Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech | Lex Fridman Podcast #397
- If the goal is the
project of human knowledge, which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think and what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know. So every time you're actually
saying "you can't say that" you're actually depriving
yourself of the knowledge of what people really think. You're causing what Timur Kuran, who's on our Board of Advisor, it's called preference falsification. You end up with an inaccurate
picture of the world, which by the way, in a lot of cases, because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think
that people are more prejudice than they might be. And actually one very real practical way it makes things worse is
when you censor people, it doesn't change their opinion, it just encourages them to
not share it with people who will get them in trouble. So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with and group polarization takes off. - The following is a
conversation with Greg Lukianoff, free speech advocate,
first-amendment attorney, president and CEO of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual
Rights and Expression. And he's the author of
"Unlearning Liberty", co-author with Jonathan Haidt of "Coddling of the American Mind" and co-author with Rikki Schlott of a new book coming out in October that you should definitely
pre-order now called "The Canceling of the American Mind" which is a definitive
accounting of the history, present and future of cancel culture. A term used and overused
in public discourse, but rarely studied and understood
with the depth and rigor that Greg and Ricky do in this book and in part in this conversation. Freedom of speech is important, especially on college campuses, the very place that should serve as the battleground of ideas, including weird and controversial ones that should encourage bold
risk-taking, not conformity. This is a Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Greg Lukianoff. Let's start with a big question. What is cancel culture? Now, you've said that you don't
like the term as it's been, quote, dragged through the
mud and abused endlessly by a whole host of controversial figures. Nevertheless, we have
the term, what is it? - Cancel culture is the
uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns starting around 2014 to
get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, et cetera, for speech that would
normally be protected by the First Amendment. And I always say would be protected because we're talking about
circumstances in which it isn't necessarily where
the First Amendment applies. But what I mean is like
as an analog to say things you couldn't lose your
job as a public employee for, and also the climate of fear that's resulted from that phenomenon, the fact that you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion. And it wasn't subtle that
there was an uptick in this, particularly on campus around 2014. John Ronson wrote a book called, "So You've Been Publicly Shamed." It came out in 2015 already
documenting this phenomena. I wrote a book called
"Freedom from Speech" in 2014 but it really was in 2017 when you started seeing this
be directed at professors. And when it comes to
the number of professors that we've seen be targeted
and lose their jobs. I've been doing this for 22 years and I've seen nothing like it. - So there's so many things
I want to ask you here. But one, actually, just looking
at the organization of FIRE, can you explain what the organization is because it's interconnected
to this whole fight in the rise of cancel culture, in the fight for freedom of speech since 2014 and before. - So FIRE was founded in
1999 by Harvey Silverglate. He is a famous civil liberties attorney. He's been on the show. He's the person who actually found me out in my very happy life
out in San Francisco, but knew I was looking
for a first-amendment job. I'd gone to law school
specifically to do First Amendment. And he found me, which was pretty cool. His protege, Kathleen Sullivan was the dean of Stanford Law School and this remains the best
compliment I ever got in my life, is that she recommended me to Harvey. And since that's the whole
reason why I went to law school, I was excited to be a part
of this new organization. The other co-founder of
FIRE is Alan Charles Kors. He's just an absolute genius. He is one of the leading
experts in the world on the enlightenment, and
particularly about Voltaire. And if any of your listeners
do like the great courses, he has a lecture on Blaise Pascal, and Blaise, of course, is
famous for the Pascal's wager. And I left it just so moved and impressed and with a depth of understanding of how important this person was. - That's interesting. You mentioned to me
offline, connected to this, that at least it runs in parallel or there's a connection
between the love of science and the love of the freedom of speech. - [Greg] Yes. - Can you maybe elaborate
where that connection is? - Sure. I think that for those of
us who are really, you know, have devoted our lives
to freedom of speech, one thing that we are into,
whether we know it or not, is epistemology, the study
and philosophy of knowledge. Freedom speech has lots of moral and philosophical dimensions, but from a pragmatic
standpoint, it is necessary because we're creatures of
incredibly limited knowledge. We are incredibly self deceiving. I always love the fact that
you've all heard Harari refers to the enlightenment
as the discovery of ignorance, because that's exactly what it was. It was suddenly being like,
wow, hold on a second. All this incredibly
interesting folk wisdom we got which by the way can be
surprisingly reliable here and there when you start testing,
a lot of it is nonsense. And it doesn't hold up, even our ideas about the way things fall. As you know, Galileo established,
like even our intuitions, they're just wrong. And so a lot of the early
history of freedom of speech, it was happening at the same time as sort of the scientific revolution. So a lot of the early debates
about freedom of speech were tied in. So certainly Galileo. I always point out like Kepler was probably like the
even more radical idea that there weren't even perfect spheres. But at the same time, largely because of the
invention of the printing press, you also had all these
political developments. And you know, I always talk
about Jan Hus, a famous Czech, the hero who was burned at
the stake and I think in 1419, but he was basically Luther
before the printing press, before Luther could get his word out. He didn't stand a chance. And that was exactly what Jan Hus was. But a century later, thanks
to the printing press, everyone could know what Luther thought. And boy did they. But it led to of course, this completely crazy
hyper disrupted period in European history. - Well, you mentioned to
jump around a little bit, the First Amendment. First of all, what is the First Amendment and what is the connection to you between the First Amendment, the freedom of speech and cancel culture? - Sure. So I'm a First Amendment
lawyer as I mentioned, and that's my passion. That's what I studied. And I think American First Amendment law is incredibly interesting. In one sentence, the First Amendment is
trying to get rid of basically all the reasons why humankind had been killing each other
for its entire existence. That we weren't going to
fight anymore over opinion, we weren't gonna fight
anymore of religion. That you have the right to
approach your government for redress grievances. That you have the freedom to associate, that all of these things
in one sentence we're like, "Nope, the government
will no longer interfere with your right to have these
fundamental human rights. And so one thing that makes
FIRE a little different from other organizations is however, we're not just a First
Amendment organization. We are a free speech organization. But at the same time, a lot of what I think free
speech is, can be well explained with reference to a lot
of First Amendment law. Partially because in American history, some of our smartest people have been thinking about
what the parameters of freedom of speech are in relationship to the First Amendment. And a lot of those principles, they transfer very well
just as pragmatic ideas. So like the biggest sin
in terms of censorship is called viewpoint discrimination. That essentially you
allow freedom of speech except for that opinion. And it's found to be
kind of more defensible and I think this makes sense that if you set up a forum and like we're only gonna
talk about economics to exclude people who wanna
talk about a different topic. But it's considered
rightfully a bigger deal if you've set up a forum for economics. But we're not gonna let people talk about that kind of economics or have that opinion on
economics most particularly. So a lot of the principles
from First Amendment law actually make a lot of philosophical sense as good principles for
when, like what is protected and unprotected speech, what should get you in trouble,
how you actually analyze it, which is why we actually
try in our definition of cancel culture to work in some of the First Amendment
norms just in the definition. So we don't have to bog
down on them as well. - You're saying so many
interesting things, but if you can linger on the
viewpoint discrimination, is there any gray area
of discussion there? Like what is and isn't economics
for the example you gave? - [Greg] Yeah. - I mean is it a science, or is it an art to draw lines
of what is and isn't allowed? - Yeah. You know, if you're
saying that something is or is not economics, well you can say everything's economics and therefore I want to talk about poetry. There'd be some line
drawing exercise in there, but let's say once you decide
to open up, to poetry even it's a big difference between saying, okay, now we're open to
poetry, but you can't say, you know, Dante was bad. Like that's a forbidden
opinion now officially in this otherwise open forum that would immediately
at an intuitive level strike people as a bigger problem than just saying that
poetry isn't economics. - I mean, that intuitive
level that you speak to, I hope that all of us have
that kind of basic intuition when a line is crossed. It's the same thing for like pornography. - Yes. - When you see it, I think there's the
same level of intuition that should be applied
across the board here. And it's when that
intuition becomes deformed by whatever forces of society, that's when it starts
to feel like censorship. - Yeah I mean, people
find it a different thing. If someone loses their job simply for their political opinion, even if that employer has every right in the world to fire you, I think Americans should
still be like, well it's true. They have every right in the world. And I'm not making a legal case that maybe you shouldn't fire someone for their political opinion,
but think that through. Like, what kind of society
do we wanna live in? And it's been funny watching,
and I point this out, yes, I will defend businesses, First Amendment rights of association to be able to have the legal right to decide who works for them. But from a moral or philosophical matter, if you think through the implications of, if every business in America becomes an expressive association in addition to being a profit
maximizing organization, that would be a disaster for democracy because you would end up in a situation where people would actually
be saying to themselves, I don't think I can actually
say what I really think and still believe I can keep my job. And that's where I was worried,
I felt like we were headed 'cause a lot of the initial response to people getting
canceled was very simply, oh, but they have the right
to get rid of this person and that's the beginning
and end of the discussion. And I thought that was a dodge, I thought that wasn't
actually a very serious way that if you care about
both the First Amendment and the freedom of speech,
of thinking it through. - So to you, just to clarify, the First Amendment is
kind of a legal embodiment of the ideal of freedom of speech and then freedom of speech. - As applied to government. - And it's very specific,
applied to government and freedom of speech is the
application of the principle to like everything including like kind of the high level philosophical ideal of the value of people being
able to speak their mind. - Yeah, it's an older,
bolder, more expansive idea. And you can have a situation, and I talk about countries
that have good free speech law, but not necessarily great
free speech culture. And I talk about how when we
sometimes make this distinction between free speech law
and free speech culture, we're thinking in a
very cloudy kind of way. And what I mean by that
is that laws generally, particularly in a common law country, it's the reflection of norms. Judges are people too. And in a lot of cases, common law is supposed to
actually take our intuitive ideas of fairness and place them into the law. So if you actually have a culture that doesn't appreciate free speech from a philosophical standpoint, it's not going to be able
to protect free speech for the long haul, even in
the law 'cause eventually, that's one of the reasons
why I worry so much about some of these terrible
cases coming out of law schools because I fear that even though, sure, American First Amendment law is very strongly protective
of First Amendment for now, it's not gonna stay that way. If you have generations
of law students graduating who actually think there's nothing, there's no higher goal than shouting down you're an opponent. - Yeah, so that's why
so much of your focus, or a large fraction of your
focus is on the higher education or education period, is because education is
the foundation of culture. - Yeah, you have this
history, you know, '64, you have the free speech
movement on Berkeley, and in '65 you have Repressive
tolerance by Herbert Marcuse, which was a declaration of,
by the way, we on the left, we should have free speech, but we should have free speech for us. I mean, I went back and
reread repressive tolerance and how clear it is. I had forgotten that it
really is kind of like, and these so-called
conservatives and right wingers, we need to repress them because
they're regressive thinkers. It really doesn't come out to
anything more sophisticated than the very old idea
that our people are good, they get free speech, they should keep it. Other side bad. We should not have, and we
have to retrain society. And of course, like, it
ends up being another, he was also a fan of Mao,
so it's not surprising that of course the
system would have to rely on some kind of totalitarian system. But that was a laughable
position, you know, say 30, 40 years ago. The idea that essentially, you know, free speech for me, not for the... As the great free speech
champion Hentoff used to say was something that you were
supposed to be embarrassed by. But I saw this when I
was in law school in '97. I saw this when I was
interning at the ACLU in '99, that there was a slow
motion train wreck coming that essentially there was
these bad ideas from campus that had been taking
on more and more steam of basically no free
speech for my opponent were actually becoming
more, more and more accepted and partially because academia was becoming less and
less viewpoint diverse. I think that as my co-author
Jonathan Haidt points out that when you have low
viewpoint diversity, people start thinking in
a very kind of tribal way. And if you don't have
the respected dissenters, you don't have the people
that you can point to that are like, "Hey,
this is a smart person." This is a smart, reasonable, decent person that I disagree with. So I guess not everyone
thinks alike on this issue. You start getting much more
kind of like only bad people, only heretics, only
blasphemers, only right wingers can actually think in this way. - Every time you say something, I always have a million thoughts and a million questions that pop up. But since you mentioned
there's a kind of drift as you write about in the
book and you mentioned now there's a drift towards
the left in academia, which would also maybe
draw a distinction here between the left and the right and the cancel culture as
you present in your book is not necessarily associated with any one political viewpoint. That there's mechanisms on both sides. - [Greg] Oh yeah. - That result in cancellation and censorship in violation
of freedom of speech. - So one thing I wanna
