, and this is an argument that you'll sometimes run into on the left, just

01:26:35.400 | the argument that, well, people on the left are just smarter.

01:26:39.320 | And it's like, okay.

01:26:40.760 | It's interesting because at least the research as of 10 years ago was indicating that if

01:26:45.840 | you dig a little bit deeper into that, a lot of the people who do consider themselves on

01:26:49.400 | the left tend to be a little bit more libertarian.

01:26:51.120 | This is something that Pinker wrote a fair amount about.

01:26:56.920 | The idea that we're just smarter is not an opinion I'm the least bit comfortable with.

01:27:04.720 | I do think that departments take on momentum when they become a place where you're like,

01:27:11.360 | wow, it'd be really unpleasant for me to work in this department if I'm the token conservative.

01:27:15.720 | And I think that takes on a life of its own.

01:27:17.920 | There are also departments where a lot of the ideology is kind of explicitly leftist.

01:27:25.160 | You look at education schools, a lot of the stuff that is actually left over from what

01:27:30.520 | is correctly called critical race theories is present.

01:27:33.880 | And you end up having that in a number of the departments.

01:27:37.800 | And it would be very strange to be in many departments a conservative social worker professor.

01:27:44.040 | I'm sure they exist, but there's a lot of pressure to shut up if you are.

01:27:50.720 | - So the process on the left of cancellation, as you started to talk about with the perfect

01:27:56.000 | rhetorical fortress, the first step is dismiss a person if you can put a label of conservative

01:28:04.560 | on them, you can dismiss them in that way.

01:28:07.080 | What other efficient or what other effective dismissal mechanisms are there?

01:28:13.320 | - We have a little bit of fun with demographic numbers.

01:28:17.520 | But I run this by height.

01:28:19.680 | And I remember him being kind of like, don't include the actual percentage.

01:28:22.560 | I'm like, no, we need to include the actual percentages because people are really bad

01:28:26.440 | at estimating what the demographics of the US actually looks like, both the right and

01:28:31.240 | the left in different ways.

01:28:33.580 | So we put it in the numbers and we talk about being dismissed for being white or being dismissed

01:28:38.480 | for being straight or being dismissed for being male.

01:28:43.440 | And you can already dismiss people for being conservative.

01:28:45.680 | And so we give examples in the book of these being used to dismiss people.

01:28:50.280 | And oftentimes on topics not related to the fact that they are male or whether or not

01:28:54.520 | they're minority.

01:28:55.520 | And then we get to, I think it's like layer six.

01:28:57.640 | And we're like, surprise, guess what?

01:28:59.720 | You're down to 0.4% of the population and none of it mattered.

01:29:02.960 | Because if you have the wrong opinion, even if you're in that 0.4% of the most intersectional

01:29:07.480 | person who ever lived and you have the wrong opinion, you're a heretic and you actually

01:29:10.960 | probably will be hated even more.

01:29:13.480 | And the most interesting part of the research we did for this was just asking every prominent

01:29:20.200 | black conservative and moderate that we knew personally, have you been told that you're

01:29:25.560 | not really black for an opinion you had?

01:29:29.040 | Every single one of them was like, oh, yeah.

01:29:31.640 | No.

01:29:32.640 | And it's kind of funny because it's like oftentimes white lefties telling them that's like, oh,

01:29:36.520 | do you consider yourself black?

01:29:37.760 | John McWhorter talked about having a reporter when he talked about when he showed that he

01:29:42.120 | dissented from some of what he described as kind of like woke racism in his book, Woke

01:29:47.600 | Ideas.

01:29:48.600 | And the reporter actually is like, so do you consider yourself black?

01:29:50.960 | He's like, what are you crazy?

01:29:53.160 | Of course I do.

01:29:54.160 | And Coleman Hughes had one of the best quotes on it.

01:29:56.800 | He said, I'm constantly being told that the most important thing to how legitimate my

01:30:02.520 | opinion is, is whether or not I'm black.

01:30:06.040 | But then when I have a dissenting opinion, I get told I'm not really black.

01:30:10.040 | So perfect.

01:30:12.600 | There's no way to falsify this argument.

01:30:17.480 | That investigation really struck me.

01:30:19.840 | So and you lay this out really nicely in the book that there is this process of saying,

01:30:23.240 | are you conservative?

01:30:24.240 | Yes.

01:30:25.240 | You can dismiss the person.

01:30:27.760 | Are you white?

01:30:28.760 | Dismiss the person.

01:30:29.760 | Are you male?

01:30:30.760 | You can dismiss the person.

01:30:31.760 | There's these categories that make it easier for you to dismiss a person's ideas based

01:30:37.480 | on that.

01:30:38.480 | And like you said, you end up in that tiny percentage and you can still dismiss.

01:30:41.080 | And it's not just dismiss.

01:30:42.360 | We talk about this from a practical standpoint, the way the limitations on reality.

01:30:48.200 | And one of them is time.

01:30:49.880 | And a lot of cancel culture as cultural norms, as this way of winning arguments without winning

01:30:56.440 | arguments is about running out the clock.

01:30:58.920 | Because by the time you get down to the bottom of the – actually even to get a couple of

01:31:04.000 | steps into the perfect rhetorical fortress and where has the time gone?

01:31:09.040 | You probably just give up trying to actually have the argument and you never get to the

01:31:15.040 | argument in the first place.

01:31:16.040 | And all of these things are pretty sticky on social media.

01:31:19.520 | Social media practically invented the perfect rhetorical fortress.

01:31:22.340 | So that each one of those stages has a virality to it.

01:31:25.560 | So it could stick and then it can get people really excited.

01:31:28.760 | It allows you to feel outrage and superiority.

01:31:32.080 | Because of that, at the scale of the virality, it allows you to never get to the actual discussion

01:31:36.840 | of the point.

01:31:37.840 | But, you know, it's not just the left, it's the right.

01:31:41.200 | Also it's an efficient rhetorical fortress.

01:31:44.500 | So something to be proud of on the right, it's more efficient.

01:31:49.680 | So you don't have to listen to liberals and anyone can be labeled a liberal if they have

01:31:53.880 | a wrong opinion.

01:31:55.120 | I've seen liberal and left and leftist all used in the same kind of way.

01:32:00.600 | That's leftist nonsense.

01:32:02.800 | You don't have to listen to experts, even conservative experts, if they have the wrong

01:32:07.560 | opinion.

01:32:08.980 | You don't have to listen to journalists, even conservative journalists, if they have the

01:32:12.160 | wrong opinion.

01:32:13.920 | And among the MAGA wing, there's a fourth proposition.

01:32:19.240 | You don't need to listen to anyone who isn't pro-Trump.

01:32:22.000 | Yeah.

01:32:23.000 | And we call it efficient because it eliminates a lot of people you probably should listen

01:32:27.760 | to at least sometimes.

01:32:28.760 | You know, like we point out sometimes like how cancel culture can interfere with faith

01:32:32.460 | and expertise.

01:32:33.540 | So we get kind of being a little suspicious of experts, but at the same time, if you follow

01:32:38.840 | that and you follow it mechanically, and I definitely, you know, I think everybody in

01:32:42.880 | the US probably has some older uncle who exercises some of these.

01:32:49.080 | It is a really efficient way to sort of wall yourself off from the rest of the world and

01:32:54.660 | dismiss at least some people you really should be listening to.

01:32:58.280 | The way you laid it out, it made me realize that we just take up so much of our brain

01:33:02.720 | power with these things.

01:33:05.400 | It's literally time.

01:33:06.400 | We could be solving things.

01:33:07.600 | And you get like, you kind of exhaust yourself through this process of being outraged based

01:33:12.800 | on these labels and you never get to actually, there's almost not enough time for empathy,

01:33:17.560 | for like looking at a person and thinking, well, maybe they're right because you're so

01:33:20.760 | busy categorizing them.

01:33:23.000 | What's the fun in empathy?

01:33:25.560 | And I mean, what's so interesting about this is that so much societal energy seems to be

01:33:31.280 | spent on these nasty primal desires where essentially a lot of it is like, please tell

01:33:37.200 | me who I'm allowed to hate.

01:33:39.600 | Where can I legitimately be cruel?

01:33:41.720 | Where can I actually exercise some aggression against somebody?

01:33:45.760 | And it seems to sometimes be just finding new justifications for that.

01:33:50.360 | And it's an understandable, you know, human failing that sometimes can be used to defend

01:33:56.600 | justice.

01:33:57.600 | But again, it will never get you anywhere near the truth.

01:34:01.080 | One interesting case that you cover about expertise is with COVID.

01:34:05.780 | So how did cancel culture come into play on the topic of COVID?

01:34:09.520 | Yeah, I think that COVID was a big blow to people's faith and expertise and cancel culture

01:34:16.240 | played a big role in that.

01:34:18.360 | I think one of the best examples of this is Jennifer Say at Levi's.

