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The following is a conversation with Greg Lukianoff, free speech advocate, First Amendment attorney, president and CEO of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and he s the author of Unleashing Liberty, co-author with Jonathan Haidt of Coddling of the American Mind, and co-author with Ricky Schlott of a new book,
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coming out in October, that you should definitely pre-order now, called The Canceling of the American Mind, which is a definitive accounting of the history, present, and future of cancel culture, a term used and overused in public discourse, but rarely studied and understood with the depth and rigor that Greg and Ricky do in this book, and in part, in this conversation.
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Freedom of speech is important, especially on college campuses, the very place that should serve as the battleground of ideas, including weird and controversial ones, that should encourage bold risk-taking, not conformity.
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Boy, can I tell you some stories about life and death.
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There s just so much, it s so personal, it s so rich with feeling, and one of the conversations, one of the soldiers has a kind of philosophical, existential discussion about
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I don t know, something about that tension that really stayed with me.
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about the value of life.
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When we look around us, how much do we value life?
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And when I do think about my own death and the death of people I love, the value of life becomes so intensely clear.
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That s policygenius.com.
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This show is also brought to you by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking a new language within weeks.
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Boy, do I have some cool announcements and developments on that front for you.
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I think that s the future.
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Forget this podcast.
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Just the breaking the barrier that language creates using artificial intelligence is going to be incredible.
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It s so exciting to me because I m really intimately cognizant of the barriers, that loss in translation barrier that s created by languages.
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And if you want to yourself break down that barrier, you need to learn the languages.
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You need to learn Spanish and Russian and Italian and German and French.
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I know a little bit of each one of those.
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Every time I mention BetterHelp, I think about my friend, Tim Dillon, because his ad reads, give zero Fs about the sponsor or about civility or rules.
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Now, I will let the sexual innuendo of that statement just ring for a bit and allow you to take it in, the beauty of that.
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And I aspire to that, because I think I have a little Tim Dillon in my heart, just like I, on his podcast, told him that he has the bluebird in his heart.
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I think I have a little Tim Dillon in my heart.
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It s a service I use to track biological data, data coming from my body.
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And also filled with melancholy and hope and gratitude for how amazing the journey has been so far.
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Something about late night with a rotisserie chicken is the absolute gateway to that level of gratitude.
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When I posted it, somebody commented saying, eating rotisserie chicken at midnight outside of a grocery store is how men do therapy.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Greg Lukianoff.
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Let s start with a big question.
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What is cancel culture?
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Now, you ve said that you don t like the term as it s been, quote, dragged through the mud and abused endlessly by a whole host of controversial figures.
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Nevertheless, we have the term.
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What is it?
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Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns, starting around 2014 to get people
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fired, expelled, deplatformed, etc.
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for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment.
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I say would be protected because we re talking about circumstances in which it isn t necessarily where the First Amendment applies.
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But what I mean is like as an analog to say things you couldn t lose your job as a public employee for.
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and also the climate of fear that s resulted from that phenomenon, the fact that you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion.
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It wasn t subtle that there was an uptick in this, particularly on campus around 2014.
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John Ronson wrote a book called So You ve Been Publicly Shamed that came out in 2015 already documenting this phenomenon.
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I wrote a book called Freedom from Speech in 2014.
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It really was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors.
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When it comes to the number of professors that we ve seen be targeted and lose their jobs, I ve been doing this for 22 years and I ve seen nothing like it.
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So there s so many things I want to ask you here.
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One, actually, just look at the Organization of Fire.
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Can you explain what the organization is?
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Because it s interconnected to this whole fight and the rise of cancel culture and the fight for freedom of speech since 2014 and before.
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So FIRE was founded in 1999 by Harvey Silverglate.
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He is a famous civil liberties attorney.
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He s a bit on the show.
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He s the person who actually found me out in my very happy life out in San Francisco but knew I was looking for a First Amendment job.
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I had gone to law school specifically to do First Amendment.
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He found me, which was pretty cool.
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His protege, Kathleen Sullivan, was the dean of Stanford Law School and this remains the best compliment I ever got in my life is that she recommended me to Harvey.
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Since that s the whole reason why I went to law school, I was excited to be a part of this new organization.
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The other co-founder of FIRE is Alan Charles Kors.
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He s just an absolute genius.
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He is one of the leading experts in the world on the Enlightenment and particularly about Voltaire.
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And if any of your listeners do like The Great Courses, he has a lecture on Blaise Pascal.
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And Blaise, of course, is famous for Pascal s Wager.
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And I left it just so moved and impressed and with a depth of understanding of how important this person
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was.
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That s interesting, you mentioned to me offline, connected to this, that at least it runs in parallel, or there s a connection between the love of science and the love of the freedom of speech.
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Can you maybe elaborate where that connection is?
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Sure, I think that for those of us who have devoted our lives to freedom of speech, one thing that we are into, whether we know it or not, is epistemology, the study and philosophy of knowledge.
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Freedom of speech has lots of moral and philosophical dimensions, but from a pragmatic standpoint, it is necessary because we re creatures of incredibly limited knowledge.
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We are incredibly self-deceiving.
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I always love the fact that Yuval Harari refers to the Enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance.
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Because that s exactly what it was.
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It was suddenly being like, wow, hold on a second.
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All of this incredibly interesting folk wisdom we got, which by the way, can be surprisingly reliable here and there, when you start testing a lot of it.
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is nonsense and it doesn t hold up.
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Even our ideas about the way things fall, you know, as Galileo established, like even our intuitions, they re just wrong.
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So a lot of the early history of freedom of speech, it was happening at the same time as sort of the scientific revolution.
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So, a lot of the early debates about freedom of speech were tied in.
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So, certainly Galileo – I always point out like Kepler was probably like the even more radical idea that there weren t even perfect spheres.
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But at the same time, largely because of the invention of the printing press, you also had all these political developments.
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I always talk about Jan Hus, you know, from the – a famous Czech hero who was burned at the stake and I think in 1419.
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But he was basically Luther before the printing press.
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Before Luther could get his word out, you know, he didn t stand a chance and that was exactly what Jan Hus was.
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But a century later, thanks to the printing press,
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Everyone could know what Luther thought and boy, did they.
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But it led to, of course, this completely crazy, hyper-disrupted period in European history.
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Well, you mentioned, to jump around a little bit, the First Amendment.
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First of all, what is the First Amendment, and what is the connection to you between the First Amendment, the freedom of speech, and cancel culture?
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Sure.
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So I m a First Amendment lawyer, as I mentioned, and that s what I—it s my passion, that s what I studied, and I think American First Amendment law is incredibly interesting.
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In one sentence, the First Amendment is trying to get rid of basically all the reasons why humankind had been killing each other for its entire existence, that we weren t going to fight any more over opinion, we weren t going to fight any more religion, that you have the right to approach your government for redress of grievances, that you have the freedom to associate, that all of these things in one sentence were like, nope, the government will no longer interfere with your right to have these fundamental human rights.
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One thing that makes FIRE a little different from other organizations is, however, we re not just a First Amendment organization.
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We are a free speech organization.
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At the same time, a lot of what I think free speech is,
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can be well explained with reference to a lot of First Amendment law, partially because in American history, some of our smartest people have been thinking about what the parameters of freedom of speech are in relationship to the First Amendment.
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And a lot of those principles, they transfer very well just as pragmatic ideas.
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So like the biggest sin in terms of censorship is called viewpoint discrimination, that essentially you allow freedom of speech except for that opinion.
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Now, it s – and it s found to be kind of more defensible and I think this makes sense that if you set up a forum and like we re only going to talk about economics to exclude people who want to talk about a different topic.
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But it s considered rightfully a bigger deal if you set up a forum for economics.
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But we re not going to let people talk about that kind of economics or have that opinion on economics, most particularly.
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So a lot of the principles from First Amendment law actually make a lot of philosophical sense as good principles for
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when like what is protected and unprotected speech, what should get you in trouble, how you actually analyze it, which is why we actually try in our definition of cancel culture to work in some of the First Amendment norms just in the definition so we don t have to bog down on them as well.
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You re saying so many interesting things, but if you can linger on the viewpoint discrimination, is there any gray area of discussion there?
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Like what is and isn t economics for the example you gave?
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Yeah.
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Is it a science or is it an art to draw lines of what is and isn t allowed?
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Yeah.
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If you re saying that something is or is not economics, well, you can say everything is economics and therefore I want to talk about poetry.
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There would be some line drawing exercise in there.
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But let s say at once you decide to open up it to poetry even.
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It s a big difference between saying, OK, now we re open to poetry, but you can t say Dante was bad.
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That s a forbidden opinion now officially in this otherwise open forum.
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That would immediately at an intuitive level strike people as a bigger problem than just saying that poetry isn t economics.
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Yeah, I mean, that intuitive level that you speak to, I hope,
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that all of us have that kind of basic intuition when the line is crossed.
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It s the same thing for like pornography, right?
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You know, when you see it.
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I think there s the same level of intuition that should be applied across the board here.
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And it s when that intuition becomes deformed by whatever forces of society, that s when it starts to feel like censorship.
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Yeah, I mean people find it a different thing.
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You know, if someone loses their job simply for their political opinion, even if that employer has every right in the world to fire you, I think Americans should still be like, well, it s true.
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They have every right in the world and I m not making a legal case that maybe you shouldn t
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fire someone for their political opinion.
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But think that through.
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Like what society do we want to—what kind of society do we want to live in?
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And it s been funny watching—you know, and I point this out.
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Yes, I will defend businesses  First Amendment rights of association to be able to have the legal right to decide, you know, who works for them.
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But from a moral or philosophical matter, if you think through the implications of if every business in America becomes an expressive association in addition to being a profit-maximizing organization, that would be a disaster for democracy because you would end up in a situation where people would actually be saying to themselves,
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I don t think I can actually say what I really think and still believe I can keep my job.
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That s where I was worried.
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I felt like we were headed because a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled was very simply, you know, oh, but they have the right to get rid of this person.
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That s the beginning and end of the discussion.
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I thought that was a dodge.
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I thought that wasn t actually a very serious way that if you care about both the First Amendment and freedom of speech of thinking it through.
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So to you, just to clarify, the First Amendment is kind of a legal embodiment of the ideal of freedom of speech, and then freedom of speech- That s applied to government.
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And it s very specific, it applied to government.
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And freedom of speech is the application of the principle to everything, including the high-level philosophical ideal of the value of people being able to speak their mind.
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SPEAKER_00
It s an older, bolder, more expansive idea and you can have a situation – and I talk about countries that have good free speech law but not necessarily great free speech culture and I talk about how when we sometimes make this distinction between free speech law and free speech culture, we re thinking in a very cloudy kind of way.
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What I mean by that is that law is generally, particularly in a common law country, it s the reflection of norms.
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Those, you know, judges are people too and in a lot of cases common law is supposed to actually take our intuitive ideas of fairness and place them, you know, into the law.
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So, if you actually have a culture that doesn t appreciate free speech from a philosophical standpoint, it s not going to be able to protect free speech for the long haul even in the law because eventually—that s one of the reasons why I worry so much about some of these terrible cases coming out of law schools because I fear that even though, sure, American First Amendment law is very strongly protective of First Amendment
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for now.
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It s not going to stay that way if you have generations of law students graduating who actually think there s nothing, there s no higher goal than shouting down you re an opponent.
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Yeah, so that s why so much of your focus or a large fraction of your focus is on the higher education or education period is because education is the foundation of culture.
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Yeah, you have this history, you know.
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64, you have the free speech movement on Berkeley.
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In 65, you have repressive tolerance by Herbert Marcuse, which was a declaration of, by the way, we on the left, we shouldn t—we should have free speech, but we should have free speech for us.
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I mean I went back and reread repressive tolerance and how clear it is.
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I had forgotten that it really is kind of like—and these so-called conservatives and right-wingers
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we need to repress them because they re regressive thinkers.
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It really doesn t come out to anything more sophisticated than the very old idea that our people are good.
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They get free speech.
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They should keep it.
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other side bad.
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We should not have – we have to retrain society and of course like it ends up being another – he was also a fan of Mao, so it s not surprising that he – of course the system would have to rely on some kind of totalitarian system.
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But that was a laughable
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position, you know, say 30, 40 years ago.
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The idea that essentially, you know, free speech for me, not for thee as the great, you know, free speech champion that Hentoff used to say was something that you were supposed to be embarrassed by.
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But I saw this when I was in law school in 97.
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I saw this when I was interning at the ACLU in 99.
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there was a slow motion train wreck coming, that essentially there was these bad ideas from campus that had been taking on more and more steam of basically no free speech for my opponent were actually becoming more and more accepted as and partially because academia was becoming less and less viewpoint diverse.
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I think that as my
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Co-author Jonathan Haidt points out that when you have low viewpoint diversity, people start thinking in a very kind of tribal way.
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If you don t have the respected dissenters, you don t have the people that you can point to that are like, hey, this is a smart person.
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SPEAKER_00
This is like – this is a smart, reasonable, decent person that I disagree with.
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SPEAKER_00
So I guess not everyone thinks alike on this issue.
1
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You start getting much more kind of like only – you know.
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only bad people, only heretics, only blasphemers, only right-wingers, you know, can actually think in this way.
1
SPEAKER_01
Every time you say something, I always have a million thoughts and a million questions that pop up, but since you mentioned there s a kind of drift, as you write about in the book, and you mentioned now there s a drift towards the left in academia, which will also maybe draw a distinction here between the left and the right and the cancel culture, as you present in your book, is not necessarily associated with any one political viewpoint, that there s mechanisms on both sides that result
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in cancellation and censorship in violation of freedom of speech.
