Live From the Comedy Cellar: Comedy, Free Speech, and Why the Last 10 Years of American Life Have Been So Uniquely Stupid with Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, and Rikki Schlott

looks super cool tonight. These are our special guests and the topic on the table today is a no big deal, very easy, simple. The topic it won't sort out tonight. Why are the last ten years I've been so fucked up? What is going on? I mean, is anyone not asking that question right now? Like, let's be honest, that is the question of the day in so many different ways. And we have such great perspectives on the table for this topic. So let me open it up and let

me just open up that broadway right now. And there's so many things that can fall into the umbrella. Do you think we just want to have any sort of opening statements on what you think might be happening before we get into the nitty gritty is this, But first I just want to say, because a lot of people

don't know, this is actually not a comedy act. Like, if you came here to see comedy, I'm sorry because so we're like, we're going to talk about the things we've been writing about and it's like really heavy and dark, but you came to laugh, So we'll try to make it funny. But there's only so much we can do well. If we can't make the dark funny, right, there's a great convenience said, if I didn't laugh, I would cry.

And I feel that that summarizes this ten years Gallows humored tonight here all right, Yeah, that's that's your opening. There are various topics to holnder that girl. I think a really big one is social media. You've all written and thought about this. Let's start with you, John, actually, because you wrote this fasting article for The Atlantic saying we're basically in the fall of Babylon right now? Is that right? Yeah, Babbel, Yeah, so does sound good though.

So actually, it all started very suddenly in early twenty twenty fourteen, when it seemed as though there was like a glitch in the matrix or a warp in the fabric of space time. And Greg picked it up first because he has his tentacles out in all kinds of campuses, so he was sort of just you know, he was like, weird stuff is happening. And I actually met Greg at

a party at Jerry Orstrom introduced us. So Jerry is over there, and I think Jerry introduced everybody here to everybody actually, but it was like something started going weird and I began to see it in you and Greg had seen it, and so that led to this collaboration of writing off this article in The Atlantic, the Coggning the American Mind, and we thought that it was just a campus thing, and so to get to your question, it was, you know, it was like the you know,

I guess the campuses were like the wuhan of the current of the current environment, and it came out. It came out, you know, on campuses, especially on the coasts in the Upper Midwest, and from there it's spread. So we were writing a book on this, the article in the book, and we were going to have a chapter at the end on when Cobblin goes to work, like what happens in office. We were beginning to hear twenty seventeen about that gen Z going into office about your generation,

because she's the exception. But we didn't have enough material. We just had anecdotes, so we closed the book down. I was thinking, I was so wish we had just made a chapter which put the chapter title, and we said, because yeah, that's right, So we should have just put it like literally a blank piece of paper and said, see our website. We'll fill this in in a year. But anyways, it's the weird just started there, but then it's spread out to the rest of society. What was

that weirdness? Good? What was how would you describe the awareness? Well, you know, in order to be really funny, it's good. It's important to talk about fifteen twenty one about like the Tudor dynasty and basically what I'm getting at it anyone, Yeah, yeah, I used to study free speech and censorship in the Tudor dynasty, and basically the printing press happened in the fourteen fifties and it started it started creating all these problems.

The which trials increased, There was lots of political unrest or elect religious blasphemy and heresy coming out of this awful machine. So in fifteen twenty one, Henry it said, I have to approve everything that comes out of the printing press from now on. I feel and at the time, if you would think of the printing press as being this infernal machine that ruined everything. One an awful time to be alive. And I feel like we're in fifteen twenty one right now that essentially we just we just

back then. They created an invention that doubled the number of people in the global conversation. It expanded it by millions. We just expanded through social media that the global conversation by billions. And of course it's going to be a crazy inarchical period. Like basically, I think there's no way out of this being a crazy, stupid time. We just have to figure out our way out so it doesn't

drive us all crazy and destroy our countries. You know, Ricky, you are our residence gen Zer I am, and you've actually had an interesting story backstory about this right with your experience in on you and can talk a little bit about you know, you're in the front lines. I was very much eyewitnessed to everything that they were talking

about in the Coddling of the American Minds. And I read it my freshman year and I recognized, like all these symptoms, these things going awry in my generation that I couldn't quite grasp what was going on. The last ten years that have been uniquely stupid have been like half my life at this point. So I at the book and it just diagnosed like the root issues of like medicalizing speech and feeling that I'm unsafe because you say something that I don't agree with, and you know,

I was. I saw all the consequences of that as an NYU student. You know, freshman year, they give you your idea. On the back of the idea is nine one one. They can't the safety number, and then the bias responds hotline and cause you're offended, and so you know that that really says a lot. That's a real thing. It's a real thing. What happens when you call them were like offend, like this train, so it goes to its a. It's a hot line. You were flying to

the administrators. They you wouldn't know better than eyes. I was there for the birth of the VRTs. Basically, like universities tried to pass speech codes in the eighties and they all got shot down in court, but they kept on building speech codes anyway that were very similar. But as they started getting shot down on court, they were kind of like, well, there's got to be another way

to sort of like police student speech son't offend. And the first time I saw this presented, it was a program I think at Cornell or Syracuse, and they decided to police the dry erase boards on a floor and they did like a whole experiment, and guess what. When students now knew that adults were policing the floor, they wrote a lot more offensive stuff on each other's board, and there was a story about them seeing a and

this they reported this with great seriousness. They found on an Asian student's door someone had written I like Rice. So they did what anyone would do. They called the police, and the police show up, and the students kind of like I wrote to that was it. And it was really it was really funny because like they were there was there was such a loss to explain what happened, and they were kind of like, well, she was trying to tell people something about herself. It's like, no, she

was making a fucking joke. People Wow called the police, And this happens a lot. That's intense. John, I read about to say, you called the hotline. So I've actually called it several times because I'm a professor at n YU and I used to make jokes in my classes and I stopped doing that in twenty I stopped doing that in twenty fifteen after all the craziness started. But I realized, you know what, you can't know who you've offended because it's not it's nothing with intent, it's nothing

with ejectic content. It's all subjective. So you have no idea how many people you've offended. And so I'm trying to find out do I have a record, like because if I know that, if I know that I've got stetten complaints, you know, then I'll, you know, I guess, go on the war path and try to, you know,

make fun of NYU need more or something. But but like, so what I need to know is are they really keeping tabs on us and keeping records or is it just like they created it because there's student pressure and now they're not really running it even still, it shouldn't be there. So I've called them, I've emailed them, those are two ways, because I want to find out, like, but they won't return my call, so I it's on my list of things to do to pretend that I'm

filing a real complaint. And you got just to get them to call me. I don't you. But the point, but the point is that the world is very, very different when there's a sort of damage is over your head. In fact, I'm just listening to a podcast right now by Andrew Andrew Huberman on play, and it's play is almost defined as low stakes contingency testing. You try things out, you get some feedback, and if it's negative, then you

don't do that again. But instead, what if in play, you know, if you make a mistake, you get a finger cut off, you only have ten chances and then you're done. So you wouldn't play very much if that was the case. And that's what's happened because some people don't have to. Hey, but there you go. That's the sort of thing that picks you up, like you don't you know if you say you know, like I was blind to that thought. Oh I can't say mind, you know.

