#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
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The following is a conversation with greg looking out of free speech advocate, first amendment attorney, president and CEO of fire, the foundation for individual rights and expression. And he's author of the leaching liberty coauthor with Johnson hate of gardening of the american mind and coauthor with rick's of a new book coming out in october that you should definitely prior, now called the cancelling of the american mind, which is a definitive accounting of the history, present and future of council culture, a term used in overused in public discourse, but rarely studied and understood, with a depth and rigor the greg and Ricky do in this book.

And in part in this conversation, pretty of speech is important, especially on college campuses, the very place that should serve as the battle ground of ideas, including weird and controversial ones, that should encourage bold retaking, not conformed. And now a quick few second market response, or check them out. And the description is the best way to support this podcast.

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Let's start with a big question. What is cancel culture? Now you've said that you don't like determines its been a quote dragged through the mud and abused and lessons by of controversial figures. Nevertheless, we have the .

term what is the council culture is the optic of campaigns, especially successful campaigns starting around twenty fourteen to get people fired, spell the platform eeta um for speech that would Normally be protected by the first amendment um and I say would be protected because we're talking about circumstances in which IT is necessarily where the first member applies.

But what I mean is like as an analogue to uh say things you couldn't lose your job as a public employee for um and also the climate fear that resulted from a from that phenomenon the fact you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion. And IT wasn't subbed that this there was an up taken this partially on campus around twenty fourteen john ronson wrote a book called so you've been publicly shamed that they came out in twenty fifteen already documenting this phenomenon I wrote a book called freedom from speech in two fourteen. And but I really wasn't twenty seventeen when he started seeing this be directed at professors. And when IT comes to the number of professors that we've seen, you be targeted and lose their jobs. I've been doing for twenty two years and i've seen nothing like that.

So there's so many things I want to ask you here. One actually just look at the organization of fire. Can you explain what the organization is? Because it's interconnected to this whole fight and the rise of cancer culture in the fight for freedom of speech since twenty fourteen and before so fire .

was founded in one thousand nine hundred ninety nine by harvey silverglate. Um he is a famous civil liberty's attorney. He is a bit bit on the show.

He's the person who actually found me out my very happy life out in separate go but knew I was looking for a first amendment job um gone to law school specifically to do first amendment um and he he found me which was pretty cool his protege catton Sullivan was the dean of stanford law school and this remains the best compliment I ever gotten my life is that SHE recommended me, uh, too, harvey. And since that's the whole reason I went to last school, I was excited to be in part of this new organization. The other cofounder of a fire is Allen erle's course.

He's just an absolution ious. He is the one of the leading experts in the world on the enlightenment, and particularly about voulant are, and if any of your listening ers do like the great courses, he has a lecture on blazed pascal. And blaze, of course, is famous for the past gal's wager. And I left IT just so moved and impressed and with a depth of understanding of how important this person was.

That's interesting. You mentioned to me offline, connected to this, that there is that at least that runs in parallel. Or there's a connection between the love of science and the love of the freedom speech. Yes, maybe elaborate where that connection is.

sure. Um I think that for those of us were really you know have devoted their lives to freedom of speech. One thing we are a into whether we know what or not is a customer logy.

Um you know the study in physical y of knowledge freedom feature has a lots of um moral and philosophical dimensions. But from a pragmatics 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 Harry refers to the enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance because that's exactly what I was. I was suddenly being like, wow, hold a second. All this incredibly interesting focus that we got, which by the way, can be surprisingly reliable here and there.

When you start testing a lot of IT is nonsense. Um IT doesn't hold up even even ideas about the way things fall, you know, gallo estaban like even our intuition ons. 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. Uh, so a lot of the early debates about freedom of speech um were tied in so get certainly get leo. I always point out like keep ler was probably like we even more radical idea that weren't even perfect spheres. But but at the same time, largely because the invention of the printing press, you also had all these political developments um and you know I always talk about Young host know from the to a famous check um uh hero who was a um who was burned at the stake and have taken fourteen nineteen um but uh he was basically loser before the printing press before luther could get this word out you know he didn't stand a chance and that was exactly what yang hose was but a century later thanks for the printing press. Everyone could know what luth you're thought and boy did did they but IT LED to, of course, this completely crazy, hyper disrupted period in in a european history.

Well, you mentioned to jump around a little bit the first amendment first, about what is the first amendment and what is the connection to you between the first amendment to find my speech and cancer culture short.

So i'm a first amendment lawyer, as I mentioned, and that's what I my passion and is what I studied. And I think american first amma laws, incredibly interesting in one sentence. The first amendment is trying to get rid of basically all the reasons why human hand had been killing each other for its entire existence, that we weren't going to fight anymore over opinion, we weren't going to fight anymore of religion.

That you have the right to approach your government for addressing agrevo ces, that you have the freedom to associate that all of these things in one sentence were like, no, you the government will no longer to fear with you with with your right to have have these fundamental and human rights. And so one thing that makes fire a little different from other organizations is, however, we're not just the first amendment organization. We are free speech organization.

And so 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 amount law, partially because in american history, some of our smartest people have been thinking about what the premiers of freedom of speech are um in relationship to the first son moment and a lot of those principles they transfer very well just as as pragmatic ideas so like the biggest sin in terms of censorship is called viewpoint discrimination that essentially you allow freedom of a speech except for that opinion. Now it's and it's found to be kind of more defensible. And I think this makes sense that if if you set up, perform and like we're only going to talk about economics to exclude people who wants to talk about a different topic, but it's considered right fully um a bigger deal if you set up a form economics.

But we're not going to 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 philological sense as good principles for when like what is protected and protected speech, what should get you in trouble um how you actually analyze IT which is why we actually try in our definition of council culture to work in some of the first amount norms just in the definition. So we don't have the bug down on them as well.

You think so many interesting things, but if you can link on the viewpoint discrimination, is there any gray area of discussion there? Like what isn't isn't economics for the example you gave? Yeah is is there I mean, is that a science is or an art to draw lines of what isn't isn't allowed yeah you know if you're saying .

that something is er is not economics, you can say everything's economics and therefore I want to talk about poetry that some line drawing exercise on there but let's say at once you decide to open up um to poetry even um it's a big difference between saying, okay now we're open to poetry but you can't say no donte was bad um like that's that's a forbidden opinion now officially in in this otherwise open forum that would immediately at an intuitive level strike people as a bigger problem than just saying that poetry isn't .

economics I mean that intuitive level they 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 the pornography. And you see, I I think there is the same level of intuition that should be applied across the board here. And it's when IT that intuition becomes performed by whatever forces of society that when that starts to feel like censorship.

yeah I mean that people find IT a different thing um you know someone loses their jobs simply for their political opinion even if that employer has every right in the to fire you. I think american should still be like when it's true they have ever right in the world. And I are not making a legal case that maybe you shouldn't fire someone for their political opinion but think that through like what what society do we what kind of society do we want to live in and it's been funny watching um you know I point this out yes, I will defend businesses uh first amendment rights of association to be able to have the legal right to decide you know who works for them um but from a moral philosophical matter, if you think through the implications of if every business in 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 and still believe I can keep my job and that's why I was worried.

I felt like we were headed because a lot of the initial response to people getting cancelled um was very simply all but they have the right to get rid of this person um and that's that's the end and beginning and end of the discussion and I thought that was a dog. I thought that wasn't actually very serious way of that. If you care about both the first amendment and freedom speech .

of thinking IT through the just clarify, the first amendment come a illegal embodiment of the idea of freedom speech and the freedom speak .

in a very .

specific apply to government and federal speech is the application of the principal es to like everything, including like kind of the high level philosophical idea of what the of the value of people being able to speak their mind yeah.

it's an older, bolder, more expensive 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. Were thinking in a very cloudy kind of way. And what I mean by that is that law is generally particular in a common law country, is is the reflection of norms. Those other judges are people too. And and a lot of cases of common lost supposed to actually take our intuitive of ideas of fair and and place them you know into the law. So if you actually have a culture that doesn't appreciate free suit from a philosophical standpoint um it's not going to be able to protect free speech for the long hall even in the law because eventually that's on the reason why I worry so much about some of these terrible cases coming out of law schools um because I fear that even though sure american first amendment law very strongly protective of first amendment for now, it's not gonna stay that way. If you have generations of law students are graduating actually think there's nothing there's no higher gold than shouting down your an opponent yes.

So that's why so much of your focus or a large frattini of focus is on the higher education or education period is because education is the foundation of culture.