be really clear about is the book takes on both
right and left cancel culture. They're different in a lot
of ways and definitely, cancel culture from the left
is more important in academia where the left dominates. But we talk a lot about cancel culture coming from legislatures. We talk a lot about cancel
culture on campus as well, because even though most of the attempts that come from on campus
to get people canceled are still from the left, there are a lot of attacks
that come from the right that come from attempts by
different organizations. And sometimes when there
are stories in Fox News, like they'll go after professors and about one third of the attempts to get professors punished
that are successful actually do come from the right and we talk about attempts
to get books banned, in the book, we talk about
suing the Florida legislature. Ron DeSantis had something
called the Stop-Woke Act, which we told everyone this
is laughably unconstitutional. They tried to ban particular
topics in higher ed and we're like, no, this is a joke. Like this will be laughed out of court. And they didn't listen to
us and they brought it, they passed it and we sued and we won. Now they're trying again with something that's
equally as unconstitutional and we will sue again and we will win. - Can you elaborate on Stop-Woke Act? This is presumably trying
to limit certain topics from being taught in school? - Yeah, basically woke topics. It came out of the sort of attempt to get at critical race theory. So it's topics related to
race, gender, et cetera. I don't remember exactly how
they tried to cabinet it to CRT but when you actually, the law's really well established that you can't tell higher education what they're allowed to teach without violating the First Amendment. And when this got in front of
a judge, it was exactly as... He was exactly as skeptical
of it as we thought he'd be. I think he called this dystopian
and it wasn't a close call. - So if you're against
that kind of teaching, the right way to fight
it is by making the case that it's not a good idea
as part of the curriculum as opposed to banning
it from the curriculum. - Yeah. The state doesn't have the
power to simply say to ban, what professors in higher education teach. Now, it gets a little more complicated when you talk about K through 12 because the state has a role in deciding what public K through 12 teaches because they're your kids. It's taxpayer funded and generally the legislature is involved. There is democratic
oversight of that process. - So for K through 12, is there also a lean towards the left in terms of the administration
that manages the curriculum? - Yeah, there definitely
is in K through 12. I mean, my kids go to public school. I have a five and a seven year old and they have lovely teachers, but we have run into a lot of problems with education schools at FIRE and a lot of the graduates
of education school end up being the administrators who clamp down on free
speech in higher education. And so I've been trying
to think of positive ways to take on some of this, some of the problems that
I see in K through 12. I thought that the
attempt to just dictate, you won't teach the following
10 books or 20 books or 200 books was the wrong way to do it. Now when it comes to deciding what books are in the curriculum, again that's something a legislature
actually can have some say in and that's pretty uncontroversial
in terms of the law. But when it comes to how you fight it, I had something that since I'm kind of stuck with the formula I called "Empowering of the American Mind" I gave principles that were inconsistent with the sort of group think and heavy emphasis on identity politics that some of the critics are
rightfully complaining about in K through 12. And that is actually in
"Canceling of the American Mind" but I have a more
detailed explanation of it that I'm gonna be putting up on my blog, the eternally radical idea. - Is it possible it's legally... This is a silly question perhaps. Create an extra protection for certain kinds of
literature, 1984 or something to remain in the curriculum. I mean it's already, it's
all protected, I guess. I guess to protect against administrators from fiddling too much
with the curriculum, like stabilizing the curriculum. I don't know what the machinery of the K through 12 public school. - In K through 12, state legislatures... - [Lex] They're part of that. - They're part of that
and they can say like, you should teach the following books. Now of course people are
always a little bit worried that if they were to recommend, teach the Declaration of Independence, that it will end up being, well they're gonna teach the
Declaration of Independence was just to protect
slavery, which it wasn't. - Yeah, so teaching a
particular topic matters which textbooks you choose, which perspective you take,
all that kind of stuff. Of course there's like religion starts to creep into the
whole question of like, is the Bible, are you allowed to incorporate
that into education? - Yeah, I mean, I'm an atheist with an intense interest in religion. I actually read the entire Bible this year just 'cause I do stuff like that. And I never actually had read it from beginning to end. Then I read the Quran 'cause you know, and I'm gonna try to do the
Book of Mormon, but, you know. - Well, you're so fascinating. Do you recommend doing that? - I think you should just to know 'cause it's such a touchstone in the way people talk about things. It can get pretty tedious. But I even made myself read through all of the very specific instructions on how tall the different
parts of the temple need to be and how long the garbs need to be and what shape they need
to be and what like... And those go on a lot. That surprisingly a big chunk of Exodus, I thought that was more like
in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but then you get to
books like Job, you know? Wow. I mean Job is such a read and no way Job originally had that ending. Like Job is basically, it starts out as this perverse
bet between God and Satan about whether or not they
can actually make a good man renounce God, and initially they can't. It's all going very predictably. And then they finally really tortured Job and he turns into the best. Why is God cruel? How
could God possibly exist? How could a kind God do these things? And he turns into like the
best lawyer in the entire world and he defeats everyone. All the people who come to argue with him, he argues the pants off of them. And then suddenly at the end
God shows up and he's like, well, you know, I am everywhere. And it's a very confusing answer. He gets an answer kind of like, I am there when Lionesses give birth and
I am there, and by the way, there's this giant monster
Leviathan that's very big and it's very scary and I
have to manage the universe and I'm kind of like, God, are you saying that you're very busy? Is that essentially your argument to Job and you don't mention the
whole kind of like that I have a bet, that's
why I was torturing you. That doesn't come up. And then at the end he decides, Job's like, oh no, you're totally right. I was totally wrong. Sorry. And God says like, I'm gonna punish those people
who tried to argue with you and didn't win. So he gets rid of the... I don't know exactly what he
does to them, I don't remember. And then he gives Job all his money back and he makes him super prosperous. And I'm like, no way that was the original ending of that book because this was like, this was clearly a beloved
novel that they were like, but it can't have that ending. - Okay. - So it's a long way of saying I actually think it's worthwhile. Some of it was, you're always kind of surprised
when you end up in the part, like there are parts of it
that will sneak up on you, kind of like Isaiah is a trip. Ecclesiastes, Depeche mode. - And you said you also the Quran. - [Greg] Yeah which was fascinating. - So it'd be interesting to ask, is there a tension between
the study of religious texts or the following of religion
and just believing in God and following the various
aspects of religion with freedom of speech. - In the First Amendment, we have something that we
call the religion clause. And I've never liked calling it just that because it's two brilliant
things right next to each other. The state may not establish
an official religion, but it cannot interfere with your right to practice your religion. That's beautiful. Two things at the same time. And I think they're both exactly right and I think sometimes the
right gets very excited of the free exercise clause and the left gets very
excited about establishment. And I like the fact that we
have both of 'em together. Now, how does this relate
to freedom of speech and how does it relate to the curriculum like we were talking about? I actually think it would be great if public schools could teach the Bible, like in the sense of like read
it as a historical document. But back when I was at the ACLU, every time I saw people trying this, it always turned into them
actually advocating for, a Catholic or a Protestant
or Orthodox even kind of like read on religion. So if you actually make it
into something advocating for a particular view on religion, then it crosses into the
establishment clause side. So Americans haven't figured
out a way to actually teach it. So it's probably better
that you learn about it outside of a public school class. - Do you think it's
possible to teach religion from like world religions kind of force without disrespecting the religions? - I think the answer is it depends on from whose perspective. - Well, like the practitioner say you're like an Orthodox follower
of a particular religion. - [Greg] Yeah. - Is it possible to not piss you off in teaching like all the
major religions of the world? - For some people, the bottom line is you
have to teach it as true. And with that, under those conditions, then the answer is no. You can't teach it without
offending someone at least. - Can't you say these
people believe it's true? Can you reform it? So you have to walk on
eggshells essentially. - You can try really hard and you will still make some people angry, but serious people will be like, oh no, you actually tried to be
fair to the beliefs here. And I try to be respectful
as much as I can about a lot of this. I still find myself much
more drawn to both Buddhism and stoicism though. - Where do I go? Okay, one interesting thing to
get back to college campuses is FIRE keeps the college
free speech rankings. - [Greg] Yes. - At rankings.thefire.org. - [Greg] I'm very proud of them. - I highly recommend 'cause forget even just the ranking, you get to learn a lot
about the universities from this entirely different perspective than people are used
to when they go to pick whatever university they want to go to. It just gives another
perspective on the whole thing and it gives quotes from
people that are students there and so on, like about their experiences and it gives different- Maybe you could speak to
the various measures here before we talk about who's in the top five and who's in the bottom five. What are the different parameters that contribute to the evaluation? - So people have been
asking me since day one to do a ranking of schools
according to freedom of speech. And even though we had the
best database in existence of campus speech codes, policies that universities have
that violate First Amendment or First Amendment norms, we
also have the best database of, we call the Disinvitation Database, but it's actually it's better named the deplatforming database, which is what we're gonna call it. - And these are all cases
where somebody was invited as a speaker to campus
and they were disinvited. - Disinvited or deplatforming
also includes shouting down. - So they showed up and
they couldn't really speak. - Yeah, exactly. And so having that, what we really needed in order to have some
serious social science to really make a serious argument about what the ranking was,
was to be able to, one, get a better sense of how many professors were actually getting
punished during this time. And then the biggest missing element was to be able to ask students directly what the environment
was like on that campus for freedom of speech. Are you comfortable
disagreeing with each other? Are you comfortable disagreeing
with your professors? Do you think violence is acceptable in response to a speaker? Do you think shouting down is okay? Do you think blocking people's
access to a speaker is okay? And once we were able to get
all those elements together, we first did a test run I
think in 2019, about 50. And we've been doing
it for four years now, always trying to make the
methodology more and more precise to better reflect the actual environment at particular schools. And this year the number one school was Michigan Technological University, which was a nice surprise. The number two school was
actually Auburn University, which was nice to see. In the top 10, the most well-known prestigious
school is actually UVA, which did really well this year. University of Chicago was not happy that they weren't number one, but University of Chicago was 13 and they had been number one or in the top three for
years prior to that. - Really? So can you explain?
It's almost surprising. Is it because of like the really strong
economics departments and things like this or what, why? - They had a case involving a student, they wouldn't recognize a
chapter of Turning Point USA and they made a very classic argument and classic in the bad way that we hear campuses across the country. Oh, we have a campus Republican, so we don't need this
additional conservative group. And we're like, no, I'm sorry. Like we've seen dozens and dozens if not hundreds of attempts to get this one particular
conservative student group derecognized or not recognized. And so we told them like, listen like we told them at FIRE
that we consider this serious and they wouldn't recognize the group. So that's a point down in our ranking. And that was enough to knock them from- They probably would've been
number two in the rankings, but now they're 13 out of 248. They're still one of the
best schools in the country. I have no problem saying that. The school that did not do
so well at a negative 10.69, negative 10.69 and we rounded
up to zero was Harvard. And Harvard has been not
very happy with that result. - The only school to
receive the abysmal ranking. - [Greg] Yeah, and there
are a couple of people- - Oh, Harvard. - Oh, Harvard. And there are a couple of people who have actually been really, I think making a mistake by
getting very Harvard sounding by being like, I've had
statisticians look at this and they think your methodology is a joke and like pointing out and this
case wasn't that important. And that scholar wasn't that scholar. Like one of the arguments
against one of the scholars that we counted against them for punishing was that that wasn't a very
famous or influential scholar. And I'm kind of like, so your your argument seems to be snobbery like essentially that like you're not understanding our
methodology for one thing. And then you're saying that actually that scholar wasn't
important enough to count. And by the way, Harvard,
by the way, Harvard... - This is the Harvard camera. - Even if we took all of
your arguments as true, even if we decided to get
rid of those two professors, you would still be in negative numbers. You would still be dead last, you would still be after
Georgetown and Penn and neither of those schools
are good for freedom of speech. - I should say, the bottom five is the University of Pennsylvania, like you said, Penn, the
University of South Carolina, Georgetown University,
and Fordham University. - All very well earned. They have so many bad cases
at all of those schools. - What's the best way to find
yourself in the bottom five if you are a university? What's the fastest way to
that negative, to that zero? - A lot of deplatforming. When we looked at the bottom five, 81% of attempts to get
speakers deplatformed were successful at the bottom five. There were a couple of
schools, I think Penn included, where every single attempt, every time a student like objected, a student group objected
to that speaker coming, they canceled this speech. And I think Georgetown
was 100% success rate. I think Penn had 100% success rate. I think Harvard did stand up for a couple, but mostly people got
deplatformed there as well. - So how do you push
back on deplatforming? Well, who would do it?