01:34:22.680 | She is a lovely woman.

01:34:25.400 | She was a vice president at Levi's.

01:34:28.080 | She talked about actually potentially to be the president of Levi's jeans.

01:34:32.600 | And she was a big advocate for kids.

01:34:36.280 | And when they started shutting down the schools, she started saying, this is going to be a

01:34:41.040 | disaster.

01:34:42.040 | This is going to hurt the poor and disadvantaged kids the most.

01:34:48.080 | We have to figure out a way to open the schools back up.

01:34:51.000 | And that was such a heretical point of view.

01:34:53.960 | And the typical kind of cancel culture wave took over as he had all sorts of petitions

01:34:58.840 | for her to be fired and that she needed to apologize and all this kind of stuff.

01:35:03.480 | And she was offered, I think, like a million dollar severance, which she wouldn't take

01:35:07.840 | because she wanted to tell the world what she thought about this and that she wanted

01:35:11.660 | to continue saying that she hadn't changed her mind, that this was a disaster for young

01:35:17.400 | people.

01:35:18.400 | And now that's kind of the conventional wisdom and the research is quite clear that this

01:35:24.600 | was devastating to particularly disadvantaged youths.

01:35:28.680 | Like people understand this now as being, okay, she was probably right.

01:35:32.460 | But one of the really sad aspects of cancel culture is people forget why you were canceled

01:35:38.480 | and they just know they hate you.

01:35:41.120 | There's this lingering kind of like, well, I don't have to take them seriously anymore.

01:35:44.680 | By the way, did you notice they happen to be right on something very important?

01:35:48.520 | Now one funny thing about freedom of speech, freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you didn't

01:35:52.800 | also have the right to say things that were wrong.

01:35:56.160 | Because if you can't engage in ideaphoria, if you can't actually speculate, you'll never

01:36:01.440 | actually get to something that's right in the first place.

01:36:04.040 | But it's especially galling when people who were right were censored and never actually

01:36:10.680 | got the credit that they deserve.

01:36:12.080 | - Well, this might be a good place to ask a little bit more about the freedom of speech.

01:36:17.640 | And you said that included in the freedom of speech is to say things that are wrong.

01:36:24.800 | What is your perspective on hate speech?

01:36:27.920 | - Hate speech is the best marketing campaign for censorship.

01:36:34.400 | And it came from academia of the 20th century.

01:36:38.680 | And that when I talked about the anti-free speech movement, that was one of their first

01:36:43.280 | inventions.

01:36:44.280 | There was a lot of talk about critical race theory and being against critical race theory.

01:36:49.440 | And fire will sue if you say that people can't advocate for it or teach it or research it.

01:36:56.040 | Because you do absolutely have the right to pursue it academically.

01:37:00.280 | However, every time someone mentioned CRT, they should also say the very first project

01:37:06.280 | of the people who founded CRT, Richard Delgado, Mary Matsuda, et cetera, was to create this

01:37:14.000 | new category of unprotected speech called hate speech and to get it banned.

01:37:18.600 | The person who enabled this drift, of course, was Herbert Marcuse in 1965, you know, basically

01:37:23.840 | questioning whether or not free speech should be a sacred value on the left.

01:37:27.340 | And he was on the losing side for a really long time.

01:37:29.680 | The liberals, you know, the way I grew up, that was basically being pro-free speech was

01:37:34.280 | synonymous with being a liberal.

01:37:37.040 | But that started to be etched away on campus.

01:37:40.480 | And the way it was was with the idea of hate speech that essentially, oh, but we can designate

01:37:48.240 | particularly bad speech as not protected.

01:37:52.760 | And who's going to enforce it?

01:37:54.960 | Who's going to decide what hate speech actually is?

01:37:57.160 | Well, it's usually overwhelmingly can only happen in an environment of really low viewpoint

01:38:02.360 | diversity because you have to actually agree on what the most hateful and wrong things

01:38:06.440 | are.

01:38:08.280 | And there's a bedrock principle.

01:38:11.680 | It's referred to this in a great case about flag burning in the First Amendment that I

01:38:15.800 | think all the world could benefit from.

01:38:18.160 | You can't ban speech just because it's offensive.

01:38:21.400 | It's too subjective.

01:38:22.400 | It basically—it's one of the reasons why these kind of codes have been more happily

01:38:27.280 | adopted in places like Europe where they have a sense that there's like a modal German or

01:38:31.400 | a modal Englishman.

01:38:33.480 | And I think this is offensive and therefore, I can say that this is wrong.

01:38:37.660 | In a more multicultural and a genuinely more diverse country that's never actually had

01:38:43.840 | an honest thought that there is a single kind of American, there's never been—like we

01:38:49.800 | had the idea of Uncle Sam but that was always kind of a joke.

01:38:52.800 | Boston always knew it wasn't.

01:38:54.240 | Richmond always knew it wasn't.

01:38:55.360 | Georgia always knew it wasn't.

01:38:56.760 | You know, Alaska.

01:38:57.760 | Like, we've always been a hodgepodge.

01:39:00.040 | And we get in a society that diverse that you can't ban things simply because they're

01:39:06.520 | offensive.

01:39:08.240 | And that's one of the reasons why hate speech is not an unprotected category of speech.

01:39:13.280 | And I go further.

01:39:14.460 | My theory on freedom of speech is slightly different than most other constitutional lawyers.

01:39:19.800 | And I think that's partially because some of the ways—some of these theories, although

01:39:23.480 | a lot of them are really good, are inadequate.

01:39:26.560 | They're not expansive enough.

01:39:28.480 | And I sometimes call my theory the pure informational theory of freedom of speech.

01:39:33.300 | Or sometimes when I want to be fancy, the lab and the looking glass theory.

01:39:37.320 | And its most important tenet is that there—is that if the goal is the project of human knowledge,

01:39:43.220 | which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what

01:39:49.000 | people really think.

01:39:51.100 | And what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know.

01:39:55.560 | So every time you're actually saying, "You can't say that," you're actually depriving

01:40:00.020 | yourself of the knowledge of what people really think.

01:40:02.460 | You're causing what Tim O'Carron, who's on our board of advisors, calls preference

01:40:06.380 | falsification.

01:40:08.020 | You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world, which by the way, in a lot of cases,

01:40:13.160 | because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that

01:40:16.760 | people are more prejudiced than they might be.

01:40:20.200 | And actually, these kind of restrictions—there was a book called Racial Paranoia that came

01:40:24.980 | out about 15 years ago that was making the point that the imposition of some of these

01:40:29.880 | codes can sometimes make people think that the only thing holding you back from being

01:40:33.800 | a raging racist are these codes.

01:40:37.060 | So it must be really, really bad.

01:40:38.720 | It can actually make all these things worse.

01:40:40.180 | And one—which we talk about in the book—one very real practical way it makes things worse

01:40:45.340 | is when you censor people, it doesn't change their opinion.

01:40:49.420 | It just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble.

01:40:53.780 | So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with, and group polarization

01:40:58.320 | takes off.

01:40:59.320 | So we have some interesting data in the book about how driving people off of Twitter, for

01:41:05.360 | example, in 2017, and then again, I think, in 2020, driving people to gab led to greater

01:41:13.340 | radicalization among those people.

01:41:15.500 | It's a very predictable force.

01:41:18.200 | Censorship doesn't actually change people's minds, and it pushes them in directions that

01:41:21.300 | actually by very solid research will actually make them more radicalized.

01:41:26.740 | So yeah, I think that the attempt to ban hate speech, it doesn't really protect us from

01:41:32.700 | it, but it gives the government such a vast weapon to use against us that we will regret

01:41:40.020 | giving them.

01:41:41.020 | Is there a way to sort of to look at extreme cases to test this idea out a little bit?

01:41:47.100 | So if we look on campus, what's your view about allowing, say, white supremacists on

01:41:53.900 | campus to do speeches?

01:41:55.900 | Okay, okay, okay.

01:41:56.980 | I think you should be able to study what people think, and I think it's important that we

01:42:03.380 | actually do.

01:42:05.100 | So I think that, you know, let's take, for example, QAnon.

01:42:08.580 | Yeah, QAnon's wrong.

01:42:12.060 | Where did it come from?

01:42:13.460 | Why did they think that?

01:42:14.820 | What's the motivation?

01:42:15.900 | Who taught them it?

01:42:16.900 | Who came up with these ideas?

01:42:18.340 | This is important to understand history.

01:42:20.380 | That's important to understand modern American politics.

01:42:24.340 | And so if you put your scholar hat on, you should be curious about kind of everyone,

01:42:32.540 | about where they're coming from.

01:42:34.460 | Darrell Davis, who I'm sure you're familiar with, part of his goal was just simply to

01:42:39.020 | get to know where people were coming from.

01:42:40.580 | And in the process, he actually de-radicalized a number of Klan's members when they actually

01:42:44.860 | realized that this black man who had befriended them actually was compassionate, was a decent

01:42:50.100 | person.

