if the goal is the project of human knowledge,
which is to know the world that it is,
you cannot know the world as it is
without knowing what people really think,
and what people really think is
an incredibly important fact to know.
Every time you're actually saying,
you can't say that,
you're actually depriving yourself of
the knowledge of what people really think.
You're causing what Timur Karan,
who's on our board of advisors,
calls preference falsification.
You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world,
which by the way, in a lot of cases,
because there are activists who
want to restrict more speech,
they actually tend to think that people are
more prejudiced than they might be.
Actually, one very real practical way,
it makes things worse, is when you censor people,
it doesn't change their opinion,
it just encourages them to not
share it with people who will get them in trouble.
It leads them to talk to people who they already agree with,
and group polarization takes off.
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 Schlatt of A New Book,
coming out in October,
that you should definitely pre-order now,
called The Canceling of the American Mind,
which is a definitive accounting of the history,
present, and future of cancel culture,
a 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.
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.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Greg Lukianoff.
Let's start with a big question.
What is cancel culture?
Now, you've said that you don't like the term
as it's been, quote,
"'dragged through the mud and abused endlessly'
by a whole host of controversial figures.
Nevertheless, we have the term, what is it?"
Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns,
especially successful campaigns,
starting around 2014 to get people fired,
expelled, deplatformed, et cetera,
for speech that would normally be protected
by the First Amendment.
And I say would be protected
because we're talking about circumstances
in which it isn't necessarily
where the First Amendment applies.
But what I mean is as an analog to,
say, things you couldn't lose your job
as a public employee for,
and also the climate of fear
that's resulted from that phenomena,
the fact that you can lose your job
for having the wrong opinion.
And it wasn't subtle that there was an uptick in this,
particularly on campus around 2014.
Jon Ronson wrote a book called
So You've Been Publicly Shamed.
It came out in 2015, already documenting this phenomena.
I wrote a book called Freedom From Speech in 2014.
But it really was in 2017
when you started seeing this be directed at professors.
And when it comes to the number of professors
that we've seen be targeted and lose their jobs,
I've been doing this for 22 years,
and I've seen nothing like it.
So there's so many things I wanna ask you here.
One, actually, just look at the Organization of Fire.
Can you explain what the organization is?
Because it's interconnected to this whole fight
and the rise of cancel culture
and the fight for freedom of speech since 2014 and before.
Fire was founded in 1999 by Harvey Silverglate.
He is a famous civil liberties attorney.
He's a bit on the show.
He's the person who actually found me
out in my very happy life out in San Francisco,
but knew I was looking for a First Amendment job.
I'd gone to law school specifically to do First Amendment.
And he found me, which was pretty cool.
His protege, Kathleen Sullivan,
was the Dean of Stanford Law School.
And this remains the best compliment I ever got in my life,
is that she recommended me to Harvey.
And since that's the whole reason why I went to law school,
I was excited to be a part of this new organization.
The other co-founder of Fire is Alan Charles Kors.
He's just an absolute genius.
He is one of the leading experts in the world
on the Enlightenment, and particularly about Voltaire.
And if any of your listeners do like the great courses,
he has a lecture on Blaise Pascal.
And Blaise, of course, is famous for the Pascal's Wager.
And I left it just so moved and impressed
with a depth of understanding
of how important this person was.
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.
Yes.
Can you maybe elaborate where that connection is?
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.
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.
We are incredibly self-deceiving.
I always love the fact that Yuval Harari
refers to the Enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance,
because that's exactly what it was.
It was suddenly being like, wow, hold on a second.
All this incredibly interesting folk wisdom we got,
which by the way, can be surprisingly reliable
here and there, when you start testing a lot of it,
is nonsense, and it doesn't hold up.
Even our ideas about the way things fall,
you know, as Galileo established,
even our intuitions, they're just wrong.
And so a lot of the early history of freedom of speech,
it was happening at the same time
as sort of the scientific revolution.
So a lot of the early debates about freedom of speech
were tied in.
So certainly Galileo, you know,
I always point out Kepler was probably
the even more radical idea
that there weren't even perfect spheres.
But at the same time,
largely because of the invention of the printing press,
you also had all these political developments.
And, you know, I always talk about Jan Hus,
you know, from a famous Czech hero
who was burned at the stake, and I think in 1419.
But he was basically Luther before the printing press.
Before Luther could get his word out, you know,
he didn't stand a chance,
and that was exactly what Jan Hus was.
But a century later, thanks to the printing press,
everyone could know what Luther thought, and boy, did they.
But it led to, of course, this completely crazy,
hyper-disrupted period in European history.
Well, you mentioned, to jump around a little bit,
the First Amendment.
First of all, what is the First Amendment,
and what is the connection to you
between the First Amendment,
the freedom of speech, and cancel culture?
Sure.
So I'm a First Amendment lawyer, as I mentioned,
and that's what I, you know, that's my passion,
that's what I studied.
I think American First Amendment law
is incredibly interesting.
In one sentence, the First Amendment
is trying to get rid of basically all the reasons
why humankind had been killing each other
for its entire existence,
that we weren't going to fight any more over opinion,
we weren't gonna 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.
And so one thing that makes FIRE a little different
from other organizations is, however,
we're not just a First Amendment organization,
we are a free speech organization.
And so, but at the same time,
a lot of what I think free speech is
can be well-explained with reference
to a lot of First Amendment law,
partially because, in 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.
And a lot of those principles,
they transfer very well just as pragmatic ideas.
So the biggest sin in terms of censorship
is called viewpoint discrimination,
that essentially you allow freedom of speech
except for that opinion.
Now, and it's found to be kind of more defensible,
and I think this makes sense,
that if you set up a forum,
we're only gonna talk about economics
to exclude people who wanna talk about a different topic,
but it's considered rightfully a bigger deal
if you've set up a forum for economics,
but we're not gonna let people talk about
that kind of economics or have that opinion on economics,
most particularly.
So a lot of the principles from First Amendment law
actually make a lot of philosophical sense
as good principles for 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.
You're saying so many interesting things,
but if you can link on the viewpoint discrimination,
is there any gray area of discussion there,
like what is and isn't economics for the example you gave?
Yeah.
Is there, I mean, is it a science or is it an art
to draw lines of what is and isn't allowed?
Yeah, you know, if you're saying
that something is or is not economics,
well, you can say everything's economics,
and therefore I wanna talk about poetry.
There'd be some line drawing exercise in there.
But let's say at once you decide to open up,
to poetry even, it's a big difference between saying,
okay, now we're open to poetry,
but you can't say, you know, Dante was bad.
Like that's a forbidden opinion now officially
in this otherwise open forum.
That would immediately at an intuitive level
strike people as a bigger problem
than just saying that poetry isn't economics.
Yeah, I mean, that intuitive level that you speak to,
I hope that all of us have that kind of basic intuition
when the line is crossed.
It's the same thing for like pornography, right?
You know, when you see it.
I think there's the same level of intuition
that should be applied across the board here.
And it's when that intuition becomes deformed
by whatever forces of society,
that's when it starts to feel like censorship.
Yeah, I mean, people find it a different thing.
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, they have every right in the world.
And I'm not making a legal case
that maybe you shouldn't fire someone
for their political opinion, but think that through.
Like what kind of society do we wanna live in?
And it's been funny watching, you know,
and I point this out, 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.
But from a moral or philosophical matter,
if you think through the implications of
if every business in America
becomes an expressive association
in addition to being a profit-maximizing organization,
that would be a disaster for democracy
because you would end up in a situation
where people would actually be saying to themselves,
I don't think I can actually say what I really think
and still believe I can keep my job.
And that's where I was worried 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.
And that's the beginning and end of the discussion.
And I thought that was a dodge.
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.
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-
As applied to government.
And it's very specific, applied to government.
Now, freedom of speech is the application of the principle
to like everything,
including like kind of the high level philosophical ideal
of the value of people being able to speak their mind.
Yeah, 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.
And what I mean by that is that law is generally,
particularly in a common law country,
it's the reflection of norms.
Those 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 into the law.
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, for now,
it's not going to stay that way
if you have generations of law students graduating
who actually think there's no higher goal
than shouting down you're an opponent.
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.
Yeah, you have this history, you know.
64, you have the free speech movement on Berkeley.
And 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.
I mean, I went back and reread Repressive Tolerance,
and how clear it is, I forgot,
I had forgotten that it really is kind of like,
and these so-called conservatives and right-wingers,
we need to repress them because they're regressive thinkers.
It really doesn't come out to anything more sophisticated
than the very old idea that our people are good,
they get free speech, they should keep it.
Other side, bad.
We should not have, and we have to retrain society.
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.
But that was a laughable position, say 30, 40 years ago.
The idea that essentially free speech for me,
not for the, as the great free speech champion,
Nat Hentoff used to say,
was something that you were supposed to be embarrassed by.
But I saw this when I was in law school in 97,
I saw this when I was interning at the ACLU in 99,
that 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.
I think that, as my co-author Jonathan Haidt points out,
that when you have low viewpoint diversity,
people start thinking in a very kind of tribal way.
And if you don't have the respected dissenters,
you don't have the people that you can point to,
that I'm like, hey, this is a smart person.
This is a smart, reasonable, decent person
that I disagree with.
So I guess not everyone thinks alike on this issue.
You start getting much more kind of like only bad people,
only heretics, only blasphemers, only right-wingers,
can actually think in this way.
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,
we should 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,
but there's mechanisms on both sides
that result in cancellation and censorship
in violation of freedom of speech.
So one thing I want to be really clear about
is the book takes on both right and left cancel culture.
They're different in a lot of ways,
and definitely cancel culture from the left
is more important in academia,
where the left dominates.
But we talk a lot about cancel culture
coming from legislatures.
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,
there are a lot of attacks that come from the right,
that come from attempts by different organizations,
and sometimes when there are stories in Fox News,
they'll go after professors.
And about one third of the attempts
to get professors punished that are successful
actually do come from the right.
And we talk about attempts to get books banned
in the book, we talk about suing the Florida legislature.
Ron DeSantis had something called the Stop Woke Act,
which we told everyone, this is laughably unconstitutional.
They tried to ban particular topics in higher ed,
and we're like, no, this is a joke.
This will be laughed out of court.
And they didn't listen to us, and they passed it,
and we sued, and we won.
Now they're trying again with something
that's equally as unconstitutional,
and we will sue again, and we will win.
Can you elaborate on the Stop Woke Act?
So this is presumably trying to limit certain topics
from being taught in school?
Yeah, basically woke topics.
It came out of the sort of attempt
to get at critical race theory.
So it's topics related to race, gender, et cetera.
I don't remember exactly how they tried to cabinet to CRT,
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.
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.
I think he called this dystopian,
and it wasn't a close call.
So if you're against that kind of teaching,
the right way to fight it is by making the case
that it's not a good idea as part of the curriculum
as opposed to banning it from the curriculum.
Yeah, it just, the state doesn't have the power
to simply say, to ban what professors
in higher education teach.
Now it gets a little more complicated
when you talk about K through 12,
because the state has a role
in deciding what public K through 12 teaches,
because they're your kids, it's taxpayer funded,
and generally the legislature is involved.
There is democratic oversight of that process.
So for K through 12, is there also a lean towards the left
in terms of the administration that manages the curriculum?
Yeah, there definitely is in K through 12.
My kids go to public school.
I have a five and a seven-year-old,
and they have lovely teachers,
but we have run into a lot of problems
with education schools at FIRE.
And a lot of the graduates of education school
end up being the administrators who clamp down
on free speech in higher education.
And so I've been trying to think of positive ways
to take on some of the problems that I see in K through 12.
