Greg Lukianoff || Free Speech

It's great to have Greg Lukianov on the podcast. Greg is an attorney, New York Times bestselling author, and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education FIRE. He is the author of Unwarning, Liberty, Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom from Speech, and Fire's Guide to Free Speech on Campus. Most recently, he co authored The Coddling of the American Mind, How good intentions and band ideas are setting up a generation

for failure with Jonathan Height. This New York Times Best Hour expands on their September twenty fifteen in Atlanta cover story of the same name. Greg is also an executive producer of Can We Take a Joke? A feature length documentary that explores the collision between comedy, censorship and outreach culture both on and off campus. Greg so excited to finally get a chance to talk to you. Yes, we meaning to do this forever, but COVID turned us into nomads for a bit. Yeah, and I'm glad this is

finally happening. Though, me too, I was a big fan of Transcend. Oh, I think you got my first ever Ascherbonnable award? Is that right? Uh huh, Yeah, Well, I was very honored to get that. I didn't know it was the first for the audience. I decided just for fun to name my monthly award for my favorite book, the prestigious Ascherbonnable Awards, and the very first book I

ever gave it to it was Transcend. That it was a great book, and like I said at the time, it goes in the rereading pile, which is the stack of books to read big, the stack of books to reread quite small. Well, I'm very honored, and I see lots of areiaus mutual understandings about the world and what's going on, and a call to transcend or tribalism transcend. What else do we want to transcender? We want to transcend a lot of things, don't we that we're currently

seeing in the world today. I have to say I call myself temperamentally an optimist, but I'm not super You're not catching me at a particularly optimistic time. I think I'm really worried about the next six months. We were talking offline, and I always point out, you know, I'm the head of a nonpartisan nonprofit, and I take that very seriously. But I will just say I am worried

about what the next six months are going to look like. Well, I think it's important to talk about openly and honestly because I think there are a lot of non partisan corporations company. I don't know how many corporations are non you know, you know, nonprofits that are finding it increasingly difficult to not take a stand, Like how do you not take a stand in what you see as the right side of history? When you think about like Nazi Germany, it's like, oh, well, we're just non partisan, you know,

let's just kill all the Jews. You know, we'll be non partisan and we won't say anything. You know. It's like when you start things getting truly alarming, you know, like, at what point is it like it's cool to like say something. It's one of those things where I don't think we're quite at the Nazi Germany level, and I think that it's really important, you know, I'm part of I jokingly refer to myself as the youngest member of the Old School ACLU, and I actually worked at the ACLU.

That was like my biggest proudest accomplishment when I was in law school was getting to intern at the ACLU of Northern California. That was like a lifelong dream of mine to do that. And I take that role extremely seriously. And I think one of the ways you avoid authoritarian outcomes is by, in a non partisan way, committing yourself to civil liberties and most of all, of course, my darling, my favorite civil liberty of all, unabashed lee is freedom

of speech. And actually, oh this is interesting, Scott. We're coming out with a documentary called Mighty Ira, which I am over the moon about. Like I can't emphasize how excited I am about this. And this comes from this was the brainchild of Nico Prino, the host of our podcast. So to Speak is the name of the podcast, and he interviewed Ira Glasser, who was the not Ira glass because Bolia confused sometimes. He was the executive director of the ACLU from I think nineteen seventy nine to two

thousand and one. He took over right after the skoky situation. I'm sure listeners know, but in nineteen seventy eight thereabouts, the ACLU defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie. And this is particularly, you know, interesting, because you end up having largely Jewish lawyers, some of them whose parents survived the Holocaust and were actually in camps are nyer,

what was the person in charge before Ira Glasser? And you know, he he lived in a community that was pretty much wiped out by the Holocaust, and he was most adamant about defending their rights because he understood that really, ultimately, it's the civil liberties that actually keep the society free, and as soon as you start compromising on it, the

other side will compromise on it too. So we made a whole documentary about the life and times of Ira Glasser because we feel like he's underappreciated partially, and he did so many many amazing things. You know, he took the ACLU to a level of national prominence that hadn't been previously, even though it was relatively well known, and

he really practiced what he preached. He was actually ended up being you know, he's a lefty, but he was friends with Bill Buckley from National Review and from Firing Line, I think was the name of the show. You know, he would go on and he's willing to debate anyone, and he did it all with good humor and intelligence.

And one of the causes he was the most serious about was actually, you know, racial equity for and so one of the things that inspired him to get into civil liberties in the first place was quite literally, Jackie Robinson going to play for the Dodgers and there's actually an amazing there's an amazing metaphor and here, you know, he's from Brooklyn and that what happened, and he and

he explained it. And this is something that I think, you know, social psychologist wouldn't enjoy in particular, is that just the actual experience of going to the stadium and seeing Jackie Robinson quite literally on his team. He started to actually feel, you know, understand, you know a lot of issues that he wasn't aware of, you know, like he uh and of course, you know, the the audience

itself was well integrated. There were there were people from all over Brooklyn coming in to see the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson and that really changed his you know, uh, the direction of his life. And and one thing is amazing about it is that got him that he started finding out things like when the Dodgers would go to different cities in the South, he couldn't stay at that

hotel because it was still segregated. And so he gets so this small, this small action by the Dodgers, when you know, actually of course historical, but at the same time, in the grand scheme of things, it would seem relatively modest, set off a trigger of events that got a number of of people really activated about civil about civil rights, and you know, and Ira really he uh basically took everything from that experience and that kind of decided the

course of his life to a large degree. And again, I really have to emphasize it was this sense of realizing that we're on the same team of the expanding circle, you know, the idea of like of actually not breaking everybody into smaller and smaller groups, but actually emphasizing the fact that, you know, we're all equally people, uh changed his life. Well, it's a middleful realization. I just try to think of what are the limits of free speech as you see it within your organization, in your chart.

There are certain things that will not defend you. You know, if you get fired for being a serial killer. But free speech, I get to you know, kill whoever I want. No, actually, you don't get to do that in a democratic society. And what are the boundaries here? One thing that you know, I talk about this in foreign countries a lot, and it's actually a very helpful way to understand your own beliefs is to defend them in an audience that's not

at all familiar with the culture you come from. I actually, I think that's one of my advantages in general, is I'm a first generation American. I still to a degree see the US with a little bit of a foreigner's eyes, and I think it can be very helpful. And the thing that I explain is that they think we're completely nuts over here, and that the First Amendment is just completely out of control, and that we're crazy about free speech.