01:42:51.100 | They realized all their preconceptions were wrong.

01:42:52.540 | So it can have a de-radicalizing factor, by the way.

01:42:55.500 | But even when it doesn't, it's still really important to know what the bad people in your

01:42:59.460 | society think.

01:43:01.220 | Honestly, in some ways, for your own safety, it's probably more important to know what

01:43:06.140 | the bad people in your society actually think.

01:43:07.860 | I personally, I don't know what you think about that, but I personally think that freedom

01:43:12.020 | of speech in cases like that, like KKK and campus, can do more harm in the short term,

01:43:18.940 | but much more benefit in the long term.

01:43:21.980 | Because you can sometimes argue for like, this is going to hurt in the short term.

01:43:27.580 | But I mean, Harvey said this, is like, consider the alternative.

01:43:31.620 | Because you've just kind of made the case for like, this potentially would be a good

01:43:35.340 | thing even in the short term.

01:43:36.980 | And it often is, I think, especially in a stable society like ours, with a strong middle

01:43:42.500 | class, all these kinds of things, where people have like the comforts to reason through things.

01:43:47.620 | But to me, it's like, even if it hurts in the short term, even if it does create more

01:43:52.820 | hate in the short term, the freedom of speech has this really beneficial thing, which is

01:43:58.860 | it helps you move towards the truth, the entirety of society, towards a deeper, more accurate

01:44:04.300 | understanding of life on earth, of society, of how people function, of ethics, of metaphysics,

01:44:12.060 | of everything.

01:44:13.380 | And that in the long term is a huge benefit.

01:44:16.260 | It gets rid of the Nazis in the long term, even if it adds to the number of Nazis in

01:44:21.100 | the short term.

01:44:22.100 | - Yeah, well, and meanwhile, and the reality check part of this is people always bring

01:44:25.860 | up, what about the Klan on campus?

01:44:27.140 | I'm like, they're never invited.

01:44:31.020 | I haven't seen a case where they've been invited.

01:44:35.260 | Usually the Klan argument gets thrown out when people are trying to excuse, and that's

01:44:40.620 | why we shouted down Ben Shapiro.

01:44:42.900 | And that's why you can't have Bill Maher on campus.

01:44:46.060 | That's why, and it's like, okay.

01:44:49.740 | It's a little bit of that whataboutism again, about being like, well, that thing over there

01:44:53.220 | is terrible, and therefore, this comedian shouldn't come.

01:44:57.020 | - So I do have a question, maybe by way of advice.

01:45:00.500 | You know, interviewing folks and seeing this, like a podcast is a platform in deciding who

01:45:08.980 | to talk to or not, that's something I have to come face to face with on occasion.

01:45:13.460 | My natural inclination before I started the podcast was I would talk to anyone, including

01:45:18.780 | people which I'm still interested in, who are, you know, the current members of the

01:45:24.100 | KKK.

01:45:25.500 | And to me, there's a responsibility to do that with skill.

01:45:31.820 | And that responsibility has been weighing heavier and heavier on me, because you realize

01:45:35.980 | how much skill it actually takes, because you have to know to understand so much.

01:45:41.340 | Because I've come to understand that the devil is always going to be charismatic.

01:45:47.300 | The devil's not going to look like the devil.

01:45:49.340 | And so you have to realize you can't always come to the table with a deep compassion for

01:45:56.420 | another human being.

01:45:57.420 | You have to have, you know, like 90% compassion and another 90% deep historical knowledge

01:46:03.700 | about the context of the battles around this particular issue.

01:46:07.340 | And that takes just a huge amount of effort.

01:46:08.980 | I don't know if there's thoughts you have about this, how to handle speech in a way,

01:46:19.780 | without censoring, bringing it to the surface, but in a way that creates more love in the

01:46:24.020 | world.

01:46:25.020 | I remember Steve Bannon got disinvited from the New Yorker Festival.

01:46:31.620 | And Jim Carrey freaked out and all sorts of other people freaked out and he got disinvited.

01:46:37.220 | And I got invited to speak on Smirconish about this.

01:46:40.660 | And I was saying, like, listen, you don't have people to your conference because you

01:46:47.660 | agree with them.

01:46:49.340 | Like that's, we have to get out of this idea that that's, because they were trying to make

01:46:53.700 | it sound like that's an endorsement of Steve Bannon.

01:46:55.660 | Like that's nonsense.

01:46:56.660 | Like if you actually look at the opinions of all the people who are there, you can't possibly

01:47:00.660 | endorse all the opinions that all these other people who are going to be there actually

01:47:03.700 | have.

01:47:04.700 | And so in the process of making that argument, I got, and also of course, the very classic,

01:47:10.180 | it's very valuable to know what someone Steve Bannon thinks.

01:47:12.740 | You should be curious about that.

01:47:14.300 | And I remember someone arguing back saying, well, would you want someone to interview

01:47:18.180 | a jihadi?

01:47:19.180 | And I'm like, because at the moment, like it was at the time when ISIS was really going

01:47:24.940 | for it.

01:47:26.660 | And I was like, would you not want to go to a talk where someone was trying to figure

01:47:31.200 | out what makes some of these people tick?

01:47:33.620 | Because that changes your framing that essentially it's like, no, it's curiosity.

01:47:37.980 | It is the cure for a lot of this stuff.

01:47:40.260 | And we need a great deal more curiosity and a lot less unwarranted certainty.

01:47:44.720 | And there's a question of like, how do you conduct such conversations?

01:47:48.740 | And I feel deeply underqualified.

01:47:50.820 | Who do you think is especially good at that?

01:47:53.920 | I feel like documentary filmmakers usually do a much better job.

01:47:57.980 | And the best job is usually done by biographers.

01:48:00.740 | So the more time you give to a particular conversation, like really deep thought and

01:48:06.500 | historical context and studying the people, how they think, looking at all different perspectives,

01:48:11.620 | looking at the psychology of the person, upbringing, their parents, their grandparents, all of

01:48:16.180 | this, the more time you spend with that, the better, the better the quality of the conversation

01:48:23.460 | is because you get to understand the, you get to really empathize with the person, with

01:48:29.780 | the people he or she represents.

01:48:31.860 | And you get to see the common humanity, all of this.

01:48:36.540 | Interviewers are often don't do that work.

01:48:40.340 | So like the best stuff I've seen is interviews that are part of a documentary.

01:48:44.620 | But even now documentaries are like, there's a huge incentive to do as quickly as possible.

01:48:49.180 | There's not an incentive to really spend time with the person.

01:48:52.000 | - There's a great new documentary about Floyd Abrams that I really recommend.

01:48:56.300 | We did a documentary about Ira Glasser called Mighty Ira, which was my video team and my

01:49:02.300 | protege Nico Perino and Chris Malby and Aaron Reese put it together.

01:49:07.460 | And it just follows the life and times of Ira Glasser, the former head of the ACLU.

01:49:12.900 | - If you could just linger on that, that's a fascinating story.

01:49:16.420 | - Oh yeah.

01:49:17.420 | - Who's Ira?

01:49:18.420 | - Ira's amazing.

01:49:19.420 | Ira, he wasn't a lawyer.

01:49:20.860 | He started working at the NYCLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union, back in I think the

01:49:26.020 | '60s.

01:49:27.020 | He was, I think Robert Kennedy recommended that he go in that direction.

01:49:32.420 | And he became the president of the ACLU right at the time that they were suffering from

01:49:38.300 | defending the Nazis at Skokie.

01:49:41.140 | And Nico and Aaron and Chris put together this, and they'd never done a documentary

01:49:46.580 | before.

01:49:47.580 | And it came out so, so well.

01:49:50.740 | And it tells the story of the Nazis in Skokie.

01:49:53.620 | It tells the story of the case around it, tells the story of the ACLU at the time and

01:49:57.780 | what a great leader Ira Glasser was.

01:49:59.900 | And one of the things that's so great is like when you get to see the Nazis at Skokie, they

01:50:05.740 | come off like the idiots that you would expect them to.

01:50:09.260 | There's a moment when the rally is not going very well and the leader gets flustered.

01:50:15.020 | And it almost seems like he's gonna like shout out kind of like, "You're making this Nazi

01:50:18.940 | rally into a mockery."

01:50:21.080 | So it showed how actually allowing the Nazis to speak at Skokie kind of took the wind out

01:50:26.260 | of their sails.

01:50:27.260 | Like if they had, the whole movement, like everybody just kind of, it all kind of dissolved

01:50:32.340 | after that because they looked like racist fools, they were.

01:50:36.180 | They were, you know, even Blues Brothers made jokes about them.

01:50:40.780 | And it didn't turn into the disaster that people thought it was going to be just by

01:50:44.340 | letting them speak.