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So, one thing I want to be really clear about is the book takes on both right and left cancel culture.
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They re different in a lot of ways and definitely, you know, cancel culture from the left is more important in academia where the left is
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dominates.
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But we talk a lot about cancel culture coming from legislatures.
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We talk a lot about cancel culture on campus as well because even though most of the attempts that come from on campus to get people canceled are still from the left,
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There are a lot of attacks that come from the right, that come from, you know, attempts by different organizations and sometimes when there are stories in Fox News, you know, like they ll go after professors.
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About one-third of the attempts to get professors punished that are successful actually do come from the right.
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We talk about attempts to get books banned in the book.
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We talk about
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I talk about suing the Florida legislature.
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Ron DeSantis had something called the Stop Woke Act, which we told everyone this is laughably unconstitutional.
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They tried to ban particular topics in higher ed and we re like, no, this is a joke.
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This will be laughed out of court.
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They didn t listen to us and they passed it and we sued and we won.
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Now, they re trying again with something that s equally as unconstitutional and we will sue again and we will win.
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Can you elaborate on the Stop Woke Act?
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This is presumably trying to limit
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certain topics from being taught in school?
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Yeah, basically woke topics.
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It came out of the sort of attempt to get at critical race theory.
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So it s topics related to race, gender, etc.
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I don t remember exactly how they tried to cabinet to CRT.
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But when you actually—the law is really well-established that you can t tell higher education what they re allowed to teach without violating the First Amendment.
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And when this got in front of a judge, it was exactly as—he was exactly as skeptical of it as we thought he d be.
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I think he called this dystopian.
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And it wasn t a close call.
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So if you re against that kind of teaching, the right way to fight it is by making the case that it s not a good idea.
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as part of the curriculum as opposed to banning it from the curriculum.
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Yeah.
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It just—the state doesn t have the power to simply say—to ban, you know, what teachers—what professors in higher education teach.
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Now, it gets a little more complicated when you talk about K-12 because the state has a role in deciding what public K-12 teaches because they re your kids.
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It s taxpayer-funded and generally the legislature is involved.
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There is democratic oversight of that process.
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So for K-12, is there also a lean towards the left in terms of the administration that manages the curriculum?
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Yeah, there definitely is in K-12.
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I mean, my kids go to public school.
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I have a five and a seven-year-old.
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and they have lovely teachers, but we have run into a lot of problems with education schools at fire.
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A lot of the graduates of education school end up being the administrators who clamp down on free speech in higher education.
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I ve been trying to think of positive ways to take on some of the problems that I see in K-12.
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I thought that the attempt to just
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dictate you won t teach the following 10 books or 20 books or 200 books was the wrong way to do it.
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Now, when it comes to deciding what books are in the curriculum, again, that s something the legislature actually can t have some say in and that s pretty uncontroversial in terms of the law.
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But when it comes to how you fight it, I had something that—since I m kind of stuck with the formula—I called empowering of the American mind.
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I gave principles that were inconsistent with the sort of groupthink and heavy emphasis on identity politics that some of the critics are rightfully complaining about in K-12.
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And that is actually in Canceling of the American Mind, but I have a more detailed explanation of it that I m gonna be putting up on my blog, The Eternally Radical Idea.
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Is it possible to legally, this is a silly question perhaps, create an extra protection for certain kinds of literature, 1984 or something, to remain in the curriculum?
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I mean, it s already, it s all protected, I guess.
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I guess to protect against administrators from fiddling too much
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with the curriculum, like stabilizing the curriculum.
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I don t know what the machinery of the K-12 public school – Matthew Feeney In K-12, you know, state legislatures – they re part of that and they can say like you should teach the following books.
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Now, of course, people are always a little bit worried that if you – if they were to recommend, you know, teach the Declaration of Independence, you know, that it will end up being – well, they re going to teach the Declaration of Independence was just to protect slavery, which it wasn t.
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Yeah, so teaching a particular topic matters, which textbooks you choose, which perspective you take, all that kind of stuff.
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Of course, there s like, religion starts to creep into the whole question of like, how, you know, is the Bible, are you allowed to teach and to incorporate that into education?
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Don t, yeah.
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I mean, I m an atheist with an intense interest in religion.
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I actually read the entire Bible this year just because I do stuff like that.
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And I never actually had read it from beginning to end.
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Then I read the Quran because, you know, and I m going to try to do the Book of Mormon, but, you know.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, sorry, you re so fascinating.
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Do you recommend doing that?
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I think you should, just to know, because it s such a touchstone in the way people talk about things.
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It can get pretty tedious, but I even made myself read through all of the very specific instructions on how tall the different parts of the temple need to be, and how long the garbs need to be, and what shape they need to be.
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And those go on a lot.
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Surprisingly, a big chunk of Exodus, I thought that was more like in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
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But then you get to books like Job, you know, wow.
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I mean, Job is such a read and no way Job originally had that ending.
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So, Job is basically—it starts out as this perverse bet between God and Satan about whether or not they can actually make a good man renounce God.
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And initially, they can t.
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It s all going very predictably.
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And then they finally really torture Job and he turns into the best
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Why is God cruel?
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How could God possibly exist?
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How could a kind God do these things?
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And he beats—he turns into like the best lawyer in the entire world, and he defeats everyone, all the people who come to argue with him.
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He argues the pants off of them.
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And then suddenly at the end, God shows up, and he s like,
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Well, you know, I am everywhere and it s a very confusing answer.
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He gives an answer kind of like, I am there when lionesses give birth and I am there.
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And by the way, there s this giant monster Leviathan that s very big and it s very scary and I have to manage the universe.
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And I m kind of like, God, are you saying that you re very busy?
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Is that essentially your argument to Job?
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And you don t mention the whole kind of like, that I have a bet that s why I was torturing you, that doesn t come up.
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And then at the end, God decides, Job s like, oh, no, you re totally right, I was totally wrong, sorry.
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And God says, I m gonna punish those people who tried to argue with you and didn t win.
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So he gets rid of the, I don t know exactly what he does to them, I don t remember.
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Then he gives Job all his money back, and it makes him super prosperous.
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I m like, no way that was the original ending of that book, because this was clearly a beloved novel that they were like, but it can t have that ending.
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It s a long way of saying, I actually think it s worthwhile.
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You re always kind of surprised when you end up in the part.
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There are parts of it that will sneak up on you, kind of like Isaiah s a trip, Ecclesiastes, Depeche Mode.
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And you did, you said you also, the Qur an.
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Yeah, which was fascinating.
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So what, is there, it d be interesting to ask, is there a tension between
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the study of religious texts or the following of religion and just believing in God and following the various aspects of religion with freedom of speech?
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Andrew Cohen In the First Amendment, we have something that we call the religion clause and I ve never liked calling it just that because it s two brilliant things right next to each other.
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The state may not establish an official religion, but it cannot interfere with your right to practice your religion.
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That s beautiful.
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Two things at the same time and I think they re both exactly right.
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exactly right.
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I think sometimes the right gets very excited of the free exercise clause and the left gets very excited about establishment and I like the fact that we have both of them together.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, how does this relate to freedom of speech and how does it relate to the curriculum like we were talking about?
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SPEAKER_00
I actually think it would be great if public schools could teach the Bible, like in the sense of like read it as a historical document.
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SPEAKER_00
But back when I was at the ACLU, every time I saw people trying this, it always turned into them actually advocating for, you know, a Catholic or a Protestant or some—or Orthodox even—kind of like read on religion.
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If you actually make it into something advocating for a particular view on religion, then it crosses into the establishment class side.
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SPEAKER_00
So Americans haven t figured out a way to actually teach it, so it s probably better that you, you know, learn outside of a public school class.
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Do you think it s possible to teach religion from like a world religions kind of course without disrespecting the religions?
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I think the answer is it depends on from whose perspective.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, like the practitioners say you re like an orthodox follower of a particular religion.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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Is it possible to not piss you off in teaching like all the major religions of the world?
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For some people, the bottom line is you have to teach it as true.
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And with that, under those conditions, then the answer is no, you can t teach it without offending someone at least.
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Can t you say these people believe it s true?
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Can you reform it?
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So you have to walk on eggshells, essentially.
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You can try really hard and you will still make some people angry, but serious people will be like, oh no, you actually tried to be fair to the beliefs here.
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And I try to be respectful as much as I can about
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a lot of this.
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I still find myself much more drawn to both Buddhism and Stoicism though.
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SPEAKER_01
Where do I go?
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, let s...
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One interesting thing to get back to college campuses is FIRE keeps the college free speech rankings at rankings.thefire.org.
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I m very proud of them.
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I highly recommend because forget even just the ranking, you get to learn a lot about the universities from this entirely different perspective than people are used to when they go to pick whatever university they want to go to.
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It just gives another perspective on the whole thing.
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And it gives quotes from people that are students there and so on about their experiences.
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And it gives different, maybe you could speak to the various measures here before we talk about who s in the top five and who s in the bottom five.
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What are the different parameters that contribute to the evaluation?
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So, people have been asking me since day one to do a ranking of schools according to freedom of speech.
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Even though we have the best database in existence of campus speech codes, policies that universities have that violate First Amendment or First Amendment norms, we also have the best database of – we call the disinvitation database.
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It s better named the deplatforming database, which is what we re going to call it.
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These are all cases where somebody was invited as a speaker to campus and they were disinvited.
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Disinvited or deplatforming also includes shouting down.
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So they showed up and they couldn t really speak.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
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And so having that, what we really needed in order to have some serious social science to really make a serious argument about what the ranking was.
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was to be able to, one, get a better sense of how many professors were actually getting punished during this time.
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Then the biggest missing element was to be able to ask students directly what the environment was like on that campus for freedom of speech.
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Are you comfortable disagreeing with each other?
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Are you comfortable disagreeing with your professors?
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Do you think violence is acceptable in response to a speaker?
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Do you think shouting down is OK?
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Do you think blocking people s access to a speaker is OK?
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And once we were able to get all those elements together, we first did a test run, I think, in 2019 of about 50.
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And we ve been doing it for four years now, always trying to make the methodology more and more precise to better reflect the actual environment at particular schools.
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And this year, the number one school was Michigan Technological University, which was a nice surprise.
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The number two school was actually Auburn University, which was nice to see.
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In the top 10, the most well-known prestigious school is actually UVA, which did really well this year.
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University of Chicago was not happy that they weren t number one, but University of Chicago is 13, and they had been number one or in the top three for years prior to that.
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So, can you explain?
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It s almost surprising.
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Is it because of like the really strong economics departments and things like this or why?
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SPEAKER_00
Matthew Feeney They had a case involving a student.
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They wouldn t recognize a chapter of Turning Point USA and they made a very classic argument that we – and classic in the bad way that we hear at campuses across the country, oh, we have a campus Republicans.
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SPEAKER_00
So, we don t need this additional conservative group.
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SPEAKER_00
We re like, no, I m sorry.
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We ve seen dozens and dozens if not hundreds of attempts to get this one particular conservative student group derecognized or not recognized.
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SPEAKER_00
We told them, like listen, we told them at FIRE that we consider this serious and they wouldn t recognize the group.
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SPEAKER_00
That s a point down in our ranking and it was enough to knock them from
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SPEAKER_00
They probably would have been number two in the rankings, but now they re 13 out of 248.
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SPEAKER_00
They re still one of the best schools in the country.
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SPEAKER_00
I have no problem saying that.
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SPEAKER_00
The school that did not do so well at a negative 10.69, negative 10.69, and we rounded up to zero was Harvard, and Harvard has been not very happy with that result.
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SPEAKER_01
The only school to receive the abysmal ranking
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
There are a couple of people— Oh, Harvard.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, Harvard.
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SPEAKER_00
There are a couple of people who have actually been really, I think, making a mistake by getting very Harvard-sounding, by being like, I ve had statisticians look at this, and they think your methodology is a joke, and pointing out, and this case wasn t that important, and that scholar wasn t—that scholar—one of the arguments against one of the scholars that we counted against them for punishing was that that wasn t a very famous or influential scholar.
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SPEAKER_00
I m kind of like,
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SPEAKER_00
So your argument seems to be snobbery, like essentially that you re not understanding our methodology, for one thing.
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SPEAKER_00
And then you re saying that actually that scholar wasn t important enough to count.
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SPEAKER_00
And by the way, Harvard, by the way, Harvard, if we... Even if we took all of your arguments as true, even if we decided to get rid of those two professors,
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SPEAKER_00
You would still be in negative numbers.
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SPEAKER_00
You would still be dead last.
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SPEAKER_00
You would still be after Georgetown and Penn, and neither of those schools are good for freedom of speech.
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SPEAKER_01
We should say the bottom five is the University of Pennsylvania, like you said, Penn, the University of South Carolina, Georgetown University, and Fordham University.
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SPEAKER_00
All very well earned.
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SPEAKER_00
They have so many bad cases at all of those schools.
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SPEAKER_01
What s the best way to find yourself in the bottom five if you re a university?
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SPEAKER_01
What s the fastest way to that negative, to that zero?
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SPEAKER_00
A lot of deplatforming.
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SPEAKER_00
When we looked at the bottom five, 81% of attempts to get speakers deplatformed were successful at the bottom five.
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SPEAKER_00
There were a couple schools, I think Penn included, where every single attempt
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Every time a student like objected, a student group objected to that speaker coming, they canceled this speech.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think Georgetown was 100% success rate.