And I have to explain, Listen, it's actually not all that different, except for a handful of different ideas, and the most important one is one that I wrote about yesterday, as Lick would have it, completely coincidentally, called the Bedrock principle that comes from the flag burning opinion Texas v. Johnson in nineteen eighty nine. And the Bedrock rule is that you can't ban something simply because it's offensive. Why

because offensiveness is too culturally subjective. It changes from year to year, it changes from person to person, It's different between people from different economic classes. I even point out that, as David Hume would love to point out, it can even be a different in an individual depending on the time of day. So offensiveness just can't be the justification

for banning particular speech. However, the First Amendment also has exceptions, like, for example, incitement to violence, you know, is the one that people usually start with, and that's you know, the situation of like let's go burn down the mayor's office. In a situation where it's like we're likely to burn down the marrior's office. Defamation isn't protected by free speech. You know, claiming falsely, particularly knowingly, that someone is you know,

something horrible, like a pedophile. That's not protected speech, nor should it. Threats are not protected speech, definitely, And it's also important to keep in mind that this binds the behavior of the government and government agents, So it applies at public colleges, it applies at a state level, at the federal level. But for a lot of what we're seeing right now, we're talking about people working for companies getting you know, the phrases, and it's become somewhat controversial,

partially because Trump started using it. But someone gets canceled. A private company is absolutely under no obligation to keep an employee who says something really, really unpopular that really angers people. However, from a cultural standpoint, I've been increasingly arguing that we should be We don't have to be perfectly tolerant, but we sure I think we surely should be more than we're currently being fair enough. And that's a very very fair statement that is a generality level

without talking about specifics. Oh and and and Scott, I did want to say one thing, and one thing that makes me different from other you know, First Amendment advocates is that the dominant metaphor for freedom of speech is this marketplace of ideas argument that essentially that ideas will battle it out in the marketplace of ideas, and the good ones will survive and the bad ones will be discarded. And therefore, because we're a democracy, it's really good to

have this marketplace of ideas. I've always thought the marketplace of ideas idea is inadequate, you know, and everybody, even the originator of the idea didn't didn't think that the good ideas always win. Is actually much simpler. But I also very strongly believe that that it's the right way to look at this. Is that very simply, and whether you put on your your political hat or your scholarly hat or your scientific hat, it's always valuable to know

what people really think and why, full stop. Yeah, I think there's definitely an argument to be made there. And when when things go in the shadows, they tend it's just like our own mind, as you know, with CBT, but also with the you know, the act approach to therapy, which I'm I'm a big advocate of acceptance and commitment therapy. You know, the more you do experiential avoidance of things

within yourself, the stronger it becomes within you. And you know, you keep things in the shadows within yourself, you kind of build them up to be like evil, you know when sometimes you just integrate them into the rest of your life and you're like, oh, it wasn't that evil. I can deal with it. I can cope with it.

So just applying the same principles to the real world, you know, in analogy, you know, you keep certain ideas, and the Shatados were kind of saying that we can't handle it, you know, like we wouldn't be able to deal with it, and it might come outsized to its actual threat. Well, and there's also just the simple premise that it's probably just better to know. This came a little bit from Harvey Silverglate's Harvey Silverglaate is co founder

of Fire along with Alan Charles Corps. Alan was a more conservative leaning libertarian who's a scholar of the Enlightenment, and Harvey is a more left leaning civil liberties lawyer who lives up in Cambridge. Used to be the president of the board of the ACLU of Massachusetts, for example, and he used to say, I thought this was a very vivid way to say it. I'd prefer to know who the Nazis in the room are. Yeah. Right, It's

a good point. So in a lot of ways. Sometimes with censorship, people are saying, I would prefer to know less about the world in which I live, and that has two damaging things. Is one, you might miss a threat, and that's important to know. But two, you might come

to believe. And this is something that was very well covered in a book called Racial Paranoia by an African American scholar named John L. Jackson, that it can actually start to seem if you need these heavy handed laws to prevent some people from saying horribly racist things, for example, that you might get the impression that things are actually far worse than you thought, and it can actually lead to a sense of, as you put it, paranoia. I

do hear what you're saying. I'm trying to think of things from every possible side possible, and I want to really dive deep into this with you. So you know, there are people, let's say someone who's that from the trans community trans rites, and they say, you know, some of these ideas are They'll they'll say things like it's harming the harming trans people, even sometimes it's causing deaths.

You know, the certain certain language is inciting. You know you did talk earlier about inciting violence is something that you know, we shouldn't promote in society. What do you do when when you hear those kinds of arguments and then you're kind of faced with a choice in a way, it's like do we who do we defend? Here? You know, are we defending the ones with the that can say whatever they want? Or do we defend those who say they're actively being harmed? I mean, you have to make

these choices in your profession. To a degree you kind of don't. I mean, ultimately, my job and my function is to defend freedom of speech. And I believe it's valuable to know what people really think under all circumstances and if and surely, you know, people are allowed to argue that an argument placism and danger And actually, I think that that argument has been unfortunately extremely popular over the past couple of years. It's and I actually, I'll say this split out. I think that that is a

dangerous rhetorical tactic that is currently being much overused. This happened at the New York Times with when they were asking James Bennett, when they were demanding James Bennett be stepped down, and that was something that had been in the works forever. They wanted to, like the younger staff wanted to get rid of James Bennett almost since he started, particularly for bringing conservatives, you know, mildly conservative. It's a barely right of center Barry Weiss to The New York Times,

and I forget the Brett's. I forgot Brett Stevens, you know, an anti Trump Republican and what's you know. I wrote about this on my blog Eternally Radical Idea because I just felt like I had to say something about it, and I had to remind people. James Bennett was hired specifically in twenty sixteen to address the fact that The New York Times, since it had so badly guessed wrong on Trump thing, that there was a realization maybe we were out of touch, Maybe we need to know where

people are coming from. So they hired James Bennett, whod done a wonderful work at The Atlantic. Full disclosure, he published Coddling the American Mind, which I say to his credit, because it was something that could have been viewed as controversial, even though you know, for I at least say for several months after and it wasn't particularly controversial. And then eventually I think that the Times kind of forgot that

was the point. So about a couple of months ago, Bennett decided to publish an article by Senator Cotton that was defending something that I think is just a horrifying idea, calling in the troops in order to put down the alleged riots going on all over the country. I say alleged because in some cases I live in DC. The idea that there were completely out of control riots is a big exaggeration. And of course what he what conton was suggesting, goes against everything you know, I fight for.

At the same time, he is a sitting senator. He

is he was, and this is kind of terrifying. He was representing what was at the time the opinion of about fifty two percent of Americans, and the end the position of the President of the United States and so and well when they published this, one of the arguments that some of the staffers started making to justify and to be clear, they wanted him gone anyway they wanted Barry Weisse gone, was that the New York Times publishing that article was putting black and brown reporters in danger.

And that's one of those things where under the current climate, the idea of saying come on, you know that that's not really what happened is he published He let people know that what I would consider to be, you know, a bad opinion, but opinion that you can afford not to know. And I watched all of these arguments come up, But I really thought that the idea that like this is putting people's lives at risk was something that was and I like, flat out I think it was more

of a rhetorical tactic than empirically justifiable. It's interesting to think about people's biases towards what they say, Yeah, this could really be a dangerous idea we needed eradicate, depending on what side that person is on. If it's someone in the far far left, here's someone who's on the far right, say something like those ideas are dangerous to us, all right, people could kill her alives. Do each of us apply these principles universally? Seems like no one's doing that.