Yeah they have this history. You know sixty four you have the free speech movement on burkey and in sixty five you have repressive tolerance by herbert Marcus, which was a declaration of, by the way, um we on the left we shouldn't we should have free speech, but we should have free speech for us I mean, I ent went back and reread, uh, repressive tolerance and how clear IT is I I forgotten forgotten that IT really is kind of like, um and these so called conservatives and right wingers, we need to repress them because the progressive thinkers IT really doesn't n come out up to anything more sophisticated than the very old idea um that our people are good. They get free speech.

We should, they should keep IT other side bad um we we should not have a and we have to retrain society and of course like IT ends up being another he was also fan of mouth so it's not surprising that he that of course the system would have to rely on some kind of totalitarian system um but that was a laugh hable um uh position you know um say thirty forty years ago the the idea that essentially you know free speech for me not for the as as the great you know free speech champion at hand top used to say was something that you were supposed to be embarrassed by but I saw this when I was in in last school and ninety seven I saw this when I was in turning at the you and ninety nine um that there was a slow motion train right coming that essentially there was um these bad ideas from campus that had been taking on more and more steam of basically no free speech for my opponent, were actually becoming more, more and more accepted as impartially because academia was becoming less and less viewpoint diverse. I think that as my coauthor JoNathan high 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 dissent, you don't have the people that you can point to that my, hey, this is a smart person. This like this is a smart, reasonable, decent person that that I disagree with so I guess not everyone thinks like on this issue you start getting much more kind of like only you know only bad people, only hero s only blast summer, only right wingers you know um can actually think in this .

way every time you say something, I always have a million thoughts and million questions that pop up. But since you mentioned there's a kind of drift, as you read about the book and you mention now, there's a drift told the left in academia, which you also maybe draw distinction here, the left in the right in the cancel culture as you present your book sure is not necessarily IT with anyone political viewpoint that there's mechanisms on both sides of that result in cancellation and censorship in violation of freedom of speech.

So one thing I want to be really clear about is the book takes on both right and left cancer culture. They're different in a lot of way, is indefinitely councell. Culture from the left is more important in academia where the left is more dominates. Um but we talk a lot about cancel culture coming from legislators. We talk a lot about cancel culture on campus as well because even though um most of the attempts that come from on campus to get people cancelled 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 and fox news, you know like they go after professors and about one third of the attempts to get professors punished that are successful actually do come from the right and and we talk about attempts to get books banned um in in the in the book we talk about um and uh talk about suing the florida legislature around santis had something of the stop woke act um which we told everyone this is laughed ably on constitutional they tried to ban you particularly topics and high and 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 suit and we won now they're trying again with something that's equally as on constitutional and we will see again and and .

we will win can you ever to walk again presumably ying to limit certain topics from being taught .

in school ah basically woke topics you know it's more IT came out of the sort of attempt to get at uh critical race theory um so it's topics related to race, gender eta. Um I don't remember exactly how they tried to cabinet to um um to C R T. Um but when you actually the laws really well established that you can't tell higher education what they're allowed to teach without violating without violating the first amendment and when this in front of a judge, IT was exactly as he was exactly as skeptical of IT as as we thought IT I think he called this topic um and IT 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 is not a good idea as part of curriculum supposed to banning IT from just the .

state doesn't have the power to simply say to ban you know what what teach what professors in higher education teach. Now IT gets a little more complicated when you talk about case through twelve because the state has a role in deciding what public case through twelve teachers because they are your kids, it's taxpayer funded and generally the legislature is involved. There is democratic oversight of that process.

So for k through twelve, as there are also leaned towards the left in terms of the administration .

that manages the cricket. Yeah definitely is in gay three twelve though. I mean my kids go to public school um I have a five and seven year old um and they have lovely teachers um but we have run into a lot of problems with education, schools at fire um and a lot of the graduates of education school on up being the administrators who clamp ed down on free speech in higher education. And so i'm been trying to think of positive ways to take on some of the some of the problems that I see in case we twelve, I thought that the attempt to just dictate you, you won't teach the following ten books in our twenty books to two hundred books was a the wrong way to do IT. Now, when IT comes to deciding what books are in the curriculum, again, that's something alleging latter actually know can have them say in and that's pretty uncontroversial terms of the law but when IT comes to high to fight IT I had something that since some kind of stuck with the formula I called empowering of the american mind I gave principles that were inconsistent um with the sort of group think and heavy emphasis on h identity politics that um of some of the critics are rightfully complaining about in case through twelve and we we that is actually in cancelling of the american mind but I have a more detailed explanation of going to be putting up on my blog the eternally .

radical idea is this possible illegally, as silicon perhaps create an extra protection for certain kinds of literature, one thousand nine hundred eighty four or something, to to remain in the curricular? I mean, third is all protected, I guess yeah I guess to protect against administrators from hidden too much with the curriculum m like stabilizing the I don't know what the machinery of the case through twelve public school in case through twelve .

know state legislators part part of that and they can say like you should teach the following book right now of course people are always a bit worried that um if you if they were to recommend, you know teach teach the declaration of independence, that IT will end up being well. They're going to teach the declaration of independence was just to protect slavery which wasn't yes.

teaching a particular topic matter with textbooks you choose which perspective you take all that stuff like religion starts to keep into the whole question of like how you know is the bible lot into corporate that their .

education don't yeah I mean i'm i'm an atheist st with an intense interest in religion. I actually read the entire bible this year just because I do stuff like that and I never actually read. Become from begin the end, then I read the current cause and i'm GTA try to do .

the book of woman. But know, well, I did. You're so fast. Um do you recommend doing that?

I think you should um just to know because it's such a touchstone um in in the way people talk about things IT can get pretty tedious. But I even made myself read through all of the very specific instructions on how tall the different parts of the temple need to be and how long the garbs need to be in what shape they need to be in what they like. And those go on a lot that surprisingly, surprisingly big chunk of exists.

Um I thought there was more like live video and do armani but then you get the books like job you know oh I mean job is such a read and no way job originally had that ending. Like to jobe is basically IT starts out of this perverse bet between god and saying about whether or not they can actually make a good man renotice god. And initially they can.

It's all going very predictably. And then they finally really torture job. And he turns into the best, why is god cruel? How could god possibly exist? How could a kind god do these things? And he beats, he turns them like the best lawyer in the entire world.

And he defeats everyone, all the people who come to argue with them. He argues the pants off of them. And then suddenly, ly at the end, god shows up and he's like, um well, you know, um I am everywhere and it's a very confusing answer.

He gives an answer kind of like, I am there when leonsis give birth and I am there and by the way, there is giant monster leviathan that's very big and it's very, I and and I have to manage the universe and I 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, you don't mention the whole kind of like that. I I I have a bet that's why I was torturing you that doesn't come up and then at the end he decided the god's decides like job like oh no you're totally right, was totally wrong sorry um and and god i'm going to punnit h those people who try to argue with you didn't win so so you get red of I don't know exactly what he does to them I don't remember um and then he gives job all is money back and all and he makes me super prosperous and i'm like no way that was origin ending of that book like because this like this was clearly a beloved novel that they were like, but I can have that ending okay so ah so the long way so I actually think it's worthwhile. Some of IT was you're always kind of surprise when you end up in the part like there are parts of IT that will sneak up on you kind of esa as a trip a claim asis to pesh mode and he .

did you said you also the cause you ah .

which was fascinating.

So what is there in shing to ask, is their attention between the study of religious text or the following of religion and just believing in god in following the various aspects of religion with the freedom speech .

in the first amendment? And we have something that we call the religion class, and I ve never liked calling IT just that, because two brilliant things right next to each other. The state may not establish an official religion, but I cannot interfere with your right to practice your religion.

beautiful. Two, two, two things at the same time. And I think and I think they are 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 we have both of together. Now, how does relate to freedom of speech and I was write the Ricky lum like we're talking about.

Um I actually think that 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 was at the l you every time I saw people trying this IT always turned into them actually advocating for you a catholic or protestant or some or orthodox ks even kind of like read on religion. Um so if you actually make IT into something advocating for a particular view on religion, then IT crossed into the establishment class side. So americans haven't figured out a way to actually teach IT. So it's probably Better that you learn to learn outside .

of a public school think is possible to teach religion um from like world religions kind of course without disrespecting the religions. If the answer is that .

depends on from whose perspective well like .

the petitioner say you like an orthodox follower of a particular religion, yeah is 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 ah um and with that under those conditions then the answer is no you can't teach you out without a fending of someone at least say these people believe it's .

true form so you have to walk and ex shells as such you can try really .

hard and you will still make some people angry but serious people will be like I know you actually tried to be fair to to to the beliefs here and I and I try to be respectful um as much as can about um a lot of this I still find myself much more drawn about boot sm stow's m though.