So it's just very difficult to talk orteague when you have to watch every I want to ask you, Ricky. So, Ricky and I are working on a on a book called Canceling of the American Mind because I'm very creative

with my titles, and it's about cancel culture. But I remember, you know, we have the amazing interns at Fire and they were they were still like, you know, optimistic, and then I asked them what it was like growing up with social media in high school and they all suddenly look terribly grave, and I realized, like how much social media has undermined interpersonal trust because they could turn you

into the crowd at any time. You could say something when you're drunk, when you're fifteen, suddenly your life is ruined. So in terms of like what the environment was like, what was it like being in high school during this time, Yeah, it was pretty tough. I mean, teenagers dealing with the twenty sixteen election. I was probably a sophomore in high

school at that point in time. I would say that that was my first little dabbling into what cancel culture looked like and people turning against each other in a life chapter where you know, with social media, you get plugged in prematurely into the world's issues, but you should be worrying about like acme and if you have a crush on and you know, you have these kids who are children that are foist into this like political discourse too young, when they're just parroting what their parents say

because they haven't really formed an idea of their own. And so it was definitely really tense. There was a lot of interpersonal strife. I feel fortunate that I'm an older member of gen Z that wasn't really like when I was twelve, I wasn't on Twitter, thank god. Oh wow, But when did you give Instagram? What'd you want Instagram? I was like eleven or twelve, I think, but very early. But that was in the early days of Instagram, before

it turned into the peace that it is now. I would say, like, you know, it's posting pictures of the sunset and like what I had for lunch, and you know, today it's like here I am doing this and that. And I think that for younger girls, even just a few years younger than me, I'm more concerned for them than for myself. Yeh was like, actually add something that we didn't know when we wrote The Coddling, which is that so I'm writing a great and I'm both writing

books falling up on this. The collling was mostly about the effects of overprotection creating a generation. You know, colleague, just means protection, doesn't mean spoilt, doesn't mean lazy. It just means over protected and therefore failing to develop anti fragility. And we had one chain after an anxiety. We had a couple of paragraphs on social media because in twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, the data wasn't clear that social media

is harmful. They were correlational studies showing small correlations, and so after wrote the book, we were challenged by various researchers. So I really got into this along with Jane twenty digging into, like what are all the studies from I've found is that if you look at all screen time for all kids, what you find is very small correlations. When you zoom in on social media for girls, they

get much much larger. And what I've learned recently is when you zoom in on social media for girls between eleven and thirteen, it's much much larger. The point is girls go through puberty first around eleven to thirteen. That's the age where they're most damaged by this, and even if you're just posting for you doing something. Everyone's comparing themselves to everyone else, and we've got that sort of a theme in our brains. It's called the what's the sociometer?

It measures how am I doing? How am I doing? And if you see everyone else is one of those parties, they are doing more than you. That's not the average, that's their best. So anyway, all I'm saying is the thing we didn't know is that it's eleven to thirteen for girls, is the is the most important period to protect. We've got to get this stuff out of middle school. We really have to have a national movement to protect middle schoolers and let them play. They should just be

playing and talking about appning and crushes or whatever. So so, yeah, that's a big piece of the puzzle as to why, as to why the students coming in in twenty fourteen, twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen were the first ones with this new attitude. That's what Greg noticed first. How many people in the crowd have actually read kind of the American line. Okay, I remember if we had to explain what I can say anything, But you have a lot of fans here.

Something that really strokes me, John, And what you've written is you you trace some of this to twenty eleven, when the invention of the like and share buttons, and I think that's a big part of the story here. Can you tind of talk all about that. It's a good thing to fill in. We sort of you know, you ask you why interview because we started off like,

why have the last ten years been so stupid? And so so the simplistic narrative of progress is actually so, you know, let's well a bit like what Greg started with, not that you're simplistic, but just like the printing press, connective could be double and then you know, if the Internet increased, like, okay, increasing connectivity is generally good thing,

but it has some bad effects. Sure, that's the storm of progress, okay, but there's a twist to it, which I think is really what made it so so nasty. So most of us here in the room can remember when you first encountered a web browser or social media or an iPhone or Uber. I mean, the technology was magical,

it was it was incredible, godlike technology. And so this was the period of techno deemocratic optimism from the fall of the billing wall through the nineties with the Internet and even then the smartphone and even early social media, and we fought in twenty eleven like, wow, this is going to be democracy here on in, you know, liberal democracy. One. Okay, the turning point turns out comes in two thousand and nine when Facebook adds the light button Twitter as the

retweet button, Facebook copies with the share button. Suddenly it's not just hey, let me connect to you and let's talk. That was what we used to call these things social networking system, social networking sites to connect people. That's good.

But after these innovations, they became it became a competition to get stuff out, to get more likes and more shares, and putting in the the retweet button makes everything go hyper viral, if you remember from COVID days, which I guess maybe some people think we're still in all though very few people here are wearing masks, so I suppose this is mostly libertarian craft or acts I heard. But when things call hyper viral, that's when it changes and we all are in danger all the time of someone

saying something about us there's no bottom. That's when it's no longer playful. Add to this, Add to this, the introduction of threaded comments. It's called in twenty thirteen, which is it used to be. If Barack Obama posts something and somebody with seven followers posts some terrible thing about him on the page, that's it. It's a stupid thing in a stream of ten thousand comments. But what Facebook said is, hey, what if we crank up engagement by

letting people fight in the comments? And so now stupid person with three followers is visible by everyone, and other people say you're a racist, you're a moron, and then other people know and before you know what, it's everyone fighting everyone. It's like those westerns where suddenly everyone's crashing a chair and everyone's head. That's so it's twenty to twenty thirteen is when is when the platform changes. And that's why you saw those first. It was like it

was like a glitch in the matrix. Yeah, really great point, And I also think it's I could spend the whole I'd be like, great boy, Jonathan, because I really do like a lot of the points you make, and generally, and you you made a really good point that people really see it as a problem of tribalism, because you know, a lot of people will just jump to that and say, well, we're living in such a tribal age, you actually see it more as a divisiveness. I think it's a really

important to station to make sure. So you know, a lot of my work, especially in my book to Righteous Mind, was on how we evolved to be tribal and that's how humans live for millions of years, and that explains a lot about our religiosity and about our politics and about sports. So that's what I was thinking, you know, all long, it's about tribalism and us versus them and polarization, and that started going up because of cable TV. Cable

tv really did a lot to enhance tribalism. What was new with social media was, yes, it does enhance tribalism. It certainly makes it easier type of sense of us versus them. What social media did which Fox News and MSNBS never did, was it fragments everything. It breaks apart everything so that everyone's fighting with everyone, even on the same team, and there's no possibility of a shared story, even on the left or on the right, there's no

possibility of a whyd shared story. So social media so to have a large, secular, diverse democracy, is sort of like a thing that should never exist. It should not be stable, but we did it and it was stable for a while. If you get the preme is exactly right. And what I've been trying to argue recently is social media after two thousand and nine, it's like we took

those parameters and we changed them. We're now so far out of the bounce of sustainability that I don't think we're going to make it unless we can get back into sustainabley. I don't know where the Overton window is right now. You know, it's very people away with that phrase, but you know, the window of acceptability in a society. Now, I feel like, I don't know. Does anyone know where the Overton windows right now? Like, raise your hand and

let us know, because I don't. You know, it seems like everything is all the rules are out the window of decorum of what we would think, you know, even in like what a president could do. Right. I don't want to get political, but it's just fascinating, you know, the Overton that's a great point, the overturn window. It was about like it's like, you know what the over window ships. But if what I'm saying is true about the fragmentation, then it's not overturned window. It's just a

thousand shards of broken glass. And if you're not oh wow, good metaphor wow it's from it's from Martin Gury. I just took it from Martin Gurry, who wrote Resulted the great book. Yeah, I've been calling it the Overton people for a little bit because it's just so easy to get to get in trouble. And meanwhile, one thing I do want to focus on is talk a little bit about what me and Ricky are working on the next book. I actually wasn't a big fan of the term cancel culture,

but then we did our studies on it. We have a great research department at fire Now. We got Sean Stevens in the audience, and what we said we found was that a black, white, Democrat, Republican everybody's terrified of cancel culture. Everybody knows the term. So if we didn't use that term, we'd be leaving most Americans out of the discussion and trying to make I don't know, like Jason Stanley at Yale happy, which well, you'll never accomplish.