01:50:45.900 | But Ira Glasser, okay, so he has this wonderful story about how Jackie Robinson joined the

01:50:52.960 | Brooklyn Dodgers and how there was a moment when it was seeing someone, an African-American

01:50:58.940 | as on their, literally on their team and how that really got him excited about the cause

01:51:04.140 | of racial equality and that became a big part of what his life was.

01:51:08.860 | And I just think of that as such a great metaphor is expanding your circle and seeing more people

01:51:15.540 | as being quite literally on your team is the solution to so many of these problems.

01:51:20.560 | And I worry that one of the things that is absolutely just a fact of life in America

01:51:24.900 | is like we do see each other more as enemy camps as opposed to people on the same team.

01:51:31.140 | And that was actually something in the early days, like me and Will Creeley, the legal

01:51:34.460 | director of FIRE, wrote about the forthcoming free speech challenges of everyone being on

01:51:39.340 | Facebook.

01:51:40.780 | And one thing that I was hoping was that as more people were exposing more of their lives,

01:51:47.740 | we'd realize a lot of these things we knew intellectually, like kids go to the bar and

01:51:51.420 | get drunk and do stupid things, that when we started seeing the evidence of them doing

01:51:58.840 | stupid things, that we might be shocked at first, but then eventually get more sophisticated

01:52:03.060 | and be like, "Well, come on, people are like that."

01:52:05.480 | That never actually really seemed to happen.

01:52:08.660 | But I think that there are plenty of things we know about human nature and we know about

01:52:13.300 | dumb things people say, and we've made it into an environment where there's just someone

01:52:20.280 | out there waiting to be kind of like, "Oh, remember that dumb thing you said we were

01:52:24.540 | 14?

01:52:25.540 | Well, I'm gonna make sure that you don't get into your dream school because of that."

01:52:28.220 | - That's offense archaeology.

01:52:29.220 | - That's not my term, though.

01:52:30.220 | It's a great term.

01:52:31.220 | - Oh, okay.

01:52:32.220 | Well, it's a great term.

01:52:33.220 | We steal from the best.

01:52:34.220 | - Yeah, digging through someone's past comments to find speech that hasn't aged well.

01:52:38.900 | - And that one's tactical.

01:52:39.900 | Like that one isn't just someone not being empathetic.

01:52:41.740 | They're like, "I'm gonna punish you for this."

01:52:44.660 | And that's one of the reasons why I got depressed writing this book, because there's already

01:52:50.340 | people who don't love me because of coddling the American mind, usually based on a misunderstanding

01:52:54.420 | of what we actually said in Coddling the American Mind, but nonetheless.

01:52:57.940 | But on this one, I'm calling out people for being very cruel in a lot of cases.

01:53:05.820 | But one thing that was really scary about studying a lot of these cases is that once

01:53:10.340 | you have that target on your back, what they're gonna try to cancel you for could be anything.

01:53:15.460 | They might go back into your old posts, find something that you said in 1995, do something

01:53:23.660 | where essentially it looks like it's this entire other thing, but really what's going

01:53:29.020 | on is they didn't like your opinion, they didn't like your point of view on something,

01:53:32.700 | and they're gonna find a way that from now on, anytime your name comes up, it's like,

01:53:36.500 | "Oh, remember this thing I didn't like about him?"

01:53:39.260 | And it's, again, it's cruel, doesn't get you anywhere closer to the truth, but it is a

01:53:44.180 | little scary to stick your neck out.

01:53:46.500 | - Okay, in terms of solutions, I'm gonna ask you a few things.

01:53:49.740 | So one, parenting.

01:53:50.740 | - Yeah.

01:53:51.820 | - Five and seven year old.

01:53:56.420 | - So I'm sure you've figured it all out then.

01:53:58.220 | - Oh God, no.

01:53:59.260 | - From a free speech perspective.

01:54:02.060 | From a free speech culture perspective, how to be a good parent.

01:54:06.260 | - I think the first quality you should be cultivating in your children if you want to

01:54:11.420 | have a free speech culture is curiosity and an awareness of the vastness that will always

01:54:19.820 | be unknown.

01:54:21.540 | And getting my kids excited about the idea that's like, "We're gonna spend our whole

01:54:25.340 | lives learning about stuff."

01:54:27.540 | And it's fast and exciting and endless and will never make a big dent in it, but the

01:54:33.820 | journey will be amazing.

01:54:36.060 | But only fools think they know everything, and sometimes dangerous fools at that.

01:54:42.540 | So giving the sense of intellectual humility early on, also saying things that actually

01:54:49.140 | do sound kind of old-fashioned, but I say things to my kids like, "Listen, if you enjoy

01:54:56.700 | study and work, both things that I very much enjoy, I do for fun, your life is going to

01:55:02.060 | feel great and it's going to feel easy."

01:55:05.380 | So some of those old-fashioned virtues are things I try to preach.

01:55:10.500 | Counterintuitive stuff like outdoor time, playing, having time that are not intermediated

01:55:15.460 | experiences is really important.

01:55:19.340 | And little things, like I talk about in the book about when my kids are watching something

01:55:25.140 | that's scary.

01:55:26.140 | And I'm not talking about like zombie movies, I'm talking about like a cartoon that has

01:55:30.420 | kind of a scary moment.

01:55:32.540 | And saying that they want to turn the TV off.

01:55:34.820 | And I talk to them and I say, "Listen, I'm gonna sit next to you and we're gonna finish

01:55:39.580 | this show.

01:55:41.340 | And I want you to tell me what you think of this afterwards."

01:55:45.140 | And I sat next to my sons.

01:55:49.020 | And by the end of it, every single time, when I asked them, "Was that as scary as you thought

01:55:53.300 | it was going to be?"

01:55:54.300 | And they were like, "No, Daddy, that was fine."

01:55:56.300 | And I'm like, "That's one of the great lessons in life.

01:55:59.140 | The fear that you don't go through becomes much bigger in your head than actually simply

01:56:04.460 | facing it."

01:56:05.460 | That's one of the reasons why I'm fighting back against this culture.

01:56:07.420 | I'd love for all of our kids to be able to grow up in an environment where people give

01:56:12.420 | you grace and accept the fact that sometimes people are gonna say things that piss you

01:56:17.220 | off, take seriously the possibility of being wrong and be curious.

01:56:21.700 | - Well, I have hope that the thing you mentioned, which is because so much of young people's

01:56:26.820 | stuff is on the internet, that they're going to give each other a break.

01:56:30.940 | Because then everybody is cancel-worthy.

01:56:33.540 | - Generation Z hates cancel culture the most.

01:56:35.940 | And that's another reason why it's like people still claiming this isn't even happening.

01:56:39.340 | It's kind of like, "No, you actually can ask kids what they think of cancel culture."

01:56:43.420 | And they hate it.

01:56:44.420 | - Yeah.

01:56:45.420 | Well, I kind of think of them as like the immune system that's like, it's the culture

01:56:49.060 | waking up to like, "No, this is not a good thing."

01:56:51.540 | - I am glad though.

01:56:52.540 | I mean, I am one of those kids who is really glad that I was a little kid in the '80s and

01:56:58.420 | a teenager in the '90s because having everything potentially online, it's not an upbringing

01:57:05.420 | I envy.

01:57:06.740 | - Well, I, because you can also do the absolutist free speech.

01:57:11.860 | I like leaning into it where I hope for a future where a lot of our insecurities, flaws,

01:57:21.940 | everything's out there.

01:57:23.460 | And to be raw honest with it, I think that leads to a better world because the flaws

01:57:29.420 | are beautiful.

01:57:30.420 | I mean, that's the flaws is the basic ingredients of human connection.

01:57:34.980 | Robert Wright, he wrote a book on Buddhism.

01:57:39.020 | And I talked about trying to use social media from a Buddhist perspective and like as if

01:57:45.020 | it's the collective unconscious meditating and seeing those little like angry bits that

01:57:51.820 | are trying to cancel you or get you to shut up and just kind of like letting them go the

01:57:56.700 | same way you're supposed to watch your thoughts kind of trail off.

01:57:59.180 | - I would love to see that like visualized.

01:58:01.980 | Whatever the drama going on, just seeing the sea of it, of the collective consciousness

01:58:08.500 | just processing this and having a little like panic attack and just kind of like breathing

01:58:14.620 | it in.

01:58:15.620 | - Look at the little sort of hateful, angry voices kind of pop up and be like, "Okay,

01:58:18.980 | there you are."

01:58:20.140 | And I'm still focused on that thing because that is one of the things is, okay, yeah,

01:58:26.900 | actually this is probably late in the game to be giving my grand theory on this stuff.

01:58:31.260 | - Never too late.

01:58:34.940 | - So what I was studying in law school when I ran out of First Amendment classes, I decided

01:58:40.820 | to study censorship during the Tudor dynasty because that's where we get our ideas of prior

01:58:45.340 | restraint that come from the licensing of the printing press, which was something that

01:58:50.420 | Henry VIII was the first to do.