Where do I go? okay. Let's one interesting thing to get back to cause campuses is fire keeps the college free speech rankings at rankings at the fire dot or very proud .

recommend because they .

forget that even just the ranking, you get to learn a lot about the universities from this entirely different perspective than people are used to when they got to pick whatever university they want to go to. IT just gives another perspective on the whole thing. And that gives quotes from people that are students are so unlike about their experiences.

And IT gives different maybe you could speak to the the various measures here before we're talking about who's in the top five and who's in the bottom five. What what are the different parameters that contribute to the evaluation. So people have .

been asking me since they want to do a ranking of schools according to freedom of speech. And even though we have, we have the best database in existence of campus speech codes, policies that universities have to violate first amendment or first amend norms. We also have the best database of of, we call the this invitation database, but it's actually the it's Better named the deep platforming database, which is we're going to call IT.

And these are all cases where somebody was invited as a speaker to campus yeah and they were disinvited .

disinvited or platform and also includes .

chatting down. So they showed up and they couldn't really .

speak yeah exactly um and um and so having that what we really needed in order to have some serious social science to really make a serious argument about what the ranking was um was to be able to one get a Better sense of how many professors were actually getting punnit ed during this time um and then the the biggest missing element was to be able to um ask students directly what the environment was like on that campus for freedom speech.

Are you comfortable disagreeing with each other? Are you comfortable disagrees with your with your professors? Do you think violence is acceptable in response to a speaker?

Do you think shouting? Do you think shouting down as OK? Do you think blocking people's access to a speaker is okay?

Um and once we are able to get all those elements together, we uh first did a test, ron, I think in twenty nineteen, about fifty, 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 A nice surprise. The number two school was actually urban university um which was what nice to see in the top ten. The most well number stage school is actually uva, which did really well this year. University chicago was not happy that they weren't number one, but university chicago is thirteen and they had been number one.

or in the top three, three years. Part about playing surprising because of economics depart 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 um that we in classic in the bad way that we hear campuses across the country oh, we have a campus republicans so we don't need the traditional conservative group and really like no, i'm sorry like we've seen dozens and dozens of not hundreds of attempts to get this one particular conservative student student group, uh d recognized or not recognized and so we told them like listen this like we told them at fire that know we consider this series and they won't recognize the group so that that that's a point down in our ranking and that was enough to knock them from.

They probably would have a number two in their rankings, but now they're thirteen out of two forty eight. There's still one of the best schools in the country. I have no problem of saying that the school that did not do so well um at a negative ten point six nine negative ten point six nine and we rounded up to zero was harvard and harvard has been um not very happy with that result.

The only school to receive the abo ranking .

yeah and there are a couple of harvard h harvard and there are a couple of people who've actually been really, I think, making a mistake by getting very harvard um sounding by being like I ve had station look at this and and think your method all is a joke like pointing in this case wasn't that important and that scholar wasn't that scholar like the one of the arms, one of the scholars that we counted against them for, uh punishing was that that wasn't a very, very famous and fluently al scholar a kind of like so your argument seems to be snowy 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, harder um if we have yeah if we even .

if .

we took all of your arguments as true, even if we decided to get rid of those two professors um you would still be in negative numbers. You would still be dead last you would still be after George chang and pen and neither of those schools are good for .

freedom of speech to say the bottom five is the university pensylvania said pen, uh, the university of south CarOlina, Georgetown university and .

form university, all very well earned, that they have so many bad cases .

at all those schools. What's the best way to find yourself in the bottom of your way to that negative to that zero .

a lot of deep at forming um that when we looked at the bottom five, uh eighty one percent of attempts to get speakers deep platform were successful at the bottom five um that there were a couple school pan included where every single attempt, every time a student like objected, a student group objected to that speaker coming, they cancelled the speech. And I think, I think George town was a hundred percent success rate.

I think pen had a hundred percent success, right? I think harvard did stand up for a couple. Mostly people got the platform there as well.

So how do you push back on the platforming? Well, who who would do IT is other students is IT faculty is the administration. What's the dynamics of a pushing back of? Basically because I imagine some of IT is culture, but imagine every university has a bunch of students who will protest basically every speaker and the question how you respond to that protest well here's .

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

They are the best constituents for free speech absolutely unambiguously until about twenty thirteen twenty fourteen and IT was only in two thousand fourteen where we had this very kind of sad for us experience. We're suddenly students were the one's advocating for deep platforming and new speech codes kind of in a similar way that they had been doing and say, like the mid eighties of, for example. But here's the dirty little seeker.

It's not, this is just the students. It's student and administrators, sometimes only handful of them though, working together to make, to create some of these problems. And this was exactly what happened at stanford.

One, kill duncan, A, A fifth circuit judge tried to speak at my oma motor and a fifth of the class showed up to shout him down. Um IT was a real showing of the of what was going on that ten minutes into the shutdown of a first circuit judge. And they keep emphasizing that because of a constitutional lawry, if circuit judge judges are big deals, they're one level below the supreme court.

Know about a fifth of the school shows up to shut him down after ten minutes, are shouting him down and administrator, A D, I, administrator gets up with a prepared speech that that she's written. That's a seven minute long speech where SHE talks about free speech. Maybe the juice doesn't worth the freeze. And we're at this law school where people could learn to chAllenge these norms. So it's clear that there was coordination you among set of some of these administrators.

And from talking to students there they were meetings, extensive meetings for a long time they show up, do a shutdown, then they take additional seven minutes to lecture the speaker on free speech not being and not the juice of free speech not being worth the um and then for the rest of IT, it's just constant heckling after SHE after he leaves. This is clearly and this and something very similar, you know, happened a number times at yale where I was very clearly administrators were helping along with with a lot of these disruptions. So I think every time there is a shutdown 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 bureaucratic 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 shutdown down and that's why they really need to investigate this that and IT is a at stanford the administrator who who gave the prepared reMarks um about the jews not being worth this way. He 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. Or administrator clearly facilitated something that was a shutdown already platforming or resulted in a professor getting fired or resulted in a student getting expelled where the administrator, uh, has got a Scott free or probably in some cases, even gone a promotion.

And so a small number of administrators, maybe even a single administrator could participate the encouraging and the organization and they're by empower the whole process.

And that's something i've seen throughout my entire career. And the only thing is kind of hard to catch this sort of in the act, so to speak. And that's when the reason why it's helpful for people to know about this, you know, because was this amazing case, this was a university of washington and we actually featured this in a documentary he made in twenty fifteen.

The came twenty twenty sixteen called can we take a joke um and this was when we started noticing something was changing on campus. We also heard that comedians were saying that they can use their good humor more. This was right around the time that Jerry sign failed in. Chris rock said that they couldn't.

They didn't want to play on campuses because they, they, they, they couldn't be funny, uh, but we featured the case of a comedian who wanted to do a musical called the passion of the musical making some of the passion of the grass with the stated goal of offending everyone, every group equally. IT was very, very much a south park. Um and it's an unusual case because we actually got documentation of administrators.

Buying tickets for angry students and holding an event where they, where they trained them to jump up in the middle of and shout, i'm offended like they bought them tickets. They sent them to this this thing with the goal of shouting IT down. Now unsurprisingly, when you send a angry group of students to shut down a play IT, it's not going to end that.

Just i'm offended and I got heated. There were death threats being from the and then the pullman, washington police told the Chris lee, the guy who made the play, that they wouldn't actually protect them. Now it's not every day you're gonna have that kind of hard evidence that that that actually seeing the administrators be so, uh, so brazen that they recorded the fact that they brought them tickets and send them. But I think a lot of that stuff is is going on. And I think it's the it's a good excuse to cut down on one of the big problems of higher education today, which is hyper project zing.

In your experience, is there a distinction to administrations in faculty in terms of h perpetrators of this, of these kinds of things? So if if we got rid of all like harvest talked about, uh, get rid of a large percent of the administration, does that help fix the? Or is the faculty also? Yes, small percent of the faculty also part of the encouraging in the organization of these kind of cancel yeah and .

and that's something that has been profoundness disappointing, is that when you look at be huge uptick in attempt get professors fired, that we seen over the last ten years and actually over last twenty two years as far back as our our records go, at first they were overwhelmingly LED by administrators attempts to get professors punished um and that was most I said that my career up until twenty thirteen was was fighting back at administrate excesses.