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SPEAKER_00
I think Penn had 100% success rate.
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SPEAKER_00
I think Harvard did stand up for a couple, but mostly people got deplatformed there as well.
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SPEAKER_01
So how do you push back on deplatforming?
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SPEAKER_01
Who would do it?
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Is it other students?
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Is it faculty?
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Is it the administration?
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What s the dynamics of pushing back?
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SPEAKER_01
Basically, because I imagine some of it is culture, but imagine every university has a bunch of students who will protest basically every speaker, and it s a question of how you respond to that protest.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, here s the dirty little secret about like the big change in 2014 and Fire and me and Hite have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus was that for most of my career, students were great on freedom of speech.
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SPEAKER_00
They were the best constituency for free speech absolutely unambiguously until about 2013, 2014.
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SPEAKER_00
It was only in 2014 where we had this very kind of sad for us experience where suddenly students were the ones advocating for deplatforming and new speech codes, kind of in a similar way that they had been doing in say like the mid- 80s, for example.
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SPEAKER_00
Here s the dirty little secret.
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SPEAKER_00
It s not—it s just the students.
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SPEAKER_00
It s students and administrators, sometimes only a handful of them though, working together to make—to create some of these problems.
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SPEAKER_00
This is exactly what happened at Stanford when Kyle Duncan, a Fifth Circuit judge, tried to speak at my alma mater.
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SPEAKER_00
and a fifth of the class showed up to shout him down.
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SPEAKER_00
It was a real showing of what was going on that ten minutes into the shout down of a Fifth Circuit judge and I keep on emphasizing that because I m a constitutional lawyer.
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SPEAKER_00
Fifth Circuit judges are big deals.
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SPEAKER_00
They re one level below the Supreme Court.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, about a fifth of the school shows up to shout him down.
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SPEAKER_00
After 10 minutes of shouting him down, an administrator, a DEI administrator gets up with a prepared speech that she s written.
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SPEAKER_00
That s a seven-minute long speech where she talks about free speech.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe the juice isn t worth the squeeze.
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SPEAKER_00
We re at this law school where people could learn to challenge these norms.
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SPEAKER_00
It s clear that there was coordination amongst some of these administrators and from talking to students there, they were in meetings, extensive meetings for a long time.
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SPEAKER_00
They show up, do a shout down, then they take additional seven minutes to lecture the speaker on free speech not being—the juice of free speech not being worth the squeeze.
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SPEAKER_00
and then for the rest of it, it s just constant heckling after she leaves.
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SPEAKER_00
This is clearly – and something very similar happened a number of times at Yale where it was very clearly administrators were helping along with a lot of these disruptions.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think every time there is a shout down at a university, the investigation should be first and foremost, did administrators
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SPEAKER_00
help create this problem?
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SPEAKER_00
Did they do anything to stop it?
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SPEAKER_00
Because I think a lot of what s really going on here is the hyper-bureaucratization of universities with a lot more ideological people who think of their primary job as basically like policing speech more or less.
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SPEAKER_00
They re encouraging students – sorry.
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SPEAKER_00
They re encouraging students who have opinions they like to do shutdowns and that s why they really need to investigate this.
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SPEAKER_00
It is at Stanford, the administrator who gave the prepared remarks about the juice not being worth the squeeze, she has not been invited back to Stanford.
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SPEAKER_00
But she s one of the only examples I can think of when these things happen a lot, where an administrator clearly facilitated something that was a shout down or deplatforming or resulted in a professor getting fired or resulted in a student getting expelled, where the administrator has got off scot-free or probably in some cases even got a promotion.
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SPEAKER_01
And so a small number of administrators, maybe even a single administrator, could participate in the encouraging and the organization and thereby empower the whole process.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s something I ve seen throughout my entire career.
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SPEAKER_00
And the only thing is it s kind of hard to catch this sort of in the act, so to speak.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s one of the reasons why it s helpful for people to know about this, you know.
2
SPEAKER_00
because there was this amazing case.
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SPEAKER_00
This was at University of Washington.
2
SPEAKER_00
We actually featured this in a documentary made in 2015, that came out in 2015, 2016, called Can We Take a Joke?
2
SPEAKER_00
This was when we started noticing something was changing on campus.
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SPEAKER_00
We also heard that comedians were saying that they couldn t use their good humor anymore.
2
SPEAKER_00
This was right around the time that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock said that they didn t want to play on campuses because they couldn t be funny.
2
SPEAKER_00
But we featured a case of a comedian who wanted to do a musical called The Passion of the Musical, making fun of The Passion of the Christ, with the stated goal of offending everyone, every group equally.
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SPEAKER_00
It was very much a South Park mission.
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SPEAKER_00
and it s an unusual case because we actually got documentation of administrators buying tickets for angry students and holding an event where they trained them to jump up in the middle of it and shout, I m offended.
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SPEAKER_00
They bought them tickets, they sent them to this thing with the goal of shouting it down.
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SPEAKER_00
Now unsurprisingly, when you send an angry group of students to shut down a play, it s not gonna end at just,
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SPEAKER_00
I m offended,  and it got heated.
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SPEAKER_00
There were death threats being thrown.
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SPEAKER_00
Then the Pullman Washington police told Chris Lee, the guy who made the play, that they wouldn t actually protect him.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, it s not every day you re going to have that kind of hard evidence that actually seeing the administrators would be so brazen that they recorded the fact that they bought them tickets and sent them.
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SPEAKER_00
But I think a lot of that stuff is going on, and I think it s a good excuse to cut down on one of the big problems in higher education today, which is hyper-bureaucratization.
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SPEAKER_01
In your experience, is there a distinction between administrators and faculty in terms of perpetrators of these kinds of things?
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SPEAKER_01
So if we got rid of all, like Harvey s talked about, getting rid of a large percentage of the administration, does that help fix the problem?
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SPEAKER_01
Or is the faculty also small?
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SPEAKER_01
percent of the faculty also part of the encouraging in the organization of these kind of cancel.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s something that has been profoundly disappointing is that when you look at the huge uptick in attempts to get professors fired that we ve seen over the last 10 years, and actually over the last 22 years, as far back as our records go.
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SPEAKER_00
At first, they were overwhelmingly led by administrators, attempts to get professors punished.
2
SPEAKER_00
That was most—you know, I d say that was my career up until 2013 was fighting back at administrative excesses.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then you start having the problem in 2014 of students trying to get people canceled.
2
SPEAKER_00
That really accelerated in 2017.
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SPEAKER_00
The number—so one way that—one thing that makes it easier to document are the petitions to get professors fired or punished.
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SPEAKER_00
and how disproportionately that those actually do come from students.
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SPEAKER_00
But another big uptick has been fellow professors demanding that their fellow professors get punished.
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SPEAKER_00
And that to me— It makes me really sad.
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SPEAKER_00
It s kind of shameful.
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SPEAKER_00
You shouldn t be proud of signing the petition to get your fellow professor.
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And what s even more shameful
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is that we get, this has almost become a cliche within FIRE, when someone is facing one of these cancellation campaigns as a professor, I would get letters from some of my friends saying, I am so sorry this has happened to you.
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SPEAKER_00
And these were the same people who publicly signed the petition to get them fired.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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Yeah, integrity.
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Integrity is an important thing in this world.
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And I think some of it,
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I m so surprised people don t stand up more for this, because there s so much hunger for it.
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And if you have the guts as a faculty or an administrator to really stand up with eloquence,
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with rigor, with integrity, I feel like it s impossible for anyone to do anything, because there s such a hunger, it s so refreshing.
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I think everybody agrees that freedom of speech is a good thing.
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Okay, sorry, sorry.
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I don t agree.
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The majority of people, even at the universities, that there s a hunger, but it s almost like,
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this kind of nervousness around it, because there s a small number of loud voices, they re doing the shouting.
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So, I mean, again, that s where great leadership comes in.
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And so, you know, presidents of universities should probably be making clear declarations of like, this is a place where we value the freedom of expression.
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SPEAKER_00
When, and this was all throughout my career, a president, a university president who puts their foot down early and says, nope, we are not entertaining firing this professor, we are not expelling this student, it ends the issue often, very fast.
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SPEAKER_00
Although sometimes, and this is where you can really tell the administrative involvement, students will do things like
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take over the president s office and then that takeover will be catered by the university.
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People will point this out sometimes as being kind of like, oh, it was clearly like my friend Sam Abrams when they tried to get him fired at Sarah Lawrence College.
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SPEAKER_00
And that was one of the times that it was used as kind of like, oh, this was hostile to the university because the students took over the president s office.
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And I m like, no, they let them take over the president s office.
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And I don t know if that was one of the cases in which the takeover was catered, but if there was ever sort of like a sign that s kind of like, yes, this is actually really quite friendly.
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Well, in some sense, like protesting and having really strong opinions, even like,
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ridiculous, crazy, wild opinions is a good thing.
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It s just it shouldn t lead to actual firing or deplatforming of people.
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Like it s good to protest.
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It s just not good to – for universities to support that and take action based on it.
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And this is one of those like tensions in First Amendment that actually I think has a pretty easy release essentially.
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You have – you absolutely have the right
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to devote your life to ending freedom of speech and ridiculing it as a concept.
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There are people who really can come off as very contemptible about even the philosophy of freedom of speech.
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We will defend your right to do that.
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We will also disagree with you.
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If you try to get a professor fired, we will be on the other side of that.
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Now, I think he had Randy Kennedy, who I really—I love him.
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I think he s a great guy.
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But he criticized us for our deplatforming database as saying, this is saying that students can t protest speakers.
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I m like, okay, that s silly.
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We, FIRE as an organization, have defended the right to protest all the time.
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We are constantly defending the rights of protestors.
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Not believing the protestors have the right to say this would—basically, that would be punishing the speakers.
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We re not calling for punishing the protestors, but what we are saying is you can t let the protestors win if they re demanding someone be fired for their freedom of speech.
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SPEAKER_02
So the line there is between protesters protesting and the university taking action based on the protest.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
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SPEAKER_00
And of course, shout downs, that s just mob censorship.
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And that s something where the university—the way you deal with that tension in First Amendment law is essentially kind of like the one positive duty that the government has.
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SPEAKER_00
The first, the negative duty, the thing that it s not allowed to do is censor you.
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But its positive duty is that if I want to say awful things or for that matter great things that aren t popular in a public park, you can t let the crowd just shout me down.
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You can t allow what s called a heckler s veto.
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That s so interesting, because I feel like that comes into play on social media somehow.
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There s this whole discussion about censorship and freedom of speech, but to me, the carrot question is almost more interesting once the freedom of speech is established, is how do you incentivize high quality debate and disagreement?
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I m thinking a lot about that.
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That s one of the things we talk about in Canceling the American Mind is arguing towards truth and that cancel culture is cruel, it s merciless, it s anti-intellectual, but it also will never get you anywhere near truth.
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You are going to waste so much time destroying your opponents in something that can actually never get you to truth through the process, of course, of you never actually get directly at truth.
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You just chip away at falsity.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, but everybody having a megaphone on the internet with anonymity, it seems like it s better than censorship.
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but it feels like there s incentives on top of that you can construct to, yeah, to incentivize better discourse.
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It s like to incentivize somebody who puts a huge amount of effort to make even the most ridiculous arguments, but basically ones that don t include any of the things you highlight in terms of all the rhetorical tricks to shut down conversations.
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Just make,
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really good arguments for whatever.
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It doesn t matter if it s communism, for fascism, whatever the heck you want to say, but do it with scale, with historical context, with steel men on the other side, all those kind of elements.
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We try to make three major points in the book.
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One is just simply cancel culture is real.
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It s a historic era and it s on a historic scale.
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The second one is you should think of cancel culture as part of a
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rhetorical as a larger lazy rhetorical approach to what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments.
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We mean that in two senses, without having winning arguments or actually having won arguments.
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We talk about all the different what we call rhetorical fortresses that both the left and the right have that prevent you from—that allow you to just dismiss the person
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or dodge the argument without actually ever getting to the substance of the argument.
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Third part is just, you know, how do we fix it?
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But the rhetorical fortress stuff is actually something I ve been—I m very passionate about because it interferes with our ability to get at truth and it wastes time and frankly it also kind of—since cancel culture is part of that rhetorical tactic, it can also ruin lives.
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It would actually be really fun to talk about this particular aspect of the book, and I highly recommend if you re listening to this, go pre-order the book now.
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SPEAKER_02
When does it come out?
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SPEAKER_00
October 17th.
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Okay, The Canceling of the American Mind.
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SPEAKER_02
Okay, so in...
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In the book you also have a list of cheap rhetorical tactics that both the left and the right use, and then you have a list of tactics that the left uses and the right uses.
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So there s the rhetorical, the perfect rhetorical fortress that the left uses, and the efficient rhetorical fortress that the right uses.
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First one is whataboutism.
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Maybe we can go through a few of them that capture your heart in this particular moment as we talk about it.
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describe examples of it, or if there s aspects of it that you see that are especially effective.
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So what about as I m defending against criticism of your side by bringing up the other side s alleged wrongdoing?
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I want to make little cards of these, of all of these tactics, and start using them on X all the time, because they are so commonly deployed, and whataboutism I put first for a reason.
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You know, it d be an interesting idea to actually integrate that into Twitter slash X, where people, you know, instead of clicking heart, they can click which of the rhetorical tactics this is.
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And then, you know, there s actually community notes, I don t know if you ve seen,
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on X that people can contribute notes, and it s quite fascinating.
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It works really, really well.