Is it other students? Is it faculty? Is it the administration? What's the dynamics of
pushing back, of basically, 'cause I imagine some of it is culture, but I imagine every university
has a bunch of students who will protest basically every speaker. And it's a question of how
you respond to that protest. - Well, here's the dirty little secret about like the big change in 2014 and FIRE and me and Haidt
have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus was that for most of my career, students were great on freedom of speech. They were the best
constituency for free speech, absolutely unambiguously
until about 2013, 2014. And it was only in 2014
where we had these very, kind of sad for us experience where suddenly students were the ones advocating for deplatforming
and new speech codes kind of in a similar way that
they had been doing in say like the mid eighties for example. But here's the dirty little secret. It's not just the students. It's students and administrators. Sometimes only a handful of them though working together to make, to create some of these problems. And this was exactly
what happened at Stanford when Kyle Duncan, a fifth circuit judge tried
to speak at my alma mater and a fifth of the class
showed up to shout him down. It was a real showing
of what was going on. That 10 minutes into the shout down of a fifth circuit judge, and
I keep on emphasizing that 'cause I'm a constitutional lawyer, fifth circuit judges are big deals. They're one level below the Supreme Court. About a fifth of the school
shows up to shout him down. After 10 minutes of shouting him down, an administrator, a DEI
administrator gets up with a prepared speech that she's written, that's a seven minute long speech where she talks about free speech, maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And we're at this law school where people could learn
to challenge these norms. So it's clear that there was coordination amongst some of these administrators. And from talking to students
there, they were in meetings, extensive meetings for a long time. They show up, do a shout down, then they take an additional seven minutes to lecture the speaker on free speech. The juice of free speech, not being worth the squeeze. And then for the rest of it, it's just constant
heckling after she leaves. This is clearly and
something very similar, happened a number of times at Yale where it was very clearly administrators were helping along with a
lot of these disruptions. So I think every time there is
a shout down at a university, the investigation should
be first and foremost, did administrators help
create this problem? Did they do anything to stop it? Because I think a lot of
what's really going on here is the hyper bureaucratization
of universities with a lot more ideological people who think of their primary job as basically like policing
speech more or less. They're encouraging students, sorry, they're encouraging students who have opinions they
like to do shout downs and that's why they really
need to investigate this. And it is at Stanford, the administrator who gave the prepared remarks about the juice not
being worth the squeeze. She has not been invited back to Stanford, but she's one of the only
examples I can think of when these things happen a lot where an administrator
clearly facilitated something that was a shout down or deplatforming or resulted in a professor getting fired or resulted in a student getting expelled where the administrator
has got off scot free or probably in some cases
even gotten a promotion. - And so a small number of administrators, maybe even a single administrator could participate in the
encouraging and the organization and thereby empower the whole process. - And that's something I've seen throughout my entire career. And the only thing, it's kind of hard to catch this sort of
in the act, so to speak. And that's one of the reasons
why it's helpful for people to know about this. There was this amazing case, this was at University of Washington and we actually featured this
in a documentary made in 2015 that came out in 2015, 2016
called, "Can We Take A Joke?" And this was when we started noticing something was changing on campus. We also heard that comedians were saying that they couldn't use
their good humor anymore. This was right around the
time that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock said that they
didn't wanna play on campuses 'cause they couldn't be funny. But we featured a case of a comedian who wanted to do a musical called "The Passion of the Musical" making fun of "The Passion of the Christ" with the stated goal
of offending everyone, every group equally. It was very much a South Park mission. And it's an unusual case because we actually got
documentation of administrators buying tickets for angry
students and holding an event where they trained them to
jump up in the middle of it and shout "I'm offended." Like, they bought them tickets, they sent them to this thing with the goal of shouting it down. Now, unsurprisingly, when you send an angry group of students to shut down a play, it's
not gonna end at just, "I'm offended." And it got heated. There were death threats being thrown. And then the Pullman
Washington police told Chris, Chris Lee, the guy who made the play, that they wouldn't actually protect him. Now it's not every day you're gonna have that
kind of hard evidence that actually seeing the
administrators be so brazen that they recorded the fact that they bought them
tickets and sent them. But I think a lot of
that stuff is going on. And I think it's a good excuse to cut down on one of the big problems in higher education today, which
is hyper bureaucratization. - In your experience,
is there a distinction between administrators and faculty in terms of perpetrators
of these kinds of things? So if we got rid of all,
like Harvey's talked about getting rid of a large
percentage of the administration, does that help fix the problem? Or is the faculty also... - [Greg] Yeah. - A small percent of the faculty also part of the encouraging
in the organization of these kind of cancel models? - Yeah. And that's something that has
been profoundly disappointing is that when you look at the huge uptick in attempts to get professors
fired that we've seen over the last 10 years and
actually over the last 22 years, as far as far back as our records go. At first they were overwhelmingly
led by administrators, attempts to get professors punished. And that was most, you know, I'd say that was my career up until 2013 was fighting back at
administrative excesses. Then you start having the problem in 2014 of students trying to get people canceled. And that really accelerated in 2017. And the number, so one way, one thing that makes it easier to document are the petitions to get
professors fired or punished and how disproportionately
that those actually do come from students. But another big uptick
has been fellow professors demanding that their fellow
professors get punished. And that to me- - [Lex] Makes me really sad. - It's kind of shameful. You shouldn't be proud
of signing the petition to get your fellow professor and what's even more shameful is that this has almost
become a cliche within FIRE when someone is facing one of
these cancellation campaigns as a professor. I would get letters from
some of my friends saying, "I am so sorry this has happened to you." And these were the same people who publicly signed the
petition to get them fired. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Integrity. Integrity is an important
thing in this world. And I think some of it, I'm so surprised people
don't stand up more for this 'cause there's so much hunger for it. And if you have the guts as
a faculty or an administrator to really stand up with
eloquence, with rigor, with integrity, I feel like it's impossible
for anyone to do anything because there's such a
hunger, it's so refreshing. - [Greg] Yeah. - I think everybody agrees
that freedom of speech is a good thing. - [Greg] Oh, I don't, I don't. - Well, okay, sorry, sorry. - [Greg] I don't agree. - The majority of people
even at the universities that there's a hunger, but it's almost like this
kind of nervousness around it because there's a small
number of loud voices that are doing the shouting. So I mean, again, that's where great leadership comes in. And so, presidents of universities should probably be making
clear declarations of like, this is a place where we value
the freedom of expression. - And this was all throughout my career, a president, a university president who
puts their foot down early and says, "Nope, we are not entertaining
firing this professor. We are not expelling this student." It ends the issue often very fast. Although sometimes, and this
is where you can really tell the administrative involvement,
students will do things like take over the president's office and then that takeover will
be catered by the university. People will point this out
sometimes as being kind of like, oh, it was clearly it,
like my friend Sam Abrams, when they tried to get him
fired at Sarah Lawrence College. And that was one of the
times that it was used as kind of like, oh, this
was hostile to the university because the students took
over the president's office. And I'm like, no, they let them take over
the president's office. And I don't know if that
was one of the cases in which the takeover was catered, but if there was ever
a sort of like a sign that's kind of like, yes, this is actually
really quite friendly. - Well in some sense, like protesting and having
really strong opinions, even like ridiculous, crazy,
wild opinions is a good thing. It's just, it shouldn't
lead to actual firing or deplatforming of people.
Like it's good to protest. It's just not good for
university to support that and take action based on it. - And this is one of those like
tensions in First Amendment that actually I think has a
pretty easy release essentially. You absolutely have the
right to devote your life to ending freedom of speech
and ridiculing it as a concept. And there are people
who really can come off as very contemptible
about even the philosophy of freedom of speech. And we will defend your right to do that. We will also disagree with you. And if you try to get a professor fired, we'll be on the other side of that. Now I think you had Randy
Kennedy who I really, I love him. I think he's a great guy. But he criticized us for
our deplatforming database as saying, this is saying that students can't protest speakers. I'm like, okay, that's silly. We FIRE as an organization, have defended the right
to protest all the time. We are constantly defending
the rights to protestors not believing that the protestors have the right to say
this would like basically, that would be punishing the speakers. We're not calling for
punishing the protestors. But what we are saying is you
can't let the protestors win if they're demanding someone be fired for their freedom of speech. - So the line there is
between protestors protesting and the university taking
action based on the protest. - Yeah, exactly. And of course shout downs,
that's just mob censorship. And that's something where the university, the way you deal with that
tension in First Amendment law is essentially kind of
like the one positive duty that the government has. The negative duty, the thing that it's not
allowed to do is censor you. But it's positive duty is that if I want to say awful
things or for that matter, great things that aren't
popular in a public park, you can't let the crowd
just shout me down. You can't allow what's
called a heckler's veto. - Heckler's veto. That's so interesting 'cause I feel like that comes into play on social media somehow because there's this whole
discussion about censorship and freedom of speech. But to me, the carrot question
is almost more interesting once the freedom of speech is established is how do you incentivize
high quality debate and disagreement? - I'm thinking a lot about that. And that's one of the things we talk about in "Canceling of the American Mind" is arguing towards truth. And that cancel culture
is cruel, it's merciless, it's anti-intellectual, but it also will never get
you anywhere in your truth. And you are going to waste so much time destroying your opponents in something that can actually
never get you to truth through the process of course, of you never actually
get directly at truth, you just chip away at falsity. - Yeah. But everybody having a
megaphone on the internet with anonymity, it seems like
it's better than censorship, but it feels like there's
incentives on top of that you can construct to
incentivize better discourse. - [Greg] Yeah. - It's like to incentivize somebody who puts a huge amount of effort to make even the most
ridiculous arguments, but basically ones that don't include any of the things you highlight in terms of all the rhetorical tricks to shut down conversations, just make really good
arguments for whatever, it doesn't matter if it's
communism, for fascism, whatever the heck you want to say. - [Greg] Yeah. - But do it with scale,
with historical context, with steelman on the other side, all those kind of elements. - We try to make three
major points in the book. One is just simply cancel culture is real. It's a historic era and
it's on a historic scale. The second one is you should
think of cancel culture as part of a rhetorical, as a larger lazy, rhetorical approach to what we
refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments. And we mean that in two senses without having winning arguments or actually having won arguments. And we talk about all the different, what we call rhetorical fortresses, that both the left and the right have that prevent you from... That allow you to just dismiss the person or dodge the argument without actually ever
getting to the substance of the argument. Third part is just, how do we fix it. But the rhetorical fortress stuff is actually something
I'm very passionate about because it interferes with
our ability to get at truth and it wastes time and
frankly it also can, since cancel culture is part
of that rhetorical tactic, it can also ruin lives. - It would actually be really fun to talk about this particular
aspect of the book. And I highly recommend if
you're listening to this go pre-order the book now.
When does it come out? - October 17th. - Okay, "The Canceling
of the American Mind." Okay, so in the book you also have a list of
cheap rhetorical tactics that both the left and the right use. And then you have a list of tactics that the left uses and the right uses. So there's the rhetorical, the perfect rhetorical
fortress that the left uses and the efficient rhetorical
fortress that the right uses. - Yeah. - First one is whataboutism. - Yeah. - Maybe we can go through a few of them that capture your heart
in this particular moment as we talk about it. And if you can describe examples of it or if there's aspects
of it that you see there especially effective. So whataboutism is
defending against criticism of your side by bringing
up the other side's alleged wrongdoing. - I wanna make little cards of these, of all of these tactics and start using them on X all the time because they are so commonly deployed. And whataboutism I put first for a reason. - You know it'd be an interesting idea to actually integrate
that into Twitter slash X where people instead of clicking heart, they can click which of the
rhetorical tactics this is. And then 'cause you know,
there's actually community notes. I don't know if you've seen on X there, people can contribute notes
and it's quite fascinating. It works really, really well. But to give it a little more structure. - Yeah. - That's a really
interesting method actually. - Yeah I actually, when I was thinking about
ways that X could be used to argue towards truth,
I wouldn't wanna have it so that everybody would be bound to that. But I think that, I imagine it almost being
like a stream within X that was truth focused, that agrees to some additional rules on how they would argue. - Man, I would love that. Where like there's, in terms of streams that
intersect and could be separated, the shit talking one where
people just enjoy talking shit. - [Greg] Okay, go for it man. - And then there's like
truth, and then I mean then there's humor, then
there's like good vibes. Like, I'm not like somebody
who absolutely needs good vibes all the time, but sometimes- - [Greg] It's nice to have. - It's nice to just log in and not have to see like the drama, the fighting, the bickering,
the cancellations, the mobs, all of this. It's good to just see, that's
why I go to Reddit r aww or like one of the cute animals ones where there's cute puppies
and kittens and it's like. - I just wanna see Ryan Reynolds
singing with Will Ferrell. I mean like. - Sometimes that's all you need. - I need that in my heart. - Yeah. Not all the time, just a little bit. And right back to the battle for truth. Okay, so whataboutism. - Whataboutism, yeah, that's everywhere when you look at it,