I thought that the attempt to just dictate
you won't teach the following 10 books,
you know, or 20 books or 200 books
was the wrong way to do it.
Now, when it comes to deciding what books
are in the curriculum, again,
that's something the legislature actually
can't have some say in, and that's pretty uncontroversial
in terms of the law.
But when it comes to how you fight it,
I had something that, since I'm kind of stuck
with the formula, I called empowering of the American mind.
I gave principles that were inconsistent
with the sort of groupthink and heavy emphasis
on identity politics that some of the critics
are rightfully complaining about in K through 12.
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.
Is it possible to legally, that's just a silly question,
perhaps, create an extra protection
for certain kinds of literature, 1984 or something,
to remain in the curriculum?
I mean, it's already, it's all protected, I guess.
I guess to protect against administrators
from fiddling too much with the curriculum,
like stabilizing the curriculum.
I don't know what the machinery
of the K through 12 public school.
In K through 12, state legislatures-
They're part of that.
They're part of that, and they can say,
you should teach the following books.
Now, of course, people are always a little bit worried
that if they were to recommend,
teach the Declaration of Independence,
that it will end up being,
well, they're gonna teach the Declaration of Independence
was just to protect slavery, which it wasn't.
Yeah, so teaching a particular topic
matters which textbooks you choose,
which perspective you take, all that kind of stuff.
So religion starts to creep into the whole question
of how is the Bible, are you allowed to teach
and to incorporate that into education?
Yeah, I mean, I'm an atheist
with an intense interest in religion.
I actually read the entire Bible this year
just because I do stuff like that,
and I never actually had read it from beginning to end.
Then I read the Quran,
and I'm gonna try to do the Book of Mormon, but you know.
Well, sorry, you're so fascinating.
Do you recommend doing that?
I think you should, just to know,
because it's such a touchstone
in the way people talk about things.
It can get pretty tedious,
but I even made myself read through
all of the very specific instructions
on how tall the different parts of the temple need to be
and how long the garbs need to be
and what shape they need to be and what,
and those go on a lot.
Surprisingly, a big chunk of Exodus,
I thought that was more like in Leviticus and Deuteronomy,
but then you get to books like Job, you know, wow.
I mean, Job is such a read,
and no way Job originally had that ending.
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,
and initially they can't.
It's all going very predictably.
And then they finally really torture Job,
and he turns into the best, why is God cruel?
How could God possibly exist?
How could a kind God do these things?
And he turns into the best lawyer in the entire world,
and he defeats everyone,
all the people who come to argue with him.
He argues the pants off of them.
And then suddenly at the end, God shows up,
and he's like, well, you know, I am everywhere,
and it's a very confusing answer.
He gives an answer kind of like,
I am there when lionesses give birth, and I am there.
And by the way, there's this giant monster leviathan
that's very big, and it's very scary,
and I have to manage the universe.
And I'm kind of like, God,
are you saying that you're very busy?
Is that essentially your argument to Job?
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.
And then at the end, God decides,
Job's like, oh, no, you're totally right.
I was totally wrong, sorry.
And God says, I'm gonna punish those people
who tried to argue with you and didn't win.
So he gets rid of the,
I don't know exactly what he does to them,
I don't remember.
And then he gives Job all his money back,
and it makes him super prosperous.
And 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.
Okay, so.
Yeah, so it's a long way of saying,
I actually think it's worthwhile.
You're always kind of surprised
when you end up in the part.
There are parts of it that will sneak up on you,
kind of like Isaiah's a trip,
Ecclesiastes, Depeche Mode.
And you said you also, the Qur'an.
Yeah, which was fascinating.
So what is there, it'd be interesting to ask,
is there a tension between the study of religious texts
or the following of religion and just believing in God
following the various aspects of religion
with freedom of speech?
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.
The state may not establish an official religion,
but it cannot interfere with your right
to practice your religion.
That's beautiful, two things at the same time.
And I think they're both exactly right.
And I think sometimes the right gets very excited
of the free exercise clause,
and the left gets very excited about establishment,
and I like the fact that we have both of them together.
Now, how does this relate to freedom of speech?
And how does it relate to the curriculum
like we were talking about?
I actually think it would be great
if public schools could teach the Bible
in the sense of read it as a historical document.
But back when I was at the ACLU,
every time I saw people trying this,
it always turned into them actually advocating
for a Catholic or a Protestant or some,
or Orthodox even, kind of like read on religion.
So if you actually make it into something advocating
for a particular view on religion,
then it crosses into the establishment clause side.
So Americans haven't figured out a way to actually teach it,
so it's probably better that you learn
outside of a public school class.
Do you think it's possible to teach religion
from like world religions kind of course
without disrespecting the religions?
I think the answer is it depends on from whose perspective.
Well, like the practitioners say
you're like an Orthodox follower of a particular religion.
Yeah.
Is it possible to not piss you off
in teaching like all the major religions of the world?
For some people, the bottom line
is you have to teach it as true.
And under those conditions, then the answer is no,
you can't teach it without offending someone at least.
Could you say these people believe it's true?
Can you reform it?
So you have to walk on eggshells essentially.
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.
And I try to be respectful as much as I can
about a lot of this.
I still find myself much more drawn
to both Buddhism and Stoicism though.
Where do I go?
Okay, one interesting thing to get back to college campuses
is the Fire keeps the college free speech rankings
at rankings.thefire.org.
I'm very proud of them.
I highly recommend,
because forget that even just the ranking,
you get to learn a lot about the universities
from this entirely different perspective
than people are used to when they go to pick
whatever university they want to go to.
It just gives another perspective on the whole thing.
And it gives quotes from people that are students there
and so on about their experiences.
And it gives different,
maybe you could speak to the various measures here
before we talk about who's in the top five
and who's in the bottom five.
What are the different parameters
that contribute to the evaluation?
So people have been asking me since day one
to do a ranking of schools according to freedom of speech.
And even though we had 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 what we call the disinvitation database.
But it's actually the,
it's better named the deplatforming database,
which is what we're gonna call it.
And these are all cases where somebody was invited
as a speaker to campus and they were disinvited.
Disinvited or deplatforming
also includes shouting down.
So they showed up and they couldn't really speak.
Yeah, exactly.
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,
was to be able to one,
get a better sense of how many professors
were actually getting punished during this time.
And 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.
Are you comfortable disagreeing with each other?
Are you comfortable disagreeing with your professors?
Do you think violence is acceptable
in response to a speaker?
Do you think shouting down is okay?
Do you think blocking people's access to a speaker is okay?
And once we were able to get all those elements together,
we first did a test run, I think in 2019,
about 50, and we've been doing it for four years now,
always trying to make the methodology more and more precise
to better reflect the actual environment
at particular schools.
And this year, the number one school
was Michigan Technological University,
which was a nice surprise.
The number two school was actually Auburn University,
which was nice to see.
In the top 10, the most well-known prestigious school
was actually UVA, which did really well this year.
University of Chicago was not happy
that they weren't number one,
but University of Chicago was 13,
and they had been number one
or in the top three for years prior to that.
Really, so can you explain?
It's almost surprising.
Is it because of the really strong economics departments
and things like this, or why?
They had a case involving a student.
They wouldn't recognize a chapter of Turning Point USA,
and they made a very classic argument,
and classic in the bad way,
that we hear at campuses across the country,
oh, we have a campus Republicans,
so we don't need this additional conservative group.
And we're like, no, I'm sorry.
We've seen dozens and dozens, if not hundreds,
of attempts to get this one particular
conservative student group
de-recognized or not recognized.
And so we told them,
we told them at FIRE that we consider this serious,
and they wouldn't recognize the group.
So that's a point down in our ranking,
and it was enough to knock them from,
they probably would have been number two in the rankings,
but now they're 13 out of 248.
They're still one of the best schools in the country.
I have no problem saying that.
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.
The only school to receive the abysmal ranking.
And there are a couple of people who've 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's 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,
kind of like, so your argument seems to be snobbery,
like essentially that you're not understanding
our methodology, for one thing,
and then you're saying that actually
that scholar wasn't important enough to count,
and by the way, Harvard, by the way, Harvard,
if we, even if we took all of your arguments as true,
even if we decided to get rid of those two professors,
you would still be in negative numbers,
you would still be dead last,
you would still be after Georgetown and Penn,
and neither of those schools are good for freedom of speech.
You should say the bottom five
is the University of Pennsylvania, Nicoset Penn,
the University of South Carolina, Georgetown University,
and Fordham University.
All very well earned, they have so many bad cases
at all of those schools.
What's the best way to find yourself in the bottom five
if you're in university?
What's the fastest way to that negative, to that zero?
A lot of deplatforming.
When we looked at the bottom five,
81% of attempts to get speakers deplatformed
were successful at the bottom five.
There were a couple schools, I think Penn included,
where every single attempt,
every time a student like objected,
a student group objected to that speaker coming,
they canceled the speech.
And I think Georgetown was 100% success rate,
I think Penn had 100% success rate,
I think Harvard did stand up for a couple,
but mostly people got deplatformed there as well.
So how do you push back on deplatforming?
Well, who would do it?
Is it other students?
Is it faculty?
Is it the administration?
What's the dynamics of pushing back of,
basically, because I imagine some of it is culture,
but I imagine every university has a bunch of students
who will protest basically every speaker,
and it's a question of how you respond to that protest.
Well, here's the dirty little secret
about the big change in 2014.
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.
They were the best constituency for free speech,
absolutely unambiguously, until about 2013, 2014.
And 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.
But here's the dirty little secret.
It's not just the students.
It's students and administrators,
sometimes only a handful of them, though,
working together to create some of these problems.
And this was exactly what happened at Stanford
when Kyle Duncan, a Fifth Circuit judge,
tried to speak at my alma mater,
and a fifth of the class showed up to shout him down.
It was a real showing of what was going on
that 10 minutes into the shout-down
of a Fifth Circuit judge,
and I keep on emphasizing that
because I'm a constitutional lawyer,
Fifth Circuit judges are big deals.
They're one level below the Supreme Court.
About a fifth of the school shows up to shout him down.
After 10 minutes of shouting him down,
an administrator, a DEI administrator, gets up
with a prepared speech that she's written
that's a seven-minute-long speech
where she talks about free speech,
maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
And we're at this law school where people could learn
to challenge these norms.
So it's clear that there was coordination
among some of these administrators,
and from talking to students there,
they were in meetings, extensive meetings for a long time.
They show up, do a shout-down,
then they take an additional seven minutes
to lecture the speaker on free speech not being,
the juice of free speech not being worth the squeeze.
And then for the rest of it,
it's just constant heckling after she leaves.
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.
So I think every time there is a shout-down at a university,
the investigation should be, first and foremost,
did administrators help create this problem?
Did they do anything to stop it?
Because I think a lot of what's really going on here
is the hyper-bureaucratization of universities
with a lot more ideological,
people who think of their primary job
as basically like policing speech, more or less,
they're encouraging students, sorry,
they're encouraging students who have opinions they like
to do shout-downs.
And that's why they really need to investigate this.
And 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.
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 gotten a promotion.
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.
And that's something I've seen throughout my entire career.
And the only thing is it's kind of hard to catch this
sort of in the act, so to speak.
And that's one of the reasons why it's helpful
for people to know about this, you know?
Because it was this amazing case.
This was at University of Washington.
And we actually featured this in a documentary
made in 2015, that came out in 2015, 2016,
called Can We Take a Joke?
And this was when we started noticing
something was changing on campus.
We also heard that comedians were saying
that they couldn't use their good humor anymore.
