#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech

The following is a conversation with Greg Gluccheonov, free speech advocate, First Amendment attorney, President and CEO of Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and he's the author of Unleashing Liberty, co-author with Jonathan Height of Coddling of the American

Mind, and co-author with Ricky Schlott of a new book coming out in October. He should definitely pre-ordered 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.

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looking out off. 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 etc 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 is

necessarily where the first amendment applies but what I mean is like 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 from that phenomenon the fact you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion and it wasn't

subtle that this there was an uptick in this particularly on on campus around 2014. John Ronson wrote a book called so you've been publicly shamed that it came out in 2015 already documenting this phenomena I wrote a book called Freedom from Speech in 2014 and but it really was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors and when it comes to the number of professors that we've seen you know be targeted and lose their jobs I've been doing this for 22 years and I've

seen nothing like it. So there's so many things I want to ask you here but one actually just look at the organization of fire can you explain what the organization is because it's interconnected to this whole fight and the rise of cancer culture and the fight for freedom of speech since 2014

and before. So 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 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 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 gotten 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 Cords he's just an absolute genius and he is the one of the leading experts in the world on the enlightenment and particularly about Valter and if any of your listeners do like the great courses he has a lecture on Blaze Pascal and Blaze of course is famous for the Pascal's wager and I left it just so moved and impressed and with a depth of understanding of how important

this person was. That's interesting you mentioned to me offline connected to this that there's 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 are really you know who've devoted our lives to freedom of speech one thing that we are into whether we know it or not is a epistemology you know the study and philosophy

of knowledge. You know freedom 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 you've all harrari 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

ways can be 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 even our ideas about the way things fall you know as Galileo establish like 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 like Kepler was probably like the even more radical

idea that 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 Huss you know from the famous Czech hero who was a who was burned of 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 Huss was but a century later thanks to the printing press everyone could know what Luther thought and boy did did they but it led to of

course this completely crazy hyper disrupted period in in in European history well you mentioned uh to jump around a little bit the first amendment first of all what is the first amendment and what is the connection to you between the first amendment the freedom of speech and cancel culture sure

so I'm a first amendment lawyer as I mentioned and that's what I uh it's my passion that's what I studied and I think American First Amendment law is incredibly interesting in one sentence the 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 anymore over opinion we weren't going to fight any more religion that you have the right to approach your government for redress of grievances um that you you have the freedom to associate that all of these things in one

sentence we're like no you the government will no longer interfere with with with your right to have these have these fundamental human human rights and so one thing that makes fire a little different from other organizations is is however we're not just a first amendment organization we are a free

speech organization and so uh and and but at the same time a lot of what I think free speech is can be well explained with reference to a lot of first amendment law partially because in American history some of our smartest people have been thinking about what the parameters of freedom

of speech are um in relationship to the first amendment and a lot of those principles they they transfer very well just as as pragmatic ideas so like the biggest sin in terms of censorship um is called viewpoint discrimination that essentially you allow freedom of speech except for that

opinion now it's and it's found to be kind of more defensible and I think this makes sense that if if you set up a forum and like we're only going to talk about economics to exclude people who want to talk about a different topic but it's considered rightfully um at a bigger deal if you set up a

forum for economics but we're not going to let people talk about that kind of economics or have that opinion on economics what most most particularly so a lot of the principles from first amendment law actually make a lot of philosophical sense as good principles for when like what is protected

on protected speech what should get you in trouble um 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 some interesting things

but if you can linger on the viewpoint discrimination is there any gray area of discussion there like what isn't isn't economics for the example you gave yeah is there uh I mean is it a science is it origin and art to draw lines of what isn't isn't allowed yeah you know if you're saying that

something is or is not economics well you can say everything's economics and therefore I want to talk about poetry there'd be some line drawing exercise in there but let's say at once you decide to open up um uh it it to poetry even um it's a big difference between saying okay now we're open

to poetry uh but you can't say you know Dante was bad um like that's a that's a forbidden opinion now officially in in this otherwise open forum that would immediately at an intuitive level strike people as a bigger problem than just saying that poetry isn't economics yeah I mean that intuitive

level 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 you know when you see it I think there's the same level of intuition that should be applied across the board here um and it's when that intuition becomes

deformed by whatever forces of society that's when it starts to feel like censorship yeah I mean people find it a different thing um you know if someone loses their job simply for their political opinion even if that employer has every right in 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 what society do we want to what kind of society do we want to live in and it's been funny watching um

you know and I point this out yes I will defend businesses uh first amendment rights of association to be able to have the legal right to decide you know who works for them um but from a moral or philosophical matter if you think through the implications of if every business in

an 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 uh and

still believe I can keep my job and that's why I was worried I felt like we were headed because a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled um was uh very simply um you know oh but they have the right to get rid of this person um and that and and that's that's the end and be

beginning and end of the discussion and I thought that was a dodge I thought that wasn't actually a very serious way of it 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 in this 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 what it of the value of uh people being able to speak

their mind yeah it's it's an older bolder I uh more expansive idea um and you can have a situation uh and I talk about countries that have good free speech law but not necessarily great free speech culture and I talk about how when we sometimes make this distinction between free speech law and

free speech culture we're thinking in a very cloudy kind of way um and what I mean by that is that law is generally particularly in a common law country it it's the reflection of norms the those the under judges are people too and a lot of cases common laws supposed to actually

take are intuitive ideas of fairness and and place them you know into the law so if you actually have a culture that doesn't appreciate free speech from a philosophical standpoint um it's not going to be able to protect free speech for the long haul even in the law because eventually that's one of

the reasons why worry so much about some of these terrible cases coming out of law schools um 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 um graduating

who actually think there's nothing there's no higher goal than shouting down you're an opponent yeah so that's why so much of your focus uh or large fraction of your focus is on the higher education or education period is because education is the foundation of culture yeah you have this

history you know uh 64 you have the free speech movement on Berkeley and in 65 you have repressive tolerance by Herbert Marcus which was a declaration of by the way um we on the left we we shouldn't we should have free speech but we should have free speech for us I mean I I went one one back and reread um uh repressive tolerance and how clear it is I forgot I had forgotten that it really is kind of like um and these so-called conservatives and right-wingers we need to repress them because

they're regressive thinkers it really doesn't come out to anything more sophisticated than the very old idea um that our people are good they get free speech we should they should keep it other side bad um we we should not have uh and we have to retrain society and of course like it it it ends up

being another he was also a fan of Mao so it's not surprising that he that of course the system would have to rely on some kind of totalitarian uh system um but that was a laughable um uh position you know uh say 30 40 years ago the idea that essentially you know free speech for me not for the

as as the great you know free speech champion that Hentoff used to say was something that you were supposed to be embarrassed by but I saw this when I was in in law school in 97 I saw this when I was interning at the ACLU in 99 um that there was a slow motion train route coming that essentially

there was um these bad ideas from campus that had been taking on more and more steam of basically no free speech for my opponent were actually becoming more more and more accepted as and partially because academia was becoming less and less viewpoint diverse I think that as my co-author Jonathan

height points out that when you have low viewpoint diversity people start thinking in a very kind of tribal way and if you don't have the respected dissenters you don't have the people that you can point to that I'm like hey this is a smart person um this is like this is a smart reasonable

decent person that I that I disagree with so I guess not everyone thinks alike on this issue you start getting much more kind of like only you know only bad people only heretics only blasphemers only right wingers you know um can actually think in this way every time you say 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 um which we're also maybe draw distinction here to the left and the right and the

cancel culture as you present in your book sure is not necessarily associated with anyone political viewpoint but there's mechanisms on both sides that result in cancellation and censorship uh 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 uh in a lot of ways and definitely you know um cancel culture from the left is more important in academia where the left is more dominates um 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 um 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 you know uh attempts by different organizations and uh sometimes when there are stories and fox news you know like 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 and we talk about uh attempts to get

books banned um in in the in the book we talk about um and uh talk about suing the Florida legislature around a santa's had something called the stop woke act um which we told everyone this is laughably unconstitutional um they they tried to ban you know particular topics in higher ed

and we're like no this is a joke like like like this will this will be laughed out of court um and they didn't listen to us and they brought it uh they passed it and we sued and we won now they're trying again with something that's equally as unconstitutional and we will sue again and we will

and we will win can you elaborate on the stop woke acts as presumably trying to limit certain topics from being taught in school yeah it basically woke topics um you know it's more it came out of the sort of attempt to get at uh critical race theory um so it's topics related to

race gender etc um i don't remember exactly how they tried to cabinet to um uh to 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 uh without violating the First Amendment and

when this got in front of a judge it was exactly as uh he was exactly as uh sceptical of it as we thought it be i think he called this dystopian um and it was 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 grid yeah it just the state doesn't have the power to simply say to ban um you know what what teach 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 they it's taxpayer funded and generally the legislature is involved um there is democratic oversight of that process so if we're K through 12 is there also lean towards the left in terms of the administration that

manages the curriculum yeah um they're they're definitely is um in K through 12 that the i mean my kids go to public school um i have a five-minute seven-year-old uh and they have lovely teachers um but we have run into a lot of problems with with education schools at fire um and a lot of the

graduates of education school end up being the administrators who clamp down on free speech in higher education and so i'm been trying to think of positive ways to take on some of this 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 ten books you know 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 a legislature actually you know can't have some say in and that's pretty uncontroversial um in terms of the law but when it

comes to how you fight it i had something that since i'm kind of stuck with a formula i called empowering of the American mind i gave principles that were inconsistent um with the sort of group think and heavy emphasis on uh identity politics uh that um you know some of the critics are

rightfully complaining about in K through 12 uh and we we that is actually in canceling of the American mind but i have a more detailed explanation of it than i'm going to be putting up on my uh blog via turnley radical idea is it possible to legally let's just silly question perhaps

create an extra protection for certain kinds of literature 1984 or something to to remain in the curriculum i mean it's already it's all protected i guess yeah i i i guess to protect against administrators from fiddling too much with the curriculum like stabilizing the curriculum i don't