when you look at Twitter, when you look at social media
in general, and the first, what we call the obstacle
course is basically time tested, old fashioned, argumentative
dodges that everybody uses. And whataboutism is just
bringing up something, like someone makes an
argument like Biden is corrupt and then someone says,
well, Trump was worse. You know, like, and that's
not an illegitimate, argument to make back, but it does, it seems to happen every time
someone makes an assertion, someone just points out some
other thing that was going on and it can get increasingly attenuated from what you're actually trying to argue. And you see this all
the time on social media and it's kind of, you know, I was a big fan of John
Stewart's Daily Show, but an awful lot of what the humor was and what the tactic was for arguing was this thing over here. It's like, oh, I'm making this argument about this important problem. Oh actually, there's this
other problem over here that I'm more concerned about and let's pick on the right here. So January 6th, watching everybody arguing about CHOP, like the occupied part of Seattle or the occupied part of Portland. And basically trying to like, oh, you're bringing up
the riot on January 6th. And by the way, I live on
Capitol Hill, so believe me, I was very aware of like
how scary and bad it was. My dad grew up in Yugoslavia
and that was a night where we all ate dinner in the basement 'cause I'm like, oh,
when this shit goes down, eat in the basement. It was genuinely scary. And people would try to
deflect from January 6th being serious by actually
making the argument that, oh, well there are crazy, horrible things happening
all over the country. Riots that came from some of
the social justice protests. And of course the answer is, you can be concerned
about both of these things and find them both problems. But if I'm arguing about CHOP, someone bringing up January
6th isn't super relevant to it. Or if I'm arguing about January 6th, someone bringing up the riots
in 2020, isn't that helpful. - We took a long dark
journey from whataboutism. - Yeah. - And related to that is
strawmanning and steelmanning. So misrepresenting the perspective of the opposing perspective
and this is something also I guess is very prevalent and it's difficult to
do the reverse of that, which is steelmanning requires empathy, it requires eloquence, it
requires understanding, actually doing the
research and understanding the alternative perspective. - My wonderful employee, Angel Eduardo has something
that he calls star-manning. And I find myself doing this a lot, it's nice to have two immigrant parents because I remember being in
San Francisco in the weird, kind of like ACLU slash
Birmingham kind of cohort and having a friend
there who was an artist who would talk about hating Kansas. And that was his metaphor
for middle America is what he meant by it. But he was kind of proud of
the fact that he hated Kansas. And I'm like, you gotta understand, I still see all of you a
little bit as foreigners and think about like, change
the name of Kansas to Croatia, change the name of Kansas to some- That's what it sounds like to me. And the star-manning idea, which I like, is the idea of being like, so you're saying that you really hate your dominant religious minority. And that's when you start
actually detaching yourself a little bit from it. How typical, America is
exceptional in a number of ways. But some of our dynamics
are incredibly typical. It's one of the reasons why like when people start reading
Thomas Sowell, for example, they start getting hooked. because one of the things he does is he does comparative analysis
of the country's problems and points out that some of these things that we think are just
unique to the United States exist in 75% of the rest of
the countries in the world. Francis Fukuyama, the book
that I'm reading right now, "The Origins of the Political Order" actually does this wonderful
job of pointing out how we're not special
in a variety of ways. This is actually something
that's very much on my mind. And Fukuyama of course, it's a great book. It's stilted a little bit in its writing because his term for one of
the things he's concerned about what destroys societies
is repatrimonialization which is the reversion to societies in which you favor your
family and friends. And I actually think a
lot of what I'm seeing in the United States, it makes me worried that we might be going through
a little bit of a process of repatrimonialization. And I think that's one of the reasons why people are so angry. I think the prospect
that we very nearly seem to have an election that was gonna be, Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton. It's like, are we a dynastic country now? Is that what's kind of happening? But also it's one of the reasons why people are getting so
angry about legacy admissions, about like how much certain families seem to be able to keep their
people in the upper classes of the United States perpetually. And believe me, like we
were poor when I was a kid and I got to go to one of the fancies. I got to go to Stanford and
I got to see how people, they treat you differently in
a way that's almost insulting. Like basically, like suddenly to a certain kind of person, I was a legitimate person. And I look at how much
America relies on Harvard, on Yale to produce its... I'm gonna use a very Marxist
sounding term, ruling class. And that's one of the reasons why you have to be particularly worried about what goes on at these elite colleges and these elite colleges with the exception
University of Chicago and UVA do really badly regarding
freedom of speech. And that has all sorts of problems. It doesn't bode well for the future of the protection of freedom of speech for the rest of the society. - So can you also empathize
there with the folks who voted for Donald Trump? Because as precisely that as a resistance to this kind of momentum
of the ruling class, this royalty that passes on the rule from generation to generation. - I try really hard to empathize
with, to a degree everybody and try to really see
where they're coming from and the anger on the right, I get it. I mean, like, I feel like the book, so "Coddling the American Mind" was a book that could be sort of a
crowd pleaser to a degree, partially because we
really meant what we said in the subtitle that
these are good intentions and bad ideas that are hurting people. And if you understand
it and read the book, you can say it's like, okay, this isn't anybody being malicious, this is people trying
to protect their kids. They're just doing it in
a way that actually can actually lead to greater
anxiety, depression, and strangely eventually pose
a threat to freedom of speech. But in this one, we can't be quite. Oh, I haven't even mentioned
my brilliant co-author Rikki Schlott, a 23 year old genius. She's amazing. I started working with
her when she was 20, who's my co-author on this book. So when I'm saying we, I am talking about me and Rikki. - [Lex] She's a libertarian. - [Greg] Libertarian journalist. - [Lex] And a journalist. Yeah, a brilliant mind. - But we can't actually write
this in a way that's too kind because cancelers aren't kind. There's a cruelty and a
mercilessness about it. I mean, I started getting
really depressed this past year when I was writing it, and I didn't even want to tell my staff why I was getting so
anxious and depressed. It's partially because I'm
talking about people who will, in some of the cases we're talking about, go to your house, target your kids. So that's a long-winded
way of saying the... I kind of can get what sort
of drives the right nuts to a degree in this. I feel like they're
constantly feeling like they're being gaslit. Elite education is really
insulting to the working class. Like part of the ideology
that is dominant right now kind of treats almost 70%
of the American public, we developed this a little bit in the perfect rhetorical fortress. Like they're to some way illegitimate and not worthy of respect or compassion. - Yeah, the general elitism that radiates self fueling elitism that
radiates from the people that go to these institutions. - And what's funny is the
elitism has been repackaged as a kind of... It masquerades as kind
of infinite compassion that essentially it's based in
a sort of very, to be frank, overly simple ideology and
over simple explanation of the world and breaking
people into groups and judging people on
how oppressed they are on the intersection of
their various identities. And it came to that I think initially and it had appeal from
a compassionate core, but it gets used in a way
that can be very cruel, very dismissive, compassionless, and allows you to not take seriously most of your fellow human beings. - It's really weird how that happened. Maybe you can explore why a thing that kind of sounds good at first... - [Greg] Yeah. - Can become such a cruel weapon of canceling and hurting
people and ignoring people. I mean, this is what you described with a perfect rhetorical fortress which is a set of questions. Maybe you can elaborate on what the perfect
rhetorical fortress is. - Yeah, so the perfect rhetorical fortress is the way that's been
developed on the left to not ever get to
someone's actual argument. I wanna make a chart,
like a flow chart of this, about like, here's the argument and here
is this perfect fortress that will deflect you every time from getting to the argument. And I started to notice this certainly when I was in law school, that there were lots of different ways you could dismiss people and
perfect rhetorical fortress, step one, and I can attest to this because I was guilty of this as well, that you can dismiss people if you can argue that
they're conservative. They don't have to be
conservative to be clear. You just have to say that they are. So I never read Thomas Sowell
because he was a right winger. I didn't read Camille Paglia because someone had convinced
me she was a right winger. There were lots of authors that, and when I was in law school, among a lot of very bright people, it really was already
an intellectual habit that if you could designate
something conservative, then you didn't really
have to think about it very much anymore or take
it particularly seriously. That's a childish way of arguing. But nonetheless, I engaged in it. It was a common tactic. I
even mentioned in the book, there was a time when
a gay activist friend who is I think decidedly to my left, but nonetheless had that
pragmatic experience of actually being an
activist, said something like, "well, just 'cause someone's conservative doesn't mean they're wrong." And I remember feeling kind
of scandalized at some level of just being like, wow,
isn't that the whole thing what we're saying is that
they're just kind of bad people with bad ideas? - You can just throw, oh,
that guy's a right winger, you can just throw that. - Boop, don't have to
think about you anymore. - Yeah, if you're popular enough, it can be kind of sticky
and it's weird because- - Because it's effective, that's why it keeps on getting used. Essentially, it should have hit someone because I have a great liberal pedigree, everything from working at
the ACLU to doing refugee law in Eastern Europe. I was part of an environmental
mentoring program for inner city high school kids in DC. I can defend myself as being on the left. But I hate doing that because
there's also part of me that's like, "okay, so what?" Like, are you really saying that if you can magically make me
argue or convince yourself that I'm on the right, that you don't have to
listen to me anymore? And again, that's arguing like children. And the reason why this
has become so popular is because even among, or
maybe especially among elites, that it works so effectively as a perfect weapon that
you can use uncritically. If I can just prove you're on the right, I don't have to think about you. It's no wonder that suddenly
you start seeing people calling the ACLU right wing and calling the New York Times right wing because it's been such an effective way to delegitimize people as thinkers. Stephen Pinker, who's on
our board of advisors, he refers to academia
as being the left pole, that essentially it's a position
from that point of view, everything looks to its right. It looks as if it's on the right. But once it becomes a
tactic that we accept, and that's one of the reasons
why I'm more on the left. But I think I'm left of center liberal. Rikki is more conservative libertarian. And initially I was kind of like, should I be really be writing something with someone who's more on the right? And I'm like, absolutely I should be. I have to actually live up to
what I believe on this stuff because it's ridiculous that
we have this primitive idea that you can dismiss
someone as soon as you claim rightly or wrongly that
they're on the right. - Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like you were
recently called right wing. FIRE, maybe you by association
because of that debate. - Oh, the LA Times. - [Lex] The LA Times. - Oh fun, let's talk about the LA Times. - So yes, there's an
article, there's a debate. I can't wait to watch it 'cause I don't think it's
available yet to watch on video. You have to attend in person. I can't wait to see it. But FIRE was in part
supporting and then LA Times wrote a scathing article about... that everybody in the
debate was basically right, leaning right. - Okay, so much to unpack there. Bari Weiss has this great
project, the Free Press, I've been very impressed. It's covering stories
that a lot of the media right or left isn't willing to cover. And we hosted a debate with her and we wanted to make it as fun and controversial as possible. So FIRE and the, The Free
Press hosted a debate. "Did the sexual revolution fail?" So the debate was really
exciting, really fun. The side that said that sexual
revolution wasn't a failure. That Grimes and Sarah
Haider were on one won. it it was nice meaty, thoughtful night and there was a review of it
that was just sort of scathing about the whole thing. And it included a line saying that FIRE, which claims to believe in free speech, but only defends
viewpoints it agrees with. I can't believe that even
made it into the magazine 'cause it's not just
calling us 'cause of course, the implication was that we're
right wing which we're not. Actually the staff leans
decidedly more to the left than to the right. But we also defend people
all over the spectrum all the time. Like that's something
that even the most minimal Google search would've solved. So like we've been giving
LA Times some heat on this because it's like, yeah, if you said, in my opinion they're right
wing, we would've argued back, you know, saying, well here's
the following 50,000 examples of us not being, but when you actually
make the factual claim that we only defend opinions
we agree with, first of all, there's no way for us
to agree with opinions because we actually have a
politically diverse staff who won't even agree on
which opinions are good and what opinions we have. But yeah, at one time when
someone did something like this and they were just being
a little bit flippant about kind of like free speech being fine, I did a 70 tweet long thread, just being like, "Hey, do you
really think this is fine?" I decided not to do that
on this particular one. But the nice thing about it
is it demonstrated two parts of the book "Canceling of the
American Mind" if not more. One of them is dismissing someone 'cause they're conservative and because that was the implication. Don't have to listen to FIRE
'cause they're conservative. But the other one is something,
a term that I invented specifically for the way
people argue on Twitter, which is hypocrisy projection. Hi, I'm a person who only caress about one
side of the political fence and I think everyone else is a hypocrite. And by the way, I haven't done
any actual research on this, but I assume everyone else is a hypocrite. And you see this happen all the time and this happens to FIRE a lot
where someone will be like, where is FIRE on this
case? And we're like, we are literally quoted
in the link you just sent but didn't actually read. Or it's like, where's FIRE on this? It's like, here's our lawsuit
about it from six months ago. So it's a favorite thing. And also John Stewart Daily
Show like the whataboutism, and the kind of like
idea that these people must be hypocrites is
something that greatest comedy. But as far as actually a rhetorical tactic that will get you the truth, just assuming that your opponent or just accusing your opponent
of always being a hypocrite is not a good tactic for truth. But by the way, it tends
to always come from people who aren't actually consistent
on free speech themselves. - So hence the projection. But basically not doing the research about whether the person
is or isn't a hypocrite and assuming others or a large
fraction of others reading it will also not do the research. And therefore this kind of statement becomes a kind of truthiness
without a grounding in actual reality.