This was right around the time that Jerry Seinfeld
and Chris Rock said that they didn't wanna play on campuses
because they couldn't be funny.
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.
It was very much a South Park mission.
And it's an unusual case because we actually got
documentation of administrators buying tickets
for angry students and holding an event
where they train them to jump up in the middle of it
and shout, I'm offended.
Like, they bought them tickets, they sent them
to this thing with the goal of shouting it down.
Now, unsurprisingly, when you send an angry group
of students to shut down a play,
it's not gonna end at just, I'm offended.
And it got heated.
There were death threats being thrown.
And then the Pullman Washington police told Chris Lee,
the guy who made the play,
that they wouldn't actually protect him.
Now, it's not every day you're gonna have
that kind of hard evidence
of actually seeing the administrators be so brazen
that they recorded the fact that they bought them tickets
and sent them.
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.
In your experience, is there a distinction
between administrators and faculty
in terms of perpetrators of these kinds of things?
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,
or is the faculty also, small percent of the faculty
also part of the encouraging in the organization
of these kind of cancel moms?
Yeah, 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,
at first they were overwhelmingly led by administrators,
attempts to get professors punished.
And that was most, I'd say that was my career up until 2013,
was fighting back at administrative excesses.
Then you start having the problem in 2014
of students trying to get people canceled.
And that really accelerated in 2017.
And the number, so one thing that makes it easier
to document are the petitions
to get professors fired or punished.
And how disproportionately
that those actually do come from students.
But another big uptick has been fellow professors
demanding that their fellow professors get punished.
And that to me-
It makes me really sad.
It's kind of shameful.
You shouldn't be proud of signing the petition
to get your fellow professor.
And what's even more shameful,
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.
And these were the same people
who publicly signed the petition to get them fired.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, integrity.
Integrity is an important thing in this world.
And I think some of it,
I'm so surprised people don't stand up more for this
because there's so much hunger for it.
And if you have the guts as a faculty or an administrator
to really stand up with eloquence,
with rigor, with integrity,
I feel like it's impossible for anyone to do anything
because there's such a hunger.
It's so refreshing.
Yeah.
I think everybody agrees that freedom of speech
is a good thing.
Oh, I don't.
Well, okay, sorry, sorry.
I don't agree.
The majority of people, even at the universities,
that there's a hunger,
but it's almost like this kind of nervousness around it
because there's a small number of loud voices
that are doing the shouting.
So, I mean, again, that's where great leadership comes in.
And so, presidents of universities
should probably be making clear declarations
of this is a place where we value the freedom of expression.
And this was all throughout my career,
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.
Although sometimes,
and this is where you can really tell
the administrative involvement,
students will do things like take over the president's office
and then that takeover will be catered by the university.
People will point this out sometimes as being kind of like,
oh, it was clearly like my friend Sam Abrams
when they tried to get him fired at a Sarah Lawrence College
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.
And I'm like, no,
they let them take over the president's office.
And I don't know if that was one of the cases
in which the takeover was catered,
but if there was ever a sign that's kind of like,
yes, this is actually really quite friendly.
Well, in some sense, protesting
and having really strong opinions,
even like ridiculous, crazy, wild opinions is a good thing.
It's just, it shouldn't lead to actual firing
or deplatforming of people.
Like it's good to protest.
It's just not good for the university to support that
and take action based on it.
And this is one of those like tensions in First Amendment
that actually I think has a pretty easy release essentially.
You absolutely have the right to devote your life
to ending freedom of speech and ridiculing it as a concept.
And there are people who really are,
can come off as very contemptible
about even the philosophy of freedom of speech.
And we will defend your right to do that.
We will also disagree with you.
And if you try to get a professor fired,
we will be on the other side of that.
Now, I think you had Randy Kennedy, who I really,
I love him, I think he's a great guy.
But he criticized us for our deplatforming database
as saying, this is saying
that students can't protest speakers.
I'm like, okay, that's silly.
We fire, as an organization,
have defended the right to protest all the time.
We are constantly defending the rights of protesters.
Not believing the protesters have the right to say this,
basically that would be punishing the speakers.
We're not calling for punishing the protesters.
But what we are saying is you can't let the protesters win
if they're demanding someone be fired
for their freedom of speech.
So the line there is between protesters protesting
and the university taking action based on the protest.
Yeah, exactly.
And of course, shout downs, that's just mob censorship.
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.
The first, the negative duty,
the thing that it's not allowed to do is censor you.
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.
You can't allow what's called a heckler's veto.
Heckler's veto.
That's so interesting,
because I feel like that comes into play on social media.
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,
how do you incentivize high quality debate and disagreement?
I'm thinking a lot about that.
And that's one of the things we talk about
in Canceling of the American Mind,
is arguing towards truth.
And that cancel culture is cruel, it's merciless,
it's anti-intellectual,
but it also will never get you anywhere in your truth.
And 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,
you just chip away at falsity.
But everybody having a megaphone on the internet
with anonymity, it seems like it's better than censorship,
but it feels like there's incentives on top of that
you can construct to incentivize better discourse.
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.
Just make really good arguments for whatever,
it doesn't matter if it's communism, for fascism,
whatever the heck you want to say,
but do it with skill, with historical context,
with steel manning the other side,
all those kinds of elements.
We try to make three major points in the book.
One is just simply cancel culture is real.
It's a historic era and it's on a historic scale.
The second one is you should think of cancel culture
as part of a rhetorical, as a larger, lazy,
rhetorical approach to what we refer to
as winning arguments without winning arguments.
And we mean that in two senses,
without having winning arguments
or while actually having won arguments.
And we talk about all the different,
what we call rhetorical fortresses
that both the left and the right have
that prevent you from, that allow you
to just dismiss the person or dodge the argument
without actually ever getting
to the substance of the argument.
Third part is just, you know, how do we fix it?
But the rhetorical fortress stuff
is actually something I'm very passionate about
because it interferes with our ability
to get at truth and it wastes time.
And frankly, it also, since cancel culture
is part of that rhetorical tactic, it can also ruin lives.
It would actually be really fun to talk about
this particular aspect of the book.
And I highly recommend if you're listening to this,
go pre-order the book now.
When does it come out?
October 17th.
Okay, the canceling of the American mind.
Okay, so 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.
So there's the rhetorical,
the perfect rhetorical fortress that the left uses
and the efficient rhetorical fortress that the right uses.
First one is what aboutism?
Maybe we can go through a few of them
that capture your heart in this particular moment
as we talk about it.
And if you can describe examples of it,
or if there's aspects of it that you see
that are especially effective.
So what aboutism is defending against criticism
of your side by bringing up
the other side's alleged wrongdoing.
I wanna make little cards of all of these tactics
and start using them on X all the time
because they are so commonly deployed
and what aboutism I put first for a reason.
You know, it'd be an interesting idea
to actually integrate that into Twitter slash X
where people, instead of clicking heart,
they can click which of the rhetorical tactics this is.
Because you know there's actually community notes,
I don't know if you've seen on X,
people can contribute notes and it's quite fascinating.
It works really, really well.
But to give it a little more structure,
that's a really interesting method actually.
Yeah, I actually, when I was thinking about ways
that X could be used to argue towards truth,
I wouldn't wanna have it so that everybody
would be bound to that.
But I think that, I imagine almost being like a stream
within X that was truth focused
that agrees to some additional rules
on how they would argue.
Man, I would love that.
In terms of streams that intersect and can be separated,
the shit talking one where people just enjoy talking shit.
Go for it, man.
And then there's like truth.
And then there's humor.
Then there's like good vibes.
I'm not like somebody who absolutely needs good vibes
all the time, but sometimes.
It's nice to have.
It's nice to just log in and not have to see
the drama, the fighting, the bickering,
the cancellations, the moms, all of this.
It's good to just see.
That's why I go to Reddit, r.aw,
or one of the cute animals ones
where there's cute puppies and kittens.
I just wanna see Ryan Reynolds singing with Will Ferrell.
Sometimes it's all you need.
I need that in my heart.
Yeah, not all the time, just a little bit.
And right back to the battle for truth.
Okay, so what aboutism?
What aboutism?
That's everywhere when you look at it,
when you look at Twitter,
when you look at social media in general.
And the first, what we call the obstacle course
is basically time-tested, old-fashioned,
argumentative dodges that everybody uses.
And what aboutism is just bringing up something,
like someone makes an argument like Biden is corrupt,
and then someone says, well, Trump was worse.
And that's not an illegitimate argument to make back,
but it seems to happen
every time someone makes an assertion,
someone just points out some other thing that was going on,
and it can get increasingly attenuated
from what you're actually trying to argue.
And you see this all the time on social media.
And it's kind of, you know,
I was a big fan of Jon Stewart's Daily Show,
but an awful lot of what the humor was
and what the tactic was for arguing was
this thing over here.
It's like, oh, I'm making this argument
about this important problem.
Oh, actually, you know,
there's this other problem over here
that I'm more concerned about.
And let's pick on the right here.
So January 6th, 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 6th?
And by the way, I live on Capitol Hill,
so believe me, I was very aware
of how scary and bad it was.
You know, 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.
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 all over the country, you know,
riots that came from some of the social justice protests.
And of course, the answer is,
you can be concerned about both of these things
and find them both problems.
But, you know, if I'm arguing about CHOP,
you know, someone bringing up January 6th
isn't super relevant to it,
or if I'm arguing about January 6th,
someone bringing up the riots in 2020,
isn't that helpful?
We took a long, dark journey from whataboutism,
and related to that is straw manning and steel manning,
so misrepresenting the opposing perspective.
And this is something also, I guess,
very prevalent, and it's difficult to do the reverse of that,
which is steel manning.
It requires empathy, it requires eloquence,
it requires understanding,
actually doing the research
and understanding the alternative perspective.
My wonderful employee, Angel Anduardo,
has something that he calls star manning.
And I find myself doing this a lot.
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,
and that was his metaphor for Middle America,
is what he meant by it.
But he was kind of proud of the fact that he hated Kansas.
And I'm like, you gotta understand,
I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners,
and think about, change the name of Kansas to Croatia.
Change the name of Kansas to some,
that's what it sounds like to me.
And the star manning idea, which I like,
is the idea being like, so you're saying
that you really hate your dominant religious minority,
and when you start actually detaching yourself
a little bit from it, how typical?
America is exceptional in a number of ways,
but some of our dynamics are incredibly typical.
It's one of the reasons why 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 75% of the rest of the countries in the world.
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.
This is actually something that's very much on my mind.
Fukuyama, of course, it's a great book.
It's stilted a little bit in its writing,
because his term for one of the things he's concerned about
what destroys societies is re-patrimonialization,
which is the reversion to societies
in which you favor your family and friends.
And I actually think a lot of what I'm seeing
in the United States, it makes me worried
that we might be going through a little bit
of a process of re-patrimonialization,
and I think that's one of the reasons
why people are so angry.
I think the prospect that we very nearly seem
to have an election that was gonna be
Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton,
it's like, are we a dynastic country now?
Is that what's kind of happening?
But 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.
And believe me, I was poor when I was a kid,
and I got to go to one of the fancies.
I got to go to Stanford.
And I got to see how people,
they treat you differently in a way that's almost insulting.
Basically, suddenly, to a certain kind of person,
I was a legitimate person.
And I look at how much America relies on Harvard,
on Yale, to produce its,
I'm gonna use a very Marxist-sounding term, ruling class.
And that's one of the reasons
why you have to be particularly worried
about what goes on at these elite colleges.
And these elite colleges,
with the exception of University of Chicago and UVA,
do really badly regarding freedom of speech.
And that has all sorts of problems.
It doesn't bode well for the future
of the protection of freedom of speech
for the rest of the society.