i don't know what the machinery of the k through 12 public school in k through 12 you know the state legislatures you know um they're part of that they're they're part of that and they can say like you should teach the following books right now of course people are always a little bit worried that

um if you uh if they were to recommend you know teach uh teach the declaration of independence you know that it will end up being well they're going to teach the declaration of independence was just to protect slavery which yeah it wasn't yeah so teaching a particular topic matter which textbooks

you choose the which perspective you take all that kind of stuff yeah so there's like religion starts to creep into the whole question of like how you know is the bible a lot to teach into corporate that into education uh don't yeah i mean i'm i'm an atheist uh with an intense interest in

religion i actually read the entire bible this year just because i do stuff like that and i never actually had read it beginning from beginning to end um i've done i read the Quran because you know and i'm gonna try to do the book of Mormon but you know well i started you're so fascinating um do

recommend doing that i think you should um just to know because it's such a touchstone um in in the way people talk about things it can get pretty tedious but i even made myself read through all of the very specific instructions on how tall the different parts of the temple need to be and how long

the garbs need to be and what shape they need to be and what like and those go on a lot um that there that that it surprisingly it's so surprisingly big chunk of exodus um i thought that was more like a leviticus and dutoramani um but then he get to books like job you know wow i mean

job is such a read and no way job originally had that ending like job job is basically it starts out of this perverse bet between god um 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 beats he turns into like the best lawyer in the entire world and he defeats everyone all the people who come to argue with him he he argues the pants off of them

and then suddenly at the end god shows up and he's like um well you know uh i am everywhere and uh it's a very confusing answer he gets an answer kind of like i am there when when when lionesses give birth and i am there and by the way there's this giant monster leviathan that's

very big and it's very scary and i and i have to manage the universe and i'm kind of like god are you saying that you're very busy is that it is is that essentially your argument to job and you don't mention the whole you don't mention the whole kind of like that i i have a bet that's why

it was torturing you that doesn't come up and then at the end he decides the god decides like job's like oh now you're totally right i was totally wrong uh sorry um and and god says like i'm going to punish those people who tried to argue with you and didn't didn't win so um so we get sort of the the i don't know exactly what he does to them and i don't remember um and then he gives job all his money back and all and it makes them super prosperous and i'm like no way that was the original ending

of that book like because this would like this was clearly a beloved novel that they were like but it can't have that ending okay so so so yeah so long way to say i actually think it's worthwhile some of it was you're always kind of surprised when you end up in the part like um

there are parts of it that will sneak up on you kind of like i say as a trip um ecclesiastes to pashmode and you did you said you also uh the the the crimes yeah which was fascinating so what is there to be interesting to ask is there a tension between the study of religious texts

or the the following of religion and just believing in god and following the the various aspects of religion with freedom of speech um in the first amendment uh we we have something that we call the religion clause that i have 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 oh that's beautiful two two two two things at the same time and i think they're and i think they're both exactly right and i think sometimes the right gets very excited of the free exercise clause and the left gets very excited about establishment and i like the fact that we have we have we have both of them together now how does relate to freedom

of speech and how is right to the curriculum like we're talking about um i actually think it would be great if public schools could teach the bible like in the sense of like read it as a historical document but back when i was at the ACLU every time i saw people trying this it always turned into

them actually advocating for you know a catholic or a Protestant or some or orthodox even kind of like read on religion um so if you actually make it into something advocating for a particular view on religion then it crosses into the uh establishment clause side so americans haven't figured out a way to actually teach it so it's probably better that you you know learn learn of outside of a public school class. Do you think it's possible to teach religion um from like uh world religions kind of

force without disrespecting the religions. I think the answer is it depends on from whose perspective well like the practitioner say you're like an orthodox follower of a particular religion. Yeah yeah is it possible to not piss you off in teaching like all the major religions of the world. For some people it the bottom line is you have to teach it as true uh um and with that under those conditions then the answer is no you can't teach it without without offending of someone at least.

Um if you say these people believe it's true can you reform 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 to the beliefs here um and I and I try to be respectful um as much as I can about um a lot of this I still find myself much more drawn to both Buddhism and stoicism. Where do I go? Okay let's one one interesting thing to get back to college

campuses is um fire keeps the college free speech rankings at rankings dot the fire dot org. I'm very proud of them. I highly recommend because I 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 they're and so on like the about their experiences and and it gives different maybe you could speak to the the various measures here before we're talking about who's in the top five and who's in the bottom five.

What 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 we had the best database in existence of campus speech codes um policies that universities have

that violate first amendment or first amendment norms we also have the best database of of we call the disinvitation database um it's but it's actually the it's better named the deplatforming database which is what we're going to call it um and these are all cases where somebody was

invited as a speaker to campus yeah and they were disinvited disinvited or deplatforming also includes shouting down um so they showed up and they couldn't really speak yeah exactly um and uh and uh and so having that what we really needed in order to have some serious social science

to really make a serious argument about what the ranking was um was to be able to one get a better sense of how many professors were actually getting punished during this time um and then the the the biggest missing element was to be able to um ask students directly what the environment was

like on that campus for freedom of speech are you comfortable disagreeing with each other are you comfortable disagreeing with your uh with your professors do you think violence is acceptable in response to a speaker do you think shouting uh do you think shouting down is okay do you think

blocking people's access to a speaker is okay um and once we were able to get all those elements together we uh first did a test run i think in 19 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 um and this year the number one school was Michigan technological university which was a a nice surprise uh the number two school was actually Auburn university um which was uh what nice to see uh in the top ten the most well-known prestigious school is actually UVA um which did really well this year university of Chicago was not happy that they weren't number one but university shish kago is thirteen and they had been number one or in the top three three years

prior to that really so can you explain it's almost surprising is it because of uh like the really strong economics departments and things like this or what why they had a case uh involving a student they wouldn't recognize a chapter of turning point USA and they made a very classic argument

that we and classic in the bad way that we hear campuses across the country oh we have a campus for publicans so we don't need this additional conservative group and we're like no i'm sorry like we've seen dozens and dozens have not hundreds of attempts to get this one particular

conservative student student group uh de-recognized or not recognized and so we told them like listen this like uh we told them at fire that uh you know we consider this serious and they wouldn't recognize the group so that that's a that that that's a point down in our ranking and

it was enough to knock them from they probably would have been number two in the rankings uh but now they're thirteen out of two forty eight there's still one of the best schools in the country i have no problem uh saying that the school that did not do so well um at a negative ten point six

nine negative ten point six nine and we rounded up to zero was Harvard and Harvard uh has been not very happy with that result the only school to receive the abysmal ranking yeah and there are a couple of all Harvard oh Harvard and there are a couple people who have actually

been really i think making a mistake by getting very Harvard um sounding by being like i've had statisticians look at this and they they they think you're methodologies of joke and uh uh and like pointing out and in this case wasn't that important and that scholar wasn't that scholar like

the arch one of the arguments against one of the scholars that we counted against them for uh punishing was that that wasn't a very you know famous or influential scholar to kind of like so your your argument seems to be snobbery like essentially that like you you're not understanding

our methodology for one thing and then you're saying that actually that scholar wasn't important enough to count and by the way Harvard by the way Harvard um if we yeah if we even if we took all of your arguments as true even if we decided to get rid of those two professors um you would still

be in negative numbers you would still be dead last you would still be after George Chow and Penn and neither of those schools are good for freedom of speech to say the the bottom five is the university of Pennsylvania and you said Penn uh the university of South Carolina

Georgetown University and Fordham University all very well earned that they have so many bad cases at all those schools um 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 de-platforming um um that uh

when we looked at the bottom five uh 81% of attempts to get speakers de-platformed were successful at the bottom five um that there were a couple schools i think Penn included were every single attempt every time a student like objected a student group objected to that speaker coming they cancelled

the speech and i think i think George Chow was 100% successful right i think Penn had 100% uh success rate i think Harvard did stand up for a couple but mostly uh people got de-platformed there as well so how do you push back on de-platforming well who who would do it is it other students

is it faculty is it the administration what's the dynamics of uh pushing back of basically because i imagine some of it is culture but imagine every university has a bunch of students who will protest basically every speaker and it's a question of how you respond to that protest well here's

here's the dirty little secret about like the big change in 2014 um and and fire and meet me and height um have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus was that for most of my career students were great um on freedom of speech they were the best constituency for free speech

absolutely unambiguously until about 2013 2014 and it was only in 2014 where we had this very you know kind of sad for us experience where suddenly students were the ones advocating for de-platforming and new speech codes kind of in a similar way that they had been doing in say like

the mid-80s for example but here's the dirty little secret it's not the it's just the students it's students and administrators sometimes only a handful of them though working together to make to create some of these problems and this was exactly what happened at Stanford when Kyle Duncan

uh a fifth circuit judge tried to speak at my alma mater and a fifth of the class showed up to shout him down um it was a real showing of the of what was what was going on that 10 minutes into the shout down of a fifth circuit judge and I keep on emphasizing that because I'm a constitutional

lawyer if a circuit judge judges are big deals they're one level below the Supreme Court um you know about a fifth of the school shows up to shout him down after 10 minutes of shouting him down and administrator a de-i administrator gets up with a prepared speech that she that she's written

that's a seven-minute long speech where she talks about uh free speech maybe the juices isn't worth the squeeze and we we we're at this law school where people could learn to challenge these norms so it's clear that there was coordination you know 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 a no additional seven minutes to to to lecture the speaker on free speech not being and not the juice of free speech not being worth the squeeze um and then for the

rest of it it's just constant heckling um after after she after she leaves this is clearly and this and something very similar you know happened a number of times at Yale where it was very clearly administrators were helping along with 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 hyperbureaucratization 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 the 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 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 administrator clearly facilitated something that was a shout-down or a de-platforming

or resulted in a professor getting fired or resulted in a student getting expelled where the administrators has got off scot free or probably in some cases even got 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 kind of hard to catch this sort of in the act so to speak and that's one of the reasons why it's helpful for people to know about this you know