- Yeah. - It breaks down that barrier
between what is and isn't true because if the mob says something is true, it takes too much effort to correct it. - And there are three ways
I wanna respond to this, which is just giving example after example of times where we defended
people on both sides of every major issue. Basically every major issue, whether it's Israel Palestine,
whether it's terrorism, whether it's gay marriage,
we have been, abortion. We have defended both
sides of that argument. The other part, and I call these the
orphans of the culture war. I really want to urge the media to start caring about free speech cases that actually don't
have a political valence that are actually just
about good old fashioned exercise of power against
the little guy or little girl or little group on campus or
off campus for that matter 'cause these cases happen, a lot of our litigation
are just little people, just regular people being
told that they can't protest, that they can't hold signs. And then the last part of the argument that I want people to
really get is like, yeah, and by the way, right wingers get in trouble too, and there are attacks from the left. And you should take those seriously too. You should care when
Republicans get in trouble, you should care when
California has a DEI program that requires this,
California community colleges has a DEI program, a policy that actually requires
even chemistry professors to work in different DEI ideas from intersectionality to
anti-racism into their classroom, into their syllabus, et cetera. This is a gross violation
of economic freedom. It is as bad as it is to tell
professors what they can't say like we fought and defeated in Florida. It's even worse to tell
them what they must say. That's downright totalitarian
and we're suing against this. And what I'm saying is that,
when you're dismissing someone for just being on the other
side of the political fence, you are also kind of
claiming, making a claim that none of these cases matter as well. And I want people to care about censorship even if it's against people they hate. - Censorship is censorship. If we can take that
tangent briefly with DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. What is the good and what is
the harm of such programs? - DEI, I know people
who are DEI consultants. Actually I have a dear
friend who I love very much who does DEI, absolutely decent people. What they want to do is create bonds of
understanding, friendship, compassion among people who are different. Unfortunately, the research on what a lot of DEI actually does is oftentimes the opposite of that. And I think that it's partially a problem with some of the ideology that comes from critical race theory, which is a real thing by the way. That informs a lot of DEI, that
actually makes it something more likely to divide than unite. We talk about this in
"Coddling of the American Mind" as the difference between common
humanity identity politics and common enemy identity politics. And I think that, I know some
of the people that I know who do DEI, they really want it to be common
humanity identity politics. But some of the actual
ideological assumptions that are baked in can
actually cause people to feel more alienated from each other. Now, when I started at FIRE, my first cases involved
9/11 and it was bad. Professors were getting targeted, professors were losing their jobs for saying insensitive things about 9/11. And both from the right
and the left actually in that case, actually sometimes
a lot more from the right. And it was really bad. And about five professors lost their jobs. That's bad. Five professors over a
relatively short period of time being fired for a political opinion. That's something that would get written up in any previous decades. We're now evaluating
like how many professors have been targeted for cancellation between 2014 and middle of
this year, July of 2023. We're at about, well over 1,000 attempts to get professors fired or punished, usually driven by students
and administrators, often driven by professors
unfortunately as well. About two thirds of those result in the professor
being punished in some way. Everything from having their
article removed to suspension, et cetera. About one fifth of those result in professors being fired. So right now, it's almost 200, it's around 190 professors being fired. So I want to give some context here. The Red Scare is generally considered to have been from 1947 to 1957. It ended by the way, in '57
when it finally became clear thanks to the First Amendment, that you couldn't actually fire
people for their ideologies. Prior to that, a lot of universities thought they could. This guy is a very
doctrinaire or communist, they can't be just persuaded,
I'm gonna fire them. They thought they actually could do that. And it was only '57 when
the law was established. So like right now, these are
happening in an environment where freedom of speech, academic freedom are clearly protected at public colleges in the United States and we're still seeing
these kind of numbers. During the Red Scare, the biggest study that was
done of what was going on I think this came out in like '55 and the evaluation was that
there was about 62 professors fired for being communists and
about 90 something professors fired for political views overall. That usually is reported
as being about 100. So 60, 90, 100 depending
on how you look at it, I think the number is actually higher. But that's only because of hindsight. Like what I mean by
hindsight is we can look back and we actually find
there were more professors who were fired as time reveals. We're at 190 professors fired. And I still have to put
up with people saying this isn't even happening. And I'm like, in the nine and a half years of cancel culture, 190 professors fired. In the 11 years of the Red Scare probably somewhere around
100, maybe probably more. The number's gonna keep going up. But unlike during the Red Scare where people could clearly
tell something was happening, the craziest thing about cancel culture is I'm still dealing with
people who are saying this isn't happening at all. And it hasn't been subtle on campus. And we know that's a wild
under count by the way, because when we surveyed professors, 17% of them said that
they had been threatened with investigation or
actually investigated for what they taught,
said or their research. And one third of them said that they were told by administrators not to take on controversial research. So like extrapolating that out, that's a huge number and the reason why
you're not going to hear about a lot of these cases is because there are so
many different conformity inducing mechanisms in the whole thing. And that's one of the reasons why the idea that you'd add something like
requiring a DEI statement to be hired or to get into a school under the current environment
is so completely nuts. We have had a genuine
crisis of academic freedom over the last, particularly
since 2017 on campuses. We have very low viewpoint
diversity to begin with. And under these circumstances, administrators just start saying, you know what the problem is, we have too much heterogeneous thought. We're not homogeneous enough. We actually need... We need another political
litmus test, which is nuts. And that's what a DEI
statement effectively is 'cause there's no way to
actually fill out a DEI statement without someone evaluating
you on your politics. It's crystal clear. We even did an experiment on this. Nate Honeycutt, he got something like
almost like 3,000 professors to participate evaluating
different kinds of DEI statements. And one was basically like the standard kind of identity politics,
intersectionality one, one was about viewpoint diversity, one was about religious diversity and one was about socioeconomic diversity. And as far as where my heart really is, it's that we have too little
socioeconomic diversity, particularly in elite higher ed, but also in education period. So the experiment was, had large participation
really interestingly set up and it tried to model the way
a lot of these DEI policies were actually implemented. And one of the ways these
have been implemented and I think in some of
the California schools is that administrators go
through the DEI statements before anyone else looks at them and then eliminates people off the top depending on how they feel
about their DEI statements. And the one on viewpoint diversity, I think like half of the
people who reviewed it would eliminate it right out. And I think it was basically the same for religious diversity. It was slightly better, like 40% for socioeconomic diversity. But that kills me. Like the idea that kind of like, yeah, that actually is the kind of
diversity that I think we need a great deal more of in higher education. It's not hostile to the
other kinds by the way, but the idea that we need
more people from the bottom, of three quarters of American society, like in higher education, I think should be something
we could all get around. That the only one that really succeeded was the one that spouted back exactly the kind of ideology that they thought the readers would like. Which is like, okay, there's no way this couldn't
be a political litmus test. We've proved that it's
a political litmus test and still school after school is adding these to its application process to make schools still more
ideologically homogenous. - Why does that have a negative effect? Is it because it enforces
a kind of group think where people are afraid, start becoming afraid to sort
of think and speak freely, liberally about whatever? - Well one, it selects
for people who tend to be, farther to the left in a situation where you already have people, a situation where universities
do lean decidedly that way. But it also establishes
essentially a set of sacred ideas that if you're being quizzed on whether what you've done to advance anti-racism, how you've been conscious
of intersectionality, it's unlikely that you'd
actually get in if you said, "by the way, I actually think
these are dubious concepts. I think they're thin. I think they're philosophically
not very defensible." Basically like if your position was, I actually actually reject these concepts as being over simple. You're not gonna get
in and I think that... The person that I always think
of that wasn't a right winger that would be like "go to hell" if you made him fill
one of these things out, it's Feynman. I feel like if you gave
one of these things to Richard Feynman, he'd be like, he would tear it to pieces. - [Lex] Yeah.
- And then not get the job. - Yeah, there's some element of it that creates this hard to pin down fear. So you said like the firing, the thing I wanted to say is, firing 100 people or 200 people, the point is even firing one
person, I've just seen it, it can create this quiet
ripple effect of fear. - Oh, of course. - That single firing of a faculty- - [Greg] Oh absolutely. - Has a ripple effect across
tens of thousands of people, of educators, of who is hired, what kind of conversations are being had, what kind of textbooks are chosen, what kind of self censorship
and different flavors of that is happening. It's hard to measure that. - Yeah I mean, when you
ask professors about, are they intimidated under
the current environment, the answer is yes. And particularly conservative professors, already reporting that
they're afraid for their jobs in a lot of different cases. - You have a lot of good
statistics in the book. Things like self-censorship. One provided with a
definition of self-censorship, at least a quarter of students said they self-censor
fairly often or very often during conversations with
other students, with professors and during classroom discussions. 25%, 27% and 28% respectively. A quarter of students also
said that they are more likely to self-censor on campus now
at the time they were surveyed than they were when they
first started college. So sort of colleges kind of instilling this
idea of censorship, self-censorship. - [Greg] And back to the
Red Scare comparison, and this is one of the interesting things about the data as well, is that that same study
that I was talking about, the most comprehensive
study of the Red Scare, there was polling about
whether or not professors were self-censoring due to
the fear of the environment. And 9% of professors said
that they were self-censoring their research and what they were saying. 9% is really bad. That's almost a 10th of professors saying that they were actually, their speech was chilled. When we did this question for professors on our
latest faculty survey, when you factor together, we asked them are they
self-censoring in their research, are they self-censoring in class, are they self-censoring online, et cetera. It was 90% of professors. So the idea that we're
actually in an environment that is historic in terms of
like how scared people are actually of expressing
controversial views, I think that it's the reason why we're gonna actually be
studying this in 50 years. The same way we studied the Red Scare. The idea that this isn't happening is we'll just be correctly
viewed as insane. - So maybe we can just
discuss the leaning, the current leaning of
academia towards the left which you describe in various
different perspectives. So one, there's a voter
registration ratio chart that you have by department,
which I think is interesting. Can you explain this chart and can you explain what it shows? - [Greg] Yeah, when I
started FIRE in 2001, I didn't take the viewpoint
diversity issue as seriously. I thought it was just
something that right wingers complained about. But I really started to get what happens when you have a community
with low viewpoint diversity. And actually a lot of the research that I got most interested in was done in conjunction
with the great Cuss Sunstein who writes a lot about group polarization and the research on this is very strong, that essentially when you have groups with political diversity, and you can see this actually
in judges for example, it tends to produce reliably
more moderate outcomes. Whereas groups that have
low political diversity tend to sort of spiral, spiral off in their own direction. And when you have a
super majority of people from just one political perspective, that's a problem for
the production of ideas. It creates a situation where
there are sacred ideas. And when you look at
some of the departments, I think the estimate from the Crimson is that Harvard has 3% conservatives. But when you look at
different departments, there are elite departments that have literally no
conservatives in them. And I think that's an unhealthy
intellectual environment. The problem is definitely
worse as you get more elite, we definitely see more
cases of lefty professors getting canceled at less elite schools. It gets worse as you get
down from the elite schools. That's where a lot of
the one third of attempts to get professors punished
that are successful, do come from the right and largely from off-campus sources. And we spend a lot of
time talking about that in the book as well. It's something that I do
think is underappreciated, but when it comes to the
low viewpoint diversity, it works out kind of like
you'd expect to a degree. Economics is what? Four to one or something like that. It's not as bad. But then when you start getting
into some of the humanities, like there are departments
that there are literally none. - Is there a good why to
why did the universities university faculty
administration move to the left? - Yeah. I don't love, and this is an argument that
you'll sometimes run into on the left, just the argument that
well people on the left are just smarter. And it's like, okay, it's interesting because
at least the research as of 10 years ago was indicating that if you dig a little
bit deeper into that, a lot of the people who do
consider themselves on the left tend to be a little bit more libertarian. Pinker wrote a fair amount about the idea that we're just smarter. It is not an opinion I'm at
least bit comfortable with. I do think that departments
take on momentum when they become a place
where you're like, wow, it'd be really unpleasant for
me to work in this department if I'm the token conservative. And I think that takes
on a life of its own. There are also departments
where a lot of the ideologies kind of explicitly leftist. You look at education schools, a lot of the stuff that
is actually left over from what is correctly
called critical race theories is present. And you end up having that in
a number of the departments. And it would be very strange
to be in many departments, a conservative social worker professor. I'm sure they exist, but there's a lot of pressure
to shut up if you are. - So the process on the
left of cancellation, as you started to talk about with the perfect rhetorical fortress, the first step is dismiss a person if you can put a label
of conservative on them, you can dismiss 'em in that way. What other efficient or what other effective
dismissal mechanisms are there? - Yeah, we have a little bit
of fun with demographic numbers and I run this by height and I remember him being kind of like, don't include the actual percentage. I'm like, no, we need to include the actual percentages 'cause people are really bad at estimating what the demographics of
the US actually looks like, both the right and the
left in different ways. So we put it in the
numbers and we talk about, being dismissed for being white or being dismissed for being straight or being dismissed for being male. And you can already dismiss
people for being conservative. And so we give examples in the book of these being used to dismiss people and oftentimes on topics not related to the fact that they're a male or whether or not they're a minority. And then we get to, I think it's like layer
six and we're like, surprise guess what? You're
down to 0.4% of the population and none of it mattered because if you have the wrong opinion, even if you're in that 0.4% of the most intersectional
person who ever lived and you have the wrong
opinion, you're a heretic and you actually probably
will be hated even more. And the most interesting part of the research we did for this was just asking every
prominent black conservative and moderate that we knew personally. Have you been told that
you're not really black for an opinion you had? Every single one of
them was like, oh yeah. And it's kind of funny
'cause it's like oftentimes white lefties telling them that's like, oh, do you consider yourself black? John McWhorter talked
about having a reporter when he showed that he dissented from some of what he described
as kind of like woke racism in his book "Woke Ideas." The reporter actually is like, so do you consider yourself black? He's like, what? He was like, what, are you crazy? Of course I do. And Coleman Hughes had one
of the best quotes on it. He said, "I'm constantly being told
that the most important thing to how legitimate my opinion is, is whether or not I'm black. But then when I have a dissenting opinion, I get told I'm not really black." So, perfect. Like, there's no way to
falsify this argument. That investigation really struck me. - And you lay this out
really nicely in the book, that there is this process of
saying, are you conservative? Yes, you can dismiss the person. Are you white? Dismiss the person. Are you male? You can dismiss the person. There's these categories
that make it easier for you to dismiss a
person's ideas based on that. And like you said, you end
up in that tiny percentage and you could still dismiss. - And it's not just dismiss. We talk about this from
a practical standpoint, the way the limitations on reality. And one of 'em is time and
a lot of cancel culture as cultural norms, as this
way of winning arguments without winning arguments is
about running up the clock because by the time you
get down to the bottom or actually even you get a couple of steps into the perfect rhetorical fortress and where has the time gone? You probably just give up trying to actually have the argument and you never get to the
argument in the first place. - And all of these things are
pretty sticky on social media. - Social media practically invented the perfect rhetorical fortress. - So that each one of those
stages has a virality to it. - [Greg] Yeah. - So it could stick and then it can get people really excited. - It allows you to feel
outraged and superiority. - Yeah because of that, at the scale of the virality allows you to never get to the actual
discussion of the point. So, but it's not just the left, it's the right also, the
efficient rhetorical fortress. So something to be proud of on the right. It's more efficient. - [Greg] Yeah. - So you don't have to listen to liberals and anyone can be labeled a liberal if they have a wrong opinion. I've seen liberal and
left and leftist all used in the same kind of way. That's leftist nonsense. You don't have to listen to experts. Even conservative experts, if
they have the wrong opinion, you don't have to listen to journalists, even conservative journalists if they have the wrong opinion. And among the MAGA wing
there's a fourth proposition, there's a fourth provision. You don't need to listen to
anyone who isn't pro-Trump. - Yeah, and we call it efficient because it eliminates a lot of people you probably should listen
to at least sometimes, like we point out sometimes
like how cancel culture can interfere with faith and expertise. So we get kind of being a
little suspicious of experts, but at the same time, if you follow that and
you follow it mechanically and I think everybody in the US probably has some older uncle
who exercises some of these. It is a really efficient way
to sort of wall yourself off from the rest of the world and dismiss, at least some people you
really should be listening to. - The way you laid it out. It made me realize that we just take up so much of our
brain power with these things it's literally time- - We could be solving things. - And you get like, you kind of exhaust yourself
through this process of being outraged based on these labels. And you never get to actually, there's almost not enough time for empathy for like looking at a person thinking, well maybe they're right 'cause you're so busy categorizing them. And it's fascinating. - What's the fun in empathy? And I mean, what's so
interesting about this is that so much societal energy seems to be spent on these nasty, primal desires where
essentially a lot of it's like, please tell me who I'm allowed to hate. Where can I legitimately be cruel? Where can I actually exercise some aggression against somebody? And it seems to sometimes be just finding new justifications for that
and it's an understandable, human failing that sometimes
can be used to defend justice, but again, it will never get
you anywhere near the truth. - One interesting case that you cover, about expertise is with COVID. - [Greg] Yeah. - So how did cancel culture come into play on the topic of COVID? - Yeah, I think that COVID was
a big blow to people's faith and expertise and cancel culture
played a big role in that. I think one of the best examples of this is Jennifer Sey at Levi's.