There's no universal You know, we talked earlier about the importance of transcendence, and you resonated with my book and I resonated with your book. There's a reason why we both resonated with each other's works. There's something that we're just desperate to transcend. Here. First of all, I don't think we like hypocrisy, right, So we can't say let's eradicate all discrimination, but then have parentheticals like, well, only

discrimination against people who are like me, you know. Yeah, So it's really tricky business because also I assume you as well want to have empathy for those who are queerly in distress psychological distress over something. How do you balance that empathy with the arguments you've made about cognitive distortions, because these just way to get someone who's mentally distressed to be even more mentally distressed is to tell them, well,

you're really crazy, you really have cognitive distortions. That's not really good psychologically in the psychological clinical space to really help someone by just saying that to them. So how do you balance all this? That's definitely a way it gets, it can be framed. But overall, I honestly think that Height and I are taking mental health more seriously than

some of our critics. And and that's you know, might sound kind of jarring, but here, here, here's my here's my observation going back to two thousand and seven, and this came from me having a a breakdown, a psychological breakdown, and would you mind reading a section from your book that I found so poignant? Well, okay, a little difficult, and I should I should preface I'd never actually talked

about this in this kind of detail with anybody. And what was funny about writing it, not necessarily haha funny, but was that causingly was that I kind of could do this thing. And I was like, I'm going to intentionally delude myself and say to myself, this is now just between me and my computer, you know, while trying to sort of like not think about the fact that this would probably end up being the single most public thing, very likely I've ever done. H So I could just

try to be as honest about as possible. So here we go. This is so have you never read this out loud? I read it one time out loud, not in a podcast. I read it. I've only actually read it out loud one other time, because you know, it's a little it's a little difficult. One thing that is funny, though, Scott, is that you can tell him I'm not doing so poorly because my h my sort of sense of humor

kind of asserts itself. So when mechanism. Yeah, exactly when I talk about really awful things, and and I know I did. Actually one time, I have a psychologist who was like, oh, when you talk about rough things, you get a smile on your face. Let's try to get you know, try to overcome that. And I'm like, no, I'm keeping that one because it worked and it doesn't seem to And you know, of course, if people think that, if the idea is that you can't really feel pain,

I can promise that I do. Just I need the mechanisms, the healthy mechanisms I have. So anyway, here goes. This is December, I think of two thousand and seven. I had spent the day scouring websites for ways to kill myself. At almost every turn, I found stories about how a method could fail, leaving you still alive but permanently injured. This even applied to shooting yourself. I could not risk that, so I went to the hardware store across the street,

looking for strong plastic bags and metal wire. The idea was to crush up all the sleeping med tranquilizers and anti anxiety meds. I had pick them all at once and then wrap my head so that if the pills didn't kill me. Suffocation would, but it had to be strong enough that I could not claw my way out of the bag. If I had a change heart, I needed to go through with it now now, I underline that as quickly as possible, because why because it was the right thing to do, and if I waited, I

might not go through with it. And I needed to go through with it while I still had the will. I felt if I felt better, it would somehow be a lie. I had a powerful sense that I was in touch with some dark, larger truth that I needed to die. I don't know if it was briefly sensing how strange the thought was that gave me the gave me that flash of sanity that caused me to call nine to one one. First, I started to explain I had a what I had planned in a detached way,

but soon I was crying. The voice on the other side of the line told me to get myself to the hospital, and thank goodness, I listened. I walked to Penn, got myself checked in. I very nearly didn't get myself checked in because I was having second thoughts. I'm like, no, no no, no, I can't go. I can't I can't be detained. You know that they can keep they can hold you for three days once you check yourself in.

And I had, you know, a good psychologist there who as I was trying to talk myself out of it, he just asked the simple question, is like, Gregor, you normally like this? And I just burst into tears, and you know, like, basically I didn't know if I was normally like that anymore. I was, I mean, Scott, I was so far gone. I thought my sister, who's a doctor, would help me kill myself because if I explained to her how in pain I was, that of course she would.

And I'm like that. And that's one of the reasons why when people are very hard to keep hard on people who kill themselves. And I've had friends, you know, killed themselves, and I come to their defense when my friends are angry, because it's like, listen, I was there too, and I was far gone, like this is not You're not talking to someone who's who's in a state of mind that you can actually relate to if you haven't

been there yourself. Well, well, Greg, first of all, thank you so much for being so vulnerable and sharing that, and you know this is suicide Prevention month, I believe, right or something along those lines. There are a lot of people right now during COVID who are feeling the lowest, maybe they felt their entire lives. This is just this is it? Like I'm bottom bottom out right now? And look how far you've grown? I mean, do you do you read that sort of mindset and does it almost

seem like a completely different person? You know? I was thinking about that very question, and I was kind of like going through this discussion in my head because of course I was a little anxious about it, and I was and I was like, I heard this sentence, you know, in my head, it feels like a completely different person. But the truth is, it doesn't It Just that's me.

That's me right there. I remember this stuff very vividly and it was still me in there and just just on me that was overwhelmed by feelings that I haven't blessedly and I'm an atheist, but I love religious imagery had in a in a really long time and I and I gotta tell you, Scott, like it helps me talk to the most rewarding thing about writing the book, period is that I still get people right writing me and asking for help, and of course, you know, the

questions are first like are you a threat to yourself? You know the guy I have the whole pattern down. And but that's the most rewarding thing of all this writing the book or and the article was how many people would write me to ask for, you know, advice. I even have ad on the things that I advised. To be clear, the things that I advise, and I say this in the thread, but in case people don't read it very carefully, most of my advisor for things that are not anywhere near as far gone as I was.

In that state. When you're that far gone, call check yourself in, go get you know, like that, that that kind of stuff, and if you know somebody's like that, check in. But yeah, I have had, I have had. You know. I was at clare Mount McKenna and a student stood up and he looked. I thought he was mad at me, you know, So I was like, oh, I said, I'm about to get a about to get an earful And he actually was talking about he just he had that face because he was just you know,

struggling with what he was going to say. And he said that he read the book. He was there himself, and it was really great to be able to say, like, guys, I love my life now, like I have two gorgeous kids, I have a great wife, I live in a town that I love. I'm doing work that it's valuable to me.

I'm not You're flourishing getting by, I'm thrilled about stuff like yeah, likes things are actually kind of great and and that's gonna be you too at some point, like it it and that kind of thinking when you're really in it is impossible, but at least maybe in that circumstance you can think, well, you know, maybe there's a little bit of hope. It could be so hard when there's fields like pressure on your chest, and anyone who's had the depression can resonate with that. The world there's

such a burden. You're a burden to the world. As far as sort of stereotypes about my work, sometimes people can assume it's all PC all the time, which is absolutely not true. You know, we deal with students on the on the left and professor's getting on the left getting in trouble all the time. But there's also kind of a big middle of cases where they don't they

don't get press attention. And this is like I'd say, probably most of the cases we see it fire they involved things that are not particularly partisan and therefore not interesting to the press, which drives me nuts, which which is one of the reasons why I insisted that in one chapter in the book, I have the one about hyper bureaucratized universities, I open up talking about a program at University of Northern Michigan that I feel like this

one valuable to explain the whole thing. So a student went into counseling services at un M and she was there to talk through a being raped. She had a sexual assault, and she didn't she didn't want to report the person, but she wanted to try to, you know, get through the feelings about it. She didn't talk about any thought of hurting herself. She wasn't planning to hurt herself.