Then you start having the problem in two thousand fourteen of students trying to get people cancelled and that really accelerated in twenty seventeen and the number. So one way that one one thing that makes the easier to document is are the petitions to get professors fired, punished um and how just proportionately that those actually do come from students. But another big uptick has been fellow fessor demanding that their fellow professors get punished.

That to me really said it's kind of shameful. You shouldn't be proud of signing the petition to get your fellow professor and what what's even more more shameful is that we get this this, this almost become a cliche within fire. When someone is facing one of these cancellation campaign of the professor, I would get letters from some of my friends saying, i'm so sorry, this has happened to you and these were the same people who publicly signed the petition to get them fired.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. integrity. Integrity is an important thing in this world. And I think some of the i'm so surprised people don't stand up more for this because there's so much hunger for IT. If you have the guts, as a fact, the other administration to really stand, stand up with eloquence, with rigor, with integrity, I feel like it's impossible for you want to do anything because there's such a hunger is so refreshing. Yeah, I think everybody agrees that freedom speech is a good thing.

But the majority .

of people, even the versions that there is a hunger. But it's almost like this kind of nervousness around IT because there's a small number of loud voices. Yes, they are doing the shouting. So I mean, again, that's that where great leadership comes in. And so you know presence of university should probably be um making clear declarations of like this is not this is a place where we value the freedom of expression .

when and this was all this all through on my career um a president a university president who puts their foot down early and says, nope you know we are not entertaining firing this professor. We are not expelling the student IT ends the issue often very, 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 the outs of times as being kind of like, oh, that was clearly like my my friend sam and when they tried to get tried to get him fired at a very Lawrence college um and that was one of the times that I was used as kind of like, oh, that was hostile to the university because they the students took over the president's office and like, no, they let them take over the president office and I don't know that was one of the cases in which the takeover ver was catered but if there was ever sort of like a sign that's kind like, yes, this isn't this is actually really quite friendly well.

in some sense like protesting and having really strong opinions, even like ridiculous, crazy, while opinions is a good thing, is just that shouldn't lead to actual firing or deploy. Farming of people is good to protest, is just not good to a free university to support and take action based on.

And this is one one like tensions in in in first to memory that actually think as a pretty easy release, essentially you have you absolutely have the right to uh devote your life to ending freedom of speech and ridiculing as a concept and and there are people who who really are can come off as very contempt. But even the philosophy of freedom of of edge, 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're rand candidate who I really love him. I think I think he's a great guy, but he he criticized us for R D.

Platforming databased as saying this is saying that that students can protest speakers and like, okay, that's Sally um we fire as an organza have defended the right to protest all the time. We are constantly defending the ride the ride protesters, not believing the protestors have the right to say this would basically that would be punishing the speakers. We're not calling for puni shing, uh, the protesters. But what we are saying is you can't let the protesters win if they're demanding someone be fired for their freedom of speech.

So the line there is between protesters protesting in the university taking action based on the protest yes.

exactly. And of course shutdowns. That's just mob censorship um and that's something where the university the way the way you should you deal that tension in first amendment law is essentially kind of like the one positive duty that the government has the first the negative duty that is not allowed to do this sense to you but its 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 um you can't let the crowd just shout me down um you can't allow what was called the hazard video.

this video that's so interesting because I feel like that comes into play on social media somehow. You know, there's this whole discussion of sense federal speech. But to me the the carrot question is almost more interesting once the freedom of species established is hide, you incentivize high quality debate and disagreement.

I'm taking a lot about that, and that's one thing we talk about. Council of the american mind is arguing towards truth and that council culture is cruel. It's mercies. Its anti intellectual.

But I 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. The truth through the process, of course, of interactions get directly at truth. You just chip away at falsity. Yeah.

but everybody having a mack phone on the internet with anonymity IT seems like is Better than censorship. But a few sectors incentives on top of that you can construct to um yet to incentivize Better to entities. Y somebody who puts a huge amount of effort to make even the most ridiculous arguments, but basically ones that don't include any other things. You highly, in terms of all the rotor ical tricks here to shut down conversation this make really good arguments for whatever IT doesn't matter if it's, uh, community for fashioner whatever help you wanted say yes, but I do IT would scale with historical context with um with still men in the other side all these kind velocity ments.

We try to make three major points on the book. One um is just simply council cultures is real, is a historic era um and it's on a historic scale. The second one is you should think of council culture as part of a um rhetorical as a larger, lazy rt oral approach to what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments.

And we mean that in two senses, without having winning arguments or while actually having one arguments, and we talk about all the different what we call rta ical fortress, that both the left and the right have that prevent you from that allow you to just dismissed the person um or dodged the argument without actually ever getting to the substance the argument. Third part is just how do we fix IT? But the motoring fortas stuff is actually something i've been a very passionate about, because IT interferes with our ability to get at truth and IT wastes time. And Frankly, IT also, since council culture is part of that retorted tactic, I 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 preorder the book. Now, what is to come on october seven? OK? The cancelling of the american? okay.

So in in a book, you also have a list of cheap hetta tactics that both left in the right use, and then you have a list of tactics that left users and the right users. But there's the rtp ical, the perfect rhetoric of fortress that the left users, and the efficient rhetoric of fortress that the right uses. The first one is, what about ism? Maybe we can go through few of them that capture your heart in this particular moment as we talk about. And if if you can describe examples of IT or with uh, there's aspx of IT that you see, they're especially effect effective. So what about tom is defending against criticism of your side by bringing up the other sides alleged wrongdoing?

I want to make little cards of these, a of all of these tactics and start using them on x all the time because they are so commonly deployed. And what about us? And I put first for a reason.

you know, be an thing idea to action, integrate that into twitter flash eggs, where people, you know, that clicking heart, they can click which of the, which of the notorious tactics this is. And then because, you know, there's actually community notes. I don't know if you've seen. On eggs that you people can contribute notes and it's quite fascinating is that works really, really well. But to give you a little more structure, yeah that's a really interesting method .

actually yeah I actually I I was thinking about x could be used to argue towards truth. I wouldn't want to have that so that, you know, everybody would be bound to that. But I think that I imagine all of being like a dream within x that was truth focused that that degrees to some additional rules and how they would argue.

I would love that where like there's in terms of streams that intersect and can be separated, the shit talking one where people just enjoy talking shit. Okay, then there's like truth and then mean there. Like then there's humor, then there's like good vibes.

Like i'm not like somebody who absolutely needs goodies all the time, but sometimes it's nice. It's nice to just log in and not have to see like the drama, the fighting, the bickering, the cancellation, the mom's old. This is good. You just see that's what I go to read IT or or or like what of the cute animals once there's cute puppies and kitten and I .

just want to see right render singing with welfare .

sometimes as all you.

I need that .

in my heart yeah not all the time just a little bit and right back to the the battle for truth. Okay.

so what about is him? What about is m me? That's everywhere when you look at, when you look at twitter, when you look at social media and general and and the first, what we call the obstacle course is basically time tested, old fashioned, you argumentative daddles that everybody uses.

And what about ism is just bringing up something like someone makes our argument, like bitten is corrupt and then someone says, well, drama was worse, you like and that's not an illegitimate, you know, argument to make back. But IT does. IT seems to happen every time that makes an assertion. Someone just points out some other thing that was going on and they can get increasing attenuated from from what you're actually trying to argue.

And when you and you see this all the time on social media and it's kind of I was a big fan of john Stuart 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 of this important problem oh, actually, you know, there's other problem over here than i'm more concerned about and you know and on the let's pick on the right here so january six you know watching everybody arguing about um chop like the the occupied part of seattle or the occupied part of port land and and basically trying to like, oh, you're bringing up the the right in january six and Better way I live on capital hills so believe me, I was very aware of like how scary and bat IT was like just my dad group in new the slower and that was a night where we're all at dinner the basement because i'm like, oh, when the shirt goes down, eat in the basement IT was genuinely scary and people would try to deflect from the generous being serious by actually be making the argument that oh well there are crazy horrible things happening in all over the country you know rights um that came from some of the social justice protest. And of course, the answer is you can be concerned about both of these things and and find them both problems. But you know if i'm arguing about chop know something, bringing up january six isn't super relevant to IT. Or if i'm arguing me about january six, someone are bringing up the riots in twenty twenty.

Isn't that helps? We took a long dog journey from what about to sba. And related to that is strong manning and steel manning. So misrepresenting the the perspective of the the opposing perspective. And this is something also I I guess it's very prevalent. It's difficult to do the reverse of that, which is still manning requires empathy, requires elective, requires understanding, actually doing the research to understanding the the the alternative perspective.