She is a lovely woman. She was a vice president at Levi's. She talked about actually potentially to be the president of Levi's jeans. And she was a big advocate for kids. And when they started
shutting down the schools, she started saying, this
is going to be a disaster. This is going to hurt the poor and disadvantaged kids the most. We have to figure out a way
to open the schools back up. And that was such a
heretical point of view. And the typical kind of
cancel culture wave took over because we had all sorts of
petitions for her to be fired and that she needed to apologize
and all this kind of stuff. And you know, she was offered I think like
a million dollar severance, which she wouldn't take 'cause
she wanted to tell the world what she thought about this and that she wanted to continue saying that she hadn't changed her mind. That this was a disaster for young people. And now that's kind of
the conventional wisdom and the research is quite clear that this was devastating to particularly disadvantaged youths. Like people understand
this now as being okay. She was probably right. But one of the really sad
aspects of cancel culture is people forget why you are canceled and they just know they hate you. There's this lingering kind of like, well I don't have to take
them seriously anymore. By the way, did you notice
they happened to be right on something very important? Now, one funny thing
about freedom of speech, freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you didn't also have the right to say things that were wrong because if you can't engage in ideaphoria, if you can't actually speculate, you'll never actually get
to something that's right in the first place. But it's especially galling
when people who were right were censored and never
actually get the credit that they deserve. - Well this might be a good place to ask a little bit more about
the freedom of speech. And so you said that included
in the freedom of speech is to say things that are wrong. What is your perspective on hate speech? - Hate speech is the best
marketing campaign for censorship and it came from academia
of the 20th century. And that when I talked about
the anti-free speech movement, that was one of their first inventions. There was a lot of talk
about critical race theory and being against critical
race theory and FIRE will sue if you say that people can't
advocate for it or teach it or research it because you
do absolutely have the right to pursue it academically. However, every time someone mentions CRT, they should also say
the very first project of the people who founded CRT, Richard Delgado, Mary Metsuda, et cetera, was to create this new
category of unprotected speech called hate speech. And to get it banned, the person who enabled
this drift of course was Herbert Marcuse in 1965 basically questioning
whether or not free speech should be a sacred value on the left. And he was on the losing
side for a really long time. The liberals, the way I
grew up that was basically being pro-free speech was
synonymous with being a liberal, but that started to be
etched away on campus. And the way it was was with
the idea of hate speech that essentially, oh, but we can designate
particularly bad speech as not protected and
who's gonna enforce it? Who's gonna decide what
hate speech actually is? Well it's usually
overwhelmingly can only happen in an environment of really
low viewpoint diversity because you have to actually agree on what the most hateful
and wrong things are. And there's a bedrock principle. it's referred to this in a
great case about flag burning in the First Amendment that I think all the
world could benefit from. You can't ban speech just
'cause it's offensive, it's too subjective. It's one of the reasons
why these kind of codes have been more happily
adopted in places like Europe where they have a sense that
there's like a modal German or a modal Englishman. And I think this is offensive
and therefore I can say that this is wrong. In a more multicultural, in a
genuinely more diverse country that's never actually
had an honest thought that there is a single kind of American. There's never been, like we
had the idea of Uncle Sam, but that was always kind of a joke. Boston always knew it wasn't,
Richmond always knew it wasn't Georgia always knew it
wasn't, you know, Alaska. Like we've always been a hodgepodge and we get in a society that diverse that you can't ban things simply 'cause they're offensive. And that's one of the reasons why hate speech is not an
unprotected category of speech. And I go further, my
theory on freedom of speech is slightly different than most other constitutional lawyers. And I think that's partially
because some of the ways, some of these theories, although a lot of them are
really good, are inadequate, they're not expansive enough. And I sometimes call my theory
the pure informational theory of freedom of speech or
sometimes when I wanna be fancy the lab and the looking glass theory. And it's most important tenet is that if the goal is the project
of human knowledge, which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think and what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know. So every time you're actually
saying "you can't say that" you're actually depriving
yourself of the knowledge of what people really think. You're causing what Timur Kuran who's on our board of advisor, it's called preference falsification. You end up with an inaccurate
picture of the world. Which by the way, in a lot of cases, because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think
that people are more prejudice than they might be. And actually these kind of restrictions, there was a book called "Racial Paranoia" that came out about 15 years ago that was making the
point that the imposition of some of these codes
can sometimes make people think that the only thing holding you back from being a raging
racist are these codes. So it must be really, really bad. It can actually make
all these things worse. And one, which we talk about in the book, one very real practical
way it makes things worse is when you censor people, it
doesn't change their opinion, it just encourages them to
not share it with people who will get them in trouble. So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with and group polarization takes off. So we have some interesting
data in the book about how driving people
off of Twitter, for example, in 2017 and then again I think in 2020, driving people to gab led
to greater radicalization among those people. It's a very predictable force. Censorship doesn't actually
change people's minds and it pushes them in
directions that actually by very solid research will actually make them more radicalized. So yeah, I think that the
attempt to ban hate speech, it doesn't really protect us from it, but it gives the government
such a vast weapon to use against us that we will
regret giving them. - Is there a ways to sort of, to look at extreme cases to
test this idea out a little bit? So if you look on campus, what's your view about allowing say, white supremacists on
campus to do speeches? KKK. - I think you should be able
to study what people think and I think it's important
that we actually do. So I think that, let's
take for example QAnon. Yeah, QAnon is wrong, but
where did it come from? Why did they think that?
What's the motivation? Who taught them it? Who
came up with these ideas? This is important to understand history, it's important to understand
modern American politics. And so if you put your scholar hat on, and which you should be
curious about kind of everyone, about where they're coming from. Daryl Davis, who I'm sure
you're familiar with, part of his goal was just
simply to get to know where people were coming from. And in the process he
actually deradicalized a number of clans members when they actually realized
that this black man who would befriended them
actually was compassionate, was a decent person. They realized all their
preconceptions were wrong. So it can have a deradicalizing
factor by the way, but even when it doesn't, it's still really important to know what the bad people in your society think. Honestly, in some ways
it's for your own safety, it's probably more important to know what the bad people in your
society actually think. - I personally, I don't know
what you think about that, but I personally think
that freedom of speech in cases like that, like KKK on campus can do more harm in the short term, but much more benefit in the long term 'cause you can sometimes argue for like, this is going to hurt in the short term. But I mean, Harvey said this, like consider the alternative.
- Yeah. - Because you've just kind
of made the case for like, this potentially would be a good thing even in the short term
and it often is I think especially in a stable society like ours with a strong middle class,
all these kinds of things where people have like the comforts to reason through things. But you know, to me it's like, even if it hurts in the short term, even if it does create more
hate in the short term, the freedom of speech has
this really beneficial thing, which is it helps you
move towards the truth, the entirety of society towards a deeper, more accurate understanding
of life on earth, of society, of how people function,
of ethics, of metaphysics, of everything. And that in the long
term is a huge benefit. It gets rid of the Nazis in the long term, even if it adds to the number
of Nazis in the short term. - Yeah. Well, and meanwhile, just for, and the reality check part of this is people always bring up, what
about the Klan on campus? I'm like, they're never invited. I haven't seen a case
where they've been invited. Usually the Klan argument gets thrown out when people are trying to excuse and that's why we
shouted down Ben Shapiro. And that's why you can't
have Bill Maher on campus. And it's like, okay. And it's a little bit of
that whataboutism again about being like, well that thing over there is terrible and therefore this
comedian shouldn't come. - So I do have a question
maybe by way of advice - Sure. - You know, interviewing
folks and seeing this, like a podcast has a platform
in deciding who to talk to or not, that's something I
have to come face to face with on occasion. My natural inclination
before I started the podcast was I would talk to anyone and including people which
I'm still interested in, who are current members of the KKK. And to me there's a responsibility
to do that with skill. And that responsibility has been weighing
heavier and heavier on me because you realize how
much skill it actually takes because you have to know,
to understand so much because I've come to understand that the devil is always
going to be charismatic. The devil's not gonna look like the devil. And so you have to realize, you can't always come to the
table with a deep compassion for another human being. You have to have like 90% compassion and another 90% deep historical knowledge about the context of the battles around this particular issue. And that takes just a
huge amount of effort. But I don't know if there's
thoughts you have about this, how to handle speech in
a way without censoring bringing it to the surface, but in a way that creates
more love in the world. - I remember Steve Bannon got disinvited from the New Yorker festival
and Jim Carrey freaked out and all sorts of other people freaked out and they got disinvited and I got invited to speak
on Serash about this. And I was saying like, listen, you don't have people to your conference because you agree with them. Like we have to get out of this idea because they were trying
to make it sound like that's an endorsement of Steve Bannon. Like that's nonsense. Like if you actually look at the opinions of all the people who are there, you can't possibly
endorse all the opinions that all these other people
who are gonna be there actually have. And in the process of
making that argument, and also of course, the very classic, it's very valuable to know
what Steve Bannon thinks. You should be curious about that and I remember someone
arguing back saying, well, would you want
someone to interview Jihadi? And I'm like, because at the moment, like
it was at the time when ISIS was really going for it. And I was like, would you not want to go to a talk where someone was trying to figure out what makes some of these people tick? But that changes your framing
that essentially it's like no, it's curiosity. is the cure
for a lot of this stuff and we need a great deal more curiosity and a lot less unwarranted certainty. - And there's a question of like, how do you conduct such conversations? - [Greg] Sure. - And I feel deeply underqualified. - Who do you think is
especially good at that? - I feel like documentary filmmakers usually do a much better job. And the best job is usually
done by biographers. So the more time you give
to a particular conversation like really deep thought
and historical context and studying the people, how they think, looking at all different perspectives. Looking at the psychology
of the person, upbringing, their parents, their
grandparents, all of this. The more time you spend with that, the better the quality
of the conversation is because you get to understand, you get to really
empathize with the person, with the people he or she represents and you get to see the common humanity. All of this. Interviewers often don't do that work. - [Greg] Yeah. - So like the best stuff
I've seen is interviews that are part of a documentary. But even now, documentaries are like, there's a huge incentive to
do as quickly as possible. There's not an incentive
to really spend time with the person. - There's a great new
documentary about Floyd Abrams that I really recommend. We did a documentary about Ira
Glasser called "Mighty Ira" which was my video team and my protege, Nico Purino and Chris Malby
and Aaron Reese put it together and it just follows the life
and times of Ira Glasser, the former head of the ACLU. - If you could just linger on that, that's a fascinating story. - [Greg] Oh, yeah.
- Who's Ira? - Ira's amazing. Ira, he wasn't a lawyer. He started working at the NYCLU, in the New York Civil
Liberties Union back in I think the sixties. I think Robert Kennedy recommended that he go in that direction and he became the president
of the ACLU right at the time that they were suffering
from defending the Nazis at Skokie and Nico and Aaron
and Chris put together this and they'd never done a documentary before and it came out so, so well, and it tells the story
of the Nazis in Skokie. It tells the story of the case around it, it tells the story of the ACLU at the time and what a great leader Ira Glasser was. And one of the things that's so great is like when you get to
see the Nazis in Skokie, they come off like the idiots
that you would expect them to. There's a moment when the
rally's not going very well and the leader gets flustered and it almost seems like
he's gonna like shout out kind of like, "you're making
this Nazi rally into a mockery" so it showed how actually allowing the Nazis to speak at Skokie kind of took the wind out of their sails. Like the whole movement,
everybody was kind of, it all kind of dissolved after that because they looked like
racist fools that they were, even "Blues Brothers"
made jokes about them. And it didn't turn into the disaster that people thought it was going to be just by letting them speak. And Ira Glassier. Okay, so he has this wonderful story about how Jackie Robinson
joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and how there was a moment
when it was seeing someone, an African American
literally on their team and how that really got 'em excited about the cause of racial equality and that became a big
part of what his life was. And I just think of that
as such a great metaphor is expanding your circle and seeing more people as being
quite literally on your team is the solution to so
many of these problems. And I worry that one of the
things that is absolutely just a fact of life in America is like we do see each other more as enemy camps as opposed to people on the same team. And that was actually
something in the early days, like me and Will Creeley, the legal director of FIRE
wrote about the forthcoming free speech challenges of
everyone being on Facebook. And one thing that I was hoping was that as more people were
exposing more of their lives, we had realized a lot of these
things we knew intellectually like kids go to the bar and
get drunk and do stupid things. That when we started seeing the evidence of them doing stupid things that we might be shocked at first, but then eventually get more
sophisticated and be like, well, come on. People are like that. That never actually
really seemed to happen. That I don't think, I think that there are plenty of things we know about human nature and we know about dumb things people say, and we've made it into an environment where there's just someone out there waiting to be kind of like, oh, remember that dumb thing
you said when we were 14. Well I'm gonna make sure that you don't get into your
dream school because of that. - That's offense archeology. - [Greg] That's not my term though. - Oh, okay.
- [Greg] It's a great term. - Well that's a great term.