She just needed someone to talk to about it. And a couple of days days later, after she goes to the counseling office, she gets an email from the administration or actually having a letter that says, you know, we heard that you went to the counseling center. By the way, if you discuss your thoughts of self harm, with your friends,

you will be disciplined. And I think it was based on a misunderstanding of contagion that essentially, you know, how if one person commits suicide and there's a possibility that'll be a little cluster, but that's not the case when people simply talk about it, and in fact, talking about it is one of the healthiest things you can do.

And when defending it was amazing hearing these administrators say things like, basically, if you could boil it down, it was like, well, you know, your friends are vulnerable too, basically saying it's like, so you're saying that I should isolate myself and I'm a burden to my friends. And what's amazing about that was when you're in the depressed mindset, you're absolutely right. And this was just such a messed

up thing. And we fought this in public as actually one of the ways who we actually become friends with Jesse singaal who's become popular, you know, partially dealing with a lot of the anti woke stuff, but his first kind of interaction with us was really about a case that was not in the slightest bit political. It was just a deeply inhumane program at university, and we found out that that at least dozens of students have been

getting the same letter every semester. Okay, good, I'm really glad that we're starting to teared out some of these misconceptions around your around you and you're, what you believe in, what you stand for, and all this book about this, that's a good one. Let's talk about some more. Because the title of this book that you wrote with Jonathan is the Coddling, And if I'm correct you, you didn't choose the word coddling, right. I don't like the title of my own book, and I'm stuck with it now.

It's funny. So the long story again twenty fifteen. I've been thinking about this idea, so actually they should fill in some gaps. Two thousand and eight. I start studying cognitive behavioral therapy in order to overcome my depression. I will also like to be clear, I was also helped by medication. I don't want to be very clear about that because I don't want to say it like I

did it just with talk therapy. I will say, however, I am one of the very many people who react very poorly to SSRIs so, but the other ones you know, I'm currently on some that help me tremendously that aren't SSRIs. So I start doing CBT. And I'm sure your audience knows this, but CBT to me is just incredibly profound

also in simplicity. And what you do is, you know, several times a day, particularly when you feel particularly sharp emotions come up, you write down what your thought was when you when you had that unpleasant experience, so it can be you know, like I always give, like going on a date and it goes poorly, and you say to yourself, I'm going to die alone. And you look at that and you ask yourself, is this a cognitive distortion? And you say, well, that's mind reading. I don't really

know if she hated me, that's fortune telling. I don't really know that that's what the future looks like. It's definitely catastrophizing. It's a ridiculous overstatement of what happened. And it's not the power of positive thinking that you're you're working towards. You're just trying to see it a little more clearly and rationally, so you're trying to get to your prefrontal cortex. You're trying to bring yourself back into your rational brain and by the end of it, you

don't get to everything's going to be swell. You get to I had a bad date and it really made me sad, you know, which is really what happened. And what's amazing is you know, and this is something that I really tried to hammer home to Hype, my very much beloved co author. He was absolute pleasure to work with. But every so often he talked about it just being like really simple, and it's like, it is simple, but

you have I but it's a discipline. You have to do it, and do it a lot, and do it regularly. You have to do these little exercises constantly. Right, We're not like these robots that were just like we read all change change changed, you know if then you know, yeah, it would be nice if you could just put the chip in. And it took and it took a long time.

But you know, I'd say, like I remember, like the election of Obama, you know, like I remember looking at myself and being like I'm happy, like I'm I'm I'm I'm actually not just okay, I'm I'm actually happy. And partially because I could see those voices that will be like you know you're broken, You're broken, and I'd hear it. And whereas it sounded just like the gospel truth to me a year earlier, it was it didn't sound right anymore. Like it sounded like, well, that's a that's a little

that's a little over the top brain. I love that. It's like it's like you had installed a medicip yeah in the in the program. Yeah. And I feel like, la silly. So how does this relate to campuses? This relates to campuses? By back then, earlier in my career, students were awesome on free speech. They understood offensive comedy, they understood challenging professors, they understood the the you know, the sixties free speech movement. They still had like a

strong kind of like affection for that. The problem in my early career twenty one to twenty twelve was administrators. Administrators were the ones who were pulling all of the kind of like exaggerated stuff. And to give you an example,

like free speech zones. These are things I've fought all over the country, and one of the big spectacular ones I fought early on was the free speech gazebo at tech Tech University, twenty foot wide, gazebo for all free speech, for all of protected activities, and you always have to point out things like that includes reading a book. I've like go Over wrote, this has no clue what they're

talking about. But keep in mind Texas Tech has twenty eight thousand students, and so I had one of my friends who has a math degree from MIT, do the dimensional analysis on it. God forbid, all twenty eight thousand students wanted to exercise their First Amendment rights at the same time, and you'd have to crush them down the density of uranium two thirty eight. It is what he

worked out. So I was seeing so many cases that involved catastrophizing, that involve fortune telling that administrators were really, in my opinion, trying to tell students, you're not nearly scared enough, you're not nearly freaked out enough, You're not aware of how fragile you are. All this kind of stuff, And millennials, who get a bad rep were not really buying it, you know, like the the administrators were selling

it and the millennials were not buying it. And what changed was the school year twenty thirteen twenty fourteen in the school year, and it wasn't the least bit subtle, was a dramatic change in attitude about free speech among students.

It was something that like, you know, I had friends who were columnists calling me just basically asking, like, what just happened because you suddenly saw one, you know, there were there was suddenly a big spike in disinvitations, you know, speakers being disinvited because they're assumed to have, you know, hateful or hurtful views. You had the first time I ever heard of trigger warnings being demanded on campus, the first time I actually saw students demanding new different versions

of speech codes. And what was especially you know, fascinating about it to me was that it was justified overwhelmingly in medicalized language. It wasn't saying, uh, you know, that's repressive, jerk can't speak on my campus because he's you know, horrible Republican until surely they said that too. It's because it would be traumatic to me in a in a medical sense. Actually, no, no, that's not exactly, that's not precise. Almost never was someone saying that it was, with some exceptions,

that it would be traumatic to me. They were saying that it would be traumatic to some undisclosed, vulnerable group on campus or sometimes disclosed to have that person speak on campus. And you know, there were shoutdowns a Brown for example, you know, the disinvitation of Condolly's rice. You know, it got a lot of people's attention. But people really started paying attention to this when it no longer fit

the stereotype of going after conservatives. It was when they went after the chancellor of Berkeley, for example, or when they went after Christine Leguard at the International Monetary Fund. That's some people went, wait, what what just happened? And like I said, be on the ground. It was really noticeable, and so I went to Hight, who was newly a

friend of mine. We became friends, overwhelming the over feeling like we were kind of like trying to be honest brokers in the middle of the culture War, and there weren't that many of us, so we should probably become friends.