But one of the wain things about the book that we're trying to convey is the numbers are kind of astounding that essentially we're getting close to, you know, nine hundred attempts to get professors fire with you know, about more than two hundred of them actually getting fired or forced a step down. Many more than that actually sanctioned some way are actually censored in a situation where there's

very low viewpoint diversity among professors. In the first place, I went on Doctor phil which which is very surreal, and you know, I pointed out that that the best research shows that during McCarthyism there were either there were about one hundred, two hundred and thirty professors who were fired from nineteen forty seven to nineteen fifty seven for being communists. We're way past that number now. And I got called out in like media matters, being like that

can't possibly be true. It's like, no, Actually, the numbers that they are literally greater. Yeah. I think on the topic of cancel culture, one thing that's often overlooked as the adults and never kind of discuss the issue is what it's like coming up in that age and being true yeah, and being a teenager and you're supposed to fuck up and fumble and do the stupid things and make the mistakes and not have that be in the permanent record, and have grace from your friends and have

compassion from the people around you. And unfortunately, there's a whole age of people who are growing up self censoring.

That's just all I've ever known, and I think that for even just people a few years younger than me, I've seen it even worse than I. Hear horror stories from parents to their middle schoolers are caught up in that, and it's hard to even imagine, well, Rickie, tell us about about political identities or political conflicts as you're growing up, because I read recently that sort of consciousness of politics and opinions about it and getting active, and it used

to be something that you know, juniors and two years in high school did, or there was some age at which kids begin to do it, and now it's pushing down to eleven or twelve, That's what I read. Did you see that and were you were you a political minority or were you you know, was there a majority? Tell us about that. Yeah, I would say that definitely started around like freshman year of high school for me, which felt a little premature. I wasn't super politically involved.

I was always more right leaning, and so a little bit of an outside around my campus, which kind of made me feel like an underdog, which is something that I shook ultimately. But I'm sure that there are a lot of young people who feel the same and are supposed to identify with a group or a tribe. I

think before it's even healthy. I mean my politics, I've been writing for two years now and they've changed considerably, and like, I look back and there's some things that I'm like, I mean, I don't agree with that anymore, and I've changed and involved as a person, and so it's a little unfortunate to see people who are like fourteen thirteen dedicating themselves to a path and a tribe and going down echo chambers on social media, and so

I think it's it's really something that's concerning to me. I have a causal question because I'm wondering how much of this is Do you think it's causing the mental health crisis we're seeing among young people right now? I mean, I'm a professor. I see it firsthand. I see the very high levels of anxiety among my students, the high waves of stress and I have noticed a significant increase since I've been teaching fifteen twenty years. I can see

it very clearly. Do you think some of this as calls are related to what we're seeing about the high anxiety leles? Yeah, yeah, well yeah, I'll take it because it's exactly what my next book is on. After we published The Condlin, I started collecting all of the studies

I could, and the story's becoming very very clear. When you graph out all the lines of rates of mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, they're all pretty stable in the early two in the early two thousands, and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, in twenty twelve or twenty thirteen, they start going up, way up, And there's all kinds of revealing that. So one thing is it's

the exact same thing in Canada and the UK. And so people say, you know, oh, what was caused by the financial crisis, And I will know because then it would have started earlier and it would have gone down as the economy improved, and then Canada they didn't even have it anyway, So it's so it's not caused by those things. But here's another really important fact that it's only it only became clear a year ago the first publication.

The lines first go up for girls on the left, and they go up the furthest So girls on the left, really they were like the canaries in the coal mine about public Yes, girls right. So there are very few studies of teenagers that asked for their politics. Day says yeah, But there are two data sets that did, and so one was the NSDU, the National Survey on Drug Use

in Health. They actually did, and they find that the liberal girls go up first, followed by conservative girls and liberal boys followed them by conservative boys, and the liberal girls look the most. And one possible reason is tumblr. Tumblr. Tumblr brought people together, not by the social graph of who you know, but it's a sort of a fan based on what you follow us. You'd get social justice Tumblr,

which is the most perfect. It's like, you know how they achieved like nuclear fusion recently, so it's like imagine, it's like imagine that sort of the three great on truths of our book. So our book is based on the three worst ideas ever, which are what doesn't kill you makes you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings, and life is a battle between good people and evil people. So you take those three beliefs, you'll be miserable if

you believe. So you put girls on Tumblr and they get that three like three laser beams focusing in on them. So I'm sorry to make light of it, but I you know, but so, yes, we actually know from a lot of things, not just the correlationships, but from experiment, it is causal. It's going on social media, especially for girls,

especially when they're in middle school. It makes them depressed and anxious, and we don't have this permanent Yeah, I had to say from my anecdotal experience, there's a perfect causlength between my friends who were on Tumblr when they were tweens and the people who ended up struggling with their mental health. Right, almost perfect. It's one of the things that the gobling American mind has succeeded beyond our

wildness dreams. We thought we were just writing something that was common sense, and we're really proud of the fact that it's been influential and it's retrust people. But it is frustrating that it feels like we didn't actually we're we're not taking serious stuff for the major one of the major premises, which is that we're teaching young people

the mental habits of anxious and depressed people. So you should not be surprised that they're anxious to depressed and adults are doing this, and in a lot of cases, they're doing it because they want to motivate them to positive action, which is kind of cruel when you think about it. So I kind of wish even though people are reading the book, I wish they'd actually take the weeks staff actually disempowering. I actually wanted to call the

book disempowered. We're telling these bright people that they are fragile, that they're easily harmed, that they uh and that essentially they're living in a social situation that is hopeless. You know, yes, feel feral cause I'm want to tell you what I when I struggle with this is where is the line for caddling? I find myself alterating between forty thousand different states during the course of my professor class. You know. Now, but let's just focus on two right now. The two.

It is a lot, but the two main ones. I feel like I I go, I feel immedic compassion. Right. If I have a student called my office hour, they say, sorry, I haven't been able to handle any of the papers

all semester. I've been depressed. Right. My immediate is like, oh, you like that sucks, right, and I want to be there for them, and then you know, that sort of instinct kicks in, and then you know, and then and then it gets to a point where sometimes the students like, oh, sorry, I didn't do anything, Sorr, I haven't done anything semester because there's a point where I'm like, I'm starting to feel like I need to be a little tough hole if you're I guess my question is where is the

caddling line? Because I don't want to Coddling almost feels sometimes like it's diminishing the reality of someone. And I know that's why I want to bring up this question because for me, I feel like I struggle to be like I genuine compassionate, but also think some of them I've really now adaptive thinking patterns I want to help them with as well. You know, I have a five and a seven year old, and they're the best thing

I ever did in my life. And it's just I was so scared of having kids, and I had no idea it was going to be this fucking awesome, But the but I'm trying to I learned so much. I mean, my son Maxwell was actually born while we were writing the book, and you know, it completely inferred my life towards the end of the book. But what I try to live, what we what we preach, and I want to give an example of how I think about it

or how how I actually try to live it. And it doesn't sound really as pernicious as the name coddling. So my when my sons are watching something scary on tea be and they tell me that they want to change the channel that they want to watch. And I'm not talking I'm not talking about like like slasher films. I'm talking about I'm talking about cartoons. And I'm like, listen, here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna sit next to you and we're gonna watch this all the way to

the end. Because and then when they get to the end, I ask them, was that as scary as you thought it was going to be? And the answer is always absolutely not. And then I just try to emphasize a lot of times pain in life is created by the avoidance of pain, but essentially the thing that you're scared of is going to become the big scary bear, and you gotta learn to face it. Otherwise we're disempowering you.