uh because it it was this amazing case this was at university at Washington um and we actually featured this in a documentary made in 2015 20 it came on 2015 2016 called can we take a joke um and this was when we started noticing something was changing on campus we also heard the comedians were saying that they couldn't use their good humor anymore this was right around the time that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock said that they couldn't uh they didn't want to play on campuses because they

they couldn't they couldn't be funny uh but we featured a case of a comedian who wanted to do a musical called the Passion of the Musical making fun of the Passion of the Christ with the stated goal of offending everyone every group equally it was very very much a South Park mission um and

it's an unusual case because we actually got documentation of administrators buying tickets for angry students and holding an event where they where they train them to to jump up in the middle of it and shout I'm offended like they they bought them tickets they sent them to

this this thing with the goal of shouting it down now unsurprisingly when you send an angry group of students to shut down a play it it's not going to end that just I'm offended um and it got heated there were death threats being thrown uh the um the and then the Pullman Washington police

told Chris uh Chris Lee the guy who made the play that he they wouldn't actually protect him now it's not every day you're gonna have that kind of hard evidence that that that that of actually seeing the administrators it'd be so uh so brazen that they recorded the fact that they bought them

tickets and sent them but I think a lot of that stuff is it is going on and I think it's the the it's a good excuse to cut down on one of the big problems in higher education today which is hyperberecordination in your experience is there a distinction between administrators and faculty

in terms of uh perpetrators of this of these kinds of things so if if we got rid of all like Harvey talked about uh getting rid of a large percentage of the administration does that help fix the problem or is the faculty also yeah small percent of the faculty also part of the encouraging in the

organization of these kind of cancel yeah and and that's something that has been profoundly disappointing um is that when you look at the huge uptick in attempts to get professors fired that we've seen over the last 10 years and actually over the last 22 years as far as far back as

our our records go um at first they're overwhelmingly led by administrators to um attempts to get professors punished um and that was most you know I'd say that was my career up until 2013 was was fighting back at administrative excesses um then you start having the problem in 2014 of students

trying to get people canceled um and that really accelerated in 2017 and the number so one one way that one one thing that makes it easier to document is are the petitions to get professors fired or punished um and how disproportionately that those actually do come from students but another

big uptick has been fellow professors demanding that the their fellow professors get punished and that to me it's kind of shameful you shouldn't be proud of signing the petition to get your fellow professor and what's what's even more more more shameful is that we get store this this is a

this is 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'm so sorry this has happened to you and these were the same people who publicly signed the petition to get them fired

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 administrator to really stand stand up uh with eloquence

with rigor with integrity I feel like it's impossible for anyone to do anything because there's such a hunger it's so refreshing yeah I think everybody agrees that freedom of speech is a good thing oh I don't I don't well okay sorry I don't agree the majority of people even at 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 yeah they're doing the shouting so I mean again that's the we're great leadership comes in and so you know presence of university should probably be making clear

declarations of like this is not this is a place where we value the freedom of expression when and this was oh this all throughout my career um a president a university president who puts their foot down early and says nope you know we are not entertaining firing this professor we are

not expelling the student it ends the issue often very fast although sometimes and this is where you can really tell the administrative involvement um 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 it's being kind of like oh it's clearly like um my friend Sam Abrams when they tried to get tried to get him fired at at a Sarah Lawrence College um and uh that was one of the times that that it was used as kind of like oh that it was hostile to the university because

they the students took over the president's office and I'm like no they let them take over the president's office and I don't know if that was one of the cases in which the the takeover was catered but if there was ever sort of like a sign that's kind of like yes this isn't this is

actually really quite friendly well in some sense like protesting and having really strong opinions even like ridiculous crazy while the opinions is a good thing it's just it shouldn't lead to actual firing or de-platforming of people like it's good to protest it's just not good to

for the university to support that and take action based on it and this is one of one of those like um tensions in in in first amendment that actually I think has a pretty easy release essentially you have you absolutely have the right to uh devote your life to ending freedom of speech

and ridiculing it as a concept and and there are people who who really are can come off as very contemptible about even the philosophy of freedom of speech um 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'll 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 he criticized us for our de-platforming database as saying this is saying that that students can't protest speakers and like okay that's silly um we fire as an organization have

defended the right to protest all the time we are constantly defending the rights the rights protesters not believing that the protesters have the right to say this would like basically that would be punishing the speakers we're not calling for punishing um uh the protesters but what we

are saying is you can't let the protesters win if they're demanding someone be fired for their freedom of speech so the line there is between protesters protesting and the university taking action based in the protest yeah exactly and of course shout-downs that

that's just mob censorship um and that's something where the university the way the the way you actually you deal with that tension in First Amendment law is essentially kind of like the one positive duty that the government has the first the negative duty that it's not allowed to do is censor you but it's positive duty is that if if if I want to say awful things or for that matter great things that aren't popular in a public park um you can't let the crowd just shout me down um you

can't allow up what's called a heckler's video that's so interesting because I feel like that comes into play on social media some uh you know there's this whole discussion about censorship and freedom of speech but to me the the carrot question is almost more interesting once the freedom of speech

is established is how do you incentivize high quality debate and disagreement I'm thinking a lot about that and that's one of the things we talk about in counseling of the American mind is arguing towards truth and that cancel culture is cruel it's merciless it's anti-intellectual but it also

will never get you anywhere in your truth and you are going to waste so much time destroying your opponents um in 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 yeah but everybody

having a megaphone on the internet with anonymity it seems like it's better than censorship but it feels like there's incentives on top of that you can construct to um yeah to incentivize better discourse yeah it's like to incentivize somebody who puts a huge

amount of effort to make even the most ridiculous arguments but basically ones that don't include any of the things you highlight in terms of all 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 yeah but do it with scale with historical context with uh with steel man in the other side all those kind of elements we try to make three major points in the book one is just simply cancel culture is real it's a it's a historic era and it's on a historic scale

the second one is you should think of cancel culture as part of a um rhetorical as a larger lazy rhetorical approach to what what what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments and we mean that in two senses without having winning arguments or well have actually having one

arguments and we talk about all the different what we call rhetorical fortresses that both the left and the right have that prevent you from that allow you to just dismiss the person um or dodge the argument without actually ever getting to the substance the argument third part

is just you know how how do we fix it but the rhetorical fortress stuff is actually something I've been I'm very passionate about because it it interferes with our ability to get at truth and it waste time and and frankly it also kind of 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 um when is it come on October 17th okay the canceling of the American mine okay so in uh

in the book you also have a list of cheap rhetorical tactics that both the left and the right use and then you have a list of tactics that the left uses and the right uses yeah there's the rhetorical the perfect rhetorical fortress that the left uses and the efficient rhetorical fortress

that the right uses yeah first one is what aboutism yeah maybe we can go through a few of them that capture your heart in this particular moment as we talk about and if if you can describe examples of it or if uh there's aspects of it that you see there especially effective effective so uh

what aboutism is defending against criticism of your side by bringing up the other side's alleged wrongdoing I want to make little cards of these uh 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 you know instead of clicking heart uh they can click which of the uh which of the rhetorical tactics this is and then because you know there's actually community notes

I don't know if you've seen on x that you people can contribute notes and it's quite fascinating it works really really well but to give it a little more structure yeah that's a really interesting method actually yeah I actually when I was thinking about ways that x could be used to argue

towards truth I wouldn't want to have it so that you know everybody would be bound to that but I think that you I imagine it won't being like a stream within x that was truth focused that that agrees to some additional additional rules on how they would argue man I would love that

where like there's in terms of streams that intersect and could be separated the shit talking one where people just enjoy talking shit okay go for it man and then there's like truth and then uh I mean there like then there's humor then there's like good vibes like you know I'm not like somebody

who absolutely needs good vibes all the time but sometimes it's nice that's nice to just log in and not have to see like the drama the fighting the bickering the the cancellations the moms all this it's good to just see that's why I go to Reddit R R or like uh what are the cute animals

ones where there's cute puppies and kittens and it's like I just want to see Ryan Reynolds singing with Will Ferrell I mean like sometimes it's all you need that in my heart yeah not all the time just a little bit and right back to the the battle for truth okay so what about is him what about

is him yeah that's everywhere when when you look at it uh when you look at Twitter when you look at social media in general um and the first like what we call the obstacle course is basically time tested old fashioned you know argumentative dodges that everybody uses and what about is him is

just bringing up something uh you know like someone makes an argument like Biden is corrupt and and then someone says well Trump was worse you know like and that's not an illegitimate you know argument to make back but it does it it seems to happen every time someone makes an assertion

someone just points out some other thing that was going on and it can get increasingly attenuated from from from what you're actually trying to argue and when you and then you see this all the time on social media and it's kind of you know I was a big fan of John 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 out this important problem oh actually you know there's this other problem over here that I'm more concerned about and it you know and on the you know let's let's pick on

the right here so January 6th you know watching everybody arguing about um chop you know like the the occupied part of Seattle or the occupied part of Portland and so and basically trying to like oh you're bringing up the the the the riot in January 6th and by the way I live on Capitol Hill so

believe me I was very aware of like how scary and bad it was um you know like that just my dad grew up in Yugoslavia and that was a night where we all like dinner in the basement because I'm like oh when the chick goes down eat in the basement it was it was it was genuinely scary and people would

try to deflect from January 6th being serious by actually being making the argument that oh well they were crazy horrible things happening in 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 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 what about

us them yeah and related to that is strong manning and steel manning so misrepresenting the the perspective of the opposing perspective and this is something also I guess it's very prevalent and it's difficult to do the reverse of that which is steel manning it requires empathy or

requires eloquence or requires understanding like she doing the research and understanding the of the alternative perspective my wonderful employee angel and Dorado has something that he calls star manning and I find myself doing this a lot it's nice to have you know two immigrant parents

um because I remember being in San Francisco uh you know 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 when he meant by it and but he

was kind of proud of the fact that he hated Kansas and I'm like you gotta understand I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners and think about like change the name of Kansas to Croatia you know change change the name of Kansas to to to some that's what it sounds like to me and the

star manning idea which I which I like is is the idea being like so you're saying that you really hate your dominant religious minority like and that's when you start actually detaching yourself a little bit from it how typical America is exceptional in a number of ways but some of our dynamics

are incredibly typical it's one of the reasons why like when people start reading Thomas Sol 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 you know 75% of the rest of the countries in the world. Friends with Foucaillamas the book that I'm reading right now origins the political order actually does this wonderful job of pointing at how we're not special in a variety of ways this is actually

something that's very much on my mind and Foucaillama of course it's a it's a it's a great book it's not it's stilted a little bit in its writing because his term for one of the things you concerned about what destroys societies is repatrimonialization which is the reversion to societies

in which you favor your family and friends and I actually think a lot of what I'm seeing in sort of um uh in the United States it makes me worried that we might be going through a little bit of a process of repatrimonialization and I think that's one of the reasons why people are so angry I

think having an I think the prospect that we you know we very we very nearly seem to have an election that was going to be you know Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton it's like are we a dynastic country now is is that what's kind of happening but also it's one of the reasons why

people are getting so angry about the about legacy admissions about like how much you know certain families seem to be able to keep their people in the upper classes of the United States perpetually and believe me like I was we were poor when I was a kid and I went and I got to go to I got to go

to one of the fancies I got to go to Stanford um and I got to see how people they treat you differently in a way that's almost insulting like basically like suddenly to a certain kind of person I was a legitimate person and I look at how much America relies on Harvard on Yale to produce its