01:58:51.940 | Where basically the idea was that if you can't print anything in England unless it's with

01:58:57.180 | these Your Majesty approved printers, it will prevent heretical work and anti-Henry VIII

01:59:05.820 | stuff from coming out.

01:59:06.820 | A pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty efficient idea if nothing else.

01:59:13.740 | And I always, so he started getting angry at the printing press around 1521 and then

01:59:18.460 | passed something that required prints to be, along with Parliament, in 1538.

01:59:25.620 | And I always think of that as kind of like where we are now because we have this, back

01:59:30.900 | then we had the original disruptive technology.

01:59:32.820 | You know, writing was probably really bad, but the next one, which was the printing press,

01:59:37.020 | which was absolutely calamitous.

01:59:38.660 | And I mean, and I say calamitous on purpose because in the short term, the witch hunts

01:59:44.100 | went up like crazy because the printing press allowed you to get that manual on how to find

01:59:48.860 | witches.

01:59:50.340 | The religious wars went crazy.

01:59:53.060 | It led to all sorts of distress, misinformation, nastiness.

01:59:58.580 | And Henry VIII was trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

02:00:00.940 | You know, he was kind of like, "I want to use this for good.

02:00:05.700 | Like I feel like it could be used."

02:00:08.020 | But he was in an unavoidable period of epistemic anarchy.

02:00:13.340 | There's nothing you can do to make the period after the printing press came out to be a

02:00:18.900 | non-disruptive, non-crazy period other than like absolute totalitarianism and destroy

02:00:24.420 | all the presses, which simply was not possible in Europe.

02:00:28.940 | So I feel like that's kind of like where we are now.

02:00:32.180 | That disruption came from adding, I think, you know, several million people to the European

02:00:36.740 | conversation and then eventually the global conversation.

02:00:39.260 | But eventually, it became the best tool for disconfirmation, for getting rid of falsity,

02:00:45.820 | for spotting bad ideas.

02:00:48.180 | And it's the benefits, the long-term benefits of the printing press are incalculably great.

02:00:56.260 | And that's what gives me some optimism for where we are now with social media because

02:01:00.100 | we are in that unavoidably anarchical period.

02:01:02.700 | And I do worry that there are attempts in states to pass things to try to put the genie

02:01:08.500 | back in the bottle.

02:01:09.500 | Like if we ban TikTok or we say that nobody under 18 can be on the internet unless they

02:01:16.660 | have parental permission, we're going at something that no amount of sort of top-down

02:01:23.900 | is going to be able to fix it.

02:01:25.860 | We have to culturally adapt to the fact of it in ways that make us wiser that actually

02:01:34.300 | and allow it potentially to be that wonderful engine for disconfirmation that we're nowhere

02:01:39.980 | near yet, by the way.

02:01:41.580 | But think about it, additional millions of eyes on problems, thanks to the printing press,

02:01:47.900 | helped create the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the discovery of ignorance.

02:01:54.220 | We now have added billions of eyes and voices to solving problems, and we're using them

02:01:59.940 | for cat videos and canceling.

02:02:01.660 | But those are just the early days of the printing press.

02:02:06.540 | All starts with the cats and the canceling.

02:02:08.980 | Is there something about X, about Twitter, which is perhaps the most energetic source

02:02:16.340 | of cats and canceling?

02:02:17.580 | It seems like the collective unconscious of the species.

02:02:19.700 | I mean, like it's one of these things where the tendency to want to see patterns in history

02:02:26.380 | sometimes can limit the actual batshit crazy experience of what history actually is.

02:02:34.860 | But yes, we have these nice comforting ideas that it's going to be like last time.

02:02:38.940 | We don't know.

02:02:40.900 | It hasn't happened yet.

02:02:42.580 | And I think how unusual Twitter is, because I think of it as like the-- because people

02:02:49.700 | talk about writing and mass communications as being expanding the size of our collective

02:02:58.220 | brain.

02:02:59.500 | But now we're kind of looking at our collective brain in real time, and it's filled just like

02:03:03.740 | our own brains with all sorts of little crazy things that pop up and appear like virtual

02:03:09.220 | particles kind of all over the place of people reacting in real time to things.

02:03:15.700 | There's never been anything even vaguely like it.

02:03:18.660 | And it can be, at its worst, awful to see.

02:03:22.220 | At its best, sometimes seeing people just getting euphoric over something going on and

02:03:27.260 | cracking absolutely brilliant immediate jokes at the same time, it can be-- it can even

02:03:33.080 | be a joyful experience.

02:03:35.260 | I feel like-- and I live in a neighborhood now on X where I mostly deal with people that

02:03:43.740 | I think are actually thoughtful, even if I disagree with them.

02:03:47.220 | And it's not such a bad experience.

02:03:49.340 | I occasionally run into those other sort of what I call neighborhoods on X where it's

02:03:53.700 | just all canceling, all nastiness, and it's always kind of an unpleasant visit to those

02:03:57.660 | places.

02:03:58.660 | I'm not saying the whole thing needs to be like my experience, but I do think that the

02:04:05.040 | reason why people keep on coming back to it is it reveals raw aspects of humanity that

02:04:09.800 | sometimes we prefer to pretend don't exist.

02:04:12.960 | Yeah, but also it's totally new, like you said.

02:04:16.480 | Just the virality, the speed, the news travels, the opinions travel, that the battle over

02:04:21.080 | ideas travels.

02:04:22.840 | Battle over information, too.

02:04:24.000 | Yeah, of what is true and not, lies travel, the old Mark Twain thing, pretty fast on the

02:04:28.940 | thing.

02:04:29.940 | Yeah.

02:04:30.940 | And it changes your understanding of how to interpret information.

02:04:34.420 | It can also stress you out to no end.

02:04:37.740 | Remember to get off it sometimes.

02:04:38.740 | The stats are pretty bad on mental health with young people, and I'm definitely in the

02:04:43.980 | camp of people who think that social media is part of that.

02:04:46.540 | I understand the debate, but I'm pretty persuaded that one of the things that hasn't been great

02:04:51.620 | for mental health of people is just constantly being exposed.

02:04:56.460 | Yeah, absolutely.

02:04:57.460 | I think it's possible to create social media that makes a huge amount of money and makes

02:05:02.820 | people happy.

02:05:03.820 | To me, it's possible to align the incentives.

02:05:08.100 | So in terms of making teenagers, making every stage of life, giving you long-term fulfillment

02:05:15.140 | and happiness with your physical existence outside of the social media and on social

02:05:19.100 | media, helping you grow as a human being, helping challenge you just the right amount

02:05:23.980 | and just the right amount of cat videos, whatever, gives this full, rich human experience.

02:05:29.900 | I think it's just a machine learning problem.

02:05:33.220 | It's like it's not easy to create a feed.

02:05:36.260 | So the easiest feed you could do is maximize engagement.

02:05:39.100 | But that's just a really dumb algorithm.

02:05:42.620 | It's like for the algorithm to learn enough about you to understand what will make you

02:05:49.540 | truly happy as a human being to grow long-term.

02:05:52.940 | That's just a very difficult problem to solve.

02:05:55.340 | Have you ever watched Fleabag?

02:05:57.500 | It's absolutely brilliant British show.

02:06:01.180 | It sets you up.

02:06:02.180 | One of the reasons why people love it so much is it sets you up that you're watching a raunchy

02:06:06.220 | British sex in the city except the main character is the most promiscuous one.

02:06:12.700 | It's like, okay, and you kind of roll your eyes a little bit.

02:06:15.140 | It's kind of funny and it's kind of cute and kind of spicy.

02:06:19.460 | And then you realize that the person is actually kind of suffering and having a hard time.

02:06:25.140 | And it gets deeper and deeper as the show goes on.

02:06:29.040 | And she will do these incredible speeches about tell me what to do.

02:06:33.300 | Like I just I know there's experts out there.

02:06:35.420 | I know there's knowledge out there.

02:06:36.900 | I know there's an optimal way to live my life.

02:06:39.780 | So why can't someone just tell me what to do?

02:06:42.680 | And it's this wonderfully like accurate, I think, aspect of human desire that what if

02:06:51.340 | something could actually tell me the optimal way to go?

02:06:55.340 | Because I think there is a desire to give up some amount of your own freedom and discretion

02:07:00.460 | in order to be told to do the optimally right thing.

02:07:04.520 | But that path scares me to death.

02:07:07.100 | - Yeah, but see the way you phrase it, that scares me too.

02:07:11.060 | So there's several things.

02:07:12.060 | One, you can be constantly distracted in a TikTok way by things that keep you engaged.

02:07:17.820 | So removing that and giving you a bunch of options constantly and learning from long

02:07:25.160 | term what results in your actual long term happiness.

02:07:29.860 | But like which amounts of challenging ideas are good for you?

02:07:36.080 | For somebody like me.

02:07:37.400 | - Just four.