So can you also empathize there
with the folks who voted for Donald Trump?
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.
I try really hard to empathize with,
to a degree, everybody,
and try to really see where they're coming from.
And the anger on the right, I get it.
I mean, I feel like the book,
so Copying the American Mind was a book
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.
And if you understand it and read the book,
you can say it's like, okay,
this isn't anybody being malicious.
This is people trying to protect their kids.
They're just doing it in a way
that actually can actually lead to greater anxiety,
depression, and strangely,
eventually pose a threat to freedom of speech.
But in this one, we can't be quite,
me and my, oh, I haven't even mentioned
my brilliant co-author, Ricky Schlatt,
a 23-year-old genius.
She's amazing.
I started working with her when she was 20,
who's my co-author on this book.
So when I'm saying we, I'm talking about me and Ricky.
She's a libertarian.
Libertarian journalist.
And a journalist, yeah, brilliant mind.
Yeah, but we can't actually write this
in a way that's too kind, because counselors aren't kind.
There's a cruelty and a mercilessness about it.
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.
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.
So that's a long-winded way of saying the,
I kind of can get what sort of drives
the right nuts, to a degree, in this.
I feel like they're constantly feeling
like they're being gaslit.
Elite education is really insulting to the working class.
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.
Yeah, the general elitism that radiates,
self-fueling elitism that radiates
from the people that go to these institutions.
And what's funny is the elitism has been repackaged
as a kind of, it masquerades as kind of infinite compassion,
that essentially it's based in a sort of very,
to be frank, overly simple ideology,
over simply a simple explanation of the world
and breaking people into groups and judging people
on how oppressed they are on the intersection
of their various identities.
And it came to that, I think, initially
with an added 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.
It's really weird how that happened.
Maybe you can explore why a thing that has,
kind of sounds good at first,
can be, can create, can become such a cruel weapon
of canceling and hurting people and ignoring people.
I mean, this is what you described
with the perfect rhetorical fortress,
which is a set of questions.
Maybe you can elaborate
on what the perfect rhetorical fortress is.
Yeah, so the perfect rhetorical fortress
is the way that's been developed on the left
to not ever get to someone's actual argument.
I wanna make a chart, like a flow chart of this
about like, here's the argument
and here is this perfect fortress
that will deflect you every time from getting to the argument
and I started to notice this certainly
when I was in law school,
that there were lots of different ways
you could dismiss people
and perfect rhetorical fortress, step one,
and I can attest to this
because I was guilty of this as well,
that you can dismiss people
if you can argue that they're conservative.
They don't have to be conservative to be clear.
You just have to say that they are.
So I never read Thomas Sowell
because he was a right-winger.
I didn't read Camille Paglia
because somebody convinced me she was a right-winger.
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.
It's a childish way of arguing,
but nonetheless, I engaged in it.
It was a common tactic.
I even mentioned in the book,
there was a time when 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,
and I remember feeling kind of scandalized at some level,
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?
You can just throw, oh, that guy's a right-winger.
You can just throw that.
Don't have to think about you anymore.
Yeah, and then it can, if you're popular enough,
it can be kind of sticky.
It's weird because it's effective.
That's why it keeps on getting used to it.
Essentially, it should have hit someone's,
because I have a great liberal pedigree,
everything from working at the ACLU
to doing refugee law in Eastern Europe.
I was part of an environmental mentoring program
for inner-city high school kids in DC.
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?
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?
And again, that's arguing like children.
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.
If I can just prove you're on the right,
I don't have to think about you.
It's no wonder that suddenly you start seeing people
calling the ACLU right wing
and calling the New York Times right wing,
because it's been such an effective way
to delegitimize people as thinkers.
You know, 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.
But once it becomes a tactic that we accept,
and that's one of the reasons why I'm more on the left,
but I think I'm a left of center liberal.
Ricky is more conservative, libertarian,
and initially I was kind of like,
should I be really be writing something
with someone who's more on the right?
And I'm like, absolutely I should be.
I have to actually live up to what I believe on this stuff,
because it's ridiculous that we have this primitive idea
that you can dismiss someone as soon as you claim,
rightly or wrongly, that they're on the right.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong,
but I feel like you were recently called right wing fire,
maybe you by association because of that debate.
Oh, not the LA Times.
The LA Times.
That was fun, let's talk about the LA Times.
So yes, there's an article, there's a debate.
I can't wait to watch it
because I don't think it's available yet
to watch on video, yet to attend in person.
I can't wait to see it.
But fire was in part supporting,
and then LA Times wrote a scathing article
about that everybody in the debate
was basically leaning right.
Okay, so much to unpack there.
Barry Weiss has this great project, The Free Press.
I've been very impressed.
It's covering stories that a lot of the media,
right or left, isn't willing to cover.
And we hosted a debate with her,
and we wanted to make it as fun and controversial as possible
so fire and The Free Press hosted a debate,
did the sexual revolution fail?
So the debate was really exciting, really fun.
The side that said that sexual revolution wasn't a failure
that Grimes and Sarah Hader were on won.
It was a nice, meaty, thoughtful night.
And there was a review of it
that was just sort of scathing about the whole thing,
and it included a line saying that fire,
which claims to believe in free speech
but only defends viewpoints it agrees with,
I can't believe that even made it into the magazine
because it's not just calling us,
because of course, the implication, of course,
is that we're right-wing, which we're not.
Actually, the staff leans decidedly more
to the left and to the right.
But we also defend people all over the spectrum all the time.
That's something that even the most minimal
Google search would have solved.
So 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 saying,
well, here's the following 50,000 examples of us not being.
But when you actually make the factual claim
that we only defend opinions we agree with,
first of all, there's no way for us to 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.
But yeah, one time when someone did something like this,
and they were just being a little bit flippant
about free speech being fine,
I did a 70-tweet-long thread, just being like,
hey, do you really think this is fine?
I decided not to do that on this particular one,
but the nice thing about it is it demonstrated two parts
of the book, Canceling of the American Mind, if not more.
One of them is dismissing someone
because they're conservative,
because that was the implication,
don't have to listen to fire because they're conservative.
But the other one is something, a term that I invented
specifically for the way people argue on Twitter,
which is hypocrisy projection.
Hi, I'm a person who only cares
about one side of the political fence,
and I think everyone else is a hypocrite.
And by the way, I haven't done any actual research on this,
but I assume everyone else is a hypocrite.
And you see this happen all the time.
And this happens to fire a lot,
where someone would be like, where is fire on this case?
And we're like, we are literally quoted
in the link you just sent, but didn't actually read.
Or it's like, where is fire on this?
It's like, here's our lawsuit about it from six months ago.
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, greatest 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 a hypocrite
is not a good tactic for truth.
But by the way, it tends to always come from people
who aren't actually consistent on free speech themselves.
So that hands 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.
And therefore this kind of statement
becomes a kind of truthiness
without a grounding in actual reality.
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.
And 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, we have been, abortion,
we have defended both sides of that argument.
The other part,
and I call these the orphans of the culture war,
I really want to urge the media to start caring
about free speech cases
that actually don't have a political valence,
that are actually just about good old fashioned exercise
of power against the little guy or little girl
or little group on campus or off campus for that matter.
Cause these cases happen,
a lot of our litigation are just little people,
just regular people being told that they can't protest,
that they can't hold signs.
And then the last part of the argument
that I want people to really get is like, yeah,
and by the way, right wingers get in trouble too.
And there are attacks from the left
and you should take those seriously too.
You should care when Republicans get in trouble.
You should care when California has a DEI program
that requires, the California community colleges
has a DEI program policy
that actually requires even chemistry professors
to work in different DEI ideas
from intersectionality to anti-racism
into their classroom, into their syllabus, et cetera.
This is a gross violation of academic freedom.
It is as bad as it is to tell professors
what they can't say,
like we fought and defeated in Florida.
It's even worse to tell them what they must say.
That's downright totalitarian.
And we're suing against this.
And what I'm saying is that
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.
And I want people to care about censorship
when it even is against people they hate.
Censorship is censorship.
If we can't take that tangent briefly with DEI,
diversity, equity, and inclusion,
what is the good and what is the harm of such programs?
DEI, I know people who are DEI consultants.
There's some, actually I have a dear friend
who I love very much who does DEI.
Absolutely decent people.
What they want to do is create bonds of understanding,
friendship, compassion among people who are different.
Unfortunately, the research on what a lot of DEI
actually does is oftentimes the opposite of that.
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.
We talk about this in coddling in the American mind
as the difference between common humanity identity politics
and common enemy identity politics.
And I think that I know some of the people that I know
who 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.
Now, when I started at FIRE,
my first cases involved 9-11, and it was bad.
Professors were getting targeted,
professors were losing their jobs
for saying insensitive things about 9-11,
and both from the right and the left.
Actually, in that case, actually,
sometimes a lot more from the right.
And it was really bad,
and about five professors lost their jobs.
That's bad.
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.
We're now evaluating how many professors
have been targeted for cancellation
between 2014 and middle of this year, July of 2023.
We're in well over 1,000 attempts
to get professors fired or punished,
usually driven by students and administrators,
often driven by professors, unfortunately, as well.
About two-thirds of those result
in the professor being punished in some way,
everything from having their article removed
to suspension, et cetera.
About one-fifth of those result in professors being fired.
So right now, it's almost 200,
it's around 190 professors being fired.
So I wanna give some context here.
The Red Scare is generally considered
to have been from 1947 to 1957.
It ended, by the way, in 57, when it finally became clear,
thanks to the First Amendment,
that you couldn't actually fire people for their ideologies.
Prior to that, a lot of universities thought they could.
This guy is a very doctrinaire communist.
You know, they can't be dissuaded, I'm gonna fire them.
They thought they actually could do that.
And it was only 57 when the law was established.
So 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.
During the Red Scare, the biggest study that was done
of what was going on, and 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.
That usually is reported as being about 100.
So 60, 90, 100, depending on how you look at it.
I think the number is actually higher,
but that's only because of hindsight.
What I mean by hindsight is we can look back
and we actually find there were more professors
who were fired as time reveals.
We're at 190 professors fired,
and I still have to put up with people saying
this isn't even happening.
And I'm like, in the nine and a half years
of cancel culture, 190 professors fired.
In the 11 years of the Red Scare,
probably somewhere around 100, maybe probably more,
the number's gonna 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.
And we know that's a wild undercount, by the way,
because when we surveyed professors,
17% of them said that they had been threatened
with investigation or actually investigated
for what they taught, said, or their research.
And one third of them said that they were told
by administrators not to take on controversial research.
So extrapolating that out, that's a huge number.
And the reason why you're not going to hear
about a lot of these cases is because there are
so many different conformity-inducing mechanisms
in the whole thing.
And that's one of the reasons why the idea
that you'd add something like requiring a DEI statement
to be hired or to get into a school
under the current environment is so completely nuts.
We have had a genuine crisis of academic freedom
over the last, particularly since 2017, on campuses.
We have very low viewpoint diversity to begin with.
And under these circumstances,
administrators just start saying,
you know what the problem is?
We have too much heterogeneous thought.
We're not homogeneous enough.
We actually need, you know,
we need another political litmus test, which is nuts.
And that's what a DEI statement effectively is,
because there's no way to actually fill out a DEI statement
without someone evaluating you on your politics.
It's crystal clear.
We even did an experiment on this.
Nate Honeycutt, he got something like,
almost like 3,000 professors to participate
evaluating different kinds of DEI statements.
And one was basically like the standard
kind of identity politics intersectionality one.
One was about viewpoint diversity.
One was about religious diversity.