My waterless employee, Angel and dorado, has something that he called star manning. And and I find myself doing this a lot is it's nice to have, you know, two immigrant parents, because I remember being in san Francisco in the weird, kind of like a lu flashed burning man kind of cohorts, and having a friend there who was an artist who would talk about hating kansas, and that was his metaphor for a middle america, is what he meant by IT.

And but he was kind of proud of the fact that he hated kansas. And i'm like, you got to understand, I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners and think about like change the name of kansas to crash and change the name of kansas to to some. That's what IT sounds like to me. And the storm ending idea, which I I like is, is the idea like so you're saying that you really hate your dominant religious minority, like and that's when you start actually attaching yourself a little bit from how typical amErica is exceptional in number ways, but some of our dynamics are credibly typical. It's one of the reasons why, like when people start reading tomaso l, for example, they start getting hooked.

Because one of things he does, if he does, comparative analysis of country's problems and points out that some of these things that we think are just uniquely united states existing, seventy five percent of the rest of the countries in the world, Frances fu kamas, the book i'm reading right now, origins, the political order, actually does this onerous job of pointing how we're not special in a variety ways. This is actually something is very much on my mind. And foot am, of course it's it's a, it's a great book.

It's not it's still did a little bit and it's writing because it's term for one of the things you concerned about what destroyed societies is repeats moniz ation, which is the reversion to ideas on what you favor your family and friends. And I actually think a lot of what i'm seeing in sort of in the united states that makes me worried that we might be going through a little bit of process of free patroon's aliza. And I think that's one of the reasons why people are so angry.

I think having no, I think the prospect that we very nearly seemed um to have an election that was gonna jeb bush versus hillery clinton like are we a dynastic country now? Is is that what's kind of happening? But also is one of the reasons why people are getting so angry about about legacy admissions about like how much, you know, certain families seem to be able to keep their people in the upper classes, the united states perpetual.

And believe me, like I was poor when I was a kid, and I went to I to go. I got to go to one of the fancy, I ve got to go to stanford um and I got to see how people they treat you differently in a way that's almost insulting, like bit basically like suddenly IT to a certain kind of person. I was a legitimate person.

And I look at how much amErica relies on harvard on yield to produce its i'm going to use a very mark of standing term ruling class. And that's one of the reasons why you have to be particularly worried about what goes on at these colleagues. And these ecologies, with the exception university of chicago uva, do really badly regarding freedom of speech and that has all sorts of problems. Doesn't bold welfare of the future of the protection of freedom of beach for the rest of the society.

So can you also emphasize there with the folks who vote for down trump um because as precisely that is a resistance to this kind of uh momentum of the ruling class, this uh this royalty that passes on the the rule from generation to generation.

I try really hard to empathize with to a degree everybody and try to really see where they are coming from um and the anger on the right I get that I mean, like I feel like the the book so calling the american mind was a book that I that could be sort of a crowd pleaser to a degree partially because we really meant what we said in the subtitle that these are uh good intensions and bad ideas that are hurting people and if you understand and read the book you can say it's like, okay, this isn't anybody being malicious, you know, this is people trying to protect their kids.

They're just doing IT in a way that actually can actually lead to greater anxiety, depression and strAngely, eventually posed a threat to freedom of speech. But in this one we can't be quite a me, my, I having mentioned my brilliant out, the Ricky slot, twenty three year old genius. She's she's amazing. I started working with when he is twenty whose whose my around this book um so what i'm saying I am talking about .

me and Ricky is a berrian beran journalist and journalist. He has a brilliant mind.

But we can't actually write this in way that's too kind because councillors aren't kind. There's a cruelty and immerse lessons 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 while I was getting so exit depressed.

It's partially because i'm talking about people who will you know in some of the cases were talking about go to your house, target your kids um so so that's allong going to wait the I can can get what sort of drives the right not to a degree in this. I feel like they're constantly feeling like they're being gas LED um elite education is really insulting to the working class um like a part of the idiot gy that is dominant right now kind of treats among the seventy percent of the american public like there. We thought we developed a little bit the perfect cator's fortas like there to some some way illegitimate um and not worthy of respect or .

compassion yeah the the general allegation that radiates self fueling a leising that radius from the people that go to these institutions .

when what's funny is the the the allegation has been replaced ed as a kind of. Mascarades is kind of infinite compassion that essentially is based in this sort of a very, to be Frank, overly simple ideology and over simply, a simple explanation of the world and breaking people on the groups and judging people on how express they are on the on the intersection of their various identities um and IT came to that, I think, initially with an appeal from a compassion core. But IT gets used in a way that is can be very cruel, very dismissive, compassion less, and allows you to not take seriously most of your fellow human beings.

It's really weird how that happened. Maybe you can explore why a thing that has kid sounds good at first, yeah. Can be concretes can become such a cruel weapon of cancelling and hurting people and ignoring people. And this is what you describe with the perfect retorted fortress yeah which is a set of question maybe you can um elaborate and I want the perfect rta ical .

fortress yes so the perfect rhetorical fortress. The way um that's been developed on the left to not ever get to someone is actual argument. I want to make a chart, like a low chart of this, about, here is the argument, and here is this perfect forests that will deflect you every time from getting the argument.

And I started to notice that certainly when I when I was in last school, that there were lots of different ways you could dismiss people and perfect crc fortas step one. And I can the test of 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 do just have to say that they are um so i'd never read time a soul because he was the right winger. I didn't read comee ogly because I was I somebody to convince me he was a wing. There are lots of authors that and when I was in law school, I eat among a lot of very bright people. IT really was already a an intellectual habit that if you could designate something conservative than you didn't really have to think about IT very much anymore or take a particular seriously. That's a childish way of arguing. But none there's I engaged IT was a comment tactic at even mentioned in the book there was a time when I um A A A gay activist friend who is I think decided believed to my left but none there's had that pragmatic experience of actually being an activist said something like what just because someone conservative IT doesn't mean they are wrong and remember that thing kind of scandalized at some levels. Just being like it's not the whole thing we're saying is that they're just a bad people.

bad ideas you can just throw oh, that I has a right winner.

You can just throw that don't think .

about any yeah and then you can if you're popular, nothing can beat those IT can be kind of sticky yeah like it's weird because .

because it's effective. That's why IT keeps on getting used that essentially IT IT should have hit someone's because because I, you know, I have a great liberal, Peter gory, you know, everything from working at the L U. To doing refugee law used to n europe was part of an environmental mentoring programme for inner city high school kids.

And dc, you know, I, I, I, I, you know defend myself as being on the left, but I hate doing that because there is also part of me that's like, okay, so what like are you really saying that if you can magically make me argue or convent yourself that that i'm on the right that you don't have to listen to anymore? And again, that's arguing like children. And the reason why this has become so popular is because even among or may be maybe especially among eef, that IT works so effectively as a perfect weapon that you can use uncritically.

If I can just prove your on the right, I don't I don't have to think about you. It's no wonder that suddenly you started seeing people calling the acu right wing and calling the new york times right wing because it's been such an effective way to deal legitimize people as as thinkers you know Steven inker who's on our board of advisors he refers to academy as being the left pole um that essentially its its a position that from um from that point of view everything looks to its right, looks as if it's on the right. But once that becomes the uh a tactic that we um accept IT IT and that's one the reasons why I know i'm i'm more on the left but the left of center liberal Ricky, is you more conservative liberal an and initially I can I shall I be really be writing something with someone who was more on the right and like absolutely I should be. I I have to actually live up to what I believe on this stuff because it's ridiculous that we have this primitive idea that you can just miss someone as soon as you claim, rightly wrongly, that they're on the right.

Well, I feel correct me from wrong, but I I feel like you were recently called right wing, uh, fire. May be you by association because of the debate you support the .

last time there an artic .

debate I can't wait to watch because I think it's available yet to watch on video, yet to in person. I can't wait to see IT. The fire was in parts, supporting in the last times, wrote a skating article about that. Everybody in the debate was basically right leaning right.

Okay, so much to impact there you know very wise has great, great project. The free press i've been very impressed. It's covering stories the that allowed the media right or left isn't willing to cover.

Um and we did a uh we hosted a debate with her um uh and we want to make IT as fun and controversial as possible. So far the free press hosted a debate, did the sexual revolution fail? So the debate was really exciting, really fun. The site that said the sexual revolution wasn't a failure.