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But to give it a little more structure, that s a really interesting method, actually.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I actually, when I was thinking about ways that X could be used to argue towards truth, I wouldn t want to have it so that everybody would be bound to that, but I think that, I imagine it almost being like a stream within X that was truth-focused, that agrees to some additional rules on how they would argue.
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Man, I would love that.
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Where, like, there s, in terms of streams that intersect and can be separated, the shit-talking one, where people just enjoy talking shit, okay.
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Go for it, man.
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And then there s, like, truth, and then, uh, I mean, there, like, then there s humor, then there s, like, good vibes, like, you know,
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I m not like somebody who absolutely needs good vibes all the time, but sometimes.
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It s nice to have.
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It s nice to just log in and not have to see, like, the drama, the fighting, the bickering, the cancellations, the moms, all of this.
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SPEAKER_02
It s good to just see.
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SPEAKER_02
That s why I go to Reddit RR, or like one of the cute animals ones, where there s cute puppies and kittens.
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And it s like, I just want to see Ryan Reynolds singing with Will Ferrell.
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I mean, like.
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Sometimes that s all you need.
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I need that in my heart.
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Yeah.
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Not all the time, just a little bit.
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And right back to the battle for truth.
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SPEAKER_02
Okay, so what aboutism?
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SPEAKER_00
What aboutism?
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Yeah, that s everywhere when you look at it, when you look at Twitter, when you look at social media in general.
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And the first, what we call the obstacle course is basically time-tested, old-fashioned, you know,
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argumentative dodges that everybody uses.
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And whataboutism is just bringing up something, you know, like someone makes an argument like, Biden is corrupt.
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And then someone says, well, Trump was worse, you know, like, and that s not an illegitimate, you know, argument to make back, but it does, it seems to happen every time someone makes an assertion, someone just points out some other thing that was going on.
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And it can get increasingly attenuated from what you re actually trying to argue.
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And when you, and you see this all the time on social media,
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It s kind of—I was a big fan of Jon Stewart s Daily Show, but an awful lot of what the humor was and what the tactic was for arguing was this thing over here.
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It s like, oh, I m making this argument about this important problem.
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Oh, actually, there s this other problem over here that I m more concerned about.
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Let s pick on the right here.
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So January 6, watching everybody arguing about CHOP, like the occupied part of Seattle or the occupied part of Portland and basically trying to like, oh, you re bringing up the riot on January 6.
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By the way, I live on Capitol Hill.
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So believe me, I was very aware of like how scary and bad it was.
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My dad grew up in Yugoslavia and that was a night where we all ate dinner in the basement because I m like, oh, when the shit goes down, eat in the basement.
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It was genuinely scary and people would try to deflect from January 6th being serious by actually making the argument that, oh, well, there are crazy horrible things happening in all over the country, riots that came from some of the social justice protests.
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SPEAKER_00
And of course, the answer is you can be concerned about both of these things and find them both problems.
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But, you know, if I m arguing about CHOP, you know, someone bringing up January 6th isn t super relevant to it.
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Or if I m arguing about January 6th, someone bringing up the riots in 2020 isn t that helpful.
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We took a long, dark journey from whataboutism.
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Yeah.
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And related to that is strawmanning and steelmanning.
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So misrepresenting the perspective of the opposing perspective.
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And this is something also, I guess it s very prevalent, and it s difficult to do the reverse of that, which is steel manning.
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It requires empathy, it requires eloquence, it requires understanding, actually doing the research and understanding the alternative perspective.
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My wonderful employee, Angel Anduardo, has something that he calls star manning.
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I find myself doing this a lot.
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It s nice to have two immigrant parents because I remember being in San Francisco in the weird kind of like ACLU slash Burning Man kind of cohort and having a friend there who was an artist who would talk about hating Kansas.
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That was his metaphor for middle America is what he meant by it.
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But he was kind of proud of the fact that he hated Kansas.
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And I m like, you gotta understand, I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners, and think about, like, change the name of Kansas to Croatia, you know, change the name of Kansas to some, that s what it sounds like to me.
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And the star manning idea, which I like, is the idea of being like, so you re saying that you really hate your dominant religious minority, like, and that s, when you start actually detaching yourself a little bit from it, how typical
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America is exceptional in a number of ways, but some of our dynamics are incredibly typical.
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It s one of the reasons why like when people start reading Thomas Sowell, for example, they start getting hooked because one of the things he does is he does comparative analysis of countries  problems and points out that some of these things that we think are just unique to the United States exist in
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75% of the rest of the countries in the world.
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For instance, Fukuyama s, the book that I m reading right now, Origins of the Political Order, actually does this wonderful job of pointing out how we re not special in a variety of ways.
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This is actually something that s very much on my mind.
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And Fukuyama, of course, it s a great book.
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It s stilted a little bit in its writing.
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because his term for one of the things he s concerned about what destroys societies is re-patrimonialization, which is the reversion to societies in which you favor your family and friends.
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I actually think a lot of what I m seeing in sort of – in the United States, it makes me worried that we might be going through a little bit of a process of repatrimonialization.
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I think that s one of the reasons why people are so angry.
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I think having – I think the prospect that we – we very nearly seem to have an election that was going to be Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton.
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It s like are we a dynastic country now?
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Is that what s kind of happening?
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Also, it s one of the reasons why people are getting so angry about legacy admissions, about how much certain families seem to be able to keep their people in the upper classes of the United States perpetually.
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SPEAKER_00
Believe me, I was poor when I was a kid and I got to go to one of the fancies.
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I got to go to Stanford.
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I got to see how people
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they treat you differently in a way that s almost insulting.
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Like basically like suddenly to a certain kind of person, I was a legitimate person.
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And I look at how much America relies on Harvard, on Yale to produce its
3
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I m going to use a very Marxist-sounding term, ruling class.
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That s one of the reasons why you have to be particularly worried about what goes on at these elite colleges.
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These elite colleges, with the exception of University of Chicago and UVA, do really badly regarding freedom of speech.
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That has all sorts of problems.
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It doesn t bode well for the future of the protection of freedom of speech for the rest of the society.
3
SPEAKER_02
So can you also empathize there with the folks who voted for Donald Trump?
3
SPEAKER_02
Because as precisely that as a resistance to this kind of momentum of the ruling class, this royalty that passes on the rule from generation to generation.
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SPEAKER_00
I try really hard to empathize with, to a degree, everybody and try to really see where they re coming from.
3
SPEAKER_00
The anger on the right, I get it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean like I feel like the book—so Coddling the American Mind was a book that I—that could be sort of a crowd pleaser to a degree, partially because we really meant what we said in the subtitle, that these are good intentions and bad ideas that are hurting people.
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SPEAKER_00
If you understand it and read the book, you can say it s like, okay, this isn t anybody being malicious.
3
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This is people trying to protect their kids.
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They re just doing it in a way that actually can actually lead to greater anxiety, depression.
3
SPEAKER_00
strangely, eventually pose a threat to freedom of speech.
3
SPEAKER_00
But in this one, we can t be quite—me and my—oh, I haven t even mentioned my brilliant co-author, Rikki Schlatt, a 23-year-old genius.
3
SPEAKER_00
She s amazing.
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SPEAKER_00
I started working with her when she was 20, who s my co-author on this book.
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SPEAKER_00
So when I m saying we, I m talking about me and Rikki.
3
SPEAKER_00
She s a libertarian.
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Libertarian journalist.
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SPEAKER_02
And a journalist, yeah, has a brilliant mind.
3
SPEAKER_00
But we can t actually write this in a way that s too kind because counselors aren t kind.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a cruelty and a mercilessness about it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean I started getting really depressed this past year when I was writing it and I didn t even want to tell my staff why I was getting so anxious and depressed.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s partially because I m talking about people who will, you know, in some of the cases we re talking about, go to your house, target your kids.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s a long-winded way of saying it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I kind of can get what sort of drives the right nuts to a degree in this.
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SPEAKER_00
I feel like they re constantly feeling like they re being gaslit.
3
SPEAKER_00
elite education is really insulting to the working class.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like part of the ideology that is dominant right now kind of treats almost 70% of the American public like they re—we developed this a little bit in The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, like they re to some way illegitimate and not worthy of respect or compassion.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, the general elitism that radiates
3
SPEAKER_02
self-fueling elitism that radiates from the people that go to these institutions.
3
SPEAKER_00
And what s funny is that the elitism has been repackaged as a kind of masquerade
4
SPEAKER_01
creates this kind of infinite compassion that essentially it s based in a sort of a very, to be frank, overly simple ideology and oversimplified explanation of the world and breaking people into groups and judging people on how oppressed they are on the intersection of their various identities.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it came to that, I think initially, it had appeal from a compassionate core, but it gets used in a way that can be very cruel, very dismissive, compassionless, and allows you to not take seriously most of your fellow human beings.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s really weird how that happened.
4
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you can explore why a thing that has
4
SPEAKER_00
kind of sounds good at first, can become such a cruel weapon of canceling and hurting people and ignoring people.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this is what you described with the perfect rhetorical fortress, which is a set of questions.
4
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you can elaborate on what the perfect rhetorical fortress is.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the perfect rhetorical fortress is the way that s been developed
4
SPEAKER_01
on the left to not ever get to someone s actual argument.
4
SPEAKER_01
I want to make a chart, like a flowchart of this about like here s the argument and here is this perfect fortress that will deflect you every time from getting to the argument.
4
SPEAKER_01
I started to notice this certainly when I was in law school that there were lots of different ways you could dismiss people.
4
SPEAKER_01
Perfect rhetorical fortress, step one,
4
SPEAKER_01
and I can attest to this because I was guilty of this as well, that you can dismiss people if you can argue that they re conservative.
4
SPEAKER_01
They don t have to be conservative to be clear.
4
SPEAKER_01
You just have to say that they are.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I never read Thomas Sowell because he was a right-winger.
4
SPEAKER_01
I didn t read Camille Paglia because I was – someone had convinced me she was a right-winger.
4
SPEAKER_01
There were lots of authors that – and when I was in law school, among a lot of very bright people, it really was already an intellectual habit that if you could designate something conservative, then you didn t really have to think about it very much anymore or take it particularly seriously.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s a childish way of arguing.
4
SPEAKER_01
But nonetheless, I engaged in it.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was a common tactic.
4
SPEAKER_01
I even mentioned in the book there was a time when a
4
SPEAKER_01
A gay activist friend who was, I think, decidedly to my left, but nonetheless had that pragmatic experience of actually being an activist, said something like, well, just because someone s conservative doesn t mean they re wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I remember feeling kind of scandalized at some level of just being like, well, no, that s kind of, isn t that the whole thing when we re saying is that they re just kind of bad people with bad ideas?
4
SPEAKER_01
You can just throw a, oh, that guy s a right winger.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can just throw that.
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SPEAKER_00
Boop.
4
SPEAKER_01
Don t have to think about you anymore.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and then it can, if you re popular enough, it can be kind of sticky.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s weird because it s effective.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s why it keeps on getting used.
4
SPEAKER_01
It essentially, it should have hit someone s, because I have a great,
4
SPEAKER_01
liberal pedigree, everything from working at the ACLU to doing refugee law in Eastern Europe.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was part of an environmental mentoring program for inner city high school kids in DC.
4
SPEAKER_01
I can defend myself as being on the left, but I hate doing that because there s also part of me that s like, okay, so what?
4
SPEAKER_01
Like, are you really saying that if you can magically make me argue or convince yourself that I m on the right, that you don t have to listen to me anymore?
4
SPEAKER_01
Again, that s arguing like children.
4
SPEAKER_01
The reason why this has become so popular is because even among—or maybe especially among elites that it works so effectively as a perfect weapon that you can use uncritically.
4
SPEAKER_01
If I can just prove you re on the right, I don t have to think about you.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s no wonder that suddenly you start seeing people calling the ACLU right-wing and calling the New York Times right-wing because it s been such an effective way to delegitimize people as thinkers.
4
SPEAKER_01
Steven Pinker, who s on our board of advisors, he refers to academia as being the left pole, that essentially it s a position that from that point of view, everything looks as if it s on the right.
4
SPEAKER_01
But once it becomes a tactic that we accept, and it s one of the reasons why, you know, I m more on the left, but I think I m left of center liberal.
4
SPEAKER_01
Ricky is, you know, more conservative, libertarian, and initially I was kind of like, should I really be writing something with someone who s more on the right?
4
SPEAKER_01
absolutely I should be.
4
SPEAKER_01
I have to actually live up to what I believe on this stuff because it s ridiculous that we have this primitive idea that you can dismiss someone as soon as you claim, rightly or wrongly, that they re on the right.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, correct me if I m wrong, but I feel like you were recently called right wing.
4
SPEAKER_00
FIRE, maybe you by association because of that debate.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, the LA Times.
4
SPEAKER_00
The LA Times.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, fun.
4
SPEAKER_01
Let s talk about the LA Times.
4
SPEAKER_00
So yes, there s an article, there s a debate.
4
SPEAKER_00
I can t wait to watch it because I don t think it s available yet to watch on video.
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SPEAKER_00
You have to attend in person.
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I can t wait to see it.
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But FIRE was in part supporting and then LA Times wrote,
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a scathing article about that everybody in the debate was basically leaning right.
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Okay.
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So much to unpack there.
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You know, Barry Weist has this great project, The Free Press.
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I ve been very impressed.
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It s covering stories that a lot of the media, right or left, isn t willing to cover.
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And we did a – we hosted a debate with her and we wanted to make it as fun and controversial as possible.