02:07:39.480 | - But there is a number like that for you, Greg.

02:07:42.760 | For me, that number is pretty high.

02:07:45.080 | I love debate.

02:07:47.920 | I love the feeling of like realizing, holy shit, I've been wrong.

02:07:52.720 | But like, I would love for the algorithm to know that about me and to help me, but always

02:07:58.040 | giving me options if I want to descend into cat videos and so on.

02:08:01.680 | - Well, the educational aspect of it.

02:08:03.440 | - Yes, education.

02:08:04.440 | - Like the idea of kind of like both going the speed that you need to and running as

02:08:07.960 | fast as you can.

02:08:08.960 | - Yeah.

02:08:09.960 | - You know?

02:08:10.960 | - I mean, there's the whole flow thing.

02:08:11.960 | I just feel YouTube recommendation for better or worse, if used correctly, it feels like

02:08:18.480 | it does a pretty good job.

02:08:20.140 | Whenever I just refuse to click on stuff that's just dopamine based and click on only educational

02:08:26.240 | things, the recommendation it provides are really damn good.

02:08:29.400 | So I feel like it's a solvable problem, at least in the space of education of challenging

02:08:35.080 | yourself, but also expanding your realm of knowledge and all this kind of stuff.

02:08:39.080 | - And I'm definitely more in the, we're in an inescapably anarchical period and require

02:08:44.100 | big cultural adjustments and there's no way that this isn't gonna be a difficult transition.

02:08:48.980 | - Is there any specific little or big things that you would like to see X do, Twitter do?

02:08:54.680 | - I have lots of thoughts on that.

02:08:57.140 | With the printing press, an extra millions of eyes on any problem can tear down any institution,

02:09:02.400 | any person or any idea.

02:09:03.820 | And that's good in some ways, 'cause a lot of medieval institutions needed to be torn

02:09:07.120 | down and some people did too, and a lot of ideas needed to be torn down.

02:09:11.200 | Same thing is true now, an extra billions of eyes on every problem can tear down any

02:09:15.080 | person, idea or institution.

02:09:17.760 | And again, some of those things needed to be torn down, but it can't build yet.

02:09:22.640 | We are not at the stage that it can build yet, but it has shown us how thin our knowledge

02:09:26.640 | was.

02:09:27.640 | It's one of the reasons why we're also aware of the replication crisis.

02:09:29.600 | It's one of the reasons why we're also aware of how kind of shoddy our research is, how

02:09:33.520 | much our expert class is arrogant in many cases.

02:09:37.600 | But people don't wanna live in a world where they don't have people that they respect and

02:09:42.640 | they can look at.

02:09:44.000 | And I think what's happening, possibly now, but will continue to happen is people are

02:09:51.000 | gonna establish themselves as being high integrity, that they will always be honest.

02:09:54.240 | I think you are establishing yourself as someone who is high integrity, where they can trust

02:09:59.320 | that person.

02:10:00.320 | A fire wants to be the institution that people can come to.

02:10:03.240 | It's like, if it's free speech, we will defend it, period.

02:10:06.640 | And I think that people need to have authorities that they can actually trust.

02:10:12.600 | And I think that if you actually had a stream that maybe people can watch in action, but

02:10:17.080 | not flood with stupid cancel culture stuff or dumb cat memes, where it is actually a

02:10:22.760 | serious discussion bounded around rules, no perfect rhetorical fortress, no efficient

02:10:27.240 | rhetorical fortress, none of the BS ways we debate, I think you could start to actually

02:10:32.540 | create something that could actually be a major improvement in the speed with which

02:10:37.700 | we come up with new, better ideas and establish and separate truth from falsity.

02:10:41.480 | - Yeah, if it's done well, it can inspire a large number of people to become higher

02:10:46.640 | and higher integrity.

02:10:47.640 | And it can create integrity as a value to strive for.

02:10:51.200 | - Yeah.

02:10:52.200 | - I mean, there's been projects throughout the internet that have done an incredible

02:10:56.880 | job of that, but have been also very flawed.

02:10:59.240 | Like Wikipedia is an example of a big leap forward in doing that.

02:11:03.920 | - It's pretty damn impressive.

02:11:04.920 | What's your overall take?

02:11:05.920 | I mean, I'm mostly impressed.

02:11:07.820 | - So there's a few really powerful ideas for the people who edit Wikipedia.

02:11:13.940 | One of which is each editor kind of for themselves declares, "I'm into politics and I really

02:11:22.700 | kind of am a left leaning guy, so I really shouldn't be editing political articles because

02:11:28.620 | I have bias."

02:11:29.620 | - Oh, that's great.

02:11:30.620 | - So they declare their biases and they often do a good job of actually declaring the biases,

02:11:34.460 | but they'll still like, they'll find a way to justify themselves.

02:11:39.100 | Like something will piss them off.

02:11:40.660 | - Yeah.

02:11:41.660 | - And they want to correct it because they love correcting untruth into truth.

02:11:46.460 | But the perspective of what is true or not is affected by their bias.

02:11:50.260 | - Truth is hard to know.

02:11:51.660 | - And it is true that there is a left leaning bias on the editors of Wikipedia.

02:11:57.240 | So for that, what happens is on articles, which I mostly appreciate, that don't have

02:12:03.480 | a political aspect to them, scientific articles or technical articles, they can be really

02:12:12.640 | strong.

02:12:13.640 | Even history, just describing the facts of history that don't have a subjective element,

02:12:17.960 | strong.

02:12:18.960 | Also, just using my own brain, I can kind of filter out if it's something about January

02:12:25.880 | 6th or something like this.

02:12:27.000 | I know I'm going to be like, I'm not, whatever's going on here, I'm gonna kind of read it,

02:12:32.840 | but most I'm gonna look to other sources.

02:12:34.280 | I'm gonna look to a bunch of different perspectives on it.

02:12:36.600 | It's going to be very tense.

02:12:38.240 | There's probably going to be some kind of bias.

02:12:40.540 | Maybe some wording will be such, which is where Wikipedia does its thing, the way they

02:12:48.020 | word stuff will be biased, the choice of words.

02:12:52.400 | But the Wikipedia editors themselves are so self-reflective.

02:12:56.440 | They literally have articles describing these very effects of how you can use words to inject

02:13:02.240 | bias in all the ways that you talk about it.

02:13:05.840 | - That's healthier than most environments.

02:13:07.520 | - It's incredibly healthy, but I think you could do better.

02:13:10.920 | One of the big flaws of Wikipedia to me that Community Notes on X does better is the accessibility

02:13:18.080 | of becoming an editor.

02:13:20.860 | It's difficult to become an editor and it's not as visible, the process of editing.

02:13:26.080 | So I would love, like you said, a stream for everyone to be able to observe this debate

02:13:31.680 | between people with integrity of when they discuss things like January 6th, the very

02:13:36.720 | controversial topics, to see how the process of the debate goes, as opposed to being hidden

02:13:42.800 | in the shadows, which it currently is in Wikipedia.

02:13:45.080 | You can access it, it's just hard to access.

02:13:48.200 | And I've also seen how they will use certain articles on certain people.

02:13:54.400 | Those about people I've learned to trust less and less.

02:13:57.600 | Because they'll literally will use those to make personal attacks.

02:14:01.000 | And this is something you write about.

02:14:03.000 | They'll use descriptions of different controversies to paint a picture of a person that doesn't

02:14:10.080 | to me at least feel like an accurate representation of the person.

02:14:14.200 | It's like writing an article about Einstein, mentioning something about theory of relativity

02:14:19.960 | and then saying that he was a womanizer and abuser and a controversy.

02:14:24.520 | Yeah, he is.

02:14:26.720 | Feynman also, not exactly the perfect human in terms of women.

02:14:33.400 | But there's other aspects to this human.

02:14:36.680 | And to capture that human properly, there's a certain way to do it.

02:14:40.680 | And I think Wikipedia will often lean, they really try to be self-reflective and try to

02:14:47.160 | stop this, but they will lean into the drama if it matches the bias.

02:14:52.560 | But again, much better than, the world I believe is much better because Wikipedia exists.

02:15:00.200 | But now that we're in these adolescent stages, we're growing and trying to come up with different

02:15:05.200 | technologies, the idea of a stream is really, really interesting.

02:15:08.760 | As you get more and more people into this discourse that where the value is, let's try

02:15:15.120 | to get the truth.

02:15:16.120 | Yeah, yeah.

02:15:17.120 | And that basically, you get little cards for nope, wrong, nope, wrong.

02:15:21.920 | And the different rhetorical techniques that are being used to avoid actually discussing.

02:15:26.480 | Yeah, and I think actually you can make it a little bit fun by you get a limited number

02:15:29.320 | of them.

02:15:30.320 | It's kind of like, you get three whataboutism cards.

02:15:34.000 | So gamifying the whole thing, absolutely.

02:15:36.400 | Yeah.