That crimes and sea hater were on one um IT was, you know a nice meet, thoughtful night and we got a there was a review of IT that was just sort of scathing about the whole thing and an included a line saying that fire which claims to believe in free speech but only defends viewpoints of degrees with I can't believe that even made IT into the magazine because this is not just calling this because of course you know the implication horse is that we're right wing um which we're not actually the staff leans decided something more to the left and to the right um but we also defend people all over the spectrum all the time like that, something that that even the most minimal google search would absolve so like we've given any times some heat on this because it's like, yeah if you said in my opinion they are right wing we went have argued back you know um saying well here here's the following fifty thousand examples of of of us not being but when you actually make the factual claim that we only defend opinions we agree with first. There's no way for us to agree with opinions because we actually have a politically diverse staff who won't even agree on which opinions are good and what opinions we have. But yeah, I had IT at one time when someone did something like this, and they were just being a little bit flipping about, kind of free speech being fine.

I did seventy tweet long a thread you know being like, hey, do you really think this is fine? I decided not to do that um on this particular one. But the nice thing about IT is IT demonstrated two parts of the book can't take the american mind if not more of them is dismissing someone because they're conservative um and because that was the implication don't have in the fire because they're conservative. But the other one is something a term I H that I invented specifically for the way people argue on twitter, which is hypocras y projection.

Hi, i'm person who only cares about one side of political fence and I think everyone else is a hectic at um and by the way, I haven't on an actual research on this, but I assume everyone else is a hydrate and you see this happen all the time and this happens to fire a lot where someone where is fire on this case we like we are literally quoted in the link you just sense but didn't actually read or it's like where's fire on this is like here's here's our lawsuit about IT from six months ago um so it's a favorite thing and also john they were daily show like the the the um what about to sm and the kind of like idea that these people must be hypocrites is something that greatest comedy. But as far as actually a rtp ical tactic that allege you the truth, just assuming that you're opponent or just accusing your opponent of always being a hydrate is not a good tactic for truth. But by the way, IT tends to always come from people who aren't actually consistent on free speech themselves .

so that hence the projection, but basically not doing the research about whether the person is or isn't to hydrate, and assuming others are a large fraction of others reading IT, uh, will also not do the research. And therefore this kind of statement becomes a kind of truthiness without a grounding in natural reality. IT breaks down that barrier between what isn't isn't true because if if the mob says something is takes too much effort to correct IT.

And there are three ways I want, like, you know, I want to respond to this, which is just giving example after example of time. Or we defended people on both sides of every major ish, basically every major issue others is israel, palestine, whit it's terrorism. Whether it's gay marriage, we have been abortion, we have defended both sides of that argument. The the other part, and I call these the orphans of the culture war, I really want to urge the media to start caring about free speech cases that actually don't have a political violence that are actually just about good old fashion exercise of power against the little guy or little girl or little group um on campus or off campus for that matter because these cases happened.

A lot of our litigation are just little people with 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 as like, yeah and by the way, uh right when you get trouble to um and there are attacks from the left and you should take this seriously too um you should care when republicans get in trouble. You should care when california has A D I uh. Program that requires this california community colleges has A D I program, a policy that actually requires even chemistry professors to work in, uh, different D I ideas from intersections, ality to anti racism into their classroom, into their silver sector.

This is a gross violation of economic freedom is as bad as IT is to tell professors what they can't say like we fought and defeated in 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 what what i'm saying is that, IT, when you're dismissing someone for just being on the other, other side of the political fans, you are also kind of claiming, making a claim that none of these cases matter as well. And I want people to care about censorship when IT even is against .

people they hate censorship, censorship. If we can take that attention briefly with dei diversity, equity and inclusion, what is the good and what is the harm of such programs?

D I I know people are. D I um the consultants are some actually I dear friend who I love very much. Um who does D I? Absolutely decent people. What they want to do is create bonds of understanding, friendship, compassion among the people, people who are different. Unfortunately, the research on what a lot of di actually does this often as the opposite of vat, 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 di, that actually makes IT something more likely to divide than unite.

We talk about this in coddling american mind is the difference between common humanity identity politics and common enemy identity politics and I think that um I know some of the people that I know who who do di they really want IT to be common matter, the identity politics but some of the actual ideological assumptions that are din can actually cause people to feel more alienated from each other. Now when I started at fire my first cases involved nine eleven um and IT was bad. Professors were getting targeted.

Professors were losing their jobs for saying in sensitive things about nine, eleven and both from from the right in the left actually in that case actually sometimes a lot more from the right um and IT was really bad and about five professors lost their jobs that's bad. Five professors on our overall timely 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 the comedy professors have been a targeted for cancellation between twenty fourteen and a middle of this year, a july of of twenty three. We're well over a thousand attempts to get professors are 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 um everything from you know having the article removed to suspension. About one fifth of those result in professors being fired.

So right now it's it's almost two hundreds, one hundred and ninety professors being fired um so I want to give some context here. Uh the red scare is generally considered to have been a from one thousand nine forty seven and one thousand nine hundred and fifty seven IT ended, by the way, in fifty seven when IT finally became clear. Um thanks for the first to memo you couldn't actually fire people for their ideologies prior to that.

A lot of university thought they could this guy is a very doctor communist ah you know, can't be just waited. I'm gonna e them. They thought they actually could do that.

And I was only fifty seven when the law was establish. So like right now, these are happening in environment where freedom of speech, academic freedom are clearly protected um at public colleagues in the united states. And we're still seeing these kind of numbers. Um during during the the red scare, the biggest study that was done of what was going on this came in like fifty five and the evaluation was that there was about sixty two professors fired for for for being communist and about ninety something professors fired for political views overall.

Um that usually is is reported as being about one hundred um so sixty ninety one hundred depending on how you look at, I think the number is actually higher um but that's only because of hindsight, like what I mean by hindsight is we can look back and we actually find there are more professors who who were fired at at time reveals we're at one hundred and ninety professors fired and I still have to put up with people saying this isn't even happening like in the nine and half years of council culture. Hundred and ninety professors fired in the eleven years of of the red scare, probably around somewhere around one hundred, probably more, it's the numbers is gona keep going up but unlike during the red scare, people could clearly tell something was happening. The crazy st thing about council cultures.

I'm still dealing with people who saying this isn't happening at all. And IT hasn't been subtlely campus. And we know that a wild undercount, by the way, because when we when we surveyed professors, seventeen percent of them said that they had been threatened with, uh threatened with investigation or actually investigated for what they taught, said or or or the 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. Yeah and that's one of the reasons why the idea that you'd add something like A D requiring A D A statement to be hired or to get into a school under the current environment is so completely nuts.

We have have a genuine crisis of academic freedom over the last, you know particularly twenty seventeen on campuses. We have a very low viewpoint diversity to begin with. And under these circumstances, administration or to start saying, you know what the problem is, we do have too much had our agents thought we have we're not homogeneous enough.

We actually need we need another political mideast, which is nuts. And that's what A D A statement effectively is because there's no way to actually fill out A D A, I statement without someone evaluating you on your politics. It's it's Crystal clear.

We even didn't an experiment on this a night, honey. A, he got something like almost like three thousand professors to participate evaluating different kinds of D, I statements. And one was basically like the standard kind of identity politics interaction ality one.

One was about viewpoint diversity, one was about religious diversity, and one was about socioeconomic versy. As far as where my heart really is, is that we have two little social economic diversity, particularly the higher, but also in an education period. So the experiment was large participation really interestingly set up. And I tried to model the way out of these di policies are actually implemented.

And one of the ways these have been implemented, and I think in some of the california schools, is that administrators and uh go through the D I statements before anyone else looks at them and then eliminate people off the top depending on how the how they feel about there um the I statements and the one on um viewpoint diversity. Uh I think like half of the people who reviewed that would would eliminate right out. And I think IT was basically the same for religious diversity.

IT was slightly Better, like forty percent for social economic diversity. But that kills me like the idea that kind of like that, that actually is the kind of diversity that I think we need a great deal more of in entire, you can agree with, is not hostile to the other kinds, by the way. But the idea that we need more people from the bottom, you know, a three quarters of the american society, like in, uh, higher education, I think, should be as something we could all get around that the only one that really, really succeeded was the one that that spouted back exactly the kind of ideology that they thought the rules would like, which is like, okay, there's no way this couldn't be a political. At my test, we've proved that is a political mister and still school after school. IT is adding these to its application process to make schools still more ideological imagination.