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So Fire and the Free Press hosted a debate, did the sexual revolution fail?
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So the debate was really exciting, really fun.
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The side that said the sexual revolution wasn t a failure that Grimes and Sarah Hader were on won.
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It was, you know, a nice, meaty, thoughtful night.
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And we got a – there was a review of it that was just sort of scathing about the whole thing.
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And it included a line saying that FIRE, which claims to believe in free speech but only defends viewpoints it agrees with,
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I can t believe that even made it into the magazine because it s not just calling us—because of course, you know, the implication of course is that we re right-wing, which we re not.
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Actually, the staff leans decidedly more to the left than to the right.
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But we also defend people all over the spectrum all the time.
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Like that s something that even the most minimal Google search would have solved.
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So like we ve been giving LA Times some heat on this because it s like, yeah, if you said, in my opinion, they re right-wing, we would have argued back.
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saying, well, here s the following 50,000 examples of us not being.
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When you actually make the factual claim that we only defend opinions we agree with, first of all, there s no way for us to agree with opinions because we actually have a politically diverse staff who won t even agree on which opinions are good and what opinions we have.
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One time when someone did something like this, and they were just being a little bit flippant about free speech being fine.
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I did a 70 tweet long thread, just being like, hey, do you really think this is fine?
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I decided not to do that on this particular one.
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The nice thing about it is it demonstrated two parts of the book, Canceling the American Mind, if not more.
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One of them is dismissing someone because they re conservative and because that was the implication, don t have to listen to fire because they re conservative.
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But the other one is something, a term that I invented specifically for the way people argue on Twitter, which is hypocrisy projection.
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Hi, I m a person who only cares about one side of the political fence, and I think everyone else is a hypocrite.
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And by the way, I haven t done any actual research on this, but I assume everyone else is a hypocrite.
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And you see this happen all the time.
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And this happens to FIRE a lot, where someone will be like, where is FIRE on this case?
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And we re like, we are literally quoted in the link you just sent, but didn t actually read.
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or it s like, where is fire on this?
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It s like, here s our lawsuit about it from six months ago.
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So it s a favorite thing and also, Jon Stewart, Daily Show, like the whataboutism and the kind of like idea that these people must be hypocrites is something that great as comedy, but as far as actually a rhetorical tactic that will get you to truth, just assuming that your opponent or just accusing your opponent of always being
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A hypocrite is not a good tactic for truth, but by the way, it tends to always come from people who aren t actually consistent on free speech themselves.
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So hence the projection, but basically not doing the research about whether the person is or isn t a hypocrite, and assuming others or a large fraction of others reading it will also not do the research.
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And therefore, this kind of statement becomes a kind of truthiness without a grounding in actual reality.
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It breaks down that barrier between what is and isn t true, because if the mob says something is true, it takes too much effort to correct it.
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There are three ways I want to respond to this, which is just giving example after example of times where we defended people on both sides of every major issue, basically every major issue, whether it s Israel-Palestine, whether it s terrorism, whether it s gay marriage, abortion.
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We have defended both sides of that argument.
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The other part, and I call these the orphans of the culture war.
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I really want to urge the media to start caring about free speech cases that actually don t have a political valence, that are actually just about good old-fashioned exercise of power against the little guy or little girl or little group on campus or off campus for that matter.
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Because these cases happen—a lot of our litigation are just little people
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There s regular people being told that they can t protest, that they can t hold signs.
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And then the last part of the argument that I want people to really get is like, yeah, and by the way, right-wingers get in trouble too.
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And there are attacks from the left.
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And you should take those seriously too.
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You should care when Republicans get in trouble.
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You should care when California has a DEI program that requires this on California community colleges.
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has a DEI program, a policy that actually requires even chemistry professors to work in different DEI ideas from intersectionality to anti-racism into their classroom, into their syllabus, etc.
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This is a gross
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violation of academic freedom.
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It is as bad as it is to tell professors what they can t say like we fought and defeated in Florida.
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It s even worse to tell them what they must say.
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That s downright totalitarian and we re suing against this and what I m saying is that it
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When you re dismissing someone for just being on the other side of the political fence, you are also kind of claiming, making a claim that none of these cases matter as well.
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And I want people to care about censorship when it even is against people they hate.
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Censorship is censorship.
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If we can take that tangent briefly with DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion,
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What is the good and what is the harm of such programs?
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DEI, I know people who are DEI consultants.
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Actually, I have a dear friend who I love very much who does DEI.
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Absolutely decent people.
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What they want to do
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is create bonds of understanding, friendship, compassion among people who are different.
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Unfortunately, the research on what a lot of DEI actually does is oftentimes the opposite of that.
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And I think that it s partially a problem with some of the ideology that comes from critical race theory, which is a real thing, by the way, that informs a lot of DEI that actually makes it something more likely to divide than unite.
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We talk about this in
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coddling the American mind as the difference between common humanity identity politics and common enemy identity politics.
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And I think that I know some of the people that I know who do DEI, they really want it to be common humanity identity politics, but some of the actual ideological assumptions that are baked in can actually cause people to feel more alienated from each other.
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Now, when I started at FIRE, my first cases involved 9-11.
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It was bad.
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Professors were getting targeted.
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Professors were losing their jobs for saying insensitive things about 9-11 and both from the right and the left.
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Actually, in that case, actually, sometimes a lot more from the right.
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It was really bad and about five professors lost their jobs.
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That s bad.
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Five professors over a relatively short period of time being fired for a political opinion, that s something that would get written up in any previous decades.
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We re now evaluating like how many professors have been targeted for cancellation between 2014 and middle of this year, July of 2023.
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We re at about well over a thousand attempts to get professors fired or punished, usually driven by students and administrators, often driven by professors unfortunately as well.
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About two-thirds of those result in the professor being punished in some way, everything from having their article removed to suspension, etc.
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About one-fifth of those result in professors being fired.
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Right now, it s almost 200.
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It s around 190 professors being fired.
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So, I want to give some context here.
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The Red Scare is generally considered to have been from 1947 to 1957.
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It ended, by the way, in 57 when it finally became clear, thanks to the First Amendment, that you couldn t actually fire people for their ideologies.
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Prior to that,
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A lot of universities thought they could.
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This guy is a very doctrinaire communist.
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He can t be dissuaded.
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I m going to fire them.
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They thought they actually could do that.
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It was only 57 when the law was established.
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Right now, these are happening in an environment where freedom of speech, academic freedom are clearly protected at public colleges in the United States and we re still seeing these kind of numbers.
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During the Red Scare, the biggest study that was done of what was going on, I think this came out in like 55, and the evaluation was that there was about 62 professors fired for being communists and about 90 something professors fired for political views overall.
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That usually is reported as being about 100.
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So, 60, 90, 100, depending on how you look at it.
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I think the number is actually higher, but that s only because of hindsight.
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What I mean by hindsight is we can look back and we actually find there were more professors who were fired as time reveals.
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We re at 190 professors fired and I still have to put up with people saying this isn t even happening.
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I m like, in the nine and a half years of cancel culture, 190 professors fired.
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In the 11 years of the Red Scare,
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probably somewhere around 100, probably more.
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The number is going to keep going up, but unlike during the Red Scare where people could clearly tell something was happening, the craziest thing about cancel culture is I m still dealing with people who are saying this isn t happening at all, and it hasn t been subtle on campus.
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We know that s a wild undercount, by the way, because when we surveyed professors,
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17% of them said that they had been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for what they taught, said, or their research.
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And one third of them said that they were told by administrators not to take on controversial research.
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So, like, extrapolating that out, that s a huge number.
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And the reason why you re not going to hear about a lot of these cases is because there are so many different conformity-inducing mechanisms in the whole thing.
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That s one of the reasons why the idea that you d add something like a – requiring a DEI statement to be hired or to get into a school under the current environment is so completely nuts.
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We have had a genuine crisis of academic freedom over the last – particularly since 2017 on campuses.
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We have very low viewpoint diversity to begin with.
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And under these circumstances, administrators just start saying, you know what the problem is?
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We have too much heterogeneous thought.
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We re not homogeneous enough.
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We actually need, you know, we need another political litmus test, which is nuts.
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That s what a DEI statement effectively is because there s no way to actually fill out a DEI statement without someone evaluating you on your politics.
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It s crystal clear.
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We even did an experiment on this.
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Nate Honeycutt, he got something like almost like 3,000 professors to participate evaluating different kinds of DEI statements.
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One was basically like the
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standard kind of identity politics intersectionality one.
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One was about viewpoint diversity.
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One was about religious diversity.
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One was about socioeconomic diversity.
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As far as where my heart really is, it s that we have too little socioeconomic diversity particularly in elite higher ed but also in education period.
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The experiment was
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had large participation, really interestingly set up, and it tried to model the way a lot of these DEI policies were actually implemented.
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One of the ways these have been implemented, and I think in some of the California schools, is that administrators go through the DEI statements before anyone else looks at them and then eliminates people off the top depending on how
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how they feel about their DEI statements.
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The one on viewpoint diversity, I think like half of the people who reviewed it would eliminate it right out.
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and I think it was basically the same for religious diversity.
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It was slightly better, like 40% for socioeconomic diversity, but that kills me.
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Like the idea that kind of like, yeah, that actually is the kind of diversity that I think we need a great deal more of in higher education.
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You can agree with—it s not hostile to the other kinds by the way, but the idea that we need more people from the bottom, you know,
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three quarters of American society, like in higher education, I think should be something we could all get around.
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But the only one that really succeeded was the one that sprouted back exactly the kind of ideology that they thought the reviewers would like, which is like, okay,
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There s no way this couldn t be a political litmus test.
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We ve proved that it s a political litmus test and still school after school is adding these to its application process to make schools still more ideologically homogenous.
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Why does that have a negative effect?
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Is it because
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It enforces a kind of groupthink where people are afraid, start becoming afraid to sort of think and speak freely, liberally about whatever.
5
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Well, one, it selects for people who tend to be farther to the left in a situation where you already have people—a situation where universities do lean decidedly that way.
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But it also establishes essentially a set of sacred ideas that if you re being quizzed on whether—you know, what you ve done to advance.
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anti-racism, how you ve been conscious of intersectionality, it s unlikely that you d actually get in if you said, by the way, I actually think these are dubious concepts.
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I think they re thin.
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I think they re philosophically not very defensible.
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Basically, like if your position was, I actually reject
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these concepts as being over-simple.
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You re not gonna get in.
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And I think that the person that I always think of that wasn t a right-winger that would be like, go to hell if you made him fill one of these things out, it s Feynman.
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I feel like if you gave one of these things to Richard Feynman, he d be like, he would tear it to pieces.
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And then not get the job.
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Yeah, there s some element of it that creates
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hard to pin down fear.
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So you said like the firing, the thing I wanted to say is firing 100 people or 200 people, the point is even firing one person, I ve just seen it, it can create this quiet ripple effect of fear.
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That single firing of a faculty has a ripple effect across tens of thousands of people, of educators, of who is hired, what kind of conversations are being had, what kind of textbooks are chosen, what kind of self-censorship and different flavors of that is happening.
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It s hard to measure that.
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Yeah, I mean when you ask professors about, you know, are they intimidated under the current environment, the answer is yes and particularly conservative professors, you know, already, you know, reporting that they re, you know, afraid for their jobs in a lot of different cases.
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You have a lot of good statistics in the book.
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Things like self-censorship.
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When provided with a definition of self-censorship, at least a quarter of students said they self-censor fairly often or very often during conversations with other students, with professors, and during classroom discussions.
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25%, 27%, and 28% respectively.
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A quarter of students also said that they are more likely to self-censor on campus now
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At the time they were surveyed, then they were when they first started college.
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So sort of college is kind of instilling this idea of censorship, self-censorship.
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Matthew Feeney And back to the Red Scare comparison, and this is one of the interesting things about the data as well.
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is that that same study that I was talking about, the most comprehensive study of the Red Scare, there was polling about whether or not professors were self-censoring due to the fear of the environment.
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And 9% of professors said that they were self-censoring their research and what they were saying.
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9% is really bad.
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That s almost a tenth of professors saying that they were actually—their speech was chilled.
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When we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey, when you factor together if they re—we asked them, are they self-censoring in their research?
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Are they self-censoring in class?
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Are they self-censoring online, etc.?
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It s 90%.
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of professors.
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So the idea that we re actually in an environment that is historic in terms of like how scared people are actually of expressing controversial views, I think that it s the reason why we re going to actually be studying this in 50 years, the same way we study the Red Scare.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s not—the idea that this isn t happening will just be correctly viewed as insane.
5
SPEAKER_00
So maybe we can just discuss the leaning, the current leaning of academia towards the left, which you describe in various different perspectives.
5
SPEAKER_00
So one, there s a voter registration ratio chart that you have by department, which I think is interesting.
5
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Can you explain this chart and can you explain what it shows?
5
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Yeah.
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When I started FIRE in 2001, I didn t take the viewpoint diversity issue as seriously.
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I thought it was just something that right-wingers complained about.
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I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low viewpoint diversity.
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Actually, a lot of the research that I got most interested in was done in conjunction with the great Cass Sunstein, who writes a lot about group polarization.
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The research on this is very strong.
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Essentially, when you have groups with
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political diversity and you can see this actually in judges for example.
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It tends to produce, you know, reliably more moderate, you know, outcomes whereas groups that have low political diversity tend to sort of spiral off in their own direction.
5
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When you have a super majority of people from just one political perspective, that s a problem for the production of ideas.
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It creates a situation where there are sacred ideas.