02:15:37.400 | Let me ask you about, so you mentioned going through some difficult moments in your life.

02:15:45.120 | What has been your experience with depression?

02:15:48.520 | What has been your experience getting out of it, overcoming it?

02:15:51.600 | Yeah, I mean, the whole thing, the whole journey with Coddling the American Mind began with

02:15:58.040 | me in the Belmont psychiatric facility in Philadelphia back in 2007.

02:16:05.200 | I had called 911 in a moment of clarity because I'd gone to the hardware store to make sure

02:16:13.920 | that when I killed myself that it stuck.

02:16:16.080 | I wanted to make sure that I had my head wrapped and everything.

02:16:19.440 | So if all the drugs I was planning to take didn't work, that I wouldn't be able to claw

02:16:23.280 | my way out.

02:16:25.440 | It'd been a really rough year.

02:16:28.080 | And I always had issues with depression, but they were getting worse.

02:16:32.520 | And frankly, one of the reasons why this cancel culture stuff is so important to me is that

02:16:38.920 | the thing that I didn't emphasize as much in Coddling the American Mind, which by the

02:16:41.920 | way, that description that I give of trying to kill myself was the first time I'd ever

02:16:45.760 | written it down.

02:16:47.520 | Nobody in my family was aware of it being like that.

02:16:51.680 | My wife had never seen it.

02:16:53.020 | And basically, the only way I was able to write that was by doing, you know how you

02:16:56.160 | can kind of trick yourself?

02:16:59.360 | And I was like, I'm going to convince myself that this is just between me and my computer

02:17:02.800 | and nobody will see it.

02:17:03.800 | And it's probably now the most public thing I've ever written.

02:17:07.640 | But what I didn't emphasize in that was how much the culture war played into how depressed

02:17:12.440 | I got.

02:17:13.520 | Because I was originally the legal director of FIRE, then I became president of FIRE in

02:17:17.520 | 2005, moved to Philadelphia where I get depressed.

02:17:20.960 | And just I don't have family there.

02:17:23.880 | There's something about the town, they don't seem to like me very much.

02:17:27.520 | But the main thing was being in the culture war all the time.

02:17:30.680 | There was a girl that I was dating.

02:17:33.440 | I remember, you know, she didn't seem to really approve of what I did.

02:17:36.200 | And a lot of people didn't really seem to.

02:17:38.200 | And meanwhile, like I was defending people on the left all the time.

02:17:42.360 | And they'd be like, oh, that's good that you're defending someone on the left.

02:17:44.480 | But they still would never forgive me for defending someone on the right.

02:17:47.360 | And I remember saying at one point, I'm like, listen, I'm like, I'm a true believer in this

02:17:52.040 | stuff.

02:17:53.040 | I'm willing to defend Nazis.

02:17:54.040 | I'm certainly willing to defend Republicans.

02:17:56.880 | And she actually said, I think Republicans might be worse.

02:18:01.400 | And that didn't, that relationship didn't go very well.

02:18:04.160 | And then I nearly got in fistfights a couple times with people on the right, because they

02:18:08.560 | found out I defended people who crack jokes about 9/11.

02:18:11.760 | Like this happened more than once.

02:18:13.280 | And, you know, by that time, I'm in my 20s.

02:18:15.480 | I'm not fistfighting again.

02:18:18.440 | But yeah, it was always like that.

02:18:20.480 | You see how hypocritical people can be.

02:18:22.760 | You can see how friends can turn on you if they don't like your politics.

02:18:27.160 | So I got an early preview of this, of what the culture we were heading into by being

02:18:33.320 | the president of FIRE, and it was exhausting.

02:18:37.880 | And that was one of the main things that led me to be, you know, suicidally depressed.

02:18:43.280 | At the Belmont Center, if you told me that that would be the beginning of a new and better

02:18:47.640 | life for me, I would have laughed if I could have.

02:18:50.640 | But I would, you know, I don't, you can tell I'm okay if I'm still laughing.

02:18:54.280 | And I wasn't laughing at that point.

02:18:57.180 | So I got a doctor and I started doing cognitive behavioral therapy.

02:19:02.240 | I started having all these voices in my head that were catastrophizing and, you know, it

02:19:09.280 | gave me over generalization and fortune telling, you know, mind reading, all of these things

02:19:15.720 | that they teach you not to do.

02:19:17.960 | And what you do in CBT is essentially you have something makes you upset, and then you

02:19:25.440 | just write down what the thought was.

02:19:28.040 | And, you know, something minor could happen and your response was, you know, like, well,

02:19:33.240 | the date didn't seem to go very well.

02:19:35.400 | And that's because I'm broken and will die alone.

02:19:37.480 | And you're like, okay, okay, okay.

02:19:39.640 | What are the following, you know, that's catastrophizing, that's mind reading, that's fortune telling,

02:19:44.640 | that's all this stuff.

02:19:46.380 | And you have to do this several times a day, forever.

02:19:49.760 | I actually need to brush up on it at the moment.

02:19:53.080 | And it slowly over time, voices in my head that have been saying horrible, you know,

02:19:58.960 | horrible internal talk, it just didn't sound as convincing anymore, which was a really

02:20:03.480 | kind of like subtle effect.

02:20:05.400 | Like it was just kind of like, oh, wait, I don't buy that I'm broken.

02:20:09.480 | You know, like that doesn't sound true.

02:20:11.400 | That doesn't sound like truth from God, like it used to.

02:20:15.680 | And nine months after I was planning to kill myself, I was probably happier than I'd been

02:20:21.160 | in a decade.

02:20:24.080 | And that was one of the things that, you know, the CBT is what led me to notice this in my

02:20:30.080 | own work that it felt like administrators were kind of selling cognitive distortions,

02:20:34.880 | but students weren't buying yet.

02:20:36.220 | And then when I started noticing that they seemed to come in actually already believing

02:20:39.280 | a lot of this stuff, that would be very dangerous.

02:20:40.960 | And that led to calling the American mind and all that stuff.

02:20:44.760 | But the thing that was rough about writing, "Canceling the American Mind," I've mentioned

02:20:48.880 | this already a couple of times.

02:20:50.520 | I got really depressed this past year because I was studying.

02:20:54.440 | You know, there's a friend in there that I talk about who killed himself after being

02:20:58.640 | canceled.

02:20:59.640 | I talked to him a week before he killed himself and I hadn't actually checked in with him

02:21:04.520 | because he seemed so confident I thought he would be totally fine because he had an insensitive

02:21:09.600 | tweet in June of 2020 and, you know, got forced out in a way that didn't actually sound as

02:21:15.520 | bad as a lot of the other professors.

02:21:17.000 | He actually at least got a severance package, but they knew he'd sue and win because he

02:21:20.840 | had before.

02:21:22.600 | And so I waited to check in on him because we were so overwhelmed with the request for

02:21:26.040 | helps and he was saying people were coming to his house still and then he shot himself

02:21:30.560 | the next week.

02:21:31.560 | And I definitely, and because everyone knows I'm so public about my struggles with this

02:21:36.000 | stuff, everybody who fights this stuff comes to me when they're having a hard time.

02:21:41.560 | And this is a very hard psychologically taxing business to be in.

02:21:45.840 | And even admitting this right now, like I think about like all the vultures out there,

02:21:51.200 | they'll have fun with it.

02:21:52.200 | Just like the same way when my friend Mike Adams killed himself, there were people like

02:21:55.160 | celebrating on Twitter that a man was dead because they didn't like his tweets.

02:22:03.280 | But somehow that made them compassionate for some abstract other person.

02:22:07.440 | So I was getting a little depressed and anxious and the thing that really helped me more than

02:22:11.920 | anything else was confessing to my staff that I, you know, books take a lot of energy.

02:22:20.720 | So I knew they didn't want to hear that not only was this taking a lot of the boss's time,

02:22:25.440 | this was making him depressed and anxious.

02:22:26.840 | But when I finally told the leadership of my staff, you know, people that even though

02:22:32.040 | I try to maintain a lot of distance from, I love very, very much, it made such a difference,

02:22:37.960 | you know, because I could be open about that.

02:22:39.960 | And the other thing was, have you heard this conference dialogue?

02:22:43.080 | Oh, yes.

02:22:44.080 | It's like an invite only thing.

02:22:46.000 | It's Orrin Hoffman runs it.

02:22:49.360 | It intentionally tries to get people over the political spectrum to come together and

02:22:54.200 | have off the record conversations about big issues.

02:22:57.560 | And it was nice to be in a room where liberal, conservative, none of the above were all like,

02:23:03.160 | oh, thank God someone's taking on council culture.

02:23:05.760 | And where it felt like, it felt like maybe this won't be the disaster for me and my family

02:23:12.360 | that I was starting to be afraid it would be that taking this stuff on might actually

02:23:16.760 | have a happy ending.

02:23:17.760 | Well, one thing I just stands out from that is the pain of cancellation can be really

02:23:28.920 | intense.