Why does that have a negative effect? Is IT. Because IT enforces a kind of group think, where people are afraid, start becoming afraid, think and speak freely liberally about whatever but one is selects for people who .

tend to be you know further to the left um in a situation where you already have people, situation where universities do lean disciple that way. But I also establishes essentially a set of sacred ideas that if you're being quiz ed on whether you know what you've done to advance anti racism um injured a uh how you've been conscious of intersections ality, 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 but basically like if if your position was I actually I actually reject um these concepts as being over simple um you're you're not going to get in and I think that the person that I always think of that wasn't a right winger, that would be like, got a hell if you if you made him fill one of these things out is fine, man. I feel like if you if you gave one of these things to Richard fireman, he'd be like he would tear IT to pieces. Yeah, yeah. There's .

some event of IT that crisis. Hard to pin down fear. So he said, like the firing, the thing I want to say, firing one hundred people or two hundred people, the point is, even firing one person i've just seen, IT IT can create this quiet ripple effect of fear. Of course, that single firing of effect solution has a rip effect across tens of thousands of people, of educators of of who is hired, what kind of conversations are being had, what kind of textbooks are chosen, kind of self censorship. And different flavors of that is happening .

is hard to measure that. Yeah I mean, when you ask professors about, you know are they intimidate under the current environment? Um the answer is yes. And particularly concerning fessor, you already reporting that there afraid for their jobs and a lot different cases.

you have a lot of good statistics in the book. Things like censorship won't provided with a definition of self censorship. At least a quarter students said they self sensor fairly often, are very often during conversations with other students, with professors and during classroom discussions, twenty five percent, twenty seven percent and twenty eight percent, respectively.

A quarter students also said that they are more likely to self send on campus. Now, at the time they were survey, then they were when they first started college. So the colleagues kind of instilling this idea of a of of censorship, self censorship and back to the red .

scared 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 comprehension study of the red scare there, was polling about whether or not professors to your self censoring due to the fear of the environment. And nine percent of professor said that they were self censoring their researching that what they were saying, nine percent really bad um almost a tenth of professor saying that they were their speech was killed when we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey um when you factor together, if there we ask them, are they self censoring and the research, are they self centering class? Are they self sensing online except ninety percent of professors. So the idea that we're actually in in an environment that is historic in terms of like how scared people are actually of expressing controversial views, I think it's it's the reason why we're gonna actually be studying this in fifty years the same the same way we study the red scare. Um it's not the idea that this isn't happening will just be correctly viewers insane.

So maybe we can just uh discuss the leaning, the current leaning of academic of the left, which you describe in very different perspective. So one, there's a voter registration ratio chart that you have by department, which I think is interesting. Can you explain this chart and can you explain what IT shows?

Yeah, when I started at fire in two thousand one I didn't take the viewpoint diversity issue as seriously. I thought I was just something that right wingers complained about. But I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low um with low viewpoint diversity and actually a lot of the research that I got most interested in was a done in conjunction with the great cause anstee um who writes a lot about group polarization because as and the research on this is very strong.

But essentially when you have groups with a political university and see this actually in judges, for example, that tends to produce you know reliably more moderate, you know, outcomes more as groups that are that have low a political diversity and the sort of spiral spiral off in their own direction. And when you have a supermajority of people from just one political perspective, that's a problem for the production of idea as a creates a situation where there are sacred ideas. And when you look at some of the departments, um you know I think the the estimate from the Christison is that harvard has three percent conservatives.

But when you look at different departments, there are elite ite departments that have literally know um conservatives are in them. And I think that's that's an healthy intellectual. The problem is definitely worse. Um as you get more elite, we definitely see more cases of lefty professors getting cancelled.

Elite schools gets worse as as as you get down from the the elite schools that's aware, a lot of the one third of attempts to get professors panners that are successful do come from the right and largely from off campus uh off campus sources. And we spend a lot of time talking about that in the book as well as something that I do think is unappreciated. But when IT comes to the low, low viewpoint diversity, IT works out kind of like you'd expect to a degree, economics is what for to wonder something like that is not as bad. But then you when you start getting into some of the humanities, like there are departments that they're literally none.

is there a good why to why do the universities university fact that the administration moved to the left?

Yeah, I don't love. And this is an argument that you're sometimes run into on the left. Just the argument that, well, people on the left of just smarter and it's like, okay, it's interesting because at least the research as of ten 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 and to be a little bit more libertarian, this so that pinker you know rote a fair amount about the idea that we're just smarter if that is not an opinion least bit comfortable with um I do think that that is that departments take on a momentum when they become a place where you like.

Why we'd be really unpleasant for you 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 E D, logic kind of explicit leftist um we look at education schools, a lot of a lot of the stuff that is actually left over from what is correctly called critical race theory is present and you end up having that in in a number of the departments um and IT would be very strange to be a in many departments, say 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 toc fortress, the first step is discussed. A person if they're just if you can put a label of conservative on them, you can dismiss them in that way. What what other efficient or what other effective a dismissal?

Yeah there we have a little bit of fun with uh uh with demographic numbers and I run this by height um and I remember him being kind of like don't include the actual percentages like no, we need to include the active percentages because people are really bad at estimating what the demographics of the U S. Actually looks like.

The right in the left in different ways um so we put in the numbers and we talk about you know um being dismissed for being White or being dismissed for being straight or being dismissed for being um and we and you can really dismiss people for being conservative and we so we we give examples in the book of of these being used to dismiss people and often times on topics not related to the fact that they are mail or whether or not their minority and then we get two. I think it's like later six and we like surprise. Guess what? You're down to point four percent of the population and none of that matter because if you have the wrong opinion, even if you're in that point four percent of the most intersections person ever lived and you have the wrong opinion, you're a heroic and you actually probably will be hated even more.

And the most interesting part of the researched for this will just asking every prominent black, conservative and moderate that that we knew personally. Have you been told that you're not really black for an opinion? You had every single one of them was, oh yeah no it's kind of funny because it's like often times White lefties telling them that's like, how do you consider yourself black john mark order talked about having a reporter um when he talked about when he show that he dissented from some of what he described as kind of like work racism in his book oke ideas that reporter actually is like so do you consider yourself black? Is like he was like you crazy? Of course I do.

And common, who's had one of the best quotes on IT, he said i'm constantly being told that the most important thing a to the how legitimate my opinion is is whether whether or 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 one, that investigation really struck me. So and you lay this.

i'd really nice in the book that there is this process of saying, are you conservative? Yes, you can dismiss the person. Are you? Why dismiss the person? Are you male? You can dismiss the person. There are these category 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 person you could still .

dismiss and it's not just dismiss. We talk about this from from a practical standpoint, the way the limitations on reality. And one of them is time um and a lot of council culture um as as as cultural norms as this way of winning arguments without winning arguments is about running up the clock because by the time you get down to the bottom of the a of the actually even you get a couple steps into the perfect coral fortas and you know where is the time gone you know like you probably just give up try uh you know trying to actually have the army and you never get to the are the first .

place and all of these things are pretty sticky. And social media, social practically .

invented the perfect of .

forrest so that each one of those stages has a vision to IT so they could sticks and and get people .

really excited, like to feel outrage and superiority .

because of that at the scale of the reality allows you to never get to the actual discussion of the point. So but you know it's not just the left, is the right also efficient rhetoric of fortress? Um so there something that would be proud of on the right it's more efficient yeah um so you don't have to listen to liberals and anyone could be labeled the liberals if they have a wrong opinion.

I've seen liberal left and leftist oil used as a in the same kind of way. That's leftist nonsense. You don't have to listen to experts here, even conservative experts.

If they have the wrong opinion, you don't have to listen to journalist, even conservative journalist, if they have the wrong opinion. And among the magi, there's a forth proposition. There's a fourth provision. You don't need to listen to anyone who is show trump .

yeah and we call the efficient because IT IT eliminates a lot of people you probably should listen to at least sometimes like we point out, sometimes like how council culture can interfere with faiths and expertise. So we get kind of being a little suspicious of experts. But the same time, if you follow that and you follow mechanically, and I definitely you know I think everybody in the U S. Probably had some ordered uncle um who exercise some of these IT is a really efficient way to sort of saw a while 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 when we realized 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 actually there's almost nine of time for empathy for like looking at a person thinking, well, maybe they're right because you're so kind of them .

fun and empathy.

I mean, so interesting about this is that so much societal energy seems to be spent on these nasty, primal desires were essentially a lot of is like, please tell me how I allowed to hate? Where can I legitimately cruel? Where can I actually exercise some aggression against somebody? And IT seems to sometimes be just finding new justifications for that and it's an understandable you know, human fAiling that sometimes can be used to defend justice. But again, you will never get you anywhere near the truth.