And I talked to him about the whole CBT idea that essentially I feel like administrators were trying to whether not intentionally, but we're trying to teach students the habits of anxious and depressed people by teaching them this exaggerated sense of fragility, this exaggerated sense of threat, all this kind of stuff, and that and the students weren't buying it up until right now, and that suddenly the students were mouthing these arguments that have been made for some time,

but it seemed like they were actually believing them. And of course the consequence that we saw coming was that this would result in it, you know, probably a modest increase in anxiety and depression among college aged students. So we wrote an article about it in twenty fifteen. It was a cover story in the I guess we've been in September Atlantic in twenty fifteen. And as I oftentimes, you know, we'll say when I give speeches, and then we solve the whole thing. Now there's no more outrage

on campus, exactly, no more fergility. We managed to write it right before things got way worse. And what we didn't have at the time was although I had plenty of reports, by the way, sometimes I have to remind height that, you know, since I was closer to campus, or sorry, closer to you know, many campuses at the same time, I was getting plenty of reports that counseling centers were overwhelmed. But you know, height is a good scientist,

so he wanted to see the data. He wanted to see what the data look like, and so we wrote the We wrote the article. It was well received. But then in the in twenty fifteen, that's when you had, you know, big explosions of protests on campus. Some of them we were psyched about. Others were protests. So we were psyched to see, you know, prou them people using their free speech. And this was a sort of an

outgrowth of Black Lives Matter. But they sometimes oftentimes we're asking that, you know, this employee be fired for something. They said, that this professor be fired for what they said, that this at university at UMass Amherst. That this newspaper no or no, it was Wesleyan, sorry Wesleyan. That this newspaper you know, stopped getting funded. And so it was one of these times where we'd been wanting, you know, a one, one thing that you can rightfully criticize millennials

for was some amount of political apathy. So it was nice to see the apathy. And but then we were a little bit distressed to see that a lot of the activism was decidedly on the other side of free speech and this. This kind of kept on going with dips and peaks and valleys until the scariest thing that I've seen in my career was the explosion of violence right after the election of Trump. So you have, of course,

the Milo riots. I know everyone hates Miley Anopolis, I understand, but the riots, if you sit down and watch how bad they were and how many people who you know got hurt, and overwhelmingly people who weren't even there, you know, like who were just innocent bystanders or reporters. For example, during that you had the assault on Alison Stanger at Middlebury. Allison Stanger, she was defending Charles Murray, you know, controversial

person who's written on rac and intelligence. Alison Stanger was there to debate him because she's, you know, a good liberal. She is you should have on our show. She is. She is about as decent, absolutely about as decent and thoughtful of a person as would be imagined. And she got a permanent head injury from being assaulted while defending someone she disagreed with but thought that she should be able to debate them. That's pretty badass. She's a pretty badass.

And I also love the fact that she's able to, you know, go to some of these conferences where she's surrounded by people who are conservatives and say things that they don't want to hear, and I'm like, so she continues to be just an amazingly brave and awesome person that then you had lesser known. Things like the at clare Mount McKenna, students completely surrounded a place where Heather

MacDonald was supposed to speak. She had to be like rushed off to a new location, nobody could actually attend her talk, and so that that really scared us. And so we were we were actually already writing the book, but were just in early stages. And you know, it came out in twenty eighteen. Okay, So we started out with how we got to the title. So back in twenty fifteen, you know, I was working on this article with John on and off for about a year, and

we were really proud of how it came out. At the very last minute, my proposed title, which had always been the incredibly boring but more accurate to what my argument was arguing towards misery, which is really what I was saying, was essentially that we're teaching teaching young people the habits that will make the magine depressed. That's what I wanted the title to be, and at the last minute they decided to change it to the sexier Coddling of the American Mind. At the time, John was convinced.

I hated it. I was like, no, people are going to think we're saying kids today are spoiled, which is not at all what we're saying. We're saying this is entirely our fault. It's something much. And I also didn't like the connection to the sort of reference to Closing of the American Mind Vallein Bloom. Not that there's anything super wrong with the book Closing in the American Mind.

It was, you know, a book written by a Yale professor or about what he thought were problems on campus back in the late nineteen eighties, largely relating to things that could roughly be called PC but not exclusively. But it had no relationship to that book other than having you know, like a critique of higher education that was

about it. And so I ended up with this title that I you know, I'm like, great, everyone's going to just run with coddling as being our point that kids that they are too coddled, and the good news was overwhelmingly people didn't initially do that. They were they actually understood that we were saying something a lot more nuanced than kids are spoiled. We're saying that we're, you know,

teaching bad psychological habits. But when it came time for the book, I, uh, you know, when when I was talking to people about it, I was like, no, no, absolutely, no way. Now it's not gonna be called coddling the American mind. What we signed the contract under was the

title Disempowered. Again, uh, much closer to what I wanted to say, And I actually really liked the title Disempowered, because what I feel like we've done is we've taken incredibly bright, incredibly enthusiastic young people and told them, by the way you can't really handle your life on your own, by the way you are much more fragile than you think you are, By the way words can harm you, by the way you're not resilient, by the way you

can't do things on your own. By the way, we're not going to teach you life skills that make you feel like a competent, fully realized human being. So that's what I wanted to emphasize, is that is really this is something that's being done to them, and the publisher, you know, when we were a year into it, didn't really like it. So we started coming with other examples, you know, Misguided Minds was one we had for a while.

I didn't really love that one. I actually, you know, at one point in frustration, was like, how about this the Great American Psychout? And that was kind of like my joke title that I had in my head, but basically making the point that I feel like, when you talk yourself into into something negative, that's psyching yourself out.

And then at the last minute we were told that the publisher, you know, the distributors, are insisting that it be coddling in the American mind And so we went back, you know, we didn't really have a choice, and we went back and just explained all we mean by coddling is that sometimes efforts to help people, to protect them can actually harm them. That's it, That's all we mean by coddling. We don't mean kids are spoiled. We actually think they got a pretty rough, you know, raw deal

in a lot of different ways. So, yeah, not a fan of the title, but I always just urge people. It's like I know you might be critical of the title. Please read the book. We even made a video to this extent. I know, I love that video, and send me that link again and I'll put in the show notes. I'm glad that I can give you an opportunity to dispel some myths that probably been bugging you for for

a long time. You do choose to use to frame of this in terms of the fragility anti fragility framework, So I think one potential criticism of that could be and I'm sure that you've gotten people who read your book and are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, those snowflakes, like the ones that have serious mental illness right, like someone is like depression. Oh, they're just anti fragile and kind of using that framework as a way of not having

to have compassion for the suffering of a person. Now, when you get people saying that, so, what do you say to them? It's hard for anyone to read the book and attribute that to us. Generally, when I've had people try to who've actually read the book and try to say that to us, they will even couch it in terms of like, I know, you guys don't want to put it this way, but we think blah blah blah, you know, like we think that these guys are snowflakes

and liberal snowflakes. Yeah, and we just point out one we hate the term snowflakes, and two I'm saying it really is our fault. And three it's not just about politics that I think that some of the very same causes that you know are causing some of these what we believe at least contributing to this big spike in mental health. It wasn't subtle at all among young people.

Are things that are actually transpartisan that essentially that's you know, paranoid parenting is something that is something that for the kind of students who go to elite colleges, that's pretty

common whether you're right, left or center. And that's one of the six causal threads we talk about about why we think we saw such a dramatic disconnect between millennials, and what we would discover was what we were seeing for the first time in twenty thirteen twenty fourteen was a critical mass of people from Generation Z were born

nineteen ninety five, nineteen ninety six or later. And that you know, when you look at the at the different sort of personality and attitude pollings about any number of things. It's a pretty sharp discontinuity between millennials and a generation Z. And we didn't know that back in twenty fourteen, but wow, we learned so much writing the book, and really it became a detective story about what was so different and

it ended up being this incredibly rich topic. And so the conclusion we came to was that it was a confluence of what led to particular the situation on campus and also the situation of mental health was and as far as like the claim that gets challenged the most, and you know, I'd be happy to be disproved on this, but I would at the same time, you know, want something that could actually explain why the discontinuity was so sharp. Was the first thing we talk about is social media.