So I mean, that's that's that's the one thing that I and I would completely I completely endorse, endorse that. But that's but you can do. You get to choose what you do with your child. Yeah, Now, the problem that the situation professors are in and actually just just so in this room, how many of you are teachers, are educators in some way raise your hand high bunch, Okay, And how many of you are managers or supervisors who have gen Z employees. Okay, that's the first person I've

ever heard a claud for that. I teach you, know, I teach you in a business school. And and people are really having a lot of trouble incorporating gyms even having a lot of difficulty. So so here's here's why, here's why they answer your question is so difficult because each of us on our own might have an idea what to do, but we can't stick our next up

unless we have backing from above. So what we have to do is you have to have you have to have the whole organization, with the whole university or the whole company have a sort of a common set of understandings. And so that's why we put actually chapter one of the Coddling online if you go to the Coddling dot com right there on the front page in front of linked chapter one, which explains anti fragility, and if you understand that idea that what doesn't kill you actually makes

you stronger, with some limitations that we'll cover that. Yeah, not always. You know, sometimes taking risks makes you fal and it doesn't think he's stronger. But we're not talking

about physical risks here, we're talking about emotional risks. Anyway, My point is it's almost impossible to dificult for any one person to solve this themselves, because if you give tough love, they could report you and or you know, so none of you, we all make the same calculation of it's just not worth it and I have so much other stuff to do it so so so it's crucial this this problem cannot be solved individuals. It has

to be solved collectively by groups. So of course what we recommend is that you buy copies of the college everyone in your university. But short of that, just send them the link to the chapter get the discussion going because what I what I you know, what I tell managers is and what I tell gen Z students is if students like, go to your manager and say, you know what, I really want to be excellent in this job.

I really want to grow, so please tell me what I'm doing wrong, give me feedback, because managers are afraid to give feedback to their gen Z employees. And I've heard some say especially to the women, which is terrible because that means the women aren't going to grow as fast as the men. So you have to have a common understanding of anti fragility, and then you have to have a two way for about strength and growth, and

in that way you can create compets of rationality in institutions. Yeah, And I would say in terms of my generations, probably the flattering attribute in the workplace is the fact that we jumped at HR and we're always ready to report.

And I think that's rooted in having always had parents watching us when we're playing together and the retattle or having a biased report hotline when we go to college and have someone to tattle, And so we're always externalizing these interpersonal conflicts and looking for somebody else or a third party or a figure of authority to adjudicate things for us. But in a corporate workplace, that that's for you as too, people to figure out what. Unfortunately, managers

are being put in that position by young people. And that's what you just said. That's the very definition of what's called moral dependency. Moral dependency is when you don't solve moral conflicts on your own, you learn to appeal for someone else to punish him. And that's what makes it difficult to work with. Are you all worried about all the mentality? That's all I was concerned about. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you see play out on social media? How you see your

entire lives be ruined? Do you? Yeah? Well, I mean that's what the you know, the book canisling in the American mind. It is ultimately about well I passed you softball? And what's been happening on campus? I mean, I've worked working on campus. In two thousand of one, I was the weird lawyer who specialized in first ament law. I worked at the ACLU of Northern California, you know, studied tudor nasty censorship like this is why why I was put on this earth, even though I'm in atheist, so

I feel like that's my mission in life. Two thousand and one, I already I was very surprised at how easy it was to get in trouble on a college campus, and how much worse things have gotten since twenty fourteen, and particularly in twenty twenty scares the shit out of me, like genuinely. And what what scares me even more is looking at a playing field where you've got people claiming the like free speech, like eat eat of musk and

on making it look great. And then at the same time there's been this sort of general way I call it the the slow motion train wreck that I could see it when I was at the a c l U in ninety nine, that there was an attempt, a deliberate attempt by some thinkers to switch the political balance of free speech, which was a core liberal idea, to be actually be what the bad guys say, and that's

actually really taken root. Now. On the other side, there used to be more libertarian influences in the Republican Party. Now with people like Sohar Marbani and Adrian Romule, you're having like a real turning against freedom of speech from both sides. So we're a little freaked out. Yeah yeah, I think there that table there, like you, I want to talk about comedy right now? Can we shift it to comedy? I want to be grave you. Greg, you were an executive producer of a awesome documentary I loved

it called can You Take a Joke? Along with right Gnome Dorman, who we want to get a huge shot out his own the university. But well, this documentary and I love this idea. You know where a lot of comedians don't feel comfortable going on college campuses right now? Yeah, they and and a lot of professors don't feel college campuses right now as well. What's a common between these two things? Well, we the problems with Can't We Take a Joke? Actually, raise your hand if you've actually seen

Can't We Take a Joke? It's really it's on Netflix, right. I'm still really proud of it. And this actually this came directly out of the comedy celling. This was inspired by non Norman. My first book was called Unlearning Liberty, warning about like we're teaching young people bad habits for living in a free society. Kind of panned out, which came up ten years ago, but nobody listened to me.

So we did it. So I did a podcast here and Lee camp who kept on emphasizing he was the most far left person on the panel, actually set towards the end of the of the podcast, I don't like playing campuses anymore, or because he can't use your good material. And I was like, even like the soap professed like far the left person doesn't want to play them anymore. So we started doing this little projects basically making the argument that Lenny Bruce would not survive five minutes on

the modern college campus. And we made this documentary. I'm super proud of it. The only problem is it came out in twenty fifteen. We didn't even have a word for cancel culture. We got Adam Croll in it, we got Penn Gelette and if Gilbert Godfrey rest his soul again, I'm an atheist, feel like religious imagery. Gilbert Godfrey completely kills it in this thing. But the only problem was we just came out with it too soon. So we're actually thinking about doing a follow up. Can't we take

a joke too or something like that. And I can add about comedy because so when I planned to graduate school. I actually thought that I was going to study humor because when I didn't know what I was gonna do with my life, I briefly thought that I might be either a comedian or a comedy writer. But I don't know that. But but it was just it was just like a few months and then I really don't. I don't think that's to do it. So I think that is said, you know, those those who can't tell jokes

study jokes. I want to go to graduate school and get a PhD in humor. I didn't respect a spec script for friends how to do did? We didn't tell it? So we both ended up in the right line of work. But you know, but I learned a little bit about about the psychology of humor and uh Freud. Uh. You know. Freud wrote a book, A Joke's Unconscious, and this is one of his most readable and sort of reasonable books. And he makes the point that that any really funny

joke has either sex or aggression. So there are jokes that have no sex or aggression. I'll tell you one. What did the hot dog vendor say to the Buddha? He said, make me one with everything. I think, okay, but notice the reaction, nobody really laughed, right, It's like plug but right. So this is Bride's point that you can have clever jokes, but to get real laughter, to get a real like, it has to have sex or

aggression in it, he said. And so and that's like part of normal society, and normal people have conflicts, and normal people and normal children tease each other, especially boys have to tease each other. So humor is woven. It has huge numbers of social functions. It's an essential part of society. But what happened the day that someone decreed that it's impact not intent, that it doesn't matter what you mean. It doesn't matter if it's a joke. If a member of these seven groups was harmed by it,

then it's a prosecutor build offense. Even though the vice response team you have to say, you apologize for the pain, the pain that you've caused. That's the formulas, and now is formula I apologize for the pain I cause. And so what happens when humor is now subject to anyone taking offense means there's only one stable position. If you think about this is like a complex Society's like a complex dynamical system with only a couple of stable equilibria.