And one was about socioeconomic diversity.
As far as where my heart really is,
it's that we have too little socioeconomic diversity,
particularly in elite higher ed,
but also in education period.
So the experiment had large participation,
really interestingly set up,
and it tried to model the way a lot of these DEI policies
were actually implemented.
And one of the ways these have been implemented,
and I think in some of the California schools,
is that administrators go through the DEI statements
before anyone else looks at them,
and then eliminates people off the top,
depending on how they feel about their DEI statements.
And the one on viewpoint diversity,
I think like half of the people who reviewed it
would eliminate it right out.
And I think it was basically the same
for religious diversity.
It was slightly better, like 40%,
for socioeconomic diversity, but that kills me.
Like the idea that kind of like, yeah,
that actually is the kind of diversity
that I think we need a great deal more of
in higher education.
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, three quarters of American society,
like in higher education,
I think should be something we could all get around.
But the only one that really succeeded
was the one that's that sprouted back exactly
the kind of, you know, ideology
that they thought the readers would like,
which is like, okay,
there's no way this couldn't be a political litmus test.
We've proved that it's a political litmus test
and still school after school
is adding these to its application process
to make schools still more ideologically homogenous.
Why does that have a negative effect?
Is it because it enforces a kind of group think
where people are afraid,
start becoming afraid to sort of think and speak freely,
liberally about whatever?
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.
But it also establishes essentially a set of sacred ideas
that if you're being quizzed
on what you've done to advance 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.
I think they're thin.
I think they're philosophically not very defensible.
Basically, like if your position was,
I actually reject these concepts as being oversimple.
You're not gonna get in.
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.
I feel like if you gave one of these things
to Richard Feynman, he'd be like,
he would tear it to pieces.
Yeah. And then not get the job.
Yeah, there's some element of it
that creates this hard to pin down fear.
So you said like the firing,
the thing I wanted to say is firing 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.
Oh, of course.
That single firing of a faculty.
Oh, absolutely.
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.
It's hard to measure that.
Yeah. I mean, when you ask professors about,
are they intimidated under the current environment?
The answer is yes.
And particularly conservative professors already reporting
that they're afraid for their jobs
in a lot of different cases.
You have a lot of good statistics in the book,
things like self-censorship,
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,
25%, 27%, 28% respectively.
A quarter of students also said that they are more likely
to self-censor on campus now at the time they were surveyed
than they were when they first started college.
So, sort of colleges kind of instilling this idea
of censorship, self-censorship.
And back to the Red Scare comparison,
and this is one of the interesting things
about the data as well,
is that that same study that I was talking about,
the most comprehensive study of the Red Scare,
there was polling about whether or not professors
were self-censoring due to the fear of the environment.
And 9% of professors said that they were self-censoring
their research and what they were saying.
9% is really bad.
That's almost a 10th of professors saying
that their speech was chilled.
When we did this question for professors
on our latest faculty survey,
when you factor together,
we asked them are they self-censoring in their research,
are they self-censoring in class,
are they self-censoring online, et cetera,
it was 90% of professors.
So, the idea that we're actually in an environment
that is historic in terms of how scared people
are actually of expressing controversial views,
I think that it's the reason why we're gonna actually
be studying this in 50 years,
the same way we study the Red Scare.
The idea that this isn't happening
will just be correctly viewed as insane.
So, maybe we can just discuss the leaning,
the current leaning of academia towards the left,
which you describe in various different perspectives.
So, one, there's a voter registration ratio chart
that you have by department, which I think is interesting.
Can you explain this chart
and can you explain what it shows?
Yeah, when I started at FIRE in 2001,
I didn't take the viewpoint diversity issue as seriously.
I thought it was just something
that right-wingers complained about.
But I really started to get what happens
when you have a community with low viewpoint diversity.
And 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.
And the research on this is very strong,
that essentially when you have groups
with political diversity,
and you can see this actually in judges, for example,
it tends to produce reliably more moderate outcomes,
whereas groups that have low political diversity
tend to sort of spiral off in their own direction.
And when you have a super majority of people
from just one political perspective,
that's a problem for the production of ideas.
It creates a situation where there are sacred ideas.
And when you look at some of the departments,
I think the estimate from the Crimson
is that Harvard has 3% conservatives.
But when you look at different departments,
there are elite departments
that have literally no conservatives in them.
And I think that's an unhealthy intellectual environment.
The problem is definitely worse as you get more elite.
We definitely see more cases of lefty professors
getting canceled at less elite schools.
It gets worse as you get down from the elite schools.
That's where a lot of the one-third of attempts
to get professors punished that are successful
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.
It's something that I do think is underappreciated.
But when it comes to the low viewpoint diversity,
it works out kind of like you'd expect to a degree.
Economics is what, four to one or something like that?
It's not as bad.
But then when you start getting into
some of the humanities,
there are departments that there are literally none.
Is there a good why to why did the university's
university faculty administration move to the left?
Yeah, I don't love,
and this is an argument that you'll sometimes run into
on the left, just the argument that,
well, people on the left are just smarter.
And it's like, okay.
It's interesting because at least the research
as of 10 years ago was indicating that
if you dig a little bit deeper into that,
a lot of the people who do consider themselves
on the left tend to be a little bit more libertarian.
There's something that Pinker wrote a fair amount about.
The idea that we're just smarter is not an opinion
I'm at least a bit comfortable with.
I do think that departments take on momentum
when they become a place where you're like,
wow, it'd be really unpleasant for me to work
in this department if I'm the token conservative.
And I think that takes on a life of its own.
There are also departments where a lot of the ideology
is kind of explicitly leftist.
You look at education schools,
a lot of the stuff that is actually leftover
from what is correctly called critical race theories
is present and you end up having that
in a number of the departments.
And it would be very strange to be a,
in many departments, a conservative social worker professor.
I'm sure they exist, but there's a lot of pressure
to shut up if you are.
So the process on the left of cancellation,
as you started to talk about
with the perfect rhetorical fortress,
the first step is dismiss a person
if you can put a label of conservative on them,
you can dismiss them in that way.
What other efficient
or what other effective dismissal mechanisms are there?
We have a little bit of fun with demographic numbers,
but I run this by height and I remember him
being kind of like, don't include the actual percentage.
I'm like, no, we need to include the actual percentages
because people are really bad at estimating
what the demographics of the US actually looks like,
both the right and the left in different ways.
So we put it in the numbers and we talk about
being dismissed for being white
or being dismissed for being straight
or being dismissed for being male.
And you can already dismiss people for being conservative.
And so 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.
And then we get to, I think it's like layer six
and we're like, surprise, guess what?
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.
And the most interesting part of the research we did
for this was just asking 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?
Every single one of them was like, oh yeah, 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?
John McWhorter talked about having a reporter
when he talked about when he showed that he dissented
from some of what he described as kind of like woke racism
in his book, Woke Ideas.
The reporter actually is like,
so do you consider yourself black?
He's like, what are you crazy?
Of course I do.
And Coleman Hughes had one of the best quotes on it.
He said, I'm constantly being told
the most important thing to how legitimate my opinion is
is whether or not I'm black.
But then when I have a dissenting opinion,
I get told I'm not really black.
So, perfect.
Like there's no way to falsify this argument.
That one really, that investigation really struck me.
So, and you laid this out really nicely in the book
that there is this process of saying, are you conservative?
Yes, you can dismiss the person.
Are you white?
Dismiss the person.
Are you male?
You can dismiss the person.
There's these categories that make it easier
for you to dismiss a person's ideas based on that.
And like you said, you end up in that tiny percentage
and you could still dismiss.
And it's not just dismiss.
We talk about this from a practical standpoint,
the way the limitations on reality.
And one of them is time.
And a lot of cancel culture as cultural norms,
as this way of winning arguments without winning arguments
is about running up the clock.
Because by the time you get down to the bottom of the,
actually even to get a couple of steps
into the perfect rhetorical fortress
and where has the time gone?
You probably just give up trying to actually
have the argument and you never get to the argument
in the first place.
And all of these things are pretty sticky on social media.
Social media practically invented
the perfect rhetorical fortress.
So that each one of those stages has a virality to it.
So it could stick and then it can get people
really excited.
It allows you to feel outrage and superiority.
Yeah, because of that, at the scale of the virality
allows you to never get to the actual discussion
of the point.
But it's not just the left, it's the right.
Also it's the efficient rhetorical fortress.
So something to be proud of on the right,
it's more efficient.
So you don't have to listen to liberals
and anyone can be labeled a liberal
if they have a wrong opinion.
I've seen liberal and left and leftist
all used in the same kind of way.
That's leftist nonsense.
You don't have to listen to experts,
even conservative experts if they have the wrong opinion.
You don't have to listen to journalists,
even conservative journalists,
if they have the wrong opinion.
And among the MAGA wing, there's a fourth proposition.
There's a fourth provision.
You don't need to listen to anyone who isn't pro-Trump.
We call it efficient because it eliminates
a lot of people you probably should listen to,
at least sometimes.
We point out sometimes how cancel culture
can interfere with faith and expertise.
So we get kind of being a little suspicious of experts.
But at the same time, if you follow that
and you follow it mechanically,
and I definitely think everybody in the US
probably has some older uncle who exercises some of these,
it is a really efficient way to sort of
wall yourself off from the rest of the world
and dismiss at least some people
you really should be listening to.
The way you laid it out, it made me realize
that we just take up so much of our brain power
with these things. So much time.
It's literally time.
We could be solving things.
And you kind of exhaust yourself
through this process of being outraged
based on these labels, and you never get to actually...
There's almost not enough time for empathy,
for looking at a person and thinking,
well, maybe they're right,
because you're so busy categorizing them.
And it's fascinating.
What's the fun in empathy?
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.
Where can I legitimately be cruel?
Where can I actually exercise
some regression against somebody?
And it seems to sometimes be
just finding new justifications for that.
And it's an understandable human failing
that sometimes can be used to defend justice.
But again, it will never get you anywhere near the truth.
One interesting case that you cover
about expertise is with COVID.
Yeah.
So how did cancel culture come into play
on the topic of COVID?
Yeah, I think that COVID was a big blow
to people's faith and expertise,
and cancel culture played a big role in that.
I think one of the best examples of this
is Jennifer Say at Levi's.
She is a lovely woman.
She was a vice president at Levi's.
She talked about actually potentially
to be the president of Levi's jeans.
And she was a big advocate for kids.
And when they started shutting down the schools,
she started saying, this is going to be a disaster.
This is going to hurt the poor
and disadvantage kids the most.
We have to figure out a way to open the schools back up.
And that was such a heretical point of view.
And the typical kind of cancel culture 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.
And she was offered, I think,
like in 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.
And now that's kind of the conventional wisdom
and the research is quite clear that this was devastating
to particularly disadvantaged youth.
Like people understand this as being,
okay, she was probably right.
But one of the really sad aspects of cancel culture
is people forget why you are canceled
and they just know they hate you.
There's this lingering kind of like,
well, I don't have to take them seriously anymore.
But by the way, did you notice they happen to be right
on something very important?
Now, one funny thing about freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech wouldn't exist
if you didn't also have the right
to say things that were wrong.
Because if you can't engage in idea foria,
if you can't actually speculate,
you'll never actually get to something
that's right in the first place.
But it's especially galling when people who were right
were censored and never actually got the credit
that they deserve.
Well, this might be a good place to ask
a little bit more about the freedom of speech.
And so you said that included in the freedom of speech
is to say things that are wrong.
What is your perspective on hate speech?
Hate speech is the best marketing campaign for censorship.
And it came from academia of the 20th century.
And that when I talked about the anti-free speech movement,
that was one of their first inventions.