The next thing we talk about is political polarization. The next two are both parenting related, and those are paranoid parenting. Kate Julian wrote a cover story for The Atlantic a couple of months ago that really hit that even harder, which was talk more about that, but it was amazing piece. Then the one that surprised me the most that we ended up deciding we wanted a whole chapter devoted to

and that was free play. We were really surprised at how consistently with every every scholar we talked to we were hearing that unstructured free time plays lack of unstructured UH free time can play havoc on all sorts of outcomes for students, you know, whether it's mental health, or

sense of autonomy, creativity, all of these things. And realizing that since we were particularly talking about the kind of kids who would go to the elite colleges, you know, these are these poor poor things have been structured from six am to when when they go to bed at night, and that can really do damage to your idea of

your own your own locals of control. And then the last two, which are related to why so intense in particular colleges is UH hyper bureaucratization, concerned for liability, all of these kind of like cold hearted things that don't get enough attention but dominate my work at fire are you know, over regulations over your brocratizations, all of these things that you're suddenly paying seventy thousand dollars a year for that that are results of fear of liability and

mass and the explosion of administrators on campus. And then the final one, which is also the one that conservatives like to point to the most, is just changing ideas

of social justice. That's where you get to different ideas of intersectionality, where you know, essentially, if you look at everything as kind of like a battle between you and the and the oppressors, but you also add to it the idea that that all your identities intersect, that you end up with ever smaller and more and more isolated groups that feel sort of attacked on all sides. Now, we do say that intersectionality, the principle, the idea that

our identities intersect, absolutely true, no doubt about it. But but that doesn't mean that it has to turn into this kind of like war of all against all. Even if you come to that conclusion, we can you unpack that a little bit more. Well, you know, essentially, if you take intersectionality to its absolute in a way that it wasn't originally intended to have a meaning, If you take it to the level at which you know, all

your identities intersect, eventually you get back to individuality. I see, yeah, yeah, you know, and yeah, the most sacred part of who you are. Yeah, it is an intersection of identities, you know, with a large amount of part of that identity is personal and that that makes you idiosyncratically you And and this is actually something where I think that we've had

enough space and nuance for me to explain this. There is one way in which I like the term snowflake and that and that's this is that people actually are you need and people will say things like no, you're not unique, or no you're not gonna you know, you can argue that someone might not be special, but you can't argue that every individual is unique. It's funny because you said earlier you don't like snowflake. I was going to say, actually I like the word snowflake in a

different context, So yeah, I'm glad you said that. Well, that's really funny because actually I do like it as a positive thing, like the idea that you are individually unique. So intersectionality, you know, the intersection of identities can actually

be interpreted very positively. But like a lot of things, even if it's academically true, when it starts getting used as a way to argue a rhetorical tactic, and even if people aren't they're not thinking of it as a tactic, but when it becomes sort of like who a battle of who's more oppressed, kind of nobody wins. Yeah, so

your uniqueness is the conglomeration of all your identities. To me, that still doesn't feel quite right, because I'd like to think I'm more than just even my identities, Like I don't even have that many identities like I like, am I allowed to opt out? You know? You know how you like keep getting like email lists? Do you want to opt out of? Like am I do? I have to be on the identity train? Like am I allowed to just be a collaboration of like my interests, my value.

I mean, there's things other than identity, right is Danny the only thing we're allowed to be? And that's one of the reasons why, like I talk about it coming back to individuality is kind of like, you know, a big part of my identity clearly is I'm a comic book reader. A part of my identity is the street that I grew up on and the friends I grew up with, and my you know, first job and all that kind of stuff. I guess we're talking about racial

gender identities, which are the most prominent in discussions right now. Yeah, And and fair enough, someone could say, well, you know, I can't change having black skin, right like, you know, that's that's my day. And I would be respectful to that that point, But you know, I was just more making the point like, do I have to view everything throughout that lens when it comes to me understanding myself? Yeah?

And that was something that we talk about in the book, is different forms of identity politics and what they mean for political success and happiness and the thing that we talk about and it's something that's been observed a million times. We just chose our own name for it, which was common enemy group politics, like the idea of like who do we find who is the bad guy? And common humanity identity politics? How do we love that distinction? Thank you? How do we get to how do we figure out

what we have in common? And I think that just flat out the one that's been more successful, to say the least, is common humanity. I think about particularly here the gay rights movement. I'm actually having dinner this weekend with my good friend Jonathan Rausch and his husband Michael.

Jonathan was one of the early people really fighting for gay marriage early on and He talks about how what a big difference it made when people started towards and this was a movement that was particularly pushed towards late seventies, which has just come out of the closet. Let all these people who think they don't like gay people remind them that they're you know, sister, uncle, cousin, that person they really love, that professor they really loved, is gay,

and that it started a long process. But it makes a huge difference when you start seeing the common humanity of other people. Yeah. Absolutely, And you know a lot of these ideas are in are abstract principles, and I do, I do see the perspective of those who I mean, they're really living in really harsh circumstances. Maybe they're those who face discrimination on daily basis, who say, well, that's easier said than done. I'm there are people who have

such a thing as self defense, right. They didn't they didn't ask for it. They didn't they didn't ask to uh, you know, it's what came to them. And so yeah, I'm right there with you at these abstract principles. And then I also want to have compassion for those who have it a lot, a lot harder than I do on a daily basis. So well, that's one of the reason why I don't knock people for this stuff. I like that, Yeah, I like that. You don't do that,

Yeah I don't. I don't. You know, I think that you know people's pain and then and that they have it is you know, it is essential. It's important to

have compassion for even people you disagree with. But when it comes to you know, fundamental rights, ultimately, my my belief and one of my core beliefs, is that ultimately we'll all be better off if human rights are respected, and human rights include the right to free speech, the right to free thought, and that we also and this is one thing that I will say that I'm not a libertarian, but since I do civil liberty's law, I

have friends who are libertarians. And one thing that I do one concept that I have taken from libertarianism that I think is worth repeating for sure, and I just simply added naive to it, which is the concept of naive statism that essentially, you got to remember a lot of times when people are thinking about big ideas quote unquote solutions to problems, they are relying on an idea that we can create some kind of government apparatus will

fix all of these things. And the thing that I see, and I will critically say, because I mean, I'm on the left side of the spectrum. You know, I'm in a bubble of Actually my bubble is better than most people. I actually really do try to have friends across the spectrum.