Ac should s there too, They're only two stable e bulibria. One is complete humorlessness. How about no jokes ever? And that's what universe is a into. There used to be jokes and confidences. It used to be academically playful. It's to be fun to be a professor. Playfulness is so rich for actually good ideas. You know, we've also what I think is really interesting. I feel like there's a deep human instinct and what I felt like was happening partially in social media is like, Okay, who am I

allowed to hate? Because it's very aggression that you're talking about. I feel like, yeah, it's everywhere that essentially we figured out a way to sort of figure out ways to demonize each other in a way that is actually briefly satisfying but destroys lives that gets you no closer to the truth. And that's kind of what I was getting out with the fifteen twenty one thing. The pretty press eventually actually have incredible benefits, but we're definitely not there yet.

You know, something to align the comedian said in that documentary is he said the comedian's purpose is to find the line and to intentionally go over it. It feels like that's the last bastion in society where we can do that, right, Because everyone's trying to find the line and then call them all on the phone. We'll throw them the line and then call them all as opposed to their profession is to find the line and see how they can go over in a way that makes

people laugh. Maybe that's all we have left in society these comedians. Yeah, I say, it's it's not that everyone's trying to call. It's that five percent or three percent are and the rest of us, the middle eighty percent of the country or whatever you want say, the middle eight percent of the country is really quite reasonable. This is a really important rule. Wherever you go, almost to

everybody's reasonable. But what's changed is that is that with social media creating this viral dynamic, it's all about the change in dynamics. After Sean Stevens and I wrote a series of bit of articles at Heterox Academy on the new dynamic that social media may possible. So don't lose your faith in humanity. Just just be upset about the crazy system that humans are now in that makes us

have to live more humorless lives. Yeah, on that note, in terms of not losing your faith in gen Z as well, I think our squeakiest reels are ridiculously squeaky. But if you look at the percent of people across the con generations and their opinions on cancel culture, overwhelmingly the most negative opinion on cancel culture is gen Z because they came of age in it, and they just have the tyranny of the minority that is so loud.

But there's so many of us who are looking around and seeing their friends dropping like pies and know that there's something wrong about this that you probably get a lot greg being part of fire in this organization that's an advocate of free speech. Is the line between free speech and hate speech. I've been willing to discuss this with you for a while. Where do we have clear ideas where that line is anymore? Yeah, well, we get

this a lot. And hate speech is one of those things that really can't be defined without subjectivity, and it's the bedrock principle. And a lot of times people point out, like in Europe they have hate speech laws and they think our law is so different. The primary difference is simply this partially because we are a generally genuinely pluralistic society. We have people with lots of different ways of talk,

lots of lots of different beliefs. The bedrock principle and First Amendment law is you can't ban something simply because it's offensive. And it's kind of funny. I read this book Stanley Fish. It is this longtime critic of the First Amendment, long time He actually wrote a book called There's No such thing as Free Speech and It's a

good thing too. And I read it and it's kind of like, Okay, you're actually pointing out that there are some exceptions to the First Amendment, and therefore it's all arbitrary, is what he jumps to, which is just a sleep point of view. Even Stanley Fish, it's like, you can't

actually define hate speech. It's too subjective. And I have to say on campus hate speech was a concept that was originally introduced in about the nineteen seventies, became popular enough in the nineteen eighties that universities introduced speech codes. Those speech codes got defeated in court. They became racial and sexual harassment policies, and they are abused all the time.

I mean, like it's completely nuts, like how often people get in trouble this, But to tell you how bad the free speech situation is the moment past two weeks there was an event you see, Davis that was actually trying to show that move that movie by Matt Walsh, you know, like, you know, offensive to some people, absolutely, but students actually showed up with bags of ship and started started throwing them movie. There's a different what's just

in students who are host hosting students Yeah, fellow students. Yeah, but that's not hate speech. What's that? What I'm saying is like talking about how bad the situation has gotten for free speech on canvas, and my overall take on a lot of like the thing that the philosophical part that's left out of the overly academic way of looking at freedom of speech is very simple. It's always valuable to know what people really think, full stop, and it's

especially true when they think challenging difficult things. We are living in a fantasy if we think we're not better off knowing someone raising their hand tells me I'm a Nazi. I'm like, oh, thank god, I know that I'm not going to be friends with you. Yes, microphone here, I compley agree, I'm gonna do a yes and as they do. But you know what about it doesn't mean we asta to amplify the assholes, you know, like I'm not I

agree everything you just said. But once we start normalizing, you know, with like you know, like Kanye West going and all these things being like fuck Jews right like, and it's like, okay, well, you know, can we stop amblifying that? You know, it's like and I'm not saying like, no free speech. I'm not saying like everyone shut down the microphone. But I do think there's some things like decorum,

certain things in society, some ideas. So here's the I think the one place where I'll disagree with Greg And it's kind of dangerous here with all these people from fire and all my but I actually think free speech is not the crucial idea on campus. That is what I what I so, what I think we need to do is for each institution look at what what is its tilos, what is its purpose? What is its function?

And when you have that clear, then you say what are the proper norms around speech that would help it meanings to those So I thank god I live in a country where we have the First Amendment, and so we're talking about what the government can do. I'm totally with you, But the arguments on campus about free speech and the First Amendment I think don't quite hit the mark,

because I think what we need is free inquiry. We have to have the ability to people to say what they think and for people to feel confident questioning it. But here intent is actually important because if a student is challenging something with the intent of challenging them of whatever they say should be allowed. But if someone but in this modern environment allows for trolling, it allows for

all sorts of things. And so you know, if ile Anopolis wants to come control, I mean, I think students should go and I think he actually is an interesting person to listen to. But should a person be able to do that in class? Should there be trolling in class? Like? No, so I even misunderstanding, but I think that the First Amendment is not exactly what we need to be talking

about on campus. Oh no, and it's not. But this is a disagreement with Robert Post, who's a scholar at Yale, with Stanley Fish, is that they just try to make that there's like this free speech thing, and then there's like freedom of inquiry over here, and I think that's just wrong. I think free speech is the big, big circle that includes things like academic freedom that has somewhat different rules. Jonathan Roush wrote this incredible book called Kindly Inquisitors.

It talks about liberal science, and that's actually a smaller sort of circle like within freedom of speech. But there's this idea that kind of like free speech First Amendment can't actually cope with what's going on on campus. Meanwhile, if you look at the case law, they actually make these distinctions every day quite well. Nobody's arguing that someone can stand up in class and shout down their professor. The professor controls the class, they have the freedom to grade.