I'm going to use 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 and and UVA do really badly regarding

freedom of speech and that has all sorts of problems um it doesn't bode well for the future of the protection of freedom of speech for the rest of the society so can you also empathize there with the folks who voted for Donald Trump because as precisely that as a resistance to this kind of

uh momentum of the ruling class this uh this royalty that passes on the uh the rule from generation to generation I try really hard to empathize with to a degree everybody and and try to really see where they're coming from um and the anger on the right I get it I mean like I

I feel like the the book so copying the American mind was a book that I that could be sort of a crowd pleaser to a degree partially because we really meant what we said in the subtitle that these are uh good intentions and bad ideas that are hurting people um and if you understand it and read

the book you can say it's like okay this isn't anybody being malicious you know this is people trying to protect their kids they're just doing it in a way that actually can actually lead to greater anxiety depression and strangely eventually pose a threat to freedom of speech

uh but in this one we can't be quite uh me and my uh oh I haven't even mentioned my brilliant co-author Ricky Schlatt the 23 year old genius she's she's she's she's amazing I started working with her one choose 20 who's who's my co-author on this book um so one of them saying we I'm talking about

me and Ricky is a libertarian libertarian journalist and a journalist yeah the brilliant mind yeah and but we can't actually write this in a way that's too kind because counselors aren't kind that 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 like go to your house target your kids um so so that's a long

one of ways and the um I I kind of can get what sort of drives the right nuts to a degree in this I feel like they're constantly feeling like they're being gaslit um elite education is really insulting to the working class um like it's part of the ideology that is dominant right now it kind

of treats almost 70% of the American public like they're the we talked we developed this a little bit in the perfect rhetorical fortress like they're to some some way illegitimate um and not worthy of respect or compassion yeah the the general elitism that radiates

self-fueling elitism that radiates from the people that go to these institutions and what's funny is that the the elitism has been repackaged as a kind of it masquerades is kind of infinite compassion that essentially it's based in a sort of a very to be frank overly simple ideology

and over simply a simple explanation of the world and breaking people into groups and judging people on how oppressed they are on their on the intersection of their various identities um and it came to that I think initially with with with an added appeal from a compassionate core

but it gets used in a way that is can be very cruel very dismissive compassion less uh 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 yeah can be can create

it can become such a cruel weapon of canceling and hurting people and ignoring people and this is what you describe with the perfect rhetorical fortress yeah which is a set of question maybe you can elaborate I want the perfect rhetorical fortresses yeah so the perfect rhetorical

fortress is the way um that's been developed on the left to not ever get to someone's actual argument um I want to make a chart like a flow chart of this about like here's the argument and here is this perfect fortress that will deflect you every time from getting the argument um and I started to notice this certainly when I when I was in law school that there were lots of different ways you could dismiss people and perfect rhetorical fortress step one and I can attest to this because

I was guilty of this as well that you can dismiss people if you can 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 Sol because he was the right winger yeah I didn't read Camille Poglia because I was I somewhat convinced me she was the right winger there were there were lots of authors that um and when I was in law school it ate 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 this a childish way of arguing but nonetheless I engaged it it was a comment tactic I even mentioned in the book there was a time when a

uh a gay activist friend who was I think decided to leave to my left but nonetheless had that pragmatic experience of actually being an activist said something like well just because someone's conservative doesn't mean they're wrong and I remember feeling kind of scandalized at some level

just being like well that's kind of it's not the whole thing we're saying is that they're just kind of bad people with bad ideas you can just throw uh all that guy's a right winger you can just throw that don't have to think about you anymore yeah and then it can uh if you're popular

enough it can be those it can be kind of sticky yeah and like and it's weird because because it's effective that's why it keeps on getting used to essentially it it should have hit someone's because because I you know I have a great liberal pedigree you know everything from working at the ACLU

to doing refugee law in Eastern Europe to I was part of an environmental mentoring program for inner city high school kids in DC you know I've been I've been I I I can ex you know defend myself as being on the left but I hate doing that because there's also part of me that's like okay so what

like are you really saying that if you can magically make me argue or convince yourself that that I'm on the right that you don't have to listen to me anymore and again that's arguing like children and the reason why this has become so popular is because even among or maybe maybe

especially among elites that it works so effectively as a perfect weapon that you can use on critically if I can just prove you're on the right I don't have to I don't have to think about you it's no wonder that suddenly you start seeing 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 at as thinkers we've you know Stephen Pinker who's on our on our board of advisors he refers to academia as being the left pole that essentially it's it's a position that from from that's point

of view everything it looks to its right it looks as if it's on the right but once it becomes a a tactic that we accept it it will and this one the reasons why I you know I'm I'm I'm more on the left I'm but I think of left of center liberal Ricky is you know more conservative libertarian

and initially I was kind of like should I be really be writing something with with someone who's more on the right and I'm like absolutely I should be I 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 just miss

someone as soon as you claim rightly or wrongly that they're on the right well I feel correct from wrong but I feel like you were recently called right wing fire maybe you by association because of that debate oh you support the LA times oh fun let's talk about the LA times so yes

there's an article there's a debate I can't wait to watch it because I don't think it's available yet to watch on video yet the tendon person I can't wait to see it but fire wasn't part supporting and then LA times wrote a scathing article about that everybody in the debate was

basically right leaning right okay so much so I'm back there you know at Barry Weist it has this you know great great project the free press I've been very impressed it's covering stories that the that a lot of the media right or left isn't willing to cover and we did a 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 the sexual revolution wasn't a failure that that grimes and serahedere

were on one it was you know a nice meaty thoughtful night and we got a review there was a review of it that was just sort of skating about the whole thing and it included a line saying that fire which claims the believe in free speech but only defends viewpoints to degrees with

I can't believe that even made it into the magazine because it's not just calling this because of course you know the implication of course is that we're right wing um at which we're not actually the staff leans decidedly more to the left and to the right um but we also defend

people all over the spectrum all the time like that's something that that even the most minimal google search would have solved so like we've been given a lot of time some heat on this because it's like yeah if you said in my opinion the right wing we would have argued back you know um

saying well here here here's the following 50,000 examples of of us not being but when you actually make the factual claim that we only defend opinions we agree with first of all there's no way for us to 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 I had a one time when someone did something like this and they were just being a little bit flippant about kind of like free speech being fine I did a 70 tweet long thread you know just being like hey do you

really think this is fine I decided not to do that um on this particular one um but the nice thing about it is it demonstrated two parts of the book uh cancels like of the American mind if not more one of them is dismissing someone because they're conservative uh and because that was the

implication don't have those in the fire because they're conservative but the other one is something a termite uh that I invented specifically for the way people argue on Twitter which is hypocrisy projection hi I'm person who only cares about one side of the political fence and I think everyone

else is a hypocrite um and by the way I haven't done any actual research on this but I assume everyone else is a hypocrite and you see this happen all the time the the and this happens to fire a lot where someone they're 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's fire on this is like here's here's our lawsuit about it from six months ago um so uh it's a favorite thing and also John Stewart daily show like the the the um what aboutism and the kind of like idea that these people

must be hypocrites is something that great as comedy but as far as actually a rhetorical tactic that will get you to truth just assuming that you're opponent or just accusing your opponent of always being a hypocrite is not a good tactic for truth but by the way it tends to always come from

people who aren't actually consistent on free speech themselves so that hence the projection but basically not doing the research about whether the person is or isn't a hypocrite and assuming others 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 yeah it breaks down that barrier between what isn't isn't true because if if the mob says something is true it takes too much effort to correct it and there are three ways I want like you know I want to

respond to this which is just giving example after example of of times where we defended people on both sides of every majoriers basically every majorershoe whether it's Israel Palestine whether it's terrorism whether it's gay marriage we have been abortion we have defended both sides of that

argument the the other part and I call these the orphans of the culture war I really want to urge the media to start caring about free speech cases that actually don't have a political valence that are actually just about good old fashioned exercise of power against the little guy or little

girl or little group on campus or off campus for that matter because these cases happen a lot of our litigation are just little people as 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 when you're scouting 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 this on California community colleges

has a DEI program that policy that actually requires even chemistry professors to work in different DEI ideas from intersectionality to anti-racism into their classroom into their syllabus etc 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 against people they hate censorship censorship if we can't take that tangent briefly with DEI diversity equity and inclusion

and what is the good and what is the harm of such programs DEI I know people are DEI consultants there's some they're 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 people who are different unfortunately the research on what a lot of DEI actually does is often times the opposite of that and I think that it's partially a problem with some of the ideology that come from a 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 what 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 from the right and the left actually in that case actually sometimes more a lot more from the right and it was really bad and about five professors lost their jobs that's bad five

professors are over a relatively short period of time being fired for a political opinion that's something that you know we would get written up in any previous decades we're now evaluating like how many professors have been targeted for cancellation between 2014 and middle of this year