We steal from the best. Digging through someone's past comments to find a speech that hasn't aged well. - And that one's tactical, like that one isn't just
someone not being empathetic. They're like, I'm gonna
punish you for this and that's one of the
reasons why I got depressed writing this book because there's already
people who don't love me because of "Coddling of the American Mind" usually based on a misunderstanding
of what we actually said in "Coddling of the American
Mind" but nonetheless, but on this one, like I'm calling out
people for being very cruel in a lot of cases, but one thing that was really scary about studying a lot of these cases is that once you have
that target on your back, what they're gonna try to cancel
you for could be anything. They might go back into your old books, find something that you said in 1995, do something where essentially it looks like it's this
entire other thing, but really what's going on is
they didn't like your opinion, they didn't like your
point of view on something and they're gonna find
a way that from now on anytime your name comes up, it's like, oh, remember this
thing I didn't like about 'em. And it's, again, it's cruel. It doesn't get you anywhere
closer to the truth but it is a little scary
to stick your neck out. - Okay, in terms of solutions. I'm gonna ask you a few things. So one, parenting. - Yeah, five and seven year old. - So I'm sure you've
figured it all out then. - Oh God, no. - From a free speech perspective. - [Greg] Yeah. - From a free speech culture perspective, how to be a good parent. - Yeah. I think the first quality
you should be cultivating in your children if you want
to have a free speech culture is curiosity and an
awareness of the vastness that will always be unknown. And getting my kids excited
about the idea that's like, we're gonna spend our whole
lives learning about stuff and it's fast and exciting and endless and we'll never make a big dent in it, but the journey will be amazing, but only fools think they know everything. And sometimes dangerous fools at that. So giving the sense of
intellectual humility early on being also, saying things
that actually do sound kind of old fashioned. I
say things to my kids like, "listen, if you enjoy study and work, both things that I very
much enjoy, I do for fun, your life is going to feel great and it's going to feel easy." So some of those old fashioned virtues are things I try to preach. Counterintuitive stuff
like outdoor time playing, having time that are not
intermediated experiences is really important. And little things. Like I talk about in the book about when my kids are
watching something that's scary and I'm not talking
about like zombie movies, I'm talking about like a cartoon that has kind of a scary moment and saying that they
want to turn the TV off. And I talk to them and I say, "listen, I'm gonna sit next to you and
we're gonna finish this show and I want you to tell me what you think of this afterwards." And I sat next to my sons
and by the end of it, every single time when I asked them, "was that as scary as you
thought it was gonna be?" And they was like, "no
daddy, that was fine." And I'm like, "that's one of
the great lessons in life. The fear that you don't go through becomes much bigger in your head than actually simply facing it." That's one of the reason
why I'm fighting back against this culture. I'd love for all of our
kids to be able to grow up in an environment where
people give you grace and accept the fact that sometimes people are gonna say
things that piss you off. Take seriously the
possibility they may be wrong and be curious. - Well I have hope that
the thing you mentioned, which is because so much
of young people's stuff is on the internet that they're going to
give each other a break 'cause then everybody's cancel worthy. - Generation Z hates
cancel culture the most. And that's another reason
why it's like people still claiming this is even happening. It's kind of like, no,
you actually can ask, kids what they think of cancel
culture and they hate it. - Yeah. Well I kind of think of them
as like the immune system that's like, that's the
culture waking up to like, no, this is not a good thing. - I am glad though. I mean, I'm one of those kids who, is really glad that I was a
little kid in the eighties and a teenager in the nineties because having everything
potentially online, it's not an upbringing I envy. - Well because you can also
do the absolutest free speech. I like leaning into it where I hope for a future where a lot of our insecurities, flaws, everything's out there. And to be raw, honest with it, I think that leads to a better world 'cause the flaws are beautiful. I mean, the flaws is the basic ingredients of human connection. - Robert Wright, he
wrote a book on Buddhism and I talked about trying
to use social media from a Buddhist perspective
and like as if you're- As if it's the collective
unconscious meditating and seeing those little like angry bits that are trying to cancel
you or get you to shut up. And just kind of like
letting them go the same way you're supposed to watch your
thoughts kind of trail off. - I would love to see
that, like visualized, whatever the drama going on, just seeing the sea of it, of the collective consciousness
just processing this and having a little like panic attack and just kind of like breathing it in. - Looking at the little
sort of hateful angry voices kind of pop up and be
like, okay, there you are. And I'm still focused on that thing because that is one of
the things is okay, yeah, actually this is probably late in the game to be giving my grand
theory on this stuff. (Lex laughs) - Never too late. - So what I was studying in law school, when I ran out of First Amendment classes, I decided to study censorship
during the Tudor Dynasty because that's where we get
our ideas of prior restraint that come from the licensing
of the printing press, which was something that Henry
VIII was the first to do. Where basically the idea was that if you can't print
anything in England, unless it's with these, your
Majesty approved printers, it will prevent heretical work and anti-Henry VIII stuff from coming out. Pretty, pretty, pretty,
pretty, pretty efficient idea if nothing else. And I always, so he started getting angry at the printing press around 1521 and then passed something
that required prints to be along with parliament in 1538. And I always think of that as
kind of like where we are now because back then we had the
original disruptive technology, writing was probably that. But the next one, which
was the printing press, which was absolutely calamitous. And I say calamitous on purpose
because in the short term the witch hunts went up like crazy because the printing press
allowed you to get that manual on how to find witches that
the religious wars went crazy. It led to all sorts of
distress, misinformation, nastiness. And Henry VIII was trying
to put the genie back in the bottle. You know, he was kind of like, I want to use this for good. Like I feel like it could be used, but he was in an unavoidable
period of epistemic anarchy. There's nothing you can do to make the period after
the printing press came out to be a non-disruptive, non-crazy period other than like absolute totalitarianism and destroy all the print presses, which simply was not possible in Europe. So I feel like that's kind
of like where we are now. That disruption came from adding, I think several million people
to the European conversation and then eventually the
global conversation. But eventually it became the
best tool for disconfirmation for getting rid of falsity,
for spotting bad ideas. And it's the benefits, the long-term benefits
of the printing press are incalculably great. And that's what gives me some
optimism for where we are now with social media 'cause we are in that
unavoidably anarchical period. And I do worry that there are attempts
in states to pass things to try to put the genie
back in the bottle. Like if we ban TikTok or
we say that nobody under 18 can be on the internet unless
they have parental permission. We're going at something that
no amount of sort of top-down is going to be able to fix it. We have to culturally
adapt to the fact of it in ways that make us wiser that actually and allow it potentially
to be that wonderful engine for disconfirmation that we're
nowhere near yet, by the way. But think about it, additional
millions of eyes on problems, thanks to the printing press helped create the scientific
revolution, the enlightenment, the discovery, ignorance. We now have added billions
of eyes and voices to solving problems and we're using them for
cat videos and canceling. - But those are just the early
days of the printing press. - Exactly. - It all starts with the
cats and the canceling. Is there something about X, about Twitter, which is perhaps the most
energetic source of cats and canceling. - It seems like the collective
unconscious of the species. I mean like, it's one of these things
where the tendency to want to see patterns in history sometimes can limit the actual
batshit crazy experience of what history actually is because yes, we have these
nice comforting ideas that it's gonna be like last time, we don't know, it hasn't happened yet. And I think how unusual Twitter is because I think of it as like the... Because people talk about
writing and mass communications and as being expanding the
size of our collective brain, but now we're kind of looking
at our collective brain in real time and it's filled
just like our own brains with all sorts of like little
crazy things that pop up and appear like virtual particles
kind of all over the place of people reacting in real time to things. There's never been anything
even vaguely like it. And it can be at its worst, awful to see. At its best sometimes seeing people like just getting euphoric
over something going on and cracking absolutely
brilliant immediate jokes. At the same time, it can
even be a joyful experience. I feel like, and I live in a neighborhood now on X where I mostly deal
with people that I think are actually thoughtful,
even if I disagree with 'em and it's not such a bad experience. I occasionally run into
those other sort of what I call neighborhoods on X, where it's just all
canceling, all nastiness and it's always kind of an
unpleasant visit to those places. I'm not saying the whole thing needs to be like my experience, but I do think that the reason why people keep on coming back to it is it reveals raw aspects of humanity that sometimes we prefer
to pretend don't exist. - Yeah but also, it's
totally new, like you said. It's just the virality, the
speed, the news travels, the opinions travel that the
battle over ideas travels. - The battle over information too. - Yeah, of what is true
and not, lies travel. The old Mark Twain thing
pretty fast on the thing. And then it changes your understanding of how to interpret information. - It can also stress you out to no end. Remember to get off it sometimes. The stats are pretty bad on
mental health with young people. And I'm definitely in the
camp of people who think that social media is part of that. I understand the debate, but I'm pretty persuaded
that one of the things that it hasn't been
great for mental health, I mean of people is just
constantly being exposed. - Yeah, absolutely. I think it's possible
to create social media that makes a huge amount of
money, makes people happy. To me, like it's possible
to align the incentives. So in terms of, yeah, making teenagers, making every stage of life, giving you long-term
fulfillment and happiness with your physical existence
outside of social media and on social media. Helping you grow as a human being, helping challenge you
just in the right amount and just the right amount of cat videos, whatever gives this full
rich human experience. I think it's just a
machine learning problem. It's like, it's not easy... - [Greg] Interesting. - To create a feed. So the easiest feed you could do is like maximize engagement. - [Greg] Yeah. - But that's just like
a really dumb algorithm. It's like for the algorithm
to learn enough about you to understand what will
make you truly happy as a human being to grow long term, that's just a very
difficult problem to solve. - Have you ever watched "Fleabag?" It's absolutely brilliant. A British show and it sets you up. One of the reasons why
like people love it so much is it sets you up that you're
watching like a raunchy British "Sex in the City"
except the main character is the most promiscuous one. And it's like okay. And you kind of roll
your eyes a little bit and it's kind of funny
and it's kind of cute and kind of spicy. And then you realize that the person is actually kind of suffering
and having a hard time and it gets deeper and
deeper as the show goes on. And she will do these incredible speeches about tell me what to do. Like I know there's experts out there, I know there's knowledge out there. I know there's an optimal
way to live my life, so why can't someone
just tell me what to do? And it's this wonderfully like, accurate I think aspect of human desire that what if something
could actually tell me the optimal way to go 'cause I think there is a desire to give up some amount of your
own freedom and discretion in order to be told to do
the optimally right thing. But that path scares me to death. - Yeah, but see the way you phrased it, that scares me too. So there's several things. One, you could be constantly
distracted in a TikTok way by things that keep you engaged. So removing that and giving you a bunch
of options constantly and learning from long-term what results in your
actual long-term happiness. So like which amounts of
challenging ideas are good for you. For somebody like me.
- Four. Just four. - But there is a number
like that for you, Greg. For me, that number is pretty high. I love debate. I love the feeling of like realizing, holy shit, I've been wrong. - Yes! - But like, I would love for the algorithm to know that about me and to help me, but always giving me options if I want to descend into
Cat videos and so on. - But the educational aspect of it. - [Lex] Yes, educational, yes. - Like the idea of kind of
like both going the speed that you need to and
running as fast as you can. - Yeah. I mean there's the whole flow thing. I just feel YouTube
recommendation for better or worse if used correctly, it feels like it does a pretty good job whenever I just refuse to click on stuff that's just dopamine based and click on only educational things, the recommendation it
provides are really damn good. So I feel like it's a solvable problem, at least in the space of
education, of challenging yourself but also expanding your realm of knowledge and all this kind of stuff. - And I'm definitely more in the, we're in an inescapably anarchical period and require big cultural adjustments and there's no way that this isn't gonna be
a difficult transition. - Is there any specific
little or big things that you'd like to see X do, Twitter do? - I have lots of thoughts on that. With the printing press,
an extra millions of eyes on any problem can tear
down any institution, any person or any idea and
that's good in some ways 'cause a lot of medieval
institutions needed to be torn down and some people did too. And a lot of ideas needed to be torn down. Same thing is true now. An extra billions of eyes on every problem can tear down any person,
idea or institution. And some, again, some of those things
needed to be torn down, but it can't build yet. We are not at the stage
that can build yet. But it has shown us how
thin our knowledge was. It's one of the reasons
why we're also aware of the replication crisis. It's one of the reasons
why we're also aware of how kind of shoddy our research is. How much our expert class
is arrogant in many cases. But people don't wanna live in a world where they don't have
people that they respect and they can look at. And I think what's happening possibly now, but will continue to happen is people are gonna establish themselves as being high integrity. That they will always be honest. I think you are establishing yourself as someone who is high integrity, where they can trust that person. FIRE wants to be the institution
that people can come to. It's like if it's free speech,
we will defend it, period. And I think that people
need to have authorities that they can actually trust. And I think that if you
actually had a stream that maybe people can watch in action but not flood with stupid
cancel culture stuff or dumb cat memes, where it is actually a serious discussion, bounded around rules. No perfect rhetorical fortress, no efficient rhetorical fortress, none of the the BS ways we debate. I think you could start to
actually create something that could actually be a major improvement in the speed with which we
come up with new better ideas and establish and separate
truth from falsity. - Yeah, if it's done well, it can inspire a large number of people to become higher and higher integrity and it can create integrity
as a value to strive for. - [Greg] Yeah. - And like, there's been
projects throughout the internet that have done incredible job of that, but have been also very flawed. Like Wikipedia is an example
of a big leap forward in doing that. - [Greg] It's pretty damn impressive. What's your overall take? I mean, I'm mostly impressed. - So there's a few really powerful ideas for the people who edit Wikipedia. One of which is each editor
kind of for themselves declares, I'm into politics and I really kind of
am a left-leaning guy, so I really shouldn't be
editing political articles 'cause I have bias. - [Greg] Oh, that's great. - They declare their biases
and they often do a good job of actually declaring the
biases, but they'll still, like, they'll find a way to justify themselves. Like something will piss them off and they want to correct it 'cause they love correcting
untruth into truth, but the perspective of what is true or not is affected by their bias. - [Greg] Truth is hard to know. - And it is true that there
is a left-leaning bias on the editors of Wikipedia. So for that, what happens is on articles,
which I mostly appreciate that don't have a
political aspect to them, scientific articles or technical articles, they can be really strong, even history just describing
the facts of history that don't have a subjective element. Strong. Also just using my own brain, I can kind of filter out if it's something about January
6th or something like this, I know I'm going to be like, I'm not, whatever's going on here,
I'm gonna kind of read it. But most I'm gonna look to other sources. I'm gonna look to a bunch of
different perspectives on it. It's going to be very tense. There's probably going
to be some kind of bias, maybe some wording will be such, which is where Wikipedia does its thing. The way they word stuff will
be biased, the choice of words. But the Wikipedia editors
themselves are so self-reflective. They literally have articles
describing these very effects of how you can use words to inject bias in all the ways that you talk about it. - [Greg] That's healthier
than most environments. - It's incredibly healthy, but
I think you could do better. One of the big flaws of Wikipedia to me that community notes on X does better is the accessibility
of becoming an editor. It's difficult to become an editor and it's not as visible
the process of editing. So I would love, like you said, a stream for everyone to be able
to observe this debate between people with integrity of when they discuss
things like January 6th, of very controversial topics to just see how the
process of the debate goes as opposed to being hidden in the shadows, which it currently is in Wikipedia. You can access that. It's just hard to access and I've also seen how they
will use certain articles like on certain people, like articles about people
I've learned to trust less and less because they
literally will use those to make personal attacks. And this is something you write about, they'll use descriptions
of different controversies to paint a picture of a person that doesn't, to me at least, feel like an accurate
representation of the person. And it's like writing an
article about Einstein, mentioning something
about theory of relativity and then saying that he
was a womanizer and abuser and like controversy, you know? Yeah, he is fine man also, you know, they're not exactly the perfect
human in terms of women, but like there's other
aspects to this human and to capture that human properly, there's a certain way to do it. I think Wikipedia will often lean, they really try to be
self-reflective and try to stop this, but they will lean into the
drama if it matches the bias. But again, much better than the world, I believe is much better
because Wikipedia exists. But now that we're in
these adolescent stages, we're growing and trying to come up with different technologies,
the idea of a stream is really, really interesting because you get more and more
people into this discourse that where the value is
let's try to get the truth. - Yeah. And that basically, you know, you get little cards for
nope wrong, nope wrong. - And the different rhetorical techniques that are being used to
avoid actually discussing. - Yeah. And I think I actually can
make it a little bit fun by getting a limited number of them. You know, it's kind of like you
get three whataboutism cards - So gamifying the whole thing? Absolutely. - [Greg] Yeah. - Let me ask you about, so you mentioned going
into some difficult moments in your life.