We've adapted our thinking of on freedom of speech that is appropriate on campus. And I do think that trying to really distinguish freedom of speech from academic freedom and free inquiry is is a mistake. But I do like the idea. I do think there's something to the three is good faith versus bad faith, and I think that's what Like I'm a john here, like you know, when you're talking to an asshole, like you know it right,

Like maybe you don't. But but like a lot of times, like yeah, maybe people are tricked all the time, but how many how many people you've met the first time you're like, oh my god, this guy's an asshole. Later for some of the all of that, I become friends. But that's a good one. Some sometimes they're fun. Sometimes they're fun. But that's a good point. But I do think we need more good faith debates and disagreements in our side today and less bad faith. Oh yeah, And

that's a major point. Like one of the things that we talk we're talking about counseling of the American mind is what we call the other rhetorical fortresses. That essentially there's a right wing rhetorical fortress. It's like, you don't need the liberals experts or people who bashed Trump. But I left it since it was partially grown out of academia.

It's just layer after layer of ad hominem and distractions and things that aren't actually arguments that all they won't actually get to the you never actually have to get

to the actual arguments someone's making. And what we're what we're pointing out is cancer culture is just one part of the way that we distort the way we argue, and that we can actually stop, we can actually call bullshit sometimes when people are just relying on you know, snark to try to dismiss the arguments, like, no, we need to create spaces where people can address the argument and actually in a truth seeking manner, not just you know,

score of social points. Absolutely, And I also worried about the algorithms. You know, the social media algorithms are solving for assholey, you know, like like you know, the X that they're solving for is like how much divisive this is there? How many shares in a negative way? How much? You know, and that's what gets amplified. So that's what I say, when the weak, we think we can have some control over what gets amplified by changing those algorithms. R Yeah, I think a lot about kind of a

with Twitter. I'm not It's interesting. There's a lot of debate about anonymity, for example, whether or not you should allow it, and I think that you should allow it, particularly because Twitter Twitter is global, but I think there should be streams within it where it's basically if you want to participate in this like in this debate, you actually have to be a real person with a reputation on the line, and there has to be rules because I do actually think you could create and I think

we've I'm still a little hopeful that we will figure out a way to use the communication with billions of people with a billion different lives to actually do better disconfirmation. There's a very simple way to do a lot of what I think we need to do, which is people seem to think either you're either you're using your real name or you're anonymous, and there's a gigantic place in

the middle called authentication. Absolutely, it's just it just means that in order you know, look, we take an hoober, we don't know the person's name, we just know their first name, but the company knows their name, and if they cheat us, then they're in trouble. And so imagine if Twitter followed up on a tump Trump must be

tweeted authenticated, You tweeted authenticate all humans. Now, so what if in order to open an account on Twitter or Facebook you have to first you get passed out to another company, whether it's clear or whether it's there's all kinds of things. Using crypto, you know, blockchain, you just get passed out to some other way of authenticating that you're a real person. Now, I think we need to do agegating. I think we've had to get to edge gatingcy.

But the people who are then actually on the platform are real people who if they make death threats or rape threats, the company can kick them off and they can't just get prosecuted. We've under prosecuted actual threats. So I think there's the biggest perform we can make to make social media less destructive of everything is just have platforms requiring authentication before you can participate with a fake name.

But there is a problem. It's the international audience and because you'd actually have to give your name in you know, and basically we're not giving it to the government, you'd be giving it to They're already dozens of of ways to do this and some will be evolved that could that could be completely unhappable because all all Twitter has to know is not your name. They just have to know, yes, this account this person checked out by someone else. That's

all you need. Yeah, on the sense of you of having antoninimity of your citizen of China, Russia or Turkey, for example, be anonymous, you would still be anonymous, but you can still be authenticated. And even if you're worried about about edge cases of some people, we're past the point where we can say, you know what, we need one platform where everyone can be on it. And if that means there's no authentication in most people or bots and assholes, well you know we need to do that

because there's some dissidence in China. Yeah, what a horrible thing to give the end of your life. And some godner's want to say, you've spent half of your life arguing with bots. Yeah, freaking suck. You know, like if it was revealed right that half of your arguments were actually with bots, I kind of make the solution to a degree, one that doesn't have the same expectations. That

is just a fundamentally different social media platform. If we want to our huge words truth that I actually think this would be a a great time to have a little Q and A and I want to tell you how we're doing it, so you can wind up. And this this is the microphone for the Q and A. So if you can just wind up if you wanted to ask you a question, and we're happy to answer your questions here. That's not a question. Don't be shy. Do you have a question? Hello? Please say your name if

you'd like to you. It was a Cardigan. My my name is brand So higher education. So I have two questions. I'll make one. So, I actually assigned the first chapter of college at the American Mind at both universities that I caught in the past. One is a public institution, one's a private institution. How to go at the public institution? It's received very well, there's a lot more initial pushback, yeah, without actually reading the text. So I'm curious here thoughts

about that. The demographics are very different at the public institution. It's a lower socioeconomic background. Private institution, more wealthy background. Second question is what you recommend for somebody who is young and navigating this space and higher education, who's not tender. Okay, I'll take the first one, the John Prick. The second one about tenures. The class differences are profound, and I send up sounding like a Marxist a lot. But I

was definitely really horrified when I got to Stanford. I mean again, I was working since I was eleven. I went worked at early to go factory sparrows, and I actually did construction and I show up at this place where I felt like people had a hard time in my human rights classes. These are high IQ people, but they seem to think that sort of like rich white

liberal or progressive values were kind of universal truth. And it was very strange to constantly be like, you guys know nothing about what the actual rest of the world looks like. Meanwhile, you know, my dad's Russian and grew up in Ugoslavia, my mom's Irish, you grew up in Britain. I spent a lot of time abroad. It just seems

so incredibly simplistic and silly. And this is not nearly as bad at public school if you have actual working class kids, if you have a public school with genuine diversity, it tends to make this all seem kind of silly and weird. So it's always the case that we still see bad free speech cases of public universities, but they're mostly about abuses of power. They're about Dean Warmer. But in higher ed it's become the like weird you know of incubator of this very sort of like honestly, like

I one of these schools, what was it? I forget, but it was one of like the it was like a finishing school, and I was pointing out, skide guys, you're acting like the Victorians that we used to make fun of. You're acting like the upper class people, but you just have different norms that you think are progressive. It really it's a major difference between schools. On the second question, what's your field English? Not English? Yeah, so you know what I'm gonna say is if so, first,

here's the good thing. When there's incredible pressures for orthodoxy, what that means is in the vast realm of things that could be studied, almost like by an electromagnetic force, everyone concentrates in a certain area and they leave almost everything empty. And this sort of happened to me by accident. I used to be on the left and I was studying moral psychology, and I was trying to help the

Democrats stop losing. And once I started like reading good conservative libertarian ritings, like oh wow, there's all these amazing ideas out there that I, you know, I never knew, And it turned out I had the whole field to myself. Nobody else was raising in these areas. Now, I already had tenure bad that time, so it was easy and I could take some risks, you can so, but we live in a different world now where if you love ideas, you don't just have one avenue to a tenure track

and then tenured position. In fact, there are a lot of people in this room already who are intellectuals who are not on the tenure track because things are really opening up. There's a really good argument. There's a really good article I just read somebody sentience me in tablet like today or something about how the intellectuals used to not get universities and it's just it's just the baby boom people they you know, awarding the draft, whatever it was,

they all moved into universities. But I think we have to see that was a temporary period. And guess what, universities are doing a terrible job of curating public intellectuals. So if you have, if you have good ideas, if you have have and remember the humanity is like we still love the humanity because it was about being human and now it's not, and so nobody's mansoring it anymore.