July of 2023 we're in about well well over a thousand 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

you know having their article removed to suspension etc about one fifth of those result in professors being fired so right now we're it's it's almost 200s for 190 professors being fired so I want to 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 doctrineary communist you know they can't be just weighted

I'm gonna fire them they thought they actually could do that and it was only 57 when the law was established so like right now these were happening in an environment where freedom of speech academic freedom are clearly protected at public colleges and in the United States and we're still

seeing these kind of numbers during during the the red scare the biggest study that was done of what was going on as I think this came out in like 55 and the evaluation was that there was about 62 professors fired for for for being communist and about 90 something professors fired

for political views overall that usually is it 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 like what I mean by hindsight is we can look back and we actually find there were more professors

who who who were fired at as time reveals we're at 190 professors fired and I still have to put up with people saying this isn't even happening I'm like in the 9.5 years of cancel culture 190 professors fired in the 11 years of of the red scare probably you know somewhere around 100

maybe probably more it's got the numbers going to keep going up but unlike during the red scare where people could clearly tell something was happening the craziest thing about cancel cultures some still dealing with people who are saying this isn't happening at all and it hasn't been

subtle on campus and we know that's a wild undercount by the way because when we when we surveyed professors 17 percent of them said that they had been threatened with threatened with investigation or actually investigated for what they taught said or or their research and one third of them

said that they were told by administrators not to take on controversial research so like extrapolating that out that 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

yeah and that's one of the reasons why the idea that you'd add something like a D like requiring a D.I. statement to be hired or to get into a school under the current environment is so completely nuts we have had a genuine crisis of academic freedom over the last you know particularly since

2017 on campuses we have very low viewpoint diversity to begin with and under these circumstances administrators to start saying you know what the problem is we have too much had had a ragenous thought we have we're not homogeneous enough we we actually need you know we need

another political immestest which is nuts and that's what a D.I. statement effectively is because there's no way to actually fill out a D.I. statement without someone evaluating you on your politics it's it's crystal clear we even didn't an experiment on this Nate honeycutte he got something

like almost like 3000 professors to participate evaluating different kinds of D.I. 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 socio-economic

diversity as far as where my heart really is it's that we have two little socio economic diversity particularly in the lead higher ed but also in education period so we the experiment was had large participation really interestingly set up and it tried to model the way a lot of these

D.I. policies were actually implemented and one of the ways these have been implemented and I think in some of the California schools is that administrators and go through the D.I. statements before anyone else looks at them and then eliminates people off the top depending on how

how they feel about their D.I. statements and the one on viewpoint diversity I think like half of the people who reviewed it would would eliminate it right out and I think it was basically the same for religious diversity it was slightly better like 40% for socio-economic 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 to 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 rears would like which is like okay there's no

way this couldn't be a political atmastest we've proved that it's a political atmastest and still school after school it 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 you know 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 whether and you know what you've done to advance anti-racism injured how you've been conscious of intersectionality it's unlikely that you'd actually get it 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 that basically like if if your position was I actually reject these concepts as being over simple you're not you're not going to get in and 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 if you made him fill one of these things out it's fine man I feel like if you if you gave one of these things to a Richard Feynman he'd be like he would tear it to pieces yeah they're not good the job yeah there's some

element of it that creates this hard to pin down fears so you said like the firing the thing I wanted to say is firing a hundred people or two hundred people the point is even firing one person I've just seen it it can create this quiet ripple effect of fear of course that single firing of a

fact oh absolutely has a ripple effect across tens of thousands of people of educators of of who is hired what kind of conversations are being had what kind of textbooks are chosen what kind of self-sensorship in different flavors of that is happening it's hard to measure that yeah I mean

when you ask professors about you know are they intimidated under the current environment the answer is yes and particularly conservative professors you know already you know reporting that they're you know afraid for their jobs in a lot of different cases you have a lot of good statistics

in the book things like self-sensorship when provided with a definition of self-sensorship at least a quarter of students said they self-sensor fairly often are very often doing conversations with other students with professors and during classroom discussions 25% 27% and 28% respectively

a quarter of students also said that they are more likely to self-sensor on campus now at the time they were surveyed then they were when they first started college so sort of college is kind of instilling this idea of censorship and self-sensorship 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 of the red scare there was polling about whether or not professors were self-sensoring due to the fear of the environment and 9% of professors said

that they were self-sensoring their research and that what they were saying 9% really bad that's almost a tenth of professors saying that they were actually their speech was chilled when we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey when you factor together

if they're we ask them are they self-sensoring in their research or they self-sensoring in class or they self-sensoring online etc. 90% of professors so the idea that we're actually in an environment that is historic in terms of like how scared people are actually of expressing controversial views

I think that it's the reason why we're going to actually be studying this in 50 years the same the the same way we study the red scare it's not the the idea that this isn't happening is 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 fire in 2001

I didn't take the viewpoint diversity issue as seriously I thought I was just something that right wingers complained about but I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low with low viewpoint diversity and actually a lot of the research that I got most interested

in was done in conjunction with the great Cassundstein who writes a lot about group polarization because as and the research on this is very strong but essentially when you have groups with political diversity and you can see this actually in judges for example it tends to produce

you know reliably more moderate you know outcomes whereas groups that are that have low political diversity tend to sort of spiral spiral off in their own direction and when you have a super majority of people from just one political 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 you know I think the the estimate from the crimson is that Harvard is has 3% conservatives but when you look at different departments there are elite departments that I

have literally no conservatives in them and I think that's that's not a healthy 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 as you get down from

the the elite schools that's where a lot of the one third of attempts to get professors punish that are successful you know do do come from the right and largely from off campus off campus sources when we spend a lot of time talking about that in the book as well and it's something that I

do think is under appreciated but when it comes to the low low viewpoint diversity it's you know it works out kind of like you'd expect to a degree you know economics is what four to one or something like that it's not as bad but then when you start getting into some of the humanities

you know like there are departments that they're literally none is there a good why to why do the universities university faculty administration move to the left yeah I don't love and this is an argument that you'll sometimes run into on the left just the argument that well people on the left

are just smarter right and it's like okay it's 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 the song that pinker

you know wrote a fair amount about the idea that we're just smarter it's not is not an opinion I'm at least bit comfortable with I do think that that a 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 ideologies kind of explicitly leftist you look at education schools a lot of the a lot of the stuff that has actually left over from

what is correctly called critical race theories is present and you end up having that in a number of the departments and it would be very strange to be a in many departments a you know a conservative social worker professor I'm sure they exist but it there's a lot of pressure to shut up if you are

so the process on the left of cancellation as you started to talk about with the perfect rhetorical fortress the the first step is dismiss a person if there's just if you can put a label of conservative on them you can dismiss them in that way what what other efficient or what other

effective dismissal yeah we have a little bit of fun with with demographic numbers and I run this by height and I remember him being kind of like I don't don't don't include the actual percentage don't like no we need to include the actual percentages because people are really bad

at estimating what what the demographics of the US actually looks like both the right and the left in different ways so we put in the numbers and we talk about you know being dismissed for being white or being dismissed for being straight or being dismissed for being male and we and you can

already dismiss people for being conservative and we so we we give examples in the book of of these being used to dismiss people and oftentimes on topics not related to the fact that they're a 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 whoever 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 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 he's like what are you crazy of course I do and Coleman Hughes had one of the best quotes on it he said I'm constantly being told that the most important thing to the how legitimate my opinion is

is whether whether or not I'm black but then when I have a dissenting opinion I get told I'm not really black so well perfect like there's there's no way to falsify this argument that one really that that investigation really struck me so I and you lay this out really nice 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 you could still dismiss and it's not just dismiss we talk about this from a from a practical standpoint the way the limitations on you know reality and one of them is time and a lot of cancel culture as 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 of the actually even to get a couple steps into the perfect rhetorical fortress and you know whereas the time gone you know like you you you you you probably just give up trying to you know trying

to actually have the argument and you never get to the argument in the first place and all of these things are pretty sticky on social media social media and practically invented the perfect rhetorical fortress so that each one of those stages has a virality to it so we could stick and get people

really excited it allows you to feel outraged and superiority yeah because of that at the scale of the virality allows you to never get to the actual discussion at the point so but you know it's not just the left it's the right also the efficient rhetorical fortress so there's something to be

proud of on the right it's more efficient yeah so you don't have to listen to liberals and anyone can be labeled a liberal if if they have a wrong opinion I've seen liberal and left and left this all used as a in the same kind of way yeah that's left this nonsense you don't have to listen to

experts yep even conservative experts if they have the wrong opinion you don't have to listen to journalists even conservative journalists if they have the wrong opinion and among the mega-wing there's a fourth proposition there's a fourth provision you don't need to listen to anyone who

isn't pro Trump yeah and we call it efficient because it eliminates a lot of people you probably should listen to at least sometimes you know like we point out sometimes like al-Khancel culture can interfere with faith and expertise so we get kind of being a little suspicious experts but the same

time if you follow that and you follow it mechanically and I definitely you know I think everybody in the U.S. probably has some older uncle who exercises some of these it is a really efficient way to sort of so you're to wall yourself off from the rest of the world and dismiss you know at least some people you really should be listening to the way you laid it out made me realize that we just take up so much of our brainpower these things it's literally time we could be solving things and you

get like you kind of exhaust yourself through this process of being outraged based on these labels and you never get to actually there's almost not enough time for empathy for like looking at a person thinking well maybe they're right because you're so busy categorizing them and it's a fun and

empathy 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's like please tell me how I'm allowed to hate it what where can I legitimately be cruel where can I actually exercise some aggression

against somebody and it seems to sometimes be just finding new justifications for that and it's an understandable you know 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 play 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 genes and she was a big advocate for kids and when they started shutting down the schools she started saying this is going to be a disaster this is going to hurt

the poor and disadvantaged kids the most 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 you know petitions for her to be fired and that she needed to apologize