There was a lot of talk about critical race theory
and being against critical race theory.
And FIRE will sue if you say that people can't advocate
for it or teach it or research it.
Because you do absolutely have the right
to pursue it academically.
However, every time someone mentions CRT,
they should also say the very first project
of the people who founded CRT,
Richard Delgado, Mary Matsuda, et cetera,
was to create this new category of unprotected speech
called hate speech and to get it banned.
The person who enabled this drift, of course,
was Herbert Marcuse in 1965,
basically questioning whether or not free speech
should be a sacred value on the left.
And he was on the losing side for a really long time.
The liberals, the way I grew up,
that was basically being pro-free speech was synonymous
with being a liberal.
But that started to be etched away on campus.
And the way it was was with the idea of hate speech,
that essentially, oh, but we can designate
particularly bad speech as not protected.
And who's gonna enforce it?
Who's gonna decide what hate speech actually is?
Well, it's usually overwhelmingly can only happen
in an environment of really low viewpoint diversity
because you have to actually agree on what the most hateful
and wrong things are.
And there's a bedrock principle that's referred to this
in a great case about flag burning in the First Amendment
that I think all the world could benefit from.
You can't ban speech just because it's offensive.
It's too subjective.
It basically, it's one of the reasons why these kind
of codes have been more happily adopted in places
like Europe where they have a sense
that there's like a modal German or a modal Englishman.
And I think this is offensive.
And therefore, I can say that this is wrong.
In a more multicultural, in a genuinely more diverse country
that's never actually had an honest thought
that there is a single kind of American,
there's never been, like we had the idea of Uncle Sam,
but that was always kind of a joke.
Boston always knew it wasn't Richmond,
always knew it wasn't Georgia,
always knew it wasn't Alaska.
Like we've always been a hodgepodge.
And we get in a society that diverse,
that you can't ban things simply because they're offensive.
And that's one of the reasons why hate speech
is not an unprotected category of speech.
And I go further.
My theory on freedom of speech is slightly different
than most other constitutional lawyers.
And I think that's partially because some of the ways,
some of these theories,
although a lot of them are really good, are inadequate.
They're not expansive enough.
And I sometimes call my theory
the pure informational theory of freedom of speech.
Or sometimes when I want to be fancy,
the lab and the looking glass theory.
And its most important tenant is that there,
is that if the goal is the project of human knowledge,
which is to know the world as it is,
you cannot know the world as it is
without knowing what people really think.
And what people really think
is an incredibly important fact to know.
So every time you're actually saying, you can't say that,
you're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge
of what people really think.
You're causing what Timur Karan,
who's on our board of advisors,
calls preference falsification.
You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world.
Which by the way, in a lot of cases,
because there are activists who want to restrict more speech
they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced
than they might be.
And actually these kind of restrictions,
there was a book called Racial Paranoia
that came out about 15 years ago
that was making the point that the imposition
of some of these codes can sometimes make people think
that the only thing holding you back
from being a raging racist are these codes.
So it must be really, really bad.
It can actually make all these things worse.
And one, which we talk about in the book,
one very real practical way it makes things worse
is when you censor people, it doesn't change their opinion.
It just encourages them to not share it with people
who will get them in trouble.
So it leads them to talk to people
who they already agree with
and group polarization takes off.
So we have some interesting data in the book
about how driving people off of Twitter, for example,
in 2017, and then again, I think in 2020,
driving people to gab led to greater radicalization
among those people.
It's a very predictable force.
Censorship doesn't actually change people's minds
and it pushes them in directions that actually
by very solid research
will actually make them more radicalized.
So yeah, I think that the attempt to ban hate speech,
it doesn't really protect us from it,
but it gives the government such a vast weapon
to use against us that we will regret giving them.
Is there a way to sort of to look at extreme cases
to test this idea out a little bit?
So if you look on campus,
what's your view about allowing say white supremacists
on campus to do speeches, okay, okay, okay.
I think you should be able to study what people think
and I think it's important that we actually do.
So I think that, let's take for example, QAnon.
Yeah, QAnon's wrong, but where did it come from?
Why did they think that?
What's the motivation?
Who taught them it?
Who came up with these ideas?
This is important to understand history.
That's important to understand modern American politics.
And so if you put your scholar hat on,
you should be curious about kind of everyone,
about where they're coming from.
Daryl Davis, who I'm sure you're familiar with,
part of his goal was just simply to get to know
where people were coming from and in the process,
he actually de-radicalized a number of clans members
when they actually realized that this black man
who had befriended them actually was compassionate,
was a decent person,
they realized all their preconceptions were wrong.
So it can have a de-radicalizing factor by the way,
but even when it doesn't,
it's still really important to know
what the bad people in your society think.
Honestly, in some ways it's for your own safety,
it's probably more important to know
what the bad people in your society actually think.
I personally, I don't know what you think about that,
but I personally think that freedom of speech
in cases like that, like KKK on campus,
can do more harm in the short term,
but much more benefit in the long term.
Because you can sometimes argue for like,
this is going to hurt in the short term,
but I mean, Harvey said this is like,
consider the alternative.
Because you've just kind of made the case for like,
this potentially would be a good thing
even in the short term.
And it often is, I think,
especially in a stable society like ours,
whether it's strong middle-class, all these kinds of things
where people have like the comforts to reason through things.
But to me, it's like, even if it hurts in the short term,
even if it does create more hate in the short term,
the freedom of speech has this really beneficial thing,
which is it helps you move towards the truth,
the entirety of society,
towards a deeper, more accurate understanding of life
on earth, of society, of how people function,
of ethics, of metaphysics, of everything.
And that in the long term is a huge benefit.
It gets rid of the Nazis in the long term,
even if it adds to the number of Nazis in the short term.
Well, and meanwhile, and the reality check part of this
is people always bring up, what about the Klan on campus?
I'm like, they're never invited.
I haven't seen a case where they've been invited.
Usually, the Klan argument gets thrown out
when people are trying to excuse,
and that's why we shouted down Ben Shapiro.
And that's why you can't have Bill Maher on campus.
And it's like, okay.
And it's a little bit of that whataboutism again
about being like, well, that thing over there is terrible,
and therefore, this comedian shouldn't come.
So I do have a question maybe by way of advice.
Sure.
Interviewing folks and seeing this,
like a podcast as a platform,
in deciding who to talk to or not,
not something you have to come face to face with
on occasion.
My natural inclination before I started the podcast
was I would talk to anyone, including people,
which I'm still interested in,
who are current members of the KKK.
And to me, there's a responsibility to do that with skill.
And that responsibility has been weighing heavier
and heavier on me,
because you realize how much skill it actually takes,
because you have to know to understand so much.
Because I've come to understand that the devil
is always going to be charismatic.
The devil's not going to look like the devil.
And so you have to realize you can't always
come to the table with a deep compassion
for another human being.
You have to have like 90% compassion
and another 90% deep historical knowledge
about the context of the battles
around this particular issue.
And that takes just a huge amount of effort.
But I don't know if there's thoughts you have about this,
how to handle speech
in a way, without censoring, bringing it to the surface,
but in a way that creates more love in the world.
I remember Steve Bannon got disinvited
from the New Yorker Festival,
and Jim Carrey freaked out
and all sorts of other people freaked out,
and he got disinvited from the,
and I got invited to speak on Smirconish about this.
And I was saying, listen,
you don't have people to your conference
because you agree with them.
We have to get out of this idea that,
because they were trying to make it sound like
that's an endorsement of Steve Bannon.
That's nonsense.
If you actually look at the opinions
of all the people who are there,
you can't possibly endorse all the opinions
that all these other people
who are going to be there actually have.
And in the process of making that argument,
and also, of course, the very classic,
it's very valuable to know what someone Steve Bannon thinks.
You should be curious about that.
And I remember someone arguing back saying,
well, would you want someone to interview a jihadi?
And I'm like, because at the moment,
it was at the time when ISIS was really going for it.
And I was like, would you not want to go to a talk
where someone was trying to figure out
what makes some of these people tick?
Because that changes your framing,
that essentially it's like, no, it's curiosity.
It is the cure for a lot of this stuff.
And we need a great deal more curiosity
and a lot less unwarranted certainty.
And there's a question of like,
how do you conduct such conversations?
And I feel deeply underqualified.
Who do you think is especially good at that?
I feel like documentary filmmakers
usually do a much better job.
And the best job is usually done by biographers.
So the more time you give to a particular conversation,
really deep thought and historical context
and studying the people, how they think,
looking at all different perspectives,
looking at the psychology of the person,
upbringing, their parents, their grandparents, all of this,
the more time you spend with that,
the better the quality of the conversation is
because you get to really empathize with the person,
with the people he or she represents.
And you get to see the common humanity, all of this.
Interviewers are often don't do that work.
So like the best stuff I've seen
is interviews that are part of a documentary.
But even now documentaries are like,
there's a huge incentive to do as quickly as possible.
There's not an incentive
to really spend time with the person.
There's a great new documentary about Floyd Abrams
that I really recommend.
We did a documentary about Ira Glasser called Mighty Ira,
which was my video team and my protege, Nico Perino
and Chris Mulvey and Aaron Reese put it together.
And it's just follows the life and times of Ira Glasser,
the former head of the ACLU.
He's, if you could just lean on that,
that's a fascinating story.
Oh yeah, Ira. Who's that?
Amazing.
Ira, he wasn't a lawyer.
He started working at the NYCLU,
the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Back in I think the 60s,
I think Robert Kennedy recommended
that he go in that direction.
And he became the president of the ACLU
right at the time that they were suffering
from defending the Nazis at Skokie.
And Nico and Aaron and Chris put together this,
and they'd never done a documentary before.
And it came out so, so well.
And it tells the story of the Nazis in Skokie.
It tells the story of the case around it,
it tells the story of the ACLU at the time
and what a great leader Ira Glasser was.
And one of the things that's so great is like,
when you get to see the Nazis at Skokie,
they come off like the idiots that you would expect them to.
There's a moment when the rally's not going very well
and the leader gets flustered.
And it almost seems like he's gonna like shout out,
kind of like, you're making this Nazi rally into a mockery.
So it showed how actually allowing the Nazis to speak
at Skokie kind of took the wind out of their sails.
Like if they had, the whole movement,
everybody just kind of, it all kind of dissolved after that
because they looked like racist fools that they were.
They were, even Blues Brothers made jokes about them.
And it didn't turn into the disaster
that people thought it was going to be
just by letting them speak.
And Ira Glasser, okay, so he has this wonderful story
about how Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers
and how there was a moment when it was seeing someone,
an African-American as on their, literally on their team
and how that really got them excited
about the cause of racial equality
and that became a big part of what his life was.
And I just think of that as such a great metaphor
is expanding your circle and seeing more people
as being quite literally on your team
is the solution to so many of these problems.
And I worry that one of the things
that is absolutely just a fact of life in America
is like we do see each other more as enemy camps
as opposed to people on the same team.
And that was actually something in the early days,
like me and Will Creeley, the legal director of FIRE,
wrote about the forthcoming free speech challenges
of everyone being on Facebook.
And one thing that I was hoping was that
as more people were exposing more of their lives,
we'd realized a lot of these things we knew intellectually,
like kids go to the bar and get drunk and do stupid things,
that when we started seeing the evidence
of them doing stupid things,
that we might be shocked at first,
but then eventually get more sophisticated
and be like, well, come on, people are like that.
That never actually really seemed to happen,
that I think that there are plenty of things
we know about human nature
and we know about dumb things people say
and we've made it into an environment
where there's just someone out there
waiting to be kind of like,
oh, remember that dumb thing you said we were 14?