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When you look at some of the departments, I think the estimate from the Crimson is that Harvard has 3% conservatives.
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When you look at different departments, there are elite departments that have literally no conservatives in them.
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I think that s on a healthy intellectual environment.
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The problem is definitely worse
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As you get more elite, we definitely see more cases of lefty professors getting canceled at less elite schools.
5
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It gets worse as you get down from the elite schools.
5
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That s where a lot of the one-third of attempts to get professors punished that are successful, you know, do come from the right and largely from off-campus sources and we spend a lot of time talking about that in the book as well.
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It s something that I do think is underappreciated.
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But when it comes to the low viewpoint diversity, it s, you know, it works out kind of like you d expect to a degree.
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You know, economics is what, four to one or something like that.
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It s not as bad.
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But then when you start getting into some of the humanities, you know, like there are departments that there are literally none.
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SPEAKER_00
Is there a good why to why did the university s university faculty administration move to the left?
5
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Yeah.
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I don t love—and this is an argument that you ll sometimes run into on the left, just the argument that, well, people on the left are just smarter.
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And it s like, okay, it s interesting because at least the research as of
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10 years ago was indicating that if you dig a little bit deeper into that, a lot of the people who do consider themselves on the left tend to be a little bit more libertarian.
5
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This is something that Pinker wrote a fair amount about.
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The idea that we re just smarter is not an opinion I m the least bit comfortable with.
5
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I do think that departments take on momentum when they become a place where you re like, wow, it would be really unpleasant for me to work in this department if I m the token conservative and I think that takes on a life of its own.
5
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There are also departments where a lot of the ideology is kind of explicitly
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leftist.
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You look at education schools, a lot of the stuff that is actually left over from what is correctly called critical race theories is present and you end up having that in a number of the departments.
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It would be very strange to be a—in many departments, a conservative social worker professor.
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I m sure they exist, but
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there s a lot of pressure to shut up if you are.
5
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So the process on the left of cancellation, as you started to talk about with the perfect rhetorical fortress, the first step is dismiss a person if they re just, if you can put a label of conservative on them, you can dismiss them in that way.
5
SPEAKER_00
What other efficient or what other effective dismissal mechanisms are there?
5
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We have a little bit of fun with demographic numbers.
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I m going to run this by height and I remember him being kind of like, don t include the actual percentage.
5
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I m like, no, we need to include the actual percentages because people are really bad at estimating what the demographics of the US actually looks like, both the right and the left in different ways.
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We put in the numbers and we talk about being dismissed for being white or being dismissed for being straight or being dismissed for being male.
5
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You can already dismiss people for being conservative.
5
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We give examples in the book of these being used to dismiss people and oftentimes on topics not related to the fact that they are male or whether or not they re minority.
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Then we get to—I think it s like layer six and we re like,
5
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Surprise, guess what?
5
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You re down to 0.4% of the population and none of it mattered because if you have the wrong opinion, even if you re in that 0.4% of the most intersectional person who ever lived and you have the wrong opinion, you re a heretic and you actually probably will be hated even more.
5
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And the most interesting part of the research we did for this was just asking,
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every prominent black conservative and moderate that we knew personally, have you been told that you re not really black for an opinion you had?
5
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Every single one of them was like, oh, yeah.
5
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No, and it s kind of funny because it s like oftentimes white lefties telling them that s like, oh, do you consider yourself black?
5
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John McWhorter talked about having a reporter when he talked about when he showed that he dissented from some of
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what he described as kind of like woke racism in his book, Woke Ideas.
5
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The reporter actually is like, so do you consider yourself black?
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He s like, what are you crazy?
5
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Of course I do.
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Coleman Hughes had one of the best quotes on it.
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He said, I m constantly being told that the most important thing to how legitimate my opinion is, is whether or not I m black.
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But then when I have a dissenting opinion, I get told I m not really black.
5
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So, perfect.
5
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There s no way to falsify this argument.
5
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That investigation really struck me.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, and you lay this out really nicely in the book, that there is this process of saying, are you conservative?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, you can dismiss the person.
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Are you white?
5
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Dismiss the person.
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Are you male?
5
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You can dismiss the person.
5
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There s these categories.
5
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that make it easier for you to dismiss a person s ideas based on that, and like you said, you end up in that tiny percentage and you can still dismiss.
5
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It s not just dismissed.
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We talk about this from a practical standpoint the way the limitations on reality and one of them is time.
5
SPEAKER_01
A lot of cancel culture as cultural norms, as this way of winning arguments without winning arguments is about running out the clock because by the time you get down to the bottom of the—actually, even you get a couple of steps into the perfect rhetorical fortress and, you know,
5
SPEAKER_01
Where is the time gone?
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, like you probably just give up trying to actually have the argument and you never get to the argument in the first place.
5
SPEAKER_00
And all of these things are pretty sticky on social media.
5
SPEAKER_00
Social media practically invented the perfect rhetorical fortress.
5
SPEAKER_00
So that each one of those stages has a virality to it, so it could stick and then it can get people really excited.
5
SPEAKER_01
It allows you to feel outrage and superiority.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because of that, at the scale of the virality, it allows you to never get to the actual discussion of the point.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, but, you know, it s not just the left, it s the right also, so the efficient rhetorical fortress.
5
SPEAKER_00
So something to be proud of on the right, it s more efficient.
5
SPEAKER_00
So you don t have to listen to liberals, and anyone can be labeled a liberal if they have a wrong opinion.
5
SPEAKER_00
I ve seen liberal and left and leftist all used in the same kind of way.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s leftist nonsense.
5
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to listen to experts, even conservative experts, if they have the wrong opinion.
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SPEAKER_00
You don t have to listen to journalists, even conservative journalists, if they have the wrong opinion.
5
SPEAKER_00
And among the MAGA wing, there s a fourth proposition.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a fourth provision.
5
SPEAKER_00
You don t need to listen to anyone who isn t pro-Trump.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we call it efficient because it eliminates
5
SPEAKER_01
A lot of people you probably should listen to at least sometimes, you know, like we point out sometimes like how cancel culture can interfere with faith and expertise.
5
SPEAKER_01
So we get kind of being a little suspicious of experts.
5
SPEAKER_01
But at the same time, if you follow that and you follow it mechanically, and I definitely, you know, I think everybody
5
SPEAKER_01
and the US probably has some older uncle who exercises some of these.
5
SPEAKER_01
It is a really efficient way to wall yourself off from the rest of the world and dismiss at least some people you really should be listening to.
5
SPEAKER_00
The way you laid it out made me realize that we just take up so much of our brain power with these things.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s literally time.
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SPEAKER_00
We could be solving things.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you kind of exhaust yourself through this process of being outraged based on these labels and you never get to actually...
5
SPEAKER_00
There s almost not enough time for empathy, for looking at a person and thinking, well, maybe they re right, because you re so busy categorizing them.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s fascinating.
5
SPEAKER_01
What s the fun in empathy?
5
SPEAKER_01
And I mean, what s so interesting about this is that so much societal energy seems to be spent on these nasty primal desires, where essentially a lot of it is like, please tell me who I m allowed to hate.
5
SPEAKER_01
Where can I legitimately be cruel?
5
SPEAKER_01
Where can I actually exercise some aggression against somebody?
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SPEAKER_01
And it seems to sometimes be just finding new justifications for that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s an understandable, you know, human failing that sometimes can be used to defend justice.
5
SPEAKER_01
But again, it will never get you anywhere near the truth.
5
SPEAKER_00
One interesting case that you cover about expertise is with COVID.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
So how did cancel culture come into play on the topic of COVID?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think that COVID was a big blow to people s faith and expertise and cancel culture played a big role in that.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think one of the best examples of this is Jennifer Say at Levi s.
5
SPEAKER_01
She is a lovely woman.
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SPEAKER_01
She was a vice president at Levi s.
5
SPEAKER_01
She talked about actually potentially to be the president of Levi s Jeans.
5
SPEAKER_01
And she was a big advocate for kids.
5
SPEAKER_01
And when they started shutting down the schools, she started saying, this is going to be a disaster.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is going to hurt the poor and disadvantaged kids the most.
5
SPEAKER_01
We have to figure out a way to open the schools back up. 
5
SPEAKER_01
That was such a heretical point of view and the typical kind of cancel culture wave took over as he had all sorts of petitions for her to be fired and that she needed to apologize and all this kind of stuff.
5
SPEAKER_01
She was offered, I think, like a million-dollar severance, which she wouldn t take because she wanted to tell the world what she thought about this and that she wanted to continue saying that she hadn t changed her mind, that this was a disaster for young people.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now, that s kind of the conventional wisdom and the research is quite clear that this was devastating.
5
SPEAKER_01
to particularly disadvantaged youths.
5
SPEAKER_01
People understand this as being, okay, she s probably right.
5
SPEAKER_01
But one of the—
7
SPEAKER_00
and coddling in the American mind, but nonetheless.
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SPEAKER_00
But on this one, you know, like I m calling out people for being very cruel in a lot of cases.
7
SPEAKER_00
But one thing that was really scary about studying a lot of these cases is that once you have that target on your back, what they re going to try to cancel you for could be anything.
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SPEAKER_00
They might go back into your old posts, find something that you said in 1995, do something where essentially it looks like it s this entire other thing, but really what s going on is they didn t like your opinion, they didn t like your point of view on something.
7
SPEAKER_00
They re going to find a way that from now on, anytime your name comes up, it s like, oh, remember this thing I didn t like about him?
7
SPEAKER_00
And it s, again, it s cruel, doesn t get you anywhere closer to the truth, but it is a little scary to stick your neck out.
7
SPEAKER_02
Okay, in terms of solutions, I gotta ask you a few things.
7
SPEAKER_02
So one, parenting.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, five and seven year old.
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SPEAKER_02
So I m sure you ve figured it all out then.
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh God, no.
7
SPEAKER_02
From a free speech perspective.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_02
From a free speech culture perspective, how to be a good parent.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think the first quality you should be cultivating in your children if you want to have a free speech culture is curiosity.
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SPEAKER_00
and an awareness of the vastness that will always be unknown.
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SPEAKER_00
And getting my kids excited about the idea that s like, we re going to spend our whole lives learning about stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s fast and exciting and endless and we ll never make a big dent in it, but the journey will be amazing.
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SPEAKER_00
but only fools think they know everything, and sometimes dangerous fools at that.
7
SPEAKER_00
So giving the sense of intellectual humility early on, being—also, you know, saying things that actually do sound kind of old-fashioned, like—but I say things to my kids like, listen, if you
7
SPEAKER_00
Enjoy, study and work, both things that I very much enjoy, I do for fun.
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SPEAKER_00
Your life is going to feel great and it s going to feel easy.
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SPEAKER_00
Some of those old-fashioned virtues are things I try to preach.
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SPEAKER_00
Counterintuitive stuff like outdoor time, playing, having time that are not intermediated experiences is really important.
7
SPEAKER_00
And little things, like I talk about in the book about when my kids are watching something that s scary, and I m not talking about like zombie movies, you know, I m talking about like a cartoon that has kind of a scary moment, and saying that they want to turn the TV off.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I talk to them and I say, listen, I m going to sit next to you and we re going to finish this show.
7
SPEAKER_00
and I want you to tell me what you think of this afterwards. 
7
SPEAKER_00
And I sat next to my sons, and by the end of it, every single time, when I asked them, was it as scary as you thought it was going to be?
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SPEAKER_00
And I was like, no, daddy, that was fine.
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SPEAKER_00
And I m like, that s one of the great lessons in life.
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SPEAKER_00
The fear that you don t go through becomes much bigger in your head than actually simply facing it.
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SPEAKER_00
That s one of the reasons why I m fighting back against this culture.
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SPEAKER_00
I d love for all of our kids to be able to grow up in an environment where people give you grace and accept the fact that sometimes people are going to say things that piss you off, take seriously the possibility it might be wrong, and be curious.
7
SPEAKER_02
Well, I have hope that the thing you mentioned, which is because so much of young people s stuff is on the internet, that they re going to give each other a break because then everybody is cancel-worthy.
7
SPEAKER_00
Generation Z hates cancel culture the most, and that s another reason why it s like people still claiming this isn t even happening.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of like, no, you actually can ask kids what they think of cancel culture, and they hate it.
7
SPEAKER_02
Well, I kind of think of them as like the immune system.
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SPEAKER_02
That s like that s the culture waking up to like, no, this is not a good thing.
7
SPEAKER_00
I am glad, though.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, I am one of those kids who, you know, is really glad that I was a little kid in the 80s and a teenager in the 90s, because having everything potentially online, it s not an upbringing I envy.
7
SPEAKER_02
Well, I because you can also do the absolutist free speech.
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SPEAKER_02
I like leaning into it, where I hope for a future where a lot of our insecurities, flaws, everything s out there.
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SPEAKER_02
And to be raw honest with it, I think that leads to a better world, because the flaws are beautiful.
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SPEAKER_02
I mean, that s the flaws as the basic ingredients of human connection.
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SPEAKER_00
Robert Wright, he wrote a book on Buddhism, and I talked about trying to use social media from a Buddhist perspective, as if it s the collective unconscious meditating, and seeing those little angry bits that are trying to cancel you or get you to shut up, and just kind of letting them go the same way you re supposed to watch your thoughts kind of trail off.
7
SPEAKER_02
I would love to see that visualized.
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SPEAKER_02
Whatever the drama going on, just seeing the sea of it, of the collective consciousness just processing this and having a little panic attack and just kind of like breathing it in.