and all this kind of stuff and you know she was offered I think like a million dollar severance which she wouldn't take because she wanted to tell the world what she thought about this and 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 pretty it is quite clear that this was devastating to particularly disadvantaged youths like people understand this as being okay I should probably right but one of the 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 happened 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 you know engage an idea for you if you can't actually speculate you'll never actually get to something that's right in the first place but it's especially

gauing when people who are right were censored and you and never actually get the credit that they deserve well this might be a good place to ask a little bit more about the freedom of speech and so you said that included in the freedom of speech is to say things that are wrong yep

um what is your perspective on hate speech hate speech is the best marketing campaign for censorship and it came from academia of the of the 20th century and that when I talked about the anti free speech movement that was one of their first inventions there there was a lot of talk about critical

race theory and and being against critical race theory and fire will sue if you say that people can't advocate for it or teach it or research it because you do absolutely have the right to to pursue it academically however every time someone mentions CRT they should also say the very

first project of the people who founded CRT um Richard Delgado, Mary Metzuda, um etc was to go was to create this new category of unprotected speech called hate speech and to get it banned the person who enabled this draft of course was Herbert Marcus in 1965 you know basically questioning

whether or not free speech should be a sacred value on the left and he was on the losing side for a really long time the liberals you know the way I grew up that was 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 with the idea of hate speech that that essentially oh but you should um we can designate particularly bad speech as uh not protected um and and who's going to enforce it who's going to decide what hate speech actually is well it's usually overwhelmingly can only happen in an environment

of really low viewpoint diversity because you have to actually agree on on what the most hateful and wrong things are and there's a bad rock principle um it's referred to this in a 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 the these uh kind of codes have been more happily adopted in places like Europe where they have a sense that there's like a modal German or a modal Englishman um and I think this is

offensive and therefore I can say that this is this is wrong in a more multicultural in a in a genuinely more diverse country that's never actually had an honest thought that there's a single kind of American there there's never been like we had we had the idea of Uncle Sam but that was

always kind of a joke um Boston always knew it wasn't Richmond always knew it wasn't George always knew it wasn't you know Alaska like we've always been a Hodgepodge and we get in a society that diverse that you can't ban things simply because they're offensive um and that's that's one of the

reasons why hate speech is not an unprotected category of speech and I and I go further my theory on freedom of speech is slightly different than most other constitutional lawyers um and I think and I think that's partially because some of the ways some of these theories although a lot of

them are really good are inadequate they're not expansive enough and I sometimes call my theory the pure informational theory of freedom of speech um or sometimes when I want to be fancy the lab and the looking glass of theory and it's most important tenant is that there is that if the goal

is the project of human knowledge which is to know the world it is you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think and what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know so every time you're actually saying you can't say that you're actually depriving

yourself of the knowledge of what people really think you're causing what Timmer Karon who's on our board of advisors calls preference falsification um you end up with an inaccurate picture of the world which by the way in a lot of cases um because there are activists who want to restrict more

speech they actually tend to think that people are more prejudice than they uh then they might be and actually these kind of restrictions there was a book called racial paranoia um that came out in about 15 years ago that was making the point that the imposition of some of these codes can

sometimes make people think that the only thing holding you back from being a raging racist um 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 um uh about how

driving people off of Twitter for example um you know in 2017 um and then again I think in 2020 driving people to gab led to you know greater radicalization among those people it's a very predictable force censorism doesn't actually change people's minds and it pushes them in directions

that actually by various you know solid research will actually make them more radicalized so yeah I think that the 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 uh 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 we look on campus yeah what's your view about allowing say white supremacists on campus to do 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 you know um let's take for example q and on yeah q and on's wrong um but where did it come from why did they think that what's the motivation who taught them it who came up with these ideas this is important to understand history that's

under important to understand modern American politics and so if you put your act if you put your scholar hat on and which you should be curious about kind of everyone about what where they're coming from Darrell 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 clients members when they actually realized that this black man who would be friended them actually was compassionate was a decent person they realized all their preconceptions were wrong so it can

have a de-radicalizing factor by the way but even when it doesn't it's still really important to know what the bad people in your society think honestly in some ways it's for for your own safety it's probably more important to know what the bad people in your society actually think I personally

don't know what you think about that by person anything that freedom of speech in cases like that like k k k 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 yeah in the short term but I mean the harry said this is like consider the alternative yeah because you 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 when people have like the comforts the reason through things yeah but you know to me it's like even if it hurts in the short term even if it does create more hate in the short term the freedom of speech has this

really beneficial thing which is it helps you move towards the truth the entirety of society towards a deeper more accurate understanding of life on earth of society of how people function of ethics of metaphysics of everything yeah and that in the long term is a huge benefit it gets

greater than Ossies in the long term even if it adds to the number of Nazis in the short term yeah well and meanwhile just for and the reality check part of this is people always bring up what about the clan on campus I'm like they're never invited um the the the the the I haven't seen a case where

where they've been invited um usually this the the clan argument gets thrown out when people are trying to excuse and that's why we shout it down Ben Shapiro and that's why you can't have Bill Mar on campus that's why you know and it's like okay um you know and it's a it's a little bit of

what aboutism 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 you know interviewing folks and seeing this like a like a podcast as a platform in deciding who to talk to and not

not something you have to come face to face with on occasion my natural inclination before I started the podcast was I talked to anyone and including people which I'm still interested in who are you know the current members of the KKK and to me there's a responsibility to do that

with skill yeah um and that responsibility has been weighing heavier and heavier on me because you realize how much skill it actually takes because you have to know to understand so much because I have come to understand that the devil is always going to be charismatic

yeah um the devil is not going to look like the devil and so you have to realize yet the you can't always come to the table with a deep compassion for another human being you have to have you know like 90% compassion and and another 90% 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 um in a way without censoring bringing it to the surface by in a way that creates more love in the world I remember um Steve Bannon got

disinvited from the New Yorker festival and Jim Carrey freaked out and all sorts of other people freaked out and he got disinvited um from from the and and I got invited to speak on some rickanish about this and I was saying like listen you don't have people to your conference because

you agree with them um like that's the we have to get out of this idea that that's because they're trying to make it sound like that's an endorsement of Steve Bannon like that's nonsense like if you actually look at the opinions of all the people who are there you can't possibly endorse all the

opinions that all these other people who are going to be there actually have and then the and the process of making that argument I got and and also of course my the very classic it's very valuable to know at someone's deep end I think you should be curious about that and I remember someone arguing

back saying well what would you want someone to interview a jihadi and I'm like because we're at the moment like it was at the time when when ISIS was really and going going going for it um and I was like would you not want to go to a talk where someone was trying to figure out what what

makes some of these people tick because and but that changes your framing that essentially it's like no it's curiosity it is the is the 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 um I feel deeply underqualified who do you like so especially good at that I feel like documentary filmmakers yeah usually doing much better job and the best job is usually done by biographers yeah so the more time you give to a particular conversation yes like really deep thought and historical context and studying the people how they think looking at all different perspectives looking at the psychology of the person yeah upbringing their parents their grandparents

all of this the more time you spend with that uh the better the better the quality of the conversation is because you get to understand the you get to really empathize with the person with the people he or she represents yeah um and you get to see the common humanity all of this I in

interviewers are often don't do that work yeah um so like the best stuff I've seen is interviews that are part of a documentary yeah but even now documentaries are like there's a huge incentive to do as quickly as possible yeah there's not an incentive to really spend time with the person

there's a great new documentary about Floyd Abrams that I really recommend we did a documentary about Ira Glasser called mighty Ira um which was my video team and my protege Niko Preeno and Chris Malki and Aaron Reese put it together and it's just follows the life and times of uh uh of Ira Glasser

the former head of the ACLU he's uh if you could just linger on that that's a fat standing story oh yeah who's who's uh amazing um Ira he wasn't a lawyer um he started working at the N and Y CLU in the New York civil liberties union back in I think the 60s he was uh I think Robert Kennedy

recommended that he go in that direction um and he became the president of the ACLU right at the time that they were um suffering from uh defending the Nazis at Skokie and Niko uh and and Aaron and Chris put together this and they'd never done a documentary before and it came out so so well um

and it tells the story of the Nazis in Skokie it tells the story of the case around it tells the story of the ACLU at the time and what a great leader Ira Glasser was and what's one of the things it'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 when the rally is not going very well and the the leader gets uh flustered and it almost seems like he's gonna like shout out kind of like you're you're making this Nazi rally into a mockery and so it showed how actually allowing the Nazis to

speak it's it's Skokie kind of took the wind out of their shells like if they had they the whole movement like everybody just kind of it all kind of dissolved after that because they looked like racist fools that they were they were you know you didn't blues brothers made joke you know

jokes about them um and it 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

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 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 that one of the things that is absolutely just a fact of life in in America is like we do see each other more as enemy camps as as opposed to people on the same team and that was actually

something in the early days like me and Will Creely the legal directorifier wrote about the forth coming 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 realize a lot of these things we knew

intellectually like kids go to the bar and get drunk and do stupid things um that uh that when we started seeing the evidence of them doing stupid things that we might be shocked at first but then eventually get more sophisticated and be like well come on people are like that that never actually

really seem to happen um that that I don't think that I think that there are plenty of things we know about human nature and we know about dumb things people say uh and we've we've made it into an environment where there's just someone out there waiting to be kind of like oh remember

that dumb thing he said we were 14 well I'm gonna make sure that you don't get into the to your dream school because of that offense archaeology where uh this 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 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 reason why I got depressed routing this book because you know I this art it's already there's already people who

don't love me because of cuddling the American mind usually based on a misunderstanding of what we actually said in cuddling in the American mind but nonetheless uh but on this one you know like I'm calling out people for being very cruel in a lot of cases but put but one thing that was really

scary about studying a lot of these cases is that once you have that target on your back what they're gonna try to cancel you for could be anything you know they might go back into your old old your old both find something that you said in 1995 you know do do something um where essentially

it looks like it's this entire other thing but really what they're what's going on is they didn't like your opinion they didn't like your point of view on something and they're gonna find a find a way that from now on anytime your name comes up it's like oh remember this this thing