- [Greg] Sure. - What has been your
experience with depression? What has been your
experience getting out of it, overcoming it? - Yeah, I mean the whole
thing, the whole journey, with "Coddling of the
American Mind" began with me at the Belmont Psychiatric
facility in Philadelphia back in 2007. I had called 911 in a moment of clarity because I'd gone to the hardware store to make sure that when I
killed myself, that it stuck. I wanted to make sure
that I had my head wrapped and everything. So like, if all the drugs I was
planning to take didn't work that I wouldn't be able
to claw my way out. It'd been a really rough year. And I always had issues with depression, but they were getting worse. And frankly, one of the reasons why
this cancel culture stuff is so important to me is that the thing that I
didn't emphasize as much in "Coddling of the American
Mind" which by the way, that description that I give
of trying to kill myself was the first time I'd
ever written it down. Nobody in my family was
aware of it being like that. My wife had never seen it. And basically the only way
I was able to write that was by doing, you know how you
can kind of trick yourself? And I was like, I'm
going to convince myself that this is just between
me and my computer and nobody will see it. And it's probably now
the most public thing I've ever written. But what I didn't emphasize in that was how much the culture war played into how depressed I got because I was originally
the legal director of FIRE, then I became president of FIRE in 2005, moved to Philadelphia
where I get depressed and, I don't have family there. There's something about the town. They don't seem to like me very much. But the main thing was
being in the culture world all the time. There was a girl that I
was dating, I remember, she didn't seem to really
approve of what I did. And a lot of people didn't
really seem to, and meanwhile, like I was defending people
on the left all the time, and they'd be like, oh, that's good that you're
defending someone on the left. But they still would never forgive me for defending someone on the right and I remember saying
at one point, I'm like, listen, I'm a true believer in this stuff. I'm willing to defend Nazis. I'm certainly willing
to defend Republicans. And she actually said, I think
Republicans might be worse. And that relationship didn't go very well. And then I've nearly gotten
fistfights a couple of times with people on the right because they found out I
defended people who crack jokes about 9/11. Like, this happened more than once. And by that time I'm in my twenties, I'm not fist fighting again. But yeah, it was always like that. You see how hypocritical people can be, you can see how friends can turn on you if they don't like your politics. So I got a early preview of this, of what the culture we were heading into by being the president of
FIRE and it was exhausting. And that was one of the main
things that led me to be, suicidally depressed. At the Belmont Center, if you told me that that
would be the beginning of a new and better life for me, I would've laughed if I could have. You can tell I'm okay
if I'm still laughing. And I wasn't laughing at that point. So I got a doctor and I started doing
cognitive behavioral therapy. I started having all
these voices in my head that were catastrophizing and it gave overgeneralization
and fortune telling, mind reading, all of these things that they teach you not to do. And what you do in CBT is essentially something makes you upset
and then you just write down what the thought was and something minor could
happen and your response was, "well the date didn't seem to go very well and that's because I'm
broken and will die alone." And you're like, okay, okay, okay. What are the following? That's catastrophizing. That's mind reading,
that's fortune telling. That's all this stuff. And you have to do this
several times a day forever. I actually need to brush
up on it at the moment. And it slowly over time, voices in my head that
have been saying horrible, horrible internal talk, it just didn't sound as convincing anymore which was really a kind
of like subtle effect. Like it was just kind of like, oh wait, I don't buy that I'm broken. Like, that doesn't sound true. That doesn't sound like truth from God like it used to. And nine months after I was
planning to kill myself, I was probably happier
than I'd been in a decade. And that was one of the things that the CBT is what led me to notice this in my own work, that
it felt like administrators were kind of selling
cognitive distortions, but students weren't buying yet. And then when I started noticing
that they seemed to come in actually already believing
in a lot of this stuff, that it would be very dangerous. And that led to "Coddling
of the American Mind" and all that stuff. But the thing that was rough about writing "The Canceling
of the American Mind" and I've mentioned this
already a couple of times. I got really depressed this past year because I was studying. There's a friend in
there that I talked about who killed himself after being canceled. I talked to him a week
before he killed himself. And I hadn't actually checked in with him because he seemed so confident. I thought he would be totally fine 'cause he had an insensitive
tweet in June of 2020 and got forced out in a way that didn't actually sound as bad as a lot of the other professors. He actually at least
got a severance package. But they knew he'd sue and
win 'cause he had before. And so I waited to check in on him 'cause we were so overwhelmed
with the request for help and he was saying people were
coming to his house still. And then he shot himself the next week. And because everyone knows I'm so public about my struggles with this stuff, everybody who fights
this stuff comes to me when they're having a hard time. And this is a very hard
psychologically taxing business to be in, and even
admitting this right now, like I think about like
all the vultures out there, they'll have fun with it. Just like the same way when my friend Mike Adams killed himself, there were people like
celebrating on Twitter that a man was dead because
they didn't like his tweets. But somehow that made them compassionate for some abstract other person. So I was getting a little
depressed and anxious. And the thing that really helped
me more than anything else was confessing to my staff... Books take a lot of energy so I knew they didn't want to hear that. Not only was this taking
a lot of the boss's time, this was making him depressed and anxious. But when I finally told
the leadership of my staff, people that even though I try to maintain a lot of distance from,
I love very, very much, it made such a difference, because I could be open about that. And the other thing was, have you heard there's
conference dialogue? - Oh yes. - It's like an invite only thing. It's Orrin Hoffman runs it, it intentionally tries to get people over the political
spectrum to come together and have off the record
conversations about big issues. And it was nice to be in a room
where liberal, conservative, none of the above were all like, oh, thank God someone's
taking on cancel culture. And where it felt like, it felt like maybe this
won't be the disaster for me and my family hat I was
starting to be afraid of. It would be that taking the stand might actually have a happy ending. - One thing that just stands out from that is the pain of cancellation
can be really intense. And that doesn't necessarily
mean losing your job, but just even you can call it bullying, you can call it whatever name, but just some number of
people on the internet. And that number can be small kind of saying bad things to you, that can be a pretty powerful
force to the human psyche, which was very surprising. And then the flip side also of that, it really makes me sad
how cruel people can be. - Yeah, thinking that your
cause is social justice in many cases can lead people to think, I can be as cruel as I
want in pursuit of this when a lot of times, it's just a way to sort
of vent some aggression, on a person that you think
of only as an abstraction. - So I think it's important
for people to realize that like whatever negative energy, whatever negativity you
want to put out there. Like there's real people
that can get hurt. Like you can really get people to one, be the worst version of themselves or to possibly take their own
life and it's not as real. - Yeah, well that's one of the
things that we do in the book to really kind of address
people who still try to claim this isn't real, is we just
quote, we quote the Pope, we quote Obama, we quote James Carville, we quote Taylor Swift on cancel culture. And Taylor Swift's quote is essentially about like
how behind all of this, when it gets particularly nasty, there's this very clear, kill yourself kind of
undercurrent to it and it's cruel. And the problem is that in
an environment so wide open, there's always going to be someone who wants to be so transgressive
and say the most hurtful, terrible thing. But then you have to remember
the misrepresentation, getting back to the old idioms. Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me, has been re-imagined in campus debates in the most asinine way. People will literally say stuff like, but now we know words can hurt. And it's like, now we know words can hurt? Guys, you didn't have to come
up with a special little thing that you teach children
to make words hurt less if they never hurt in the first place. It wouldn't even make sense the saying, it's a saying that you repeat to yourself to give yourself strength when the bullies have noticed
you're a little weird. This might be a little personal. And it helps, it really does
help to be like, "listen, okay, assholes are
gonna say asshole things and I can't let them have
that kind of power over me." - Yeah, it still is a learning experience 'cause it does hurt. - But for the good people
out there who actually, just sometimes think that they're venting, you know, think about it. Remember that there are people
on the other side of it. - Yeah, for me it hurts my
kind of faith in humanity. I know it shouldn't, but it does sometimes when I just see people
being cruel to each other, it kind of, it floats a
cloud over my perspective of the world that I wish
didn't have to be there. - Yeah, that was always
my sort of flippant. But the answer to that, if mankind is basically
good or basically evil being like the biggest debate
in philosophy and being like, well the problem first is there's nothing basic about humanity. - Yeah, what gives you hope
about this whole thing, about this dark state that
we're in as you describe, how can we get out? What gives you hope that we will get out? - I think that people are sick of it. I think people are sick of not
being able to be authentic. And that's really what censorship is. It's basically telling
you don't be yourself. Don't actually say what you think. Don't show your personality,
don't dissent, don't be weird, don't be wrong. And that's not sustainable. I think that people have
kind of had enough of it, but one thing I definitely
wanna say to your audience is it can't just be up to us
arguers to try to fix this. And I think that, and this may sound like
it's an unrelated problem, I think if there were highly respected, let's say extremely
difficult ways to prove that you're extremely
smart and hardworking, that cost little or nothing that actually can give the Harvards and the Yales of the world
a run for their money, I think think that might
be the most positive thing we could do to deal with a
lot of these problems and why. I think the fact that we
have become a weird America with a great anti-elitist tradition has become weirdly elitist in
the respect that we not only, again are our leadership coming from these few fancy schools, we actually have like
great admiration for them. We kind of look up to them. But I think we'd have a
lot healthier of a society if people could prove their excellence in ways that are coming from
completely different streams and that are highly respected. I sometimes talk about
there should be a test that anyone who passes it gets like a BA in the
humanities, like a super BA. Something like someone not a GED, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something that like, one out of only a couple,
like 100 people can pass. Some other way of actually of not going through
these massive, bloated, expensive institutions that
people can raise their hands and say, "I'm smart and hardworking." I think that could be an
incredibly healthy way. I think we need additional
streams for creative people to be solving problems,
whether that's on X or someplace else. I think that there's lots of
things that technology could do to really help with this. I think some of the stuff
that Sal Khan is working on at Khan Academy could really help. So I think there's a lot of ways, but they exist largely around coming up with new ways of doing things. Not just expecting the
old things that have say $40 billion in the bank that they're going to reform themselves. And I've been picking on Harvard a lot, but I'm gonna pick on
'em a little bit more. And I talk a lot about class again. And there's a great book called
"Poison Ivy" by Evan Mandery which I recommend to everybody. It's outrageous, it sounds like me in a rant at Stanford, and I think the stat is,
elite higher education has more kids from the top 1% than they have from the bottom 50 or 60% depending on the school. And when you look at how much they actually like
replicate class privilege, it's really distressing. So everybody should read "Poison Ivy." - And above all else, if you're
weird, continue being weird. - [Greg] Yeah, please. - And you're one of the most interesting, one of the weirdest in
the most beautiful way people I've ever met, Greg. Thank you for the really
important work you do. - Everybody watch Kid Cosmic. - I appreciate the class, the hilarity that you
brought here today, man, this is an amazing conversation. Thank you for the work you do. Thank you, thank you. And for me, who deeply
cares about education, higher education, thank you for holding the MITs
and the Harvard's accountable for doing right by the
people that walk their halls. So thank you so much for talking today. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Greg Lukianoff. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with
some words from Noam Chomsky. "If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of
speech for views you don't like. Gables was in favor of freedom
of speech for views he liked, so was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in
favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise." Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.