Episode description

In this wide ranging conversation focused on Greg Lukianoff’s co-authored (with Jonathan Haidt) book The Coddling of the American Mind, and his new documentary film Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story, about the free speech champion Ira Glassner, who headed the ACLU for decades, he and Shermer discuss:

• the state of free speech today,
• how coddled today’s students are,
• the data on rates of depression and anxiety in students today,
• possible causes of the coddling of the American mind: social media, screen time, culture of safetyism, culture of victimhood, helicopter parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play,
• cancel culture and its effect on self-censorship and silencing speech,
• current rates of deplatforming and canceling in academia,
• the polarization of politics,
• when self-censorship is healthy,
• default to truth theory vs. default to skepticism theory,
• How gullible are we, really?
• how to combat the negative influencers on social media,
• a brief history of free speech in the 20th and 21th centuries,
• why people in power want to silence dissenters (even free speech advocates in power), and
• the value of viewpoint diversity.

Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Lukianoff is a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School. He specializes in free speech and First Amendment issues in higher education. He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech. Read about his new film: Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story.