I didn't like about them and it's again it's cruel doesn't get you anywhere closer to the truth and but it is a little scary to stick your neck out okay in terms of solutions yeah I could ask you a few things so one uh parenting yeah five and seven year old so I'm sure you've figured it

all out then oh god no from a free speech perspective yeah uh 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 going to 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

um and sometimes dangerous fools at that so giving the sense of intellectual humility early on being also you know saying things that actually do sound kind of old-fashioned like but I say things to my kids like listen if you enjoy study and work both things that I very much enjoy I do

for fun um your life is going to feel great and it's going to feel easy um so some but some you know some of those old-fashioned virtues of things I try to preach um counterintuitive stuff like outdoor time playing um having time that are not intermediate experiences is really uh is really

important and little things like um I talk about on the book about when my kids are watching something that's scary and I'm not talking about like zombie movies you know I'm talking about like you know a cartoon that has kind of a scary moment and saying that they want to turn the TV off

and I and I talk to them and I say listen I'm gonna sit next to you and we're gonna finish this show and I want you to tell me what you think of of this afterwards and I sat next to my sons um and by the end of it every single time I you know when I asked them was it as scary as you

thought it was going to be and there was like no daddy that was fine and I'm like that's one of the great lessons in life the fear that you don't go through becomes much bigger in your head than actually simply facing it that's one of the reason why I'm fine back against this culture I love

you know for all of our kids to be able to grow up in an environment where people give you grace and you know the accept the fact that sometimes people are going to say things that piss you off take seriously the possibility may be wrong and and uh be curious well I'm I have hope that

the thing you mentioned which is because so much of young people's stuff is on the internet that they're going to give each other a break because then everybody is cancel-worthy generation z hates cancel culture the most and that's another reason why it's like

people still claiming this has even happening it's kind of like no you actually can ask you know 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 that's the culture waking up to like that this is not a good

thing I am glad though I mean I I'm one of those kids who you know is really glad that I was a little kid in the 80s and a teenager in the 90s because having everything potentially online it's not a not bringing an envy well I because you can also do the absolute free speech I like

leaning into it yeah where I hope for future where a lot of our insecurities flaws everything's out there yeah and to be raw honest with it I think that leads to a better world because the flaws are beautiful I mean that's the flaws is the the basic ingredients of human connection

Robert Wright he wrote a book on on Buddhism and I talked about trying to use social media from a from a Buddhist perspective and like as if you're as if it's the collective unconscious meditating and seeing those little like angry bits that are trying to cancel your get you to

shut up and just kind of like letting them go the same way you're supposed to watch your thoughts kind of trail off I would love to see that like visualized whatever the whatever the drama going on going on just seeing the sea of it of the collective consciousness just processing this and

having a little like panic attack and just kind of like yeah reading it in look at it the little sort of hateful angry voices kind of pop up and be like okay there you are and I'm still focused on on that thing because that is that is one of the things is okay yeah actually this is probably

late in the game to be to giving my grand theory on this stuff but never too late so so what I was studying in law school when I ran out of first amendment classes I decided to study censorship during the tutor 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-handry VIII stuff from coming

out pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty efficient idea of nothing else and I always so he started getting angry at the printing press around 1521 and then passed something that required prints to be along with parliament in 1538 and I always think of that as kind of like where we are now

because we have this we had the back then we had the original disruptive technology you know writing was probably 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 and how to find witches that the religious wars went crazy they led to all sorts of distress misinformation nastiness and Henry VIII was trying to put the genie back in the bottle you know he was kind of like I can I can I

want to use this for good like I feel like it could it could be used but he was in an unavoidable period of epistemic anarchy there's nothing you can do to make the period after the printing press come came out to be a non-distructive non-crazy period other than like total totalitarianism

and destroy all the print 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 you know several million people to the European conversation and that eventually the global conversation but eventually

it became the best tool for disc confirmation for getting rid of falsity for spotting bad ideas and it's the benefit 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 an arco-copy period and I do worry that there are attempts and 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 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 disc confirmation that we're nowhere near yet by the way but think about

additional millions of eyes on problems thanks to the printing press helped create the scientific revolution the enlightenment the discovery ignorance we now have added billions of eyes and voices to solving problems and we're just we're using them for cat videos and cancelling

but those are just the early days of the printing press the ball starts with the cats and the cancelling is there something about x about twitter which is perhaps the most energetic source of cats and cancelling it seems like the collective unconscious

of the species I mean like it's one of these things where the tendency to want to see patterns in history sometimes can limit the actual batshit crazy experience of what history actually is because yes we have these nice comforting ideas that it's going to 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 because people talk about you know writing and mask 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 and and and appear like virtual particles kind of all over the place of people you know reacting in real time to things there's never been anything even vaguely

like it and it can be at its worst awful to see at its best sometimes seeing people like just getting euphoric over something going on and cracking absolutely brilliant immediate jokes you know at the same time it can be it can 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 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 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 a virality the speed the news travels the opinions travel that the battle over ideas travels and 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 it changes your understanding of how to

interpret information because it's stressed out to no end I remember to get off at sometimes yes the stats are pretty bad on on mental health with with with young people and I'm definitely in the camp of people who think that social media it is part of that I understand you know the

debate but I'm pretty persuaded that one of the things that is hasn't been great for mental health I mean of people is this just constantly being exposed yeah absolutely I think it's possible to create social media that makes a huge amount of money makes people happy to me like it's

possible to align yeah the the incentives so in terms of yeah making teenagers making 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

need to write them out and just write them out of cat videos whatever gives this full rich human experience I think it's just a machine learning problem yeah it's like it's not easy thing to create a feed so the easiest feed you could do is like maximize engagement yeah but it's just like a really

dumb algorithm yeah it's like for the for the algorithm to learn enough about you to understand what will make you truly happy as a human being to grow a long term that's just a very difficult problem to solve yeah watch Fleabag it's absolutely brilliant British show um and it sets you up

one of the reasons why like people love it so much is it sets you up that you're watching like a a raunchy British sex in the city except the main character is the most per mischievous one it's like okay and you kind of roll your eyes a little bit out it's kind of funny and it's kind of

cute and what kind of kind of spicy and then you realize that the person is actually kind of suffering and having a hard time and it gets deeper and deeper as the show goes on and she will do these incredible speeches about tell me what to do like I just I know there's experts out there I

know there's knowledge out there I know there's an optimal way to live my life so why can't someone just tell me what to do and and it's this wonderfully like um accurate I think uh aspect of human desire that what if something could actually tell me the optimal way to go because I think there

is a desire to give up some amount of your own freedom and discretion in order to be told to do the optimally right thing but that path scares me to death yeah we see the way you phrase it that's it scares me too so there's several things like yeah one you can be constantly distracted in a

tech talk way by things that keep you engaged yeah so removing that and giving you a bunch of options constantly and learning from long term what results in your actual long term happiness hmm it's like which amounts of challenging ideas are good for you um that you know for for somebody

like me just for but there is a number like that for you yeah Greg like for for me that number is pretty high I love debate I love I love the feeling of like realizing holy shit I've been wrong yes but like you know and I would love for the algorithm to know that about me and to help me but

always giving me options if I want to descend into cat videos and so on for the educational aspect that but yes education yes like the idea of kind of like both going the speed that you need to and running as fast as you can yeah you know I mean there's that you know the whole flow thing

I just feel you two recommendation for for better or worse if used correctly it feels like it does a pretty good job whenever I just refuse to click on stuff that's just dopamine based and click on only educational things yeah the recommendation it provides a really damn good so I feel like

it's a solvable problem at least in this in this 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 where an inescapably an article period and we're require big cultural adjustments and there's

gonna there's no way that this isn't going to be difficult transition is there any specific little or big things that you 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

any person or any idea and that's good in some ways because a lot of medieval institutions needed to be torn down some people did to 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 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 can build yet but it has shown us how thin our knowledge was it's one of the reasons why we're also aware of the replication crisis it's one of the reasons why we're also aware of how

kind of shoddy our research is how much our expert class is arrogant in many cases but people don't want to live in a world where they don't have people that they respect and they can look at and I think what's happening possibly now but we'll continue to happen as people are going to

establish themselves as being high integrity that they will always be honest and you are establishing yourself as someone who who is high integrity where they can trust that person a fire wants to be you know the institution that people can come to is like if it's free speech we will defend it

period and I think that people need new need to have authorities that they can actually trust and I think that if you actually had a stream that maybe people can watch an action but not flood with stupid cancel culture stuff or dumb cat means where it is actually a serious discussion bounded

around rules no perfect rhetorical fortress no efficient rhetorical fortress none of the the BS ways we debate I think you could start to actually create something that could actually be a major improvement in the in the speed with which we come up with new better ideas and establish

and separate truth from falsity yeah if it's done well it can inspire large number of people to become higher and higher integrity and it can create integrity as a value to strive for yeah I mean like you know there's been projects throughout the internet that have done 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 well 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 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're

all still like they'll find a way to justify themselves like something will piss them off yeah and they want to correct it because they they love correcting untruth into truth but the perspective of what is true and not is affected by their bias truth is hard to know and and it is

true that there is a left-leaning bias on the editors of Wikipedia so for that what happens is on articles which I mostly appreciate that don't have a political aspect to them you know scientific articles or technical articles they can be really strong even history just

describing the facts of history they 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 while January 6th or something like this I know I'm going to be like I'm not whatever's going on here I'm gonna kind of

read it but most I'm gonna look to other sources I'm gonna 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 word this is where Wikipedia does this 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 in jug bias yeah in all the ways that you talk about it that's faster healthier than most environments it's

incredibly healthy but I think you could do better one of the big flaws that Wikipedia to me that community notes on X does better is the accessibility of becoming an editor it's it's difficult to become an editor and it's not as visible the process of editing so I would

love as like you said a stream yeah everyone to be able to observe this debate between people with integrity yeah of when they discuss things like January 6th are very controversial topics to see how the process of the debate goes as opposed to being hidden in the shadows which it currently

isn't Wikipedia you can access it's just hard to access but and I've also seen how they will use certain articles like uncertain people like 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's it doesn't to me at least feel like an accurate representation of the person it's like writing an article about Einstein mentioning something about theory of relativity and saying

that he was a womanizer an abuser in a like controversy you know yeah he is fine man also you know not you know they're not exactly the perfect human in terms of women but like there's other aspects of this human and to capture that human properly there's a certain way to do it I think Wikipedia

will often lean they really try to be self reflective and try to stop this but they will lean into the drama if it matches the bias yeah but again much better than the world I believe is much better because Wikipedia exists but now that we're in these at the lesson stages we're growing and trying