That means it's a huge market for you. So I think there is space opening up for public intellectuals who got some academic training and then we're kicked off the off the ranch and then found, you know, like the first humans into North America. Like you're gonna have huge mega faun at a sleigh. It's gonna be great. All Right, we're friends, angel Edwardo. I wanted to ask you on

this on the free speech thing. I argue about free speech a lot, and one thing that I get a lot is this kind of what I would call the mind virus arguments, which is kind of Elon muscuses that for you as well. Yeah, but I think he needs a different thing. This is the kind of thing where someone will say, oh, you know this, Joe Rogan had this person on this podcast and it was awful, and we need to make sure he doesn't have a podcast

anymore because he had this person. And I say, well, how do you know that this person selling these terrible things? He said, well, I watched the Internet podcast and I said, but are you okay? You heard all these ideas and then they were yeah, I'm but all these idiots there. So I'm just curious. I'm curious what you guys think

about that particular. Yeah, I'm I'm tempted to make my next book something called Fight the guardians, which is about like people who actually see Plato's Republic and see the guardian class who who you know, people aren't real, but the ideas are real and we're the only ones who know it. And there it should be a dictatorship of the smart, dangerous people. And I think that there is

so much elitism in this. There's so much kind of like, oh, we care about disadvantaged people, but they're you know, basically, then treat them like they're dumb and evil, like they're stupid and evil people. And so yeah, the any elitism, you know, to a degree is not as dangerous when it's not tied to authoritarianism. But both on the right and the left, you know, there is this rise of kind of like we are the smartest and we when these other people are dumb and we have to take over.

It's all it's not thinking like people are free society where we're supposed to be equal democratic citizens. Was what. It's a cultish meteg Thank you, Michael him Is Paul. I'm gonna a little backstories because like, don't then you're gonna all move me because I'm basically an outgroup just based on this conversation, I work in diversity inclusion that my friend, so I work in I work in diversity inclusion today. I started off in euroscience researcher for Chris

Stanford Graphical Columbia. All that you guys ended up moving to the applied side of human sciences, which naturally today means you're gonna work in diversity inclusion for certain companies. And I consult with chief diversitary officers. It's basically like therapy sessions. The average tenure for a chief agrisity officers around one point five years max. And what's astonishing to

me is I use your book all the time. I use wol Gang, I use a parasitic mind and the virgity delusion because I'm trying to restore confidence in what this was before the Me Too movie Black Lives like the heart of the and I was fundamentally about transcending our differences in apparent What I want to know, obviously, the comminished man. I already know Scott because he did

a podcast with us a while ago. But I want to know, like there's this war right Obviously, the and I was ideologically captured by the liberal left and the liberal at a time, unfriends sented social division and distrust right, so we're dealing with that, how to restore a movement that actually has a pretty good cause. Right at the end of the day, no one chose to be white, no one chose to be black, and one a fair world, and this movement, to me, it's that the point where

he needs a regrant rights. I just want to say it, awesome question, Thank you for that. So I recently finally decided what I am. That is because you know, coming out, I want to do this before we talk about this the other day politically. Here about politically, I am an anti identitarian. And what I mean by that, what I mean by that is, you know, so when I was born in nineteen sixty three, you know, that was one

hundred hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. In that hundred years, how much progress, like some but not

one hundred years worth of progress. And then you go for nineteen sixty three to nineteen seventy three, how much progress on civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, seventy to eighty three each decade on every possible front you could care about, social justice, Incredible progress all the way to twenty thirteen when our first black president was just re elected when gay marriage proposals passed everywhere and it was

about become the law. Gol Land. So I used to be on the left, and you know, every thing you care about with rights and diverse inclusions was making incredible progress. So if you're in that space in twenty thirteen, you should be saying, Yay America, whatever it is that we've

been doing, let's keep doing it. But instead, because of these changes in social media that allowed little viruses were nurtured in a few English departments and then I departments, they spread out and they took over universities and from there elsewhere, even though most people don't believe it. So I really am coming to see that the issue is not left right. The issue is are you an American who believes that this amazing polyglot, large diverse nation we

should be continuing to make identity matter less? Or do you believe that we should stop what we were doing up to twenty thirteen to say, how about we make identity be everything? How about that? How's that going to work? Okay? So I thought we have to all unight, you could all unite in saying, like you know this identitarianism is a bad thing. Of course, You're free to be you know, Jewish or Italian or Chinese or gay or anything you want, of course, but free to the Italian you can identify us.

I'd love to hear back from you, what do you think of what? I agree? One hundred percent Scott. Actually, just so, I just did a talk with a bunch of corporate executives last Wednesday, and I used Scott's artwork to cap it off, basically self transcendence, and it's like, hey, we really recognizelfs. But I agree. I just what I'm what I'm finding is that there is such a level of just kind of the people that are Indian I

that were there before all that that's one camp. And then there's the group of people who were quickly reactively promoted into a role absence any previous understanding of this field. And in addition to that, the fact that it's become very weaponized know how to like it used to be university and everything included, and they never stepping included, They never steep included and belonging. All you need to add is an end word, and you can call it the

Biden movement. And so it's just ridiculous. It's it's it's become really insane, and I don't I'm struggling with and how do you how do you regain the reins for something that's gone so far off the rails to the point where there's people who believe in it and it's worse facets. I'm conscious by training all that it's worst facets with such conviction at the highest levels of corporations and at the highest levels of media, and at the

highest levels of epidamia, every single area of our information ecosystem. Yeah, there's a there's a there's a book there by the way, so we believe what you're saying so much. We actually incubated. She was actually in can't we take a joke? Carol Foster has this program for actually getting people to talk to each other, like each other, become friends, take themselves a little less seriously, like something that will actually leave people feel closer. Chloe bat I love you, you know,

has a great program. There is I think we need to innovate in the DEI space exactly in the way you're saying, I actually believe or not. Like one of my one of my best friends is the DEI person, you know, and I think that I think that there is I think there is an effort of what to kind of restore to something that actually brings people together as opposed to the divide. Yeah, and in the business world, companies actually have to ultimately make money and be successful.

Universities don't. And so there's no sign there is no sign. There's no sign of a pendulum swing in the academic space, but there is clear movement in the corporate space. And so you can't beat something with nothing if you if there are better alternatives, and several executives have said to me, if someone would come up with a kind of diversity training that actually work, we'd all do it. But so one thing I'd suggest is, whenever, whenever somebody's pushing something,

say what's the evidence for that? Is there evidence that this work? Before we make people spend time and money? Is there evidence? Because there never is, So that might be one strategy to sort of stall until other positive stre appreciate it. Thank you, What were you doing with the act? I saw you wanted to say something. I was just going to add that. I think there there might be like a logical short circuiting of the entire

it was identity politics and an intersectional identity politics. And I think because my generation is so diverse and fits into so many ven diagrams, when you're saying, I'm this is my sexuality, this is my race, and this is my gender, and you're layering it over and over and over, and it's not just about one immutable characteristic. The ultimate argument that you're making is that I'm an individual and

I'm more complex than these groups. And so I think gen Z and our demographical diversity might just short circuit that, like identity politics instinct. I asked you you welcome, Thanks, thanks for a wonderful Oh yeah, I talk. I can say that again to the micro I have a wonderful part. Thank you so much for a thanks for I still appreciate what you just said again, which is right me. We all just need to read more books. Okay, So

I'm I'm sorry. I'm a higher education person here, but I find that one of the things I notice in classes is I teach, I teach what's your field? I teach eighteenth and nineteen sent My research field is eighteenth the nineteenth century Spain in Europe. I love it either too. But my teaching is Spanish in general, like middle to upper levels Spanish in a large public university our one.