Well, I'm gonna make sure that you don't get
into your dream school because of that.
That's offense archeology.
Yeah, that's not my term though.
It's a great term.
It's a great term.
We steal from the best.
Digging through someone's past comments
to find a speech that hasn't aged well.
And that one's tactical.
Like that one isn't just someone not being empathetic.
They're like, I'm gonna punish you for this.
Or, and that's one of the reasons why I got depressed
writing this book.
Because there's already people who don't love me
because of coddling the American mind,
usually based on a misunderstanding
of what we actually said
and coddling in the American mind, but nonetheless.
But on this one, I'm calling out people
for being very cruel in a lot of cases.
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 gonna try to cancel you for could be anything.
They might go back into your old post,
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.
And they're gonna 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?
And it's, again, it's cruel.
It doesn't get you anywhere closer to the truth.
But it is a little scary to stick your neck out.
Okay, in terms of solutions,
I'm gonna ask you a few things.
So one, parenting.
Yeah, five and seven year old.
So I'm sure you've figured it all out then.
Oh God, no.
From a free speech perspective.
Yeah.
From a free speech culture perspective,
how to be a good parent.
Yeah, I think the first quality
you should be cultivating in your children
if you want to have a free speech culture
is curiosity and an awareness of the vastness
that will always be unknown.
And getting my kids excited about the idea that's like,
we're gonna spend our whole lives learning about stuff.
And it's fast and exciting and endless
and we'll never make a big dent in it,
but the journey will be amazing.
But only fools think they know everything.
And sometimes dangerous fools at that.
So giving the sense of intellectual humility early on.
Being also, you know, saying things
that actually do sound kind of old-fashioned.
But I say things to my kids like,
listen, if you enjoy study and work,
both things that I very much enjoy, I do for fun,
your life is going to feel great
and it's going to feel easy.
So some of those old-fashioned virtues
are things I try to preach.
Counterintuitive stuff like outdoor time, playing,
having time that are not intermediated experiences
is really important.
And little things, like I talk about in the book
about when my kids are watching something that's scary.
And I'm not talking about like zombie movies, you know,
I'm talking about like a cartoon
that has kind of a scary moment.
And saying that they want to turn the TV off.
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.
And I want you to tell me what you think of this afterwards.
And I sat next to my sons.
And by the end of it, every single time,
when I asked them,
was that as scary as you thought it was going to be?
And they were like, no, daddy, that was fine.
And I'm like, that's one of the great lessons in life.
The fear that you don't go through
becomes much bigger in your head
than actually simply facing it.
That's one of the reasons
why I'm fighting back against this culture.
I'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
you might be wrong and be curious.
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.
Generation Z hates cancel culture the most.
And that's another reason why it's like,
people still claiming this is even happening.
It's kind of like, no, you actually can ask kids
what they think of cancel culture and they hate it.
Yeah, well, I kind of think of them
as like the immune system.
That's like, it's the culture waking up to like,
no, this is not a good thing.
I am glad though.
I mean, I'm one of those kids who 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 of envy.
Well, because you can also do the absolute free speech.
I like leaning into it where I hope for a future
where a lot of our insecurities, flaws,
everything's out there.
And to be raw, honest with it,
I think that it leads to a better world
because the flaws are beautiful.
I mean, that's the flaws
is the basic ingredients of human connection.
Robert Wright, he wrote a book on Buddhism.
And I talked about trying to use social media
from a Buddhist perspective
and like as if it's the collective unconscious meditating
and seeing those little like angry bits
that are trying to cancel you or get you to shut up
and just kind of like letting them go
the same way you're supposed to watch your thoughts
kind of trail off.
I would love to see that like visualized.
Whatever the drama going on,
just seeing the sea of it,
of the collective consciousness just processing this
and having a little like panic attack
and just kind of like breathing it in.
Looking at the little sort of hateful angry voices
kind of pop up and be like, okay, there you are.
And I'm still focused on that thing
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.
But...
Never too late.
So when 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,
it will prevent heretical work
and anti-Henry VIII stuff from coming out.
Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty efficient idea
if nothing else.
And I always, and 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.
And 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,
writing was probably really bad, but the next one,
which was the printing press,
which was absolutely calamitous.
And I mean, and I say calamitous on purpose
because in the short term, the witch hunts went up like crazy
because the printing press allowed you to get that manual
on how to find witches,
that the religious wars went crazy.
It led to all sorts of distress, misinformation, nastiness.
And Henry VIII was trying to put the genie back
in the bottle.
He was kind of like, I want to use this for good,
like I feel like it could be used.
But he was in an unavoidable period of epistemic anarchy.
There's nothing you can do to make the period
after the printing press 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.
So I feel like that's kind of like where we are now.
That disruption came from adding,
I think several million people to the European conversation
and then eventually the global conversation.
But eventually it became the best tool for disconfirmation,
for getting rid of falsity, for spotting bad ideas.
And it's the benefits, the long-term benefits
of the printing press are incalculably great.
And that's what gives me some optimism
for where we are now with social media,
because we are in that unavoidably anarchical period.
And I do worry that there are attempts in states
to pass things to try to put the genie back in the bottle.
Like 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 no amount of sort of top-down
is going to be able to fix it.
We have to culturally adapt to the fact of it
in ways that make us wiser that actually,
and allow it potentially to be that wonderful engine
for disconfirmation that we're nowhere near yet, by the way.
But think about it, additional millions of eyes
on problems, thanks to the printing press,
helped create the scientific revolution,
the enlightenment, the discovery of ignorance.
We now have added billions of eyes and voices
to solving problems, and we're using them
for cat videos and canceling.
But those are just the early days of the printing press.
It all starts with the cats and the canceling.
Is there something about X, about Twitter,
which is perhaps the most energetic source
of cats and canceling?
It seems like the collective unconscious of the species.
It's one of these things where the tendency
to want to see patterns in history sometimes
can limit the actual batshit crazy experience
of what history actually is.
Because yes, we have these nice comforting ideas
that it's gonna be like last time.
We don't know, it hasn't happened yet.
And I think how unusual Twitter is,
because I think of it as like the,
because people talk about writing and mass communications
and as being expanding the size of our collective brain.
But now we're kind of looking at our collective brain
in real time, and it's filled just like our own brains
with all sorts of like little crazy things that pop up
and appear like virtual particles kind of all over the place
of people reacting in real time to things.
There's never been anything even vaguely like it.
And it can be, at its worst, awful to see.
At its best, sometimes seeing people just getting euphoric
over something going on and cracking absolutely brilliant
immediate jokes at the same time.
It can be, it can even be a joyful experience.
I feel like, and 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.
I occasionally run into those other sort of
what I call neighborhoods on X
where it's just all canceling, all nastiness,
and it's always kind of an unpleasant visit to those places.
I'm not saying the whole thing needs to be
like my experience, but I do think that
the reason why people keep on coming back to it
is it reveals raw aspects of humanity
that sometimes we prefer to pretend don't exist.
Yeah, but also it's totally new, like you said.
Yeah.
It's just the virality, the speed, the news travels,
the opinions travel, that the battle over ideas travels.
The battle over information too.
Yeah, of what is true and not, lies travel,
the old Mark Twain thing, pretty fast on the thing.
Yeah.
And then it changes your understanding
of how to interpret information.
It can also stress you out to no end.
Remember to get off it sometimes.
The stats are pretty bad on mental health
with young people, and I'm definitely in the camp
where people will think that social media is part of that.
I understand 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.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it's possible to create social media
that makes a huge amount of money and makes people happy.
To me, it's possible to align the incentives.
So in terms of 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,
helping challenge you just in the right amount
and just the right amount of cat videos, whatever,
gives this full, rich human experience.
I think it's just a machine learning problem.
It's not easy to create a feed.
So the easiest feed you could do is maximize engagement.
But that's just a really dumb algorithm.
It's for the algorithm to learn enough about you
to understand what will make you truly happy
as a human being to grow long-term.
That's just a very difficult problem to solve.
Have you ever watched Fleabag?
It's an absolutely brilliant British show.
And it sets you up.
One of the reasons why people love it so much
is it sets you up that you're watching
a raunchy British Sex and the City,
except the main character is the most promiscuous one.
It's like, okay.
And you roll your eyes a little bit and it's kind of funny
and it's kind of cute and kind of spicy.
And then you realize that the person
is actually suffering and having a hard time.
And it gets deeper and deeper as the show goes on.
And she will do these incredible speeches
about, tell me what to do.
I know there's experts out there.
I know there's knowledge out there.
I know there's an optimal way to live my life.
So why can't someone just tell me what to do?
And it's this wonderfully accurate, I think,
aspect of human desire that what if something could actually
tell me the optimal way to go?
Because I think there is a desire to give up some amount
of your own freedom and discretion in order to be told
to do the optimally right thing.
But that path scares me to death.
Yeah, but see the way you phrased it, it scares me too.
So there's several things.
One, you can be constantly distracted in a TikTok way
by things that keep you engaged.
So removing that and giving you a bunch
of options constantly and learning from long-term
what results in your actual long-term happiness.
So like which amounts of challenging ideas are good for you?
That, you know, for somebody like me, well exactly.
Just four.
But there is a number like that for you, Greg.
Like for me, that number is pretty high.
I love debate.
I love the feeling of like realizing, holy shit,
I've been wrong.
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.
Well, the educational aspect of it.
Yes, education, yes.
The idea of kind of like both going the speed
that you need to and running as fast as you can.
Yeah.
I mean, there's the whole flow thing.
I just feel YouTube recommendation for better or worse,
if used correctly, it feels like it does a pretty good job.
Whenever I just refuse to click on stuff
that's just dopamine-based
and click on only educational things,
the recommendation it provides are really damn good.
So I feel like it's a solvable problem,
at least in the space of education, of challenging yourself,
but also expanding your realm of knowledge
and all this kind of stuff.
And I'm definitely more in the,
we're in an inescapable hierarchical period
and require big cultural adjustments.
And there's no way that this isn't gonna
be a difficult transition.
Is there any specific little or big things
that you would like to see X do, Twitter do?
I have lots of thoughts on that.
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 needed to be torn down.
Same thing is true now.
An extra billions of eyes on every problem
can tear down any person, idea, or institution.
And some, again, some of those things
needed to be torn down, but it can't build yet.
We are not at the stage that it can build yet.
But it has shown us how thin our knowledge was.
It's one of the reasons why we're also aware
of the replication crisis.
It's one of the reasons why we're also aware
of how kind of shoddy our research is,
how much our expert class is arrogant in many cases.
But people don't wanna live in a world
where they don't have people that they respect
and they can look at.
And I think what's happening, possibly now,
but will continue to happen,
is people are gonna establish themselves
as being high integrity, that they will always be honest.
I think you are establishing yourself
as someone who is high integrity,
where they can trust that person.
A fire wants to be the institution that people can come to.
It's like, if it's free speech, we will defend it, period.
And I think that people need to have authorities
that they can actually trust.
And I think that if you actually had a stream
that maybe people can watch in action,
but not flood with stupid cancel culture stuff
or dumb cat memes,
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.
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.
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.
I mean, there's been projects throughout the internet
that have done an incredible job with that,
but have been also very flawed.
Like Wikipedia is an example of a big leap forward
in doing that.
It's pretty damn impressive.
What's your overall take?
I mean, I'm mostly impressed.
So there's a few really powerful ideas
for the people who edit Wikipedia.
One of which is each editor kind of for themselves declares,
you know, I'm into politics
and I really kind of am a left leaning guy.
So I really shouldn't be editing political articles
because I have bias.