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

um you know it's kind of like you get three what about osm guards so game of finding the whole thing absolutely yeah let me ask you about as you mentioned going to some difficult moments in your life or what 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 um with the be with Coddling American Mine began with me um in the 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 I stuck I wanted to make sure that I you know had my head wrapped and everything so like if all the drugs I was planning to take didn't work that I wouldn't be able to you know claw my way out it'd been a really rough year and I always had issues with

depression um but they were getting worse and frankly one of the reasons why this cancel culture stuff is so um important to me is that the thing that I didn't emphasize as much in Coddling American Mine which by the way that description that I give of trying to kill myself was the first time

I'd ever written it down nobody in my family was aware um of how of it being like that my wife had never seen it and basically the only way I was able to write that was by by doing you know how you can kind of trick yourself if um and I was like I'm going to convince myself that this is just

between me and my computer and nobody will see it it's probably now the most public thing I've ever written um but what I didn't emphasize in that was how much the culture war played into how depressed I got because I was originally legal director of fire that I became president of fire in

2005 moved to Philadelphia where I get depressed um and uh in just I don't have family there there's something about the town they don't seem to like me very much um but the main thing was being in the culture world of time um there was a girl that I was dating um I remember you know she didn't

seem to really approve of what I did and a lot of people didn't really seem to and meanwhile like I was defending people on the left all the time and they'd be like oh that's good that you're defending someone left but they still would never forgive me for defending someone on the right

and I remember saying what one point I'm like listen I'm like I'm I'm a true believer in this stuff I'm willing to defend Nazis I'm certainly willing to defend Republicans and she actually said I think Republicans might be worse um and that didn't that really shouldn't go very well and then

I nearly got in fist fights a couple times with with people on the right um because they found out I defended people who crack jokes about 9-11 like this happened more than once I'm not you know about that time in my 20s I'm not fist fighting again um but yeah it was always like that you

you see how hypocritical people 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 uh of of of of what the culture we were heading into by being the president of fire and it was exhausting um and and that was one of the main

things that led me to be no suicidal lead depressed uh at the Belmont Center if you told me that that would be the beginning of a new and better life for me I would have laughed if I could have but I would you know I don't like you can tell I'm okay if I'm still laughing and I wasn't laughing

um at that point so um I got a doctor and I started doing cognitive behavioral therapy I started having all these voices in my head that were catastrophizing and um you know it gave an over over generalization and uh fortune telling you know mind reading all of these things that

they teach you not to do and it uh and what they what what you do in CBT is essentially you you have a something makes you upset and then you just write down what the thought was um and you know something minor could happen in your response was you know like um well the date seemed to go

very well um and that's because I'm broken and we'll die alone and you're like okay okay okay what what are what are the following you know uh that's catastrophizing that's mind reading that's fortune telling us all this stuff um and you have to do this several times a day forever I actually

need to brush up on it at the moment um and it slowly over time voices in my head that have been saying horrible you know horrible internal talk it just didn't sound as convincing anymore which was a really kind of like subtle effect like it was just kind of like oh wait I don't buy that I'm

broken you know like that doesn't sound true that doesn't sound like truth from God like like it used to and nine months after I was planning to kill myself I was probably happier than I'd been in the decade um and that was one of the things that you know that the CBT is what led me to notice this

in my own work that it felt like administrators were kind of selling cognitive distortions but students were buying it and then when I started noticing that they seemed to come in actually already believing a lot of this stuff that would be very dangerous and that led to calling the American

mind and all that stuff but the thing that was rough about writing Canceling the American mind I'd have mentioned this already a couple of times I got really depressed this past year um because I was studying you know I there's a friend in there that I talk about who killed himself after being

canceled I talked him a week before he killed himself and I hadn't actually um I hadn't actually checked in with him because he seemed so confident I thought it would be totally fine because he he he had an insensitive tweet in June of 2020 and you know got got forced out in a way that didn't

actually sound as bad as a lot of the other professors he actually got a severance package but they knew he'd sue and win um because he had before and so I waited to check in on him because we were so overwhelmed with the request for help 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 you know my struggle to the stuff everybody um who fights this stuff comes to me when they're having a hard time and this is a very hard psychologically taxing business to be in and

even admitting this right now like I think about like all the all the vultures out there they'll have fun with it just like the same way went went when my friend Mike Adams killed himself there were people like celebrating on Twitter um that that a man was dead uh because they didn't like his

tweets and but somehow that made them compassionate for some abstract other person so I was getting a little depressed and anxious and the thing that really helped me more than anything else um was confessing to my staff that I you know I I books take a lot of energy so I did I knew they

didn't want to hear that not only was this taking a lot of the boss's time this was making him depressed and anxious but when I finally told my the leadership of my staff um you know people that even though I try to maintain a lot of distance from I love very very much um it made such a

difference you know um 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 orange Hoffman um runs it it intentionally tries to get people over the political spectrum um to come together

uh and have off the record conversations about big issues and it was nice to be in a room where liberal conservative none of the above were all like oh thank god someone's taken on cancel culture and where it felt like it felt like maybe this won't be the the disaster for me and my family that

I was that I was starting to be afraid 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 the pain of cancellation can be really intense and that doesn't necessarily mean losing your job but just even

in collie bullying you can call whatever name but just some number of people on the internet and that number can be small kind of saying bad things to you yeah that can be a pretty powerful force to the human psyche which is but was very surprising and then the flip side also of that

um it really makes me sad how cruel people can be yeah it's such a it thinking that your your cause is social justice in many cases can lead people to think I can be as cruel as I want and pursuit of this when it a lot of times it's you know just a way to sort of

vent some aggression on on a person that you think of it only as an abstraction so I think it's important for people to realize that they're whatever like whatever whatever negative energy whatever negativity you want to put out there like there's real people they can get hurt yeah like you can

really get people um to one be the worst version of themselves are too possibly take their own life and it's not as real yeah well that that's one of the things that we do in the book um to to really kind of address people who so try to claim this is it isn't real is we just quote you know we

quote the Pope we quote Obama we quote James Carville we quote Taylor Swift on cancel culture like well um and Taylor Swift quote is is essentially about like how behind all of this there's there's the that when it gets particularly nasty there's this very clear you know kill yourself

kind of undercurrent to it um and it's it's cruel and the problem is that in an environment so wide open there's always going to be someone who wants to be so transgressive and say the most hurtful you know terrible thing but then you have to remember the misrepresentation getting

back to the old idioms sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never never hurt me has been reimagined in campus debates in the most ass and ian 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 hurt 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 we

heard that might be a little personal um the uh and it helps it really does help to be like listen okay assholes are gonna say asshole things um and i can't let them have that kind of power over me yeah yeah it's still a learning experience because it does it does it does it does it does

hurt but for but for the good people out there who actually you know just sometimes think think that they're venting you know 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 um i know it shouldn't but it does sometimes

when i just see people being cruel to each other it kind of it's uh it floats a cloud over my perspective of the world that don't i wish didn't have to be there yeah i that was always my sort of flippant but uh 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 uh first is there's nothing basic about humanity yeah what gives you hope about this whole thing about about this dark state that we're in as you describe how can we get out what gives you hope that we will get out

i think that people are sick of it um i think people are sick of not being able to be authentic um and that's really you know what censorship is it's basically telling you don't be yourself don't actually be to say what you think um don't show your personality don't dissent don't be weird don't

be wrong um and that's not sustainable i i think that people have kind of had enough of it uh but one thing i definitely want to say to your audience is it can't just be up to us our yours to try to fix this um and i think that in 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 hard working that cost little or nothing that actually can give the harvards and the yales of the world are run for their money i think that might be the most positive thing we could do to to to deal

with a lot of these problems and why i think the fact that we have become a weird america with a great anti-illetus tradition has become weirdly elitist in this in in in the respect that we not only again are our leadership coming from these few fancy schools we actually have like great admiration

for them we kind of look up to them but i think we'd have a lot healthier of a society if people could prove you know they're excellence in ways that are coming from completely different streams and and that that that our higher respect that i sometimes talk about there should be a test that

anyone who passes it gets like a you know a ba and the humanities that it like a super ba like something like some way not a gd that's not what i'm talking about i'm talking about something that like you know one out of a only a couple like a hundred 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'm smart and hard working 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 some place 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 salcon is working on icon 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 forty billion dollars in the bank that they're going to reform themselves and and here's my you know i've been picking on Harvard a lot but i'm going to pick on

a little bit more um the i want and uh i talk a lot about class again and you know there's a great book called poison ivy um by Evan mandry which i recommend everybody and outrageous it sounds like me and a rant at stanford um which was uh and i and i think the stat is you know elite higher

education has more kids from the top one percent than they have from the bottom 50 or 60 percent depending on the school um and when you look at how much they actually like replicate class privilege it's it's really distressing so everybody should repose an ivy and above all else uh if you're weird to continue being weird yeah and you're one of the most interesting one of the weirdest in the most beautiful way people have ever met Greg uh thank you for the really important work you do this was

this was everybody watch kid cosmon i appreciate the class the hilarious that you brought here today man um this was an amazing conversation thank you for the work you do thank you thank you and for me who deeply cares about education and higher education thank you for uh holding the MITs and the

Harvard's accountable uh for um doing right by the people that walk their halls so thank you so much for talking today thanks for listening to this conversation with Greg lookie out of the support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words

from gnome chansky 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