But at the same time, you know, one argument that I felt like I was getting in all the time was just reminding people, you know that actual people are going to be running that program, right and that includes you know, Trump odin Republicans are going to be running

that program too. And that's the thing that I feel like when I would be when I was working for the A C. L You in San Francisco, I felt like I was constantly having this argument over and over again, where it was like, I know, you think those hate speech laws are going to be good. They're going to be but you know who's going to be in charge of them. Your greatest enemies are going to be in

charge of them. So there's a lot about there's a lot about civil liberties and law that that and that's one of the reasons why I think that there's still so much to be said for the for the Founders, for all their faults, is that it was a great service to us to both be optimistic about human potential and a not small amount cynical about human about human nature.

And I think that a lot of you know, separation of government, common law, common law, jurisprudence, a lot of the systems we have in place are and are and always have been to deal with stuff that we're just not all that good at. Yeah, And it just seems like this time in our history we're losing sight of a lot of those insights that they had many years ago. We're losing we're forgetting what human well we'll not forget. We're seeing I guess full force what human's nature is like,

but we're not seeing the potential as much. And that saddens me, you know, as a humanistic, optimistic guy. Ultimately, And and and the permit one moment of snark. I was going to say, you, you might be surprised to know this, Scott, but Congress is actually supposed to do things. Yeah, fair enough, Like and and sometimes when I when I look at the way government's running right now, it's just it's just like, Wow, that wasn't we we put so many checks and balances like in the way of that

and we're just not using them. Well, this this Trump guy dreamed some swamp so much that he's he's Trump and he's trumping everything. I always say, I worked for a nonpartisan nonprofit and but you know, the thing I wrote yesterday was talking about how Trump is suddenly talking about again not suddenly, he's talking about the flag burning amendment. You know, they actually know he put them in jail, put them in jail for a year if they Yeah, my favorite, do you develop a little bit of a

dark sense of humoring this stuff? My my favorite was when he was saying that they'd lose their citizenship if they if they burned a flag, And I'm like, huh, that's interesting, Like so like what would happened to me? Like suddenly I'm stay like, well what happens? Can you just be neutral citizenship? Is that? Does that exist? Exactly?

I'm sweet? Yeah, So I wrote I wrote about that yesterday in terms of the bedrock principle, also making the point it's like, be careful what you wish for, dude, Like the like the principle that undergirds the flag burning opinion which, by the way, you should like people should read it, Texas Johnson is a beautiful opinion and it's about the right to burn an American flag. And in it, you know, it says we just can't ban things because

just because they're offensive. And I was like, dude, you know who has the most to lose from that no longer being part of the law you Floyd Abrams actually wrote wrote something saying like, listen, he would have been arrested in other countries for some of the things you said during the campaign. It's like, no, you actually you want to keep this this element. They are good, this kind of it's a very logical and very fair argument.

I think you need to keep making over and over again because I think many of us are not aware of that, and we can we can all fall into our traps where we forget you know, that that things could change very quickly and suddenly what we're arguing for comes against us. Right. Oh yeah, and that's a very important point. Hey, I'm really appreciative of the time you've

spent on this show. Now, you have so many fans that when I put up at a call on Twitter, you know, anyone have questions for Greg looking on off, I got a million questions. Do you have an extra bonus ten to fifteen minutes to answer some Twitter questions? Or absolutely cool? Okay, so Amy Alcon I know Amy. Yeah, she's the advice guy, very fun of the universe. This book, by the way, her her book on a lot of like a lot of the things she builds her advice.

Her most recent advice book around which I think is nice manners for people who occasionally say fuck. I think it might be called what it is, but one of the one of the major sort of psychological premises it really hits home is embodied cognition, which is an interesting idea which I haven't given too much lot to. Absolutely, she's a badass, a woman for sure. So she said, talk to him about what a difference CBT has made for him and continues to make, and why he decided

to be open and coddling about his feeling suicidal. Greatly admire him for this. Also, what about him upbringing personality led him to be the champion of free speech on campus? Feel free to answer any all that or past well? Part one I think we answered to to a large degree. Part two, How I got so passionate about freedom of speech is you know, for lack of a better word, multiculturalism.

And actually, I think I didn't realize how powerful this one factoid about my life actually is because I usually talk about my father's Russian upbringing and my grandfather fighting fighting in the Bolshek Revolution, and his grandfather being a surf and you know, like we're surf stock. We were. My great great grandfather I lose track of the greats was, you know, bought his way to freedom in eighteen fifty eight,

eighteen fifty nine. You know, if he'd waited a couple of years, he would have gotten it for free, because these are Alexander the Second declared surfed him over. But we were actually we were killing it in Russia. We were something that would have later been called kulos because we were peasants who went from being serfs to being professors and judges and land owned very quickly, and I am proud of that. But then the bulsh Revolution broke out and we had to run because people like us

were shot in the back of the head. And so my grandfather uh took his family to Zagreb in Yugoslavia, where the where the poor whites went. The richer ones went to Paris like Nabakov and so my and then my father's dad died when he was six, and my father was was made it an orphan. He saw his brother his mother couldn't support him anymore. So he grew up all over Yugoslavia in just awful, awful conditions. He was born in nineteen twenty six. My father is much

older than most people. So long story I've always taken very seriously, like the Russia part of it and the

opposing totalitarianism. What I probably undervalue was how much having a father who grew up all over Yugoslavia made me think about things like the culture wars, because he grew up in a situation where there people who looking at them, they're the same freaking people, you know, like they look the same as each other, and they are at each other's throats to kill each other over perceived historical differences

between the two of them. So Yugoslavia is like one long story about like what a uh, you know, a world looks like where you know, it's just the war of all against all. So I definitely grew up with a strong suspicion of totalitarianism at a deep belief in American pluralism, and the actual neighborhood I grew up in

was kids. You know, there were a lot of other first generation kids and immigrant kids, and so multiculturalism like being in an environment where there was no single dominant ethnic group and a lot of the kids weren't even you know, like American multi generations. They were relatively new or or flat out new. Got you have to get used to the idea that if like Danny When's mother decided what we'd be allowed to say, there'd be all sorts of categories of things that we that we shouldn't say.

If my mother decided, like what we'd be allowed to say would be very British because my mom is you know, thinks of her self to British, you know, all the norms would be different. And in that situation, what makes sense free speech That essentially you actually you get some amount of patients. People don't necessarily know where we're coming from.

Immediately you hear people out. It is true occasionally people get punched that that did happen sometimes, but ultimately the you know, particularly the stark contrast, by the way between Russian culture, which has a which has a pretty biting, kind of like brutal honesty is a is something that's that's sort of stereotypically Russian and my mother's sort of exaggerated Irish Britishness where politeness was absolutely the most important thing in the world. And very early on I realized

you couldn't be both honest and polite. So I started with a real passion for free speech that came from being a first generation kid. And then I went and did journalism in high school and sorry, I did journalism in college. And when people come into your office and are like, you got to fire that columnist, and then you watch the gears turning because they don't know why you have to fire that columnist, yet they just know

they're mad and that person has to go. And so I just got more and more forgive the expression radicalized in the direction of free speech. And then finally the Communications Decency Act of nineteen ninety five came out. They were trying to ban quote unquote indecency on the Internet, which laughably unconstitutional, unbelievably unconstitutional, and I really dove into that, and that's why I applied to law school. I specialized in First Amendment. People thought I was nuts to put

all my eggs in that basket. I probably was. I was very lucky that there was a really plumb job as soon as like a year after I got out. But yeah, you know, it's one of those things where I hyper specialized in it. I took every class Stanford offered on constitutional law on First Amendment, and then when I ran out, I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty. We could have had a whole other podcast chat just about you at you like your life

and your family home. My gosh, you're an interesting cat. Oh thanks, I love them very much. I'm glad. Actually, that's one nice thing about COVID is I've I've gotten to see more of them. Good. Good. So Dan Dolmoar wants to know how how's he doing because I know you had a recent health scare. Yeah. So I had a pretty rough twenty nineteen. It started with us getting rear ended on the way home from seeing our family up in New England back down to DC. You know,

kids in the car. Thankfully, I had moments of being mildly skeptical of how aggressive you know, child seats are, thinking like maybe we're kind of going over the top and there's a less you know, intrusive way to do this. After getting hit, you know, in a rear ending accident that really hurt me and my wife, I'm never skeptical again. Like the kids were completely fine and we were pretty badly injured. My god, so he just kept on going.