7
SPEAKER_00
Looking at the little sort of hateful, angry voices kind of pop up and be like,
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay, there you are.
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SPEAKER_00
And I m still focused on that thing.
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SPEAKER_00
Because that is one of the things is—okay, yeah, actually this is probably late in the game to be giving my grand theory on this stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
But— Never too late.
7
SPEAKER_00
So what I was studying in law school when I ran out of First Amendment classes, I decided to study censorship during the Tudor dynasty because that s where we get our ideas of prior restraint that come from the licensing of the printing press, which was something that Henry VIII was the first to do, where basically the idea was that if you can t print anything in England unless it s with these—your majesty approved printers,
7
SPEAKER_00
It will prevent heretical work and anti-Henry VIII stuff from coming out.
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SPEAKER_00
Pretty efficient idea, if nothing else.
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SPEAKER_00
I always—so he started getting angry at the printing press around 1521 and then passed something that required prints to be—along with Parliament in 1538.
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SPEAKER_00
I always think of that as kind of like where we are now because we have this—back then, we had the original disruptive technology.
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SPEAKER_00
Writing was probably—the next one, which was the printing press, which was absolutely calamitous.
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SPEAKER_00
I say calamitous on purpose because in the short term, the witch hunts went up like crazy because the printing press allowed you to get that manual on how to find witches.
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SPEAKER_00
that the religious wars went crazy.
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SPEAKER_00
It led to all sorts of distress, misinformation, nastiness.
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SPEAKER_00
Henry VIII was trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
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SPEAKER_00
He was kind of like, I want to use this for good, like I feel like it could be used.
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SPEAKER_00
But he was in an unavoidable period of epistemic anarchy.
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SPEAKER_00
There s nothing you can do to make the period after the printing press came out to be a non-disruptive, non-crazy period other than like absolute totalitarianism and destroy all the presses, which simply was not possible in Europe.
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SPEAKER_00
So I feel like that s kind of like where we are now.
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SPEAKER_00
That disruption came from adding, I think, you know, several million people to the European conversation and then eventually the global conversation.
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SPEAKER_00
But eventually, it became the best tool for disconfirmation, for getting rid of falsity, for spotting bad ideas.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s the benefits, the long-term benefits
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SPEAKER_00
of the printing press are incalculably great.
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SPEAKER_00
That s what gives me some optimism for where we are now with social media because we are in that unavoidably anarchical period.
7
SPEAKER_00
I do worry that there are attempts in states to pass things to try to put the genie back in the bottle.
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SPEAKER_00
If we ban TikTok or we say that nobody under 18 can be on the internet unless they have parental permission, we re going at something that
7
SPEAKER_00
No amount of sort of top-down is going to be able to fix it.
7
SPEAKER_00
We have to culturally adapt to the fact of it in ways that make us wiser that actually – and allow it potentially to be that wonderful engine for disconfirmation that we re nowhere near yet by the way.
7
SPEAKER_00
Think about it.
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SPEAKER_00
Additional millions of eyes on problems, thanks to the printing press, helped create the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the discovery of ignorance.
7
SPEAKER_00
We now have added billions of eyes and voices to solving problems, and we re using them for cat videos and canceling.
7
SPEAKER_02
but those are just the early days of the printing press.
7
SPEAKER_02
It all starts with the cats and the canceling.
7
SPEAKER_02
Is there something about X, about Twitter, which is perhaps the most energetic source of cats and canceling?
7
SPEAKER_00
It seems like the collective unconscious of the species.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s one of these things where the tendency to want to see patterns in history sometimes can limit
7
SPEAKER_00
the actual batshit crazy experience of what history actually is.
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SPEAKER_00
Because yes, we have these nice comforting ideas that it s going to be like last time.
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SPEAKER_00
We don t know.
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SPEAKER_00
It hasn t happened yet.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think how unusual Twitter is, because I think of it as like the – because people talk about
7
SPEAKER_00
you know, writing and mass communications and as being expanding the size of our collective brain.
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SPEAKER_00
But now we re kind of looking at our collective brain in real time.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s filled just like our own brains with all sorts of like little crazy things that pop up and appear like virtual particles kind of all over the place of people, you know,
7
SPEAKER_00
reacting in real time to things, there s never been anything even vaguely like it.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it can be, at its worst, awful to see.
7
SPEAKER_00
At its best, sometimes seeing people like just getting euphoric over something going on and cracking absolutely brilliant immediate jokes, you know, at the same time, it can be – it can even be a joyful experience.
7
SPEAKER_00
I feel like – and
7
SPEAKER_00
I live in a neighborhood now on X where I mostly deal with people that I think are actually thoughtful, even if I disagree with them, and it s not such a bad experience.
7
SPEAKER_00
I occasionally run into those other sort of what I call neighborhoods on X where it s just all canceling, all nastiness, and it s always kind of an unpleasant visit to those places.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m not saying the whole thing needs to be like my experience, but I do think that
7
SPEAKER_00
The reason why people keep on coming back to it is it reveals raw aspects of humanity that sometimes we prefer to pretend don t exist.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, but also it s totally new, like you said.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s just the virality, the speed, the news travels, the opinions travel, that the battle over ideas travels.
7
SPEAKER_02
The battle over information, too.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, of what is true and not.
7
SPEAKER_02
Lies travel, the old Mark Twain thing, pretty fast on the thing.
7
SPEAKER_02
And it changes your understanding of how to interpret
7
SPEAKER_00
It can also stress you out to no end.
7
SPEAKER_00
Remember to get off it sometimes.
7
SPEAKER_00
The stats are pretty bad on mental health with young people.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I m definitely in the camp of people who think that social media is part of that.
7
SPEAKER_00
I understand, you know, the debate, but I m pretty persuaded that one of the things that hasn t been great for mental health of people is just constantly being exposed.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, absolutely.
7
SPEAKER_02
I think it s possible to create social media that makes a huge amount of money, makes people happy.
7
SPEAKER_02
To me, like, it s possible to align the incentives.
7
SPEAKER_02
So in terms of, yeah, making teenagers, making every stage of life, giving you long-term fulfillment and happiness with your physical existence outside of the social media and on social media, helping you grow as a human being,
7
SPEAKER_02
helping challenge you just the right amount and just the right amount of cat videos, whatever, gives this full, rich human experience.
7
SPEAKER_02
I think it s just a machine learning problem.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s like it s not easy to create a feed.
7
SPEAKER_02
So the easiest feed you could do is like maximize engagement.
7
SPEAKER_02
But that s just like a really dumb algorithm.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s like for the algorithm to learn enough about you to understand
7
SPEAKER_02
what will make you truly happy as a human being to grow long-term.
7
SPEAKER_02
That s just a very difficult problem to solve.
7
SPEAKER_00
Have you ever watched Fleabag?
7
SPEAKER_00
It s an absolutely brilliant British show.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it sets you up.
7
SPEAKER_00
One of the reasons why people love it so much is it sets you up that you re watching a raunchy British sex in the city, except the main character is the most promiscuous one.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s like, OK.
7
SPEAKER_00
And you kind of roll your eyes a little bit.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of funny, and it s kind of cute, and kind of spicy.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then you realize that the person is actually kind of suffering and having a hard time.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it gets deeper and deeper as the show goes on.
7
SPEAKER_00
And she will do these incredible speeches about, tell me what to do.
7
SPEAKER_00
I know there s experts out there.
7
SPEAKER_00
I know there s knowledge out there.
7
SPEAKER_00
I know there s an optimal way to live my life.
7
SPEAKER_00
So why can t someone just tell me what to do?
7
SPEAKER_00
And it s this wonderfully, like,
7
SPEAKER_00
accurate, I think, aspect of human desire that what if something could actually tell me the optimal way to go?
7
SPEAKER_00
Because I think there is a desire to give up some amount of your own freedom and discretion in order to be told to do the optimally right thing, but that path scares me to death.
7
SPEAKER_02
But see, the way you phrase it, it scares me too.
7
SPEAKER_02
So there s several things.
7
SPEAKER_02
One, you could be constantly distracted in a TikTok way by things that keep you engaged.
7
SPEAKER_02
So removing that and giving you a bunch of options constantly,
7
SPEAKER_02
and learning from long-term what results in your actual long-term happiness.
7
SPEAKER_02
So, like, which amounts of challenging ideas are good for you?
7
SPEAKER_02
That, you know, for somebody like me, exactly.
7
SPEAKER_02
Just four.
7
SPEAKER_02
But there is a number like that for you, Greg.
7
SPEAKER_02
That s a lot.
7
SPEAKER_02
For me, that number is pretty high.
7
SPEAKER_02
I love debate.
7
SPEAKER_02
I love the feeling of, like, realizing, holy shit, I ve been wrong.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_02
But like, you know, and I would love for the algorithm to know that about me and to help me, but always giving me options if I want to descend into cat videos and so on.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, the educational aspect of it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes, education.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like the idea of kind of like both going the speed that you need to and running as fast as you can.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
You know, I mean, there s that, you know, the whole flow thing.
7
SPEAKER_02
I just feel YouTube recommendation.
7
SPEAKER_02
for better or worse, if used correctly, it feels like it does a pretty good job.
7
SPEAKER_02
Whenever I just refuse to click on stuff that s just dopamine-based and click on only educational things, the recommendation it provides are really damn good.
7
SPEAKER_02
So I feel like it s a solvable problem.
7
SPEAKER_02
problem, at least in the space of education, of challenging yourself, but also expanding your realm of knowledge and all this kind of stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I m definitely more in the, we re in an inescapably anarchical period and require big cultural adjustments and there s no way that this isn t going to be a difficult transition.
7
SPEAKER_02
Is there any specific little or big things that you would like to see X do, Twitter do?
7
SPEAKER_00
I have lots of thoughts on that.
7
SPEAKER_00
With the printing press, an extra millions of eyes on any problem can tear down any institution, any person or any idea and that s good in some ways because a lot of medieval institutions needed to be torn down and some people did too and a lot of ideas.
7
SPEAKER_00
need to be torn down.
7
SPEAKER_00
Same thing is true now.
7
SPEAKER_00
An extra billions of eyes on every problem can tear down any person, idea, or institution.
7
SPEAKER_00
Again, some of those things needed to be torn down, but it can t build yet.
7
SPEAKER_00
We are not at the stage that it can build yet, but it has shown us how thin our knowledge was.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s one of the reasons why we re also aware of the replication crisis.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s one of the reasons why we re also aware of how shoddy our research is, how much our expert class is
7
SPEAKER_00
arrogant in many cases, but people don t want to live in a world where they don t have people that they respect and they can look at.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think what s happening, possibly now, but will continue to happen is people are going to establish themselves as being high integrity, that they will always be honest.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think you are establishing yourself as someone who is high integrity.
7
SPEAKER_00
where they can trust that person.
7
SPEAKER_00
A fire wants to be the institution that people can come to.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s like if it s free speech, we will defend it, period.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think that people need new—need to have authorities that they can actually trust.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think that if you actually had a stream that maybe people can watch in action but
8
SPEAKER_00
not flood with, you know, stupid cancel culture stuff or dumb cat means where it is actually a serious discussion bounded around rules, no perfect rhetorical fortress, no efficient rhetorical fortress, none of the BS ways we debate.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think you could start to actually create something that could actually be a major improvement in the speed with which we come up with new better ideas and establish and separate truth from falsity.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, if it s done well, it can inspire a large number of people to become higher and higher integrity, and it can create integrity as a value to strive for.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, like, you know, there s been projects throughout the internet that have done an incredible job of that, but have been also very flawed.
8
SPEAKER_01
Like Wikipedia is an example of a big leap forward in doing that.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s pretty damn impressive.
8
SPEAKER_00
What s your overall take?
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I m mostly impressed.
8
SPEAKER_01
So there s a few really
8
SPEAKER_01
powerful ideas for the people who edit Wikipedia, one of which is each editor kind of for themselves declares, you know, I m into politics, and I really kind of am a left-leaning guy, so I really shouldn t be editing political articles, because I have bias.
8
SPEAKER_01
So they declare their biases, and they often do a good job of actually declaring the biases, but they re all still like,
8
SPEAKER_01
they ll find a way to justify themselves, like something will piss them off.
8
SPEAKER_01
And they want to correct it, because they love correcting untruth into truth.
8
SPEAKER_01
But the perspective of what is true or not is affected by their bias.
8
SPEAKER_00
Truth is hard to know.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it is true that there is a left-leaning bias on the editors of Wikipedia.
8
SPEAKER_01
So for that,
8
SPEAKER_01
What happens is on articles, which I mostly appreciate, that don t have a political aspect to them, scientific articles or technical articles, they can be really strong.
8
SPEAKER_01
Even history, just describing the facts of history that don t have a subjective element, strong.
8
SPEAKER_01
Also, just using my own brain, I can kind of filter out if it s something about January 6th or something like this.
8
SPEAKER_01
I know I m going to be like,
8
SPEAKER_01
I m not, whatever s going on here, I m gonna kinda read it, but most I m gonna look to other sources.
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I m gonna look to a bunch of different perspectives on it.
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It s going to be very tense.
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There s probably going to be some kind of bias.
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Maybe some wording will be such, which is where Wikipedia does its thing, the way they word stuff will be biased, the choice of words.
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But the Wikipedia editors themselves are so self-reflective, they literally have articles describing these very effects of how you can use words to inject bias in all the ways that you talk about it.
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That s healthier than most environments.
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It s incredibly healthy, but I think you could do better.