So they declare their biases
and they're often do a good job
of actually declaring the biases,
but they'll still like,
they'll find a way to justify themselves.
Like something will piss them off
and they want to correct it
because they love correcting untruth into truth.
But the perspective of what is true or not
is affected by their bias.
Truth is hard to know.
And it is true that there is a left leaning bias
on the editors of Wikipedia.
So for that, what happens is on articles,
which I mostly appreciate
that don't have a political aspect to them,
you know, scientific articles or technical articles,
they can be really strong.
Even history, just describing the facts of history
that don't have a subjective element, strong.
Also just using my own brain,
I can kind of filter out if it's, you know,
if it's something about January 6th or something like this,
I know I'm going to be like,
I'm not, whatever's going on here,
I'm going to kind of read it,
but most I'm going to look to other sources.
I'm going to look to a bunch of different perspectives on.
It's going to be very tense.
There's probably going to be some kind of bias.
Maybe some wording will be such,
which is one where this is where Wikipedia does its thing.
The way they word stuff will be biased, the choice of words,
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 talked about.
It's fast.
It's healthier than most environments.
It's incredibly healthy, but I think you could do better.
One of the big flaws of Wikipedia to me,
that Community Notes on X does better,
is the accessibility of becoming an editor.
It's difficult to become an editor
and it's not as visible the process of editing.
So I would love, like you said, a stream.
Everyone to be able to observe this debate
between people with integrity
of when they discuss things like January 6th,
the very controversial topics,
to just see how the process of the debate goes,
as opposed to being hidden in the shadows,
which it currently is in Wikipedia.
You can access it.
It's just hard to access.
And I've also seen how they will use certain articles
on certain people.
Articles about people I've learned to trust less and less,
because they'll literally will use those
to make personal attacks.
And this is something you write about.
They'll use descriptions of different controversies
to paint a picture of a person that doesn't, to me,
at least feel like an accurate representation of the person.
And it's like writing an article about Einstein
mentioning something about a theory of relativity
and then saying that he was a womanizer, an abuser,
and a controversy.
Yeah, he is.
Feynman also, they're not exactly the perfect human
in terms of women,
but there's other aspects to this human.
And to capture that human properly,
there's a certain way to do it.
I think Wikipedia will often lean,
they really try to be self-reflective and try to stop this,
but they will lean into the drama if it matches the bias.
But again, much better than,
the world, I believe, is much better
because Wikipedia exists.
But now that we're in these adolescent stages,
we're growing and trying to come up
with different technologies,
the idea of a stream is really, really interesting.
As you get more and more people into this discourse
that where the value is, let's try to get the truth.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that basically, you get the little cards
for nope, wrong, nope, wrong.
And the different rhetorical techniques
that are being used to avoid actually discussing.
Yeah, and I think actually you can make it
a little bit fun by you get a limited number of them.
It's kind of like, you get three whataboutism cards.
It's a game of finding the whole thing, absolutely.
Yeah.
Let me ask you about,
so you mentioned going to some difficult moments
in your life. Sure.
What has been your experience with depression?
What has been your experience getting out of it,
overcoming it?
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.
I 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.
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.
It'd been a really rough year,
and I always had issues with depression,
but they were getting worse.
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 give
of trying to kill myself was the first time
I'd ever written it down.
Nobody in my family was aware of it being like that.
My wife had never seen it, and basically the only way
I was able to write that was by doing,
you know how you can kinda trick yourself?
And I was like, I'm going to convince myself
that this is just between me and my computer
and nobody will see it, and it's probably now
the most public thing I've ever written.
But 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,
and it's just I don't have family there.
There's something about the town, they don't seem
to like me very much, but the main thing was being
in the culture war all the time.
There was a girl that I was dating.
I remember, she didn't seem to really approve
of what I did, and a lot of people didn't really seem to.
And meanwhile, 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.
And I remember saying, at one point, I'm like,
listen, I'm a true believer in this stuff.
I'm willing to defend Nazis.
I'm certainly willing to defend Republicans.
And she actually said, I think Republicans might be worse.
And that didn't, that really shouldn't go very well.
And then I nearly got in fistfights a couple times
with people on the right because they found out
I defended people who cracked jokes about 9-11.
Like, this happened more than once.
By the time I'm in my 20s, I'm not fistfighting again.
But yeah, it was always like that.
You see how hypocritical people can be.
You can see how friends can turn on you
if they don't like your politics.
So I got an early preview of this,
of what the culture we were heading into
by being the president of FIRE, and it was exhausting.
And that was one of the main things that led me
to be suicidally depressed.
At the Belmont Center, if you told me that
that would be the beginning of a new and better life for me,
I would've laughed if I could've, 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.
So I got a doctor, and I started doing
cognitive behavioral therapy.
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.
And what you do in CBT is essentially you have,
something makes you upset,
and then you just write down what the thought was.
And, you know, something minor could happen,
and your response was, you know, like,
well, the date didn't seem to go very well,
and that's because I'm broken and will die alone.
And you're like, okay, okay, okay,
what are the following, you know,
that's catastrophizing, that's mind-reading,
that's fortune-telling, that's all this stuff.
And you have to do this several times a day, forever.
I actually need to brush up on it at the moment.
And it slowly, over time, voices in my head
that had been saying horrible, you know,
horrible internal talk,
it just didn't sound as convincing anymore,
which was really kind of like subtle effect.
Like, it was just kind of like, oh, wait,
I don't buy that I'm broken.
You know, like, that doesn't sound true.
That doesn't sound like truth from God, like it used to.
And nine months after I was planning to kill myself,
I was probably happier than I'd been in a decade.
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.
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.
And that led to coddling the American mind
and all that stuff.
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.
You know, there's a friend in there that I talk about
who killed himself after being canceled.
I talked to him a week before he killed himself
and 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
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.
And so I waited to check in on him
because we were so overwhelmed with the request for helps.
And he was saying people were coming to his house still
and then he shot himself the next week.
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.
And this is a very hard,
psychologically taxing business to be in.
And even admitting this right now,
like I think about like all the vultures out there,
they'll have fun with it.
Just like the same way
when my friend Mike Adams killed himself,
there were people like celebrating on Twitter
that a man was dead because they didn't like his tweets.
But somehow that made them compassionate
for some abstract other person.
So I was getting a little depressed and anxious.
And the thing that really helped me more than anything else
was confessing to my staff that I,
books take a lot of energy.
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 them depressed and anxious.
But when I finally told 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.
And the other thing was,
have you heard this conference dialogue?
Oh yes.
It's like an invite only thing.
It's Oren Hoffman runs it.
It intentionally tries to get people
over the political spectrum to come together
and have off the record conversations about big issues.
And it was nice to be in a room
where liberal, conservative, none of the above
were all like, oh, thank God someone's taken
on cancel culture.
And where it felt like maybe this won't be
the disaster for me and my family
that I was starting to be afraid it would be,
that taking the stuff on might actually have a happy ending.
Well, one thing I just stands out from that
is the pain of cancellation can be really intense.
And that doesn't necessarily mean losing your job,
but just even, you can call it bullying,
you can call it whatever name,
but just some number of people on the internet,
and that number can be small,
kind of saying bad things to you.
That can be a pretty powerful force to the human psyche,
which was very surprising.
And then the flip side also of that,
it really makes me sad how cruel people can be.
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 just a way
to vent some aggression on a person
that you think of only as an abstraction.
So I think it's important for people
to realize that whatever negative energy,
whatever negativity you want to put out there,
there's real people that can get hurt.
You can really get people to one,
be the worst version of themselves,
or two, possibly take their own life.
And it's not, it's real.
Yeah, 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, we quote the Pope,
we quote Obama, we quote James Carville,
we quote Taylor Swift on cancel culture.
And Taylor Swift's quote is essentially
about how behind all of this,
when it gets particularly nasty,
there's this very clear kill yourself
kind of undercurrent to it, and it's cruel.
And the problem is that in an environment so wide open,
there's always going to be someone
who wants to be so transgressive
and say the most hurtful, terrible thing.
But then you have to remember the misrepresentation,
getting back to the old idioms,
sticks and stones will break my bones,
but names will never hurt me,
has been reimagined in campus debates
in the most asinine way.
People will literally say stuff like,
but now we know words can hurt.
And it's like, now we know words can hurt?
Guys, you didn't have to come up
with a special little thing that you teach children
to make words hurt less
if they never hurt in the first place.
It wouldn't even make sense, the saying.
It's a saying that you repeat to yourself
to give yourself strength
when the bullies have noticed you're a little weird.
Maybe a little personal.
And it helps, it really does help to be like,
listen, okay, assholes are gonna say asshole things,
and I can't let them have that kind of power over me.
Yeah, yeah, it still is a learning experience
because it does hurt.
But for the good people out there
who actually just sometimes think that they're venting,
you know, they think about it.
Remember that there are people on the other side of it.
Yeah, for me, it hurts my kind of faith in humanity.
I know it shouldn't, but it does sometimes.
When I just see people being cruel to each other,
it kind of, it floats a cloud
over my perspective of the world
that I wish didn't have to be there.
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.
Yeah, what gives you hope about this whole thing,
about this dark state that we're in,
as you describe, how can we get out?
What gives you hope that we will get out?
I think that people are sick of it.
I think people are sick of not being able to be authentic.
And that's really what censorship is.
It's basically telling you don't be yourself.
Don't actually say what you think.
Don't show your personality.
Don't dissent, don't be weird, don't be wrong.
And that's not sustainable.
I think that people have kind of had enough of it.
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.
And I think that, and this may sound
like it's an unrelated problem,
I think if there were highly respected,
let's say extremely difficult ways to prove
that you're extremely smart and hardworking
that cost little or nothing,
that actually can give the Harvards and the Yales
of the world a 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.
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, are our leadership coming
from these few fancy schools,
we actually have great admiration for them.
We kind of look up to them.
But I think we'd have a lot healthier of a society
if people could prove their excellence in ways
that are coming from completely different streams,
and that are highly respected.
I sometimes talk about, there should be a test
that anyone who passes it gets a BA in the humanities
that, like a super BA, like some way, not a GED,
that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about something that one out of only a couple,
like 100 people can pass.
Some other way of actually, of not going through
these massive, bloated, expensive institutions
that people can raise their hands and say,
I am smart and hardworking.
I think that could be an incredibly healthy way.
I think we need additional streams for creative people
to be solving problems, whether that's on X
or someplace else.
I think that there's lots of things that technology
could do to really help with this.
I think some of the stuff that Sal Khan is working on
at Khan Academy could really help.
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.
And here's my, you know, I've been picking on Harvard a lot,
but I'm gonna pick on them a little bit more.
And I talk a lot about class again.
And there's a great book called Poison Ivy by Evan Mandry,
which I recommend to everybody, and it's outrageous.
It sounds like me on a rant at Stanford,
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.
And when you look at how much they actually, like,
replicate class privilege, it's really distressing.
So everybody should read Poison Ivy.
And above all else, if you're weird,
continue being weird.
And you're one of the most interesting,
one of the weirdest, in the most beautiful way
people I've ever met.
Greg, thank you for the really important work you do.
This was, this is-
Everybody watch Kid Cosmic.
I appreciate the class,
the hilarity that you brought here today, man.
This was an amazing conversation.
Thank you for the work you do.
Thank you, thank you.
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.
So thank you so much for talking today.
Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Greg Lukianoff.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Noam Chomsky.
If you believe in freedom of speech,
you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like.
Gables was in favor of freedom of speech
for views he liked.
So was Stalin.
If you're in favor of freedom of speech,
that means you're in favor of freedom of speech
precisely for views you despise.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.