My so we got head injuries. We were so out of it we didn't understand that we had head injuries. It took us, you know, talking to a doctor to be like, yeah, all the things you're describing that's making you not think clearly is because you got a head injury. And then my this wasn't a surprise, but it was still devastating. My wife's father died. I loved him very

much too, his amazing power of man. Like, you know, we went to the funeral and wake, you know, delirious from head injuries, and it just it was one thing after the other like that, and I thought I was in the clear. And then the summer of twenty nineteen, I find I have a very rare tumor in my jaw. I'm like, oh, you know, just get it out. It's like, actually we can't get it out without removing say twenty five percent like severing entirely like your jaw. And I

was like, you're kidding me. And what they wanted to do. And if I have one characteristic, it's that I'm a walker. I walk everywhere. I've made my entire staff get used to the idea that I that they're going to talk to me while I'm walking on the phone. They wanted to take my fibula, and take my entire fibula, and you could break my dignity, but you can't take you can't take my fibula. So I was horrified. I and

I looked for doctor after doctor or the doctor. I was trying to get in front of the guy that was considered to be the best guy in DC. But you know, and I pulled every string I possibly could, and finally he was the twelfth doctor I talked to, and he was the first one to be like, they're they're telling you something that's too aggressive. It's something designed

for metastatic cancers. This one generally is not metastatic, so you can actually cut the margins a little closer, and that they'd patched the difference with something called morphogenic pome protein, with the idea that the two sides of your jawul would heal together, which is miraculous. I mean, I know the technology has been around for some time, but it's still you know, it would tell your body to grow

new bone. And I spent you know, the surgery was was no picnic, and I had to have a titanium plate in my jaw, which I still have and I look a little funny. But since oh absolutely, and since I couldn't, I didn't well, I didn't want to go to get the follow ups during COVID. I didn't know for a good nine months if the surgery had been a success, and I was, you know, starting to kind of convince myself that that maybe it wasn't. Given you what I thought was swelling and all this kind of stuff.

And I found out last week that the surgery was a success. The two sides of my jaw had fused to get other due to that miraculous morphogenic bone protein. And so I've been feeling like a million bucks since then, because like the single biggest thing was because if I had to have more of that surgery, the thing I was told was it's gonna hurt a lot more. It's not gonna go as well because you've already messed with things in there and having that off of my mind.

And this is the kind of cant This is the kind of tumor that generally doesn't return. Like once you've gotten rid of it, I should be done with it. Knock on wood. Yeah, I'll knock on wood too. Yeah. Well cool, thanks for that update. I know a lot of people, a lot of people really care about you. So oh, thank you. Appreciate that update. I got actually surprisingly like warm fuzzies from Twitter a lot. Yeah, well you heard you? Are you said Jonathan beloved. You're pretty

beloved too, my man, So oh, don't forget that. Uh so our robson uh just asked him how he felt when he won the gold When I won the gold? Yeah, what did I win the golden? I was wondering that myself. Oh, I know what it is. I know what it is. That's right. I haven't heard this joke in a long time. Greg luganis. When I was a kid, the person who had the name that was closest to mine was the diver, the Olympic diver. Greg luganis so I Willing who won the gold medal in the Olympics. I did actually get

that affair amount. I actually got luky an Off an awful lot as a kid too, But yeah, I got Greg Luganis. I never really like, didn't hurt my feelings because I was like, oh thanks Olympian, cool metal. But it was a pretty bad butchering in my name. Oh, Evan, you said you also got Greg lukianof. Isn't that your an actual name luky Anoff? That that was what I would That's the way people would mispronounce my name and it would kind of well no, but in that case

it was It was honest. It was an honest mistake because if you look at the spelling of my name, what you're supposed to know My dad came over in the nineteen fifties when he was in his late twenties, and he went to University wisconsinant of Madison. It's very cue to hear with the Russian accident goal Badgers, but you're supposed to know that the I and the A together in that transliteration stands for that backwards are, which

is the Russian letter. Yeah. So I tried to get my family to change the spelling of our name to l u k y A N o V, which is much closer to how you actually said it, and you said my name very well. But they wouldn't they wouldn't change it. Okay, Well, well I'm going to end in this amazing podcast interview with with something positive, So right, Susan Groff asked, what might be some rays of hope you've seen since publishing the book? Please give us something.

I was hoping you weren't going to ask me that because I didn't want to, because right now I'm for us. I'm super duper pessimistic at the moment. Since writing the book, I mean, I at least have been pleased by the fact that overwhelmingly people have been charitable to it, even

if they disagreed with it. You know, they made good arguments and that's productive, you know, just the I did have one review written of it that was kind of blew me away because it was just like, this sounds like something this bad person would say, and that's like something that the Trump would have said, and like it was basically just this entire guilt by association, dark comparison, things like, Wow, you've made no subject of argument. You've just been like they might be like bad people, and

I'm like okay, but overwhelming. I feel the conversation has been very constructive. I will be honest, short term, I'm not super optimistic. Short term, I think, particularly the next six months politically have me scared, frankly half to death. I think that I'm seeing things that really scare me in the administration. You know, that makes it sound like it's that the are already like the election is going

to be contested on campuses. You know, I've seen this big uptick in you know, speech policing, and you know, you should check out some of the examples because they're they're you know, some of them are just ridiculous. But here's why I am hopeful about free speech. Free speech works really well. It's really good for telling you what problems you have, and particularly the ones you want to ignore.

So freedom of speech. My best hope in it is that the societies that are more open, that have more free speech, will always have an advantage over those that aren't. And I hope that people, even just out of their own self interest, will continue to defend this fundamentally important human right, even though so many forces conspire against it. Thank you, Greg for being such a voice of reason and compassion in this this I don't even know how to what adjective to use their time. I don't even

know what the rate word there is. It's crazy. Doesn't seem to quite capture what we're experiencing. But an a dull If that's true, that's true? Oh great, God bless you man, and thanks for being on the Psychology Podcast today. Thanks for Ami Scott. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com.

That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a reading and review of the podcast on iTunes and subscribe to the Psychology Podcast YouTube channel, as we're really trying to increase our viewership on YouTube. In fact, many of these episodes are in video format on YouTube, so you'll definitely want to check out that channel. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.