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One of the big flaws of Wikipedia, to me, that community notes on X does better,
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is the accessibility of becoming an editor.
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It s difficult to become an editor, and it s not as visible, the process of editing.
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So I would love, like you said, a stream for everyone to be able to observe this debate.
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between people with integrity of when they discuss things like January 6th, very controversial topics, to see how the process of the debate goes, as opposed to being hidden in the shadows, which it currently is in Wikipedia.
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You can access it, it s just hard to access.
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And I ve also seen how they will use certain articles like
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on certain people, like articles about people I ve learned to trust less and less.
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Because they ll literally will use those to make personal attacks.
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And this is something you write about.
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They ll use descriptions of different controversies to paint a picture of a person that s
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that doesn t to me at least feel like an accurate representation of the person.
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It s like writing an article about Einstein mentioning something about theory of relativity and then saying that he was a womanizer and abuser and like controversy, you know.
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Yeah, he is.
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Feynman also.
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Not exactly the perfect human in terms of women, but there s other aspects of this human, and to capture that human properly, there s a certain way to do it.
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I think Wikipedia will often lean, they really try to be self-reflective and try to stop this, but they will lean into the drama if it matches the bias.
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But again,
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Much better than, the world, I believe, is much better because Wikipedia exists.
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But now that we re in these adolescent stages, we re growing and trying to come up with different technologies, the idea of a stream is really, really interesting.
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As you get more and more people into this discourse that where the value is, let s try to get the truth.
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Yeah, and that basically, you know, you get little cards for nope, wrong, nope, wrong.
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And the different rhetorical techniques that are being used to avoid actually discussing.
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Yeah, and I think actually you can make it a little bit fun by you get a limited number of them.
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You know, it s kind of like you get three whataboutism cards.
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It s a game of finding the whole thing, absolutely.
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Let me ask you about, so you mentioned going through some difficult moments in your life.
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What has been your experience with depression?
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What has been your experience getting out of it, overcoming it?
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Yeah, I mean the whole thing, the whole journey with Coddling the American Mind began with me at the Belmont Psychiatric Facility in Philadelphia back in 2007.
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had called 911 in a moment of clarity because I d gone to the hardware store to make sure that when I killed myself that it stuck.
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I wanted to make sure that I had my head wrapped and everything, so if all the drugs I was planning to take didn t work, that I wouldn t be able to claw my way out.
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It had been a really rough year, and I always had issues with depression, but they were getting worse.
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And frankly, one of the reasons why this cancel culture stuff is so important to me is that the thing that I didn t emphasize as much in Coddling the American Mind, which by the way, that description that I gave of trying to kill myself was the first time I d ever written it down.
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Nobody in my family was aware of how
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of it being like that.
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My wife had never seen it.
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And basically, the only way I was able to write that was by doing—you know how you can kind of trick yourself?
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And I was like, I m going to convince myself that this is just between me and my computer and nobody will see it.
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It s probably now the most public thing I ve ever written.
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What I didn t emphasize in that was how much the culture war played into how depressed I got because I was originally the legal director of FIRE, then I became president of FIRE in 2005, moved to Philadelphia where I get depressed.
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I don t have family there.
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There s something about the town.
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They don t seem to like me very much.
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But the main thing was being in the culture war all the time.
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There was a girl that I was dating.
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I remember, you know, she didn t seem to really approve of what I did, and a lot of people didn t really seem to.
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And meanwhile, like, I was defending people on the left all the time, and they d be like, oh, that s good that you re defending someone on the left, but they still would never forgive me for defending someone on the right.
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And I remember saying, at one point, I m like, listen, I m like, I m a true believer in this stuff.
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I m willing to defend Nazis.
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I m certainly willing to defend Republicans.
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and she actually said, I think Republicans might be worse.
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That relationship didn t go very well.
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Then I nearly got in fistfights a couple of times with people on the right because they found out I defended people who crack jokes about 9-11.
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This happened more than once.
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By that time, I m in my 20s.
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I m not fistfighting again.
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Yeah, it was always like that.
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You see how hypocritical people can be.
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You can see how friends can turn on you if they don t like your politics.
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I got an early preview of this, of what the culture we re heading into by being the president of FIRE and it was exhausting.
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And that was one of the main things that led me to be, you know, suicidally depressed.
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At the Belmont Center, if you told me that that would be the beginning of a new and better life for me, I would have laughed if I could have, but I would—you know, I don t—you can tell I m okay if I m still laughing, and I wasn t laughing at that point.
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So I got a doctor and I started doing cognitive behavioral therapy.
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I started having all these voices in my head that were catastrophizing and, you know, it gave me over generalization and fortune telling, you know, mind reading, all of these things that they teach you not to do.
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And what you do in CBT is essentially you have a
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something makes you upset.
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And then you just write down what the thought was.
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And, you know, something minor could happen.
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And your response was, you know, like, well, the date didn t seem to go very well.
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And that s because I m broken and will die alone.
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And you re like, OK, OK, OK.
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What are the following?
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You know, that s catastrophizing.
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That s mind reading.
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That s fortune telling.
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That s all this stuff.
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And you have to do this several times a day.
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forever.
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I actually need to brush up on it at the moment.
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And it slowly over time, voices in my head that have been saying horrible, you know, horrible internal talk, it just didn t sound as convincing anymore, which was a really kind of like subtle effect.
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Like, it was just kind of like, oh, wait, I don t buy that I m broken.
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You know, like, that doesn t sound true.
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That doesn t sound like truth from God, like it used to.
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And nine months after I was planning to kill myself, I was probably happier than I d been in a decade.
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And that was one of the things that, you know, the CBT is what led me to notice this in my own work, that it felt like administrators were kind of selling cognitive distortions, but students weren t buying yet.
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And then when I started noticing that they seemed to come in actually already believing in a lot of this stuff, that it would be very dangerous.
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And that led to coddling the American mind and all that stuff.
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But the thing that was rough about writing Canceling the American Mind, and I ve mentioned this already a couple of times, I got really depressed this past year because I was studying.
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You know, there s a friend in there that I talk about who killed himself after being canceled.
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I talked to him a week before he killed himself and I hadn t actually
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I hadn t actually checked in with him because he seemed so confident I thought he would be totally fine because he had an insensitive tweet in June of 2020 and, you know, got forced out.
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In a way that didn t actually sound as bad as a lot of the other professors, he actually at least got a severance package but they knew he d sue and win because he had before.
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And so I waited to check in on him because we were so overwhelmed with the request for helps.
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And he was saying people were coming to his house still.
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And then he shot himself the next week.
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And I definitely and because everyone knows I m so public about my struggles with this stuff, everybody who fights this stuff comes to me when they re having a hard time.
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And this is a very hard, psychologically taxing business to be in.
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And even admitting this right now, like,
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I think about all the vultures out there, they ll have fun with it.
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Just like the same way when my friend Mike Adams killed himself, there were people celebrating on Twitter that a man was dead because they didn t like his tweets.
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But somehow that made them compassionate for some abstract other person.
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So I was getting a little depressed and anxious, and the thing that really helped me more than anything else was confessing to my staff.
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that I, you know, books take a lot of energy.
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So I knew they didn t want to hear that not only was this taking a lot of the boss s time, this was making him depressed and anxious.
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But when I finally told my, the leadership of my staff, you know, people that even though I try to maintain a lot of distance from, I love very, very much, it made such a difference, you know, because I could be open about that.
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And the other thing was, have you heard this conference dialogue?
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Oh, yes.
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It s like an invite-only thing.
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It s Orrin Hoffman runs it.
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It intentionally tries to get people over the political spectrum to come together and have off-the-record conversations about big issues.
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And it was nice to be in a room where liberal, conservative, none of the above were all like, oh, thank God someone s taking on cancel culture and where it felt like
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I felt like maybe this won t be the disaster for me and my family that I was that I was starting to be afraid it would be that taking the stuff on might actually have a happy ending.
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Well, one thing I just stands out from that.
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is the pain of cancellation can be really intense.
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And that doesn t necessarily mean losing your job, but just even, you can call it bullying, you can call it whatever name, but just some number of people on the internet
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and that number can be small, kind of saying bad things to you.
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That can be a pretty powerful force to the human psyche, which was very surprising.
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And then the flip side also of that, it really makes me sad how cruel people can be.
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It s such a—thinking that your cause is social justice in many cases can lead people to think, I can be as cruel as I want in pursuit of this, when a lot of times it s, you know, just a way to sort of vent some aggression on a person that you think of only as an abstraction.
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I think it s important for people to realize that they re—whatever, like, whatever
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whatever negative energy, whatever negativity you want to put out there, there s real people that can get hurt.
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You can really get people to one, be the worst version of themselves, or two, possibly take their own life, and it s not...
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Yeah.
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Well, that s one of the things that we do in the book to really kind of address people who still try to claim this isn t real is we just quote.
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We quote the Pope.
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We quote Obama.
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We quote James Carville.
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We quote Taylor Swift on cancel culture.
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And Taylor Swift s quote is essentially about like how behind all of this, when it gets particularly nasty, there s this very clear, you know, kill yourself kind of undercurrent to it.
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And it s cruel.
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And the problem is that in an environment so wide open, there s always going to be someone who wants to be so transgressive and say the most hurtful, you know, terrible thing.
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But then you have to remember the misrepresentation, getting back to the old idioms.
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Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me has been
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reimagined in campus debates in the most asinine way.
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People will literally say stuff like, but now we know words can hurt.
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And it s like, now we know words can hurt?
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Guys, you didn t have to come up with a special little thing that you teach children to make hurt words hurt less if they never hurt in the first place.
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It wouldn t even make sense, the saying.
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It s a saying that you repeat to yourself to give yourself strength when the bullies have noticed you re a little weird.
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That might be a little personal.
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And it helps.
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It really does help to be like, listen, OK, assholes are going to say asshole things, and I can t let them have that kind of power over me.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It still is a learning experience because it does hurt.
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But for the good people out there who actually just sometimes think that they re vented, think about it.
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Remember that there are people on the other side of it.
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Yeah, for me it hurts my kind of faith in humanity.
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I know it shouldn t, but it does sometimes.
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When I just see people being cruel to each other, it kind of...
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It floats a cloud over my perspective of the world that I wish didn t have to be there.
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Yeah, that was always my sort of flippant answer to that if mankind is basically good or basically evil being like the biggest debate in philosophy and being like, well, the problem with the first is there s nothing basic about humanity.
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Yeah, what gives you hope about this whole thing?
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About this dark state that we re in, as you describe, how can we get out?
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What gives you hope that we will get out?
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I think that people are sick of it.
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I think people are sick of not being able to be authentic.
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And that s really what censorship is.
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It s basically telling you, don t be yourself.
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Don t actually say what you think.
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Don t show your personality.
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Don t dissent.
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Don t be weird.
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don t be wrong.
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And that s not sustainable.
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I think that people have kind of had enough of it.
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But one thing I definitely want to say to your audience is it can t just be up to us arguers to try to fix this.
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And I think that, and this may sound like it s an unrelated problem, I think if there were
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highly respected, let s say extremely difficult ways to prove that you re extremely smart and hardworking that cost little or nothing that actually can give
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the Harvards and the Yales of the world that run for their money, I think that might be the most positive thing we could do to deal with a lot of these problems and why.
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I think the fact that we have become a weird – America with a great anti-elitist tradition has become weirdly elitist in the respect that we – not only again our leadership coming from these
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few fancy schools.
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We actually have like great admiration for them.
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We kind of look up to them.
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But I think we d have a lot healthier of a society if people could prove, you know, their excellence in ways that are coming from completely different streams and that are highly respected.
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I sometimes talk about there should be a test that anyone who passes it gets like a, you know, a BA in the humanities that – like a super BA.
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Like something – like someone not a GED.
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That s not what I m talking about.
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I m talking about something that like
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Thank you.
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one out of only a couple, like a hundred people can pass.
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Some other way of actually, of not going through these massive bloated expensive institutions that people can raise their hands and say, I m smart and hardworking.
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I think that could be an incredibly healthy way.
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I think we need additional streams for creative people to be solving problems, whether that s on X or someplace else.
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I think that there s lots of things that technology could do to really help with this.
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I think some of the stuff that Sal Khan is working on at Khan Academy could really help.
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So I think there s a lot of ways, but they exist largely around coming up with new ways of doing things, not just expecting the old things that have, say, $40 billion in the bank that they re going to reform themselves.
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Here s my – I ve been picking on Harvard a lot, but I m going to pick on them a little bit more.
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I talk a lot about class again.
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There s a great book called Poison Ivy by Evan Mandry, which I recommend to everybody.
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It s outrageous.
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It sounds like me and a rant at Stanford.
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which was, and I think the stat is, you know, elite higher education has more kids from the top 1% than they have from the bottom 50 or 60%, depending on the school.
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And when you look at how much they actually like replicate class privilege, it s really distressing.
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So everybody should read Poison Ivy.
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And above all else, if you re weird, continue being weird.
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And you re one of the most interesting, one of the weirdest, in the most beautiful way, people I ve ever met.
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Greg, thank you for the really important work you do.
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Everybody watch Kid Cosmic!
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I appreciate the class, the hilarity that you brought here today, man.
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This is an amazing conversation.
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Thank you for the work you do.
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Thank you, thank you.
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And for me, who deeply cares about education, higher education, thank you for holding the MITs and the Harvards accountable for doing right by the people that walk their halls.
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So thank you so much for talking today.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Greg Lukianoff.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Noam Chomsky.
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If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don t like.
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Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked.
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So was Stalin.
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If you re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.