02:23:30.720 | And that doesn't necessarily mean losing your job, but just even you can call it bullying,

02:23:34.880 | you can call it whatever name, but just some number of people on the internet.

02:23:40.120 | And that number can be small, kind of saying bad things to you.

02:23:46.640 | That can be a pretty powerful force to the human psyche, which was very surprising.

02:23:51.640 | And then the flip side also of that, it really makes me sad how cruel people can be.

02:24:01.120 | Thinking that your cause is social justice in many cases can lead people to think I can

02:24:06.800 | be as cruel as I want in pursuit of this.

02:24:09.800 | When a lot of times it's just a way to sort of vent some aggression on a person that you

02:24:16.760 | think of only as an abstraction.

02:24:18.360 | So I think it's important for people to realize that they're whatever negative energy, whatever

02:24:29.200 | negativity you want to put out there, there's real people that can get hurt.

02:24:34.920 | You can really get people to one, be the worst version of themselves, or two, possibly take

02:24:41.520 | their own life.

02:24:42.520 | And it's not as real.

02:24:45.360 | Yeah.

02:24:46.360 | Well, that's one of the things that we do in the book to really kind of address people

02:24:50.560 | who still try to claim this isn't real, is we just quote.

02:24:55.400 | We quote the Pope.

02:24:56.480 | We quote Obama.

02:24:57.540 | We quote James Carville.

02:24:58.920 | We quote Taylor Swift on cancel culture.

02:25:02.400 | And Taylor Swift's quote is essentially about how behind all of this, when it gets particularly

02:25:07.480 | nasty, there's this very clear kill yourself kind of undercurrent to it.

02:25:14.200 | And it's cruel.

02:25:16.400 | And the problem is that in an environment so wide open, there's always going to be someone

02:25:22.560 | who wants to be so transgressive and say the most hurtful, terrible thing.

02:25:27.960 | But then you have to remember the misrepresentation, getting back to the old idioms, sticks and

02:25:32.720 | stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me, has been reimagined in campus

02:25:41.280 | debates in the most asinine way.

02:25:43.440 | People will literally say stuff like, but now we know words can hurt.

02:25:46.720 | And it's like, now we know words can hurt?

02:25:49.720 | Guys, you didn't have to come up with a special little thing that you teach children to make

02:25:55.520 | words hurt less if they never hurt in the first place.

02:25:57.960 | It wouldn't even make sense, the saying.

02:26:00.040 | It's a saying that you repeat to yourself to give yourself strength when the bullies

02:26:04.840 | have noticed you're a little weird.

02:26:07.200 | That might be a little personal.

02:26:11.120 | And it helps.

02:26:12.120 | It really does help to be like, listen, okay, assholes are going to say asshole things,

02:26:17.800 | and I can't let them have that kind of power over me.

02:26:20.400 | Yeah.

02:26:21.400 | Yeah.

02:26:22.400 | But also as a learning experience, because it does hurt.

02:26:26.320 | But for the good people out there who actually just sometimes think that they're vending,

02:26:31.240 | think about it.

02:26:32.240 | Remember that there are people on the other side of it.

02:26:34.440 | Yeah.

02:26:35.440 | For me, it hurts my kind of faith in humanity.

02:26:38.440 | I know it shouldn't, but it does sometimes.

02:26:40.720 | When I just see people being cruel to each other, it floats a cloud over my perspective

02:26:49.240 | of the world.

02:26:51.000 | I wish I didn't have to be there.

02:26:53.040 | Yeah.

02:26:54.040 | That was always my sort of flippant answer to that, if mankind is basically good or basically

02:26:59.720 | evil being the biggest debate in philosophy and being like, well, the problem with the

02:27:05.760 | first is there's nothing basic about humanity.

02:27:08.400 | Yeah.

02:27:09.400 | Yeah.

02:27:10.400 | What gives you hope about this whole thing, about this dark state that we're in as you

02:27:16.600 | describe?

02:27:17.600 | How can we get out?

02:27:18.600 | What gives you hope that we will get out?

02:27:21.240 | I think that people are sick of it.

02:27:24.600 | I think people are sick of not being able to be authentic.

02:27:29.600 | That's really what censorship is.

02:27:31.800 | It's basically telling you don't be yourself.

02:27:33.600 | Don't actually say what you think.

02:27:36.320 | Don't show your personality.

02:27:37.680 | Don't dissent.

02:27:38.680 | Don't be weird.

02:27:39.680 | Don't be wrong.

02:27:41.200 | That's not sustainable.

02:27:42.320 | I think that people have kind of had enough of it.

02:27:46.640 | One thing I definitely want to say to your audience is it can't just be up to us arguers

02:27:56.200 | to try to fix this.

02:27:59.640 | I think that, and this may sound like it's an unrelated problem, I think if there were

02:28:06.160 | highly respected, let's say extremely difficult ways to prove that you're extremely smart

02:28:12.120 | and hardworking that cost little or nothing that actually can give the Harvards and the

02:28:18.560 | Yales of the world a run for their money, I think that might be the most positive thing

02:28:22.520 | we could do to deal with a lot of these problems and why.

02:28:26.360 | I think the fact that we have become a weird, America with a great anti-elitist tradition

02:28:33.000 | has become weirdly elitist in the respect that we not only again are our leadership

02:28:39.240 | coming from these few fancy schools, we actually have like great admiration for them.

02:28:44.440 | We kind of look up to them.

02:28:46.200 | But I think we'd have a lot healthier of a society if people could prove their excellence

02:28:51.360 | in ways that are coming from completely different streams and that are highly respected.

02:28:56.040 | I sometimes talk about there should be a test that anyone who passes it gets like a BA in

02:29:02.160 | the humanities that like a super BA.

02:29:05.840 | Like something, like someone not a GED.

02:29:08.200 | That's not what I'm talking about.

02:29:09.200 | I'm talking about something that like, you know, one out of only a couple, like a hundred

02:29:13.880 | people can pass.

02:29:14.880 | Some other way of actually, of not going through these massive bloated expensive institutions

02:29:20.640 | that people can raise their hands and say, "I'm smart and hardworking."

02:29:23.600 | I think that could be an incredibly healthy way.

02:29:26.480 | I think we need additional streams for creative people to be solving problems whether that's

02:29:30.200 | on X or someplace else.

02:29:32.240 | I think that there's lots of things that technology could do to really help with this.

02:29:35.960 | I think some of the stuff that Sal Khan is working on at Khan Academy could really help.

02:29:40.960 | So I think there's a lot of ways but they exist largely around coming up with new ways

02:29:45.140 | of doing things, not just expecting the old things that have say $40 billion in the bank

02:29:52.040 | that they're going to reform themselves.

02:29:54.200 | And here's my, you know, I've been picking on Harvard a lot but I'm going to pick on

02:29:57.120 | a little bit more.

02:30:00.320 | And I talk a lot about class again.

02:30:03.040 | And you know, there's a great book called Poison Ivy by Evan Mandry, which I recommend

02:30:07.360 | to everybody.

02:30:08.360 | It's outrageous.

02:30:09.360 | It sounds like me in a rant at Stanford, which was, and I think the status, you know, elite

02:30:15.240 | higher education has more kids from the top 1% than they have from the bottom 50 or 60%,

02:30:21.040 | depending on the school.

02:30:23.520 | And when you look at how much they actually like replicate class privilege, it's really

02:30:28.320 | distressing.

02:30:29.320 | So everybody should read Poison Ivy.

02:30:31.160 | And above all else, if you're weird, continue being weird.

02:30:38.240 | And you're one of the most interesting, one of the weirdest, in the most beautiful way

02:30:41.640 | people I've ever met.

02:30:43.160 | Greg, thank you for the really important work you do.

02:30:46.200 | This was, this is...

02:30:48.440 | Everybody watch Kid Cosmic.

02:30:51.920 | I appreciate the class, the hilarity that you brought here today, man.

02:30:56.040 | This is an amazing conversation.

02:30:57.480 | Thank you for the work you do.

02:30:59.560 | Thank you.

02:31:00.560 | And for me, who deeply cares about education, higher education, thank you for holding the

02:31:06.560 | MITs and the Harvards accountable for doing right by the people that walk their halls.

02:31:13.600 | So thank you so much for talking today.

02:31:16.200 | Thanks for listening to this conversation with Greg Lukianoff.

02:31:18.800 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:31:23.040 | And now let me leave you with some words from Noam Chomsky.

02:31:27.000 | If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like.

02:31:32.560 | Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked.

02:31:36.560 | So was Stalin.

02:31:38.100 | If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech

02:31:41.640 | precisely for views you despise.

02:31:45.880 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:31:48.640 | Bye.

02:31:49.640 | Bye.

02:31:50.640 | Bye.

02:31:51.640 | Bye.

02:31:52.640 | Bye.

02:31:53.640 | Bye.

02:31:53.640 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

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