So one of the ways that I tend to get around this kind of polarization of class and I think that this is this is the first thing, and then I have another question to the very first quick thing is one aspect is the personality of the teacher, the moral commitment of the teacher or the moral personalities doing for parents or families who see higher educationment so I'm only talking about But then another aspect is why people are seeking higher educator and why people see higher education.

People see higher education and maintain themselves into terrible debt all for it. Right, I've asked my students, what is the thing that you're most concerned about, and it's their loans. Okay, it's their loans. So this is not, though, something that has to do with liberal conservative counseling. It's about higher procritization,

but it's about a lot of things. So one of the things that I'm wondering about, and it's something that I'm not demanding a particular kind of language for discussing, but one of the things I'm wondering about is the role and I say this carefully. Okay, I say this carefully.

I'm not trying to be some I'm not. It's hard to about money, and it's hard to talk about finance, and it's hard to talk about the fact that when we see TV, for example, when we see something that is on Instagram, when we see anything that is presented in the university, there's a lot of money behind that. And when you see things on television in particular, everything nothing gets before the screen unless it is carefully scripted, groom,

make up and whatever. So we have a line from as individuals, whether we go to higher education or not, what is our world. I don't want to use the word capitalism. I don't want to use them money. I mean, you talk about how people get canceled, so I get canceled. I feel like I get canceled. If I want to bring up how do we talk about the influence of corporate control over our media. So let's let's be real. We have platforms here, we have billionaires who and they

have Yeah. Okay, so I'll take this. I'll take this in part made. And also this is my sister Rebecca, who is a professor at Bio State. I know you got height. So so Rebecca and I so so Rebecca. So Rebecca is a is a true liberal. She is very no you know, hold on, hold so she's so so she's she's always been on the left. But she also saw very clearly. I mean, in fact, one of the first place I heard about cancel culture was you

on your job talks in the nineties. The fact that she studied Madrid was like, oh, you shouldn't study Madrid. You need to study the marginalize it, you know, the margin. It's like, yeah, yes, so yeah, so okay. So I think what you're pointing out, what you're pointing out is that there are a lot of dynamics of conflict that corrupt or damage what we do on campus and money. Yeah, yes, so I think we I think I think we can. We mentioned this in the in the books, we have

a chapter on chapter on your organization. So when universities, universities have evolved over such a long period, but in the eighties, that it can much more corporate, much more corporatized. We've got that. We call what many multiversities multiversities sixties.

I do so, but I just what I just want to question whether if you raise that if you raise that, will you be shamed and mobbed and fired or will you just be like either dismissed or someone will disagree with you because it's not if it's not really a cancel culture. What I don't hear you all addressing and I know I'm trying. I was, Okay. The thing that I find find frustrating and it's not exactly corporatism. It's

a weird combination of incentives. And I don't really get whether it isn't more just outright anger at the fact that hire a education has acted like a cartel. Thank you, they raised their money together, they have They have overwhelmingly increased the barocratization. That's what you're paying for. You're not paying for more and better professors, you're paying for more administrators. Meanwhile, this is putting you in debt for the rest of your life. We've got to break the system. A Margaret

University of a bustin. How do we discuss the fact that, like, for example, nineteenth century corporations, Greg, you could know about this nineteenth century corporations. Yeah, Jonathan, this is one of the greatest psychologists of our generation. Staying aroun here Jonathan' school I just want to say he's had a huge impact of my own work on daydreaming and mind wandering.

So so thank you. This is really really stimulating. And I'm John I think I heard you saying that you that you think we should really take social media out of the hands of thirteen wherever was the eleven thirteen soas to delay to sixteenth. Yeah, so I'm wondering. I mean, I'm putting myself in the shoes of one of those adolescents and imagining not being happy about, you know, having that restriction and feeling like this is a maybe it's not coddling, but it's a kind of it's a kind

of coddling. It's like you are not mature enough to be able to handle this material. And so I'm just questioning, like, but yourself, imagine you were. Is that a contradiction and and does that really sit well with you? It's so well with me. So here's why. So when you and I were young high school kids smoked and you could get cigarettes in a vending machine, and I'm sure people said like, well, you know, what are you gonna do band vending machines, Like of course, you know, kids are

gonna get cigarettes. But eventually we realize, you know what, we kind of have to bandit machines and we have to kind of try to try to stop this from children. The basic argument in the caddling wasn't social media is destroying them. It's the fact that they are overprotected and not given life experience. What kids need is to be out unsupervised. America is a great experiment in self governance, but yet we never let kids be self governing. Is

Laras Kenezi here? I thought she was on the list somewhere, is Lunar here? I don't know. Anyway, Yes, let grow go to letgrow dot com support us anyway. My point is kids need to be out having real interactions and adventures and getting into trouble and getting out of trouble and getting lost and getting that. They need to do all that stuff. As soon as they get the phone, and especially with social media, they go out, they sit there and they're on the phone. They literally don't play.

So this I believe is inhibiting development. It's almost that they have emotional scurvy. And as long as as long as they have as long as they have a phone with social media, that's the end of childhood. That's the end of experience. So yes, it seems superficially like a contradiction. But if they were going to have experience, we have

to delay social media until it's less damaging. And now that there's evidence that it's especially damaging for eleven to thirteen year old girls, yep, I think it's in the class of cigarettes. What about riding bicycles and doing the class of cigarettes? Riding the danger there was trivial. What would you say about one in four girls being damaged? Is that a lot or a little? I mean most

of them aren't damaged, So what you know? Whereas bicycles, Look, if bicycles were killing one quarter or severely maiming one quarter of the children a road that I would say the same about bicycles. But bicycles give them the experienced. Bicycles give them the independence to get away from adults and have adventures. Thank you. Time for one more short question, the bigger things. So I was going to apply for a job open science librarian at NYU, which required a

diversity segment. I could not having been to Headox Academy conference, I could not bring myself to write it. But much more significantly, at the University of California, Berkeley, they require like very elaborate statements that are basically political confessions. So what do we do about these? Yeah, I'll take that. So we have I mentioned the research team. I used to kind of pretend to be fires social scientists because

I was really interested in things like psychology. And then finally we started getting like really great employees at pal Leprewski, for example, was a chief researcher for a while, but we now have people like Sean Stevens, and we just had someone Comby Fry was amazing, but we just had someone named Nate Honeycutt, and he actually did research. He simulated the situation. He actually got you know, panels of

administrators and professors to review DEI statements. Because the claim is that you can talk about listen, we're not, we're not. This is in a political litmus test. You can talk about viewpoint diversity, you can talk about religious diversity, you can talk about economic diversity. You don't have to talk about just the sort of like liberal identitarian line on this. And he did the experiment and you absolutely have to talk about the identitarian line. It is absolutely a political

litmus test. And to me this is insane because we already have a tiny number of conservatives in Hire and to begin with, they have multiple hoops they have to jump through. The situation is actually getting worse. There are secret tributals, the possibility of cancelations, and on top of that with someone actually looked out at Hire It and said, you know what, there's too much intellectual diversity here. We need a political litmus test. So we're figuring out ways

to fight it. Well, we're actually considering litigating it that there's different forms of a financial legislation, I guess, but it is a political litmus test. Excellent, it is wrong. I want to thank everyone for coming tonight. A couple announcements. One, if you like when you heard today, if we subscribe to the Psychology podcast. Another thing is if please leave at that exit today and don't come if you want to talk to us, like, don't come up. There's a

show right after this. Let's be respectful. We will be outside if you want to talk to us for a couple of seconds on a the whole leaving. Finally, let's just give a big roun apultal amazing guests say that use it there it is