One interesting case you cover about expertise with covered yeah so how do cancel culture come in to play on the topic of code yeah I .

think that covered was a big blow to people's faith and expertise and cancelled culture play a big role in that. Um I think one of the best examples of this is Jennifer say at levis um SHE is a lovely woman um SHE was a vice president levice uh SHE talked about actually potentially could be the president of levice genes and SHE was a big advocate for kids. And when they started shutting down the schools, SHE started saying, this is going to be a disaster.

This is going to hurt the poor and disadvantaged kids the most um we have to figure out way to open the schools back up and that was such a herdal point of view to just and the typical kind of council culture wave took over as yet all sorts of petitions were to be fired and that SHE to apologize and all kind of stuff and you know he was offered, I think, like a million dollars servants which SHE wouldn't take because he wanted to tell the world what he thought about this and and that he wanted to continue saying um that SHE hadn't changed her mind that this was a disaster for Young people and now that kind of the conventional is dom and the research is tty is quite clear that this was devastating to particularly disadvantaged use. Like people understand this as as being okay. He was probably right.

But one of the one of the really sad aspects of cancel culture is people forget why you are cancelled and they just know they hate you. Um there's this lingering kind of like, well, I don't have to take them seriously, ending more, by the way, did you know what that happen to be right on something very important? Now one funny thing about freedom speech. Freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you didn't also have the the right to say things that were wrong because if you can't engage an idea of oria, if you can actually speculate, you'll never actually get to something that's right in the first place. But it's especially ging when people who are right were censored and you and never actually get the credit they deserve will .

this might be a good place to ask a little bit more about the famous speech in so you said that including the freedom species to say things that are wrong. Yes, what is your perspective on hate speech?

Hate speech is the best marketing campaign for censorship. Um and IT came from academia um of the of the twenty century and that when I talked about the anti re free speech movement um that was one of their first inventions.

There was a lot of talk about critical race theory um and and being against critical race theory and fire will sue if you say that people can advocate for or teach IT or research IT because you do absolutely have the right to to pursue IT academically. However, every time someone mentioned C R T, they should also say the very first project of the people who founded C R T. Um Richard GTA amErica sua mixtures was to 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 Marcus. In one hundred and sixty five, you basically questioning whether or not free speech should be a sacred value on the left. And he was on the losing side for a really long time. The liberals, you know, the way I grew up that was basically being proper speech with sonoma, with being a liberal.

But that started to be edged the way on campus and the way IT was was with the idea of hate speech that essentially oh but you should um we can designate particularly bad speech as um not protected um and and who's going to enforce that? Who's going to decide what hate speech actually is? Well it's usually overwhelmingly can only happen in an environment of really low viewpoint diversity because you have to actually agree on on what the most hateful and and wrong things are.

And there's a bedrock principle. Um it's referred to this in in a great case about flag burning in the first of memory that I think all the world could benefit from. You can't ban speech just as it's offensive. It's too subjective IT.

Basically, 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 model german or a model englishman um and I think this is offense and therefore I can say that this is this is wrong in a more multi cultural and in a genuinely more diverse country that is never actually had an honest thought that there is a single kind of american. There's never bitten like we had the idea of uncle sam, but I was always kind of a joke. Boston always knew IT wasn't richmond, always knew wasn't George, always knew IT wasn't alaska.

Like we've always been a hodge podge and we get in a society that diverse that you can't ban things simply because they're offensive um and that's that's when the reasons why hate speech is not an unprotected tive category of speech and I and I go further my theory on freedom of speech is slightly different than most other constitutional lawyers um and I think and I think that's partially because some of the ways some of these theories, although a lot of them are really good, are inadequate. They're not expensive enough. And I sometimes called my theory the pure information theory of freedom of speech or sometimes when I want to be fancy, the lab in the looking glass theory.

And its most important tenant is that there is that if the goal is the project of human knowledge, which is to know the world, that is, 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 say that you're actually depriving yourself with the knowledge of what people really think you're causing. What timer cron, who is on our board of advisors, caused preference falsification?

Um you end up with an inaccurate picture of the world which by the way, in a lot of cases um because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that people are more prejudice than they um than they might be um and actually kind of restrictions there was a book called racial paranoia um that came out in about fifteen 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 must be really, really bad. You can actually make all these things worse. And one would we talk about in the book, one very real practical way that makes things worse is when you sensor people IT doesn't change their opinion IT just encouraging 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 polar ization takes off. So we have some interesting that a in the book um about how driving people off of twitter, for example um you know in twenty s seventeen um and then I think I think in twenty twenty driving people the gab LED to you know greater radical zo among those people. It's a very predictable force sense.

People actually change people's minds and IT pushes them in direct that actually, by very solid research, will actually make them more radicalized. So yeah, I think that, I think that the attempts 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 wasted of to look at extreme cases to test this idea a little bit on campus? What's your view about allowing, say, what is the promises on campus to do, to do speeches? Okay, kay. K.

I think you should be able to study what people think, and I think it's important that we actually do. So I think that you know, um let's take, for example, q on on yeah Q N on wrong.

Um what where did IT come from? Why did they think that? What's the motivation? Who taught them at? Who came up with these ideas? This is important understand history that's under a understand modern american politics and so if you put your act, if you put your scholar head on and which uh, you should be curious about kind of everyone about what where they're coming from darl 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 them in the process.

He actually d radicalized the number of clans members when they actually realized that this black man who would be friended them actually was compassionate, was a decent person. They realize all their preconceptions were wrong. So I can have A D radicalizing factor, by the way.

But even when IT doesn't, it's still really important to know what the bad people in your society think. Honestly, in some ways, it's for for your own safety. It's probably more important to know what the bad people in your society actually think.

I person, or what you think about my person, think that freedom of speech in cases like that, like cake campus, can do more harm short term, but much more Better fit long, because you can sometimes argue for, like this is going to hurt yeah in the short term. But I mean, Harry said this is, I consider the alternative because you just kind of meet 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, a with a stronger midd class, all these kinds of things. But people have like the comforts, the reason through things. Yeah you know, to me it's like even if IT hurts in the short term, even if he does create more hate in the short term, the freedom speech has this really beneficial thing, which is that helps you move towards the truth, the entirety society, towards A A deeper, more accurate understanding of life on earth, of society, of how people function, what of ethics, of metaphysics, of everything. And that in the long term, as a huge benefit, IT gets rather than our seas in the long term, even if IT adds to the number of ladies in the short term.

Well, I meanwhile, just in the reality check part, this is people always bring up what about the class on campus and like they're never invited um I haven't seen a case where where they would ve been invited um usually this the the clan argument gets thrown out when people are trying to excuse and that's why we shut up down bench pero. And that's why you can't have billed marr on campus. That's why you know and it's like, okay, um you know and it's is a little of being that thing over there is terrible and therefore didn't.

Ut so I do you have a question maybe by way of advice, you know, interviewing folks and seeing this like like a podcast is a platform in deciding who to talk or not. Not something have to come face to face with on occasion. My natural inclination ation, before starting the pockets was I talk to anyone and including people who am still interested in who are, you know, the current members of the K, K, K.

And to me, there's a responsibility to do that. Would skill yeah. And that responsibility has been wearing every year. And heavy, you realize how much skill that actually tastes because you have to know to understand so much, because I have, i've come to understand that the devil is always going to be caires matic. The devil is gonna look like the devil.

And so you have to realize yet that you can't always come to the table with a deep compassion for another human being you have have you know like ninety percent compassion in and another ninety percent deep historico acknowledge about the context of the battles around this particular issue. And that takes just a huge model. ver. But if there's thoughts you have about this, how to handle speech in a way without censoring, bringing into the surface, but in a way that creates more love in the world.

I remember Steve banning got disinvited from the new york ker festival, and jim kerry freak out, and all sorts of other people freaked ed out. They got disadvised from from the and I got invited to speak on some mechanism about this and I was saying, like listen, you don't have .

people to your conference .

because you agree with them um like that we have to get out of this idea that that's because they were trying to make IT sound like that's an enormous of Steve ban and like that's a nonsense. Like we've actually look at the opinions of all the people who are there. You can't possibly endorse all the opinions that all these other people who are going to be there actually have. And in the process of making that argument, I get and and also, of course, the very clastic very valuable to know if someone to to be thanks, you should be here about that. And I remember someone arguing back, saying, would you want someone to interviews jai? And i'm like because at the moment, like was at the time when when ISIS was really, really going for IT um and I was like, would you not want to go to a talk where someone was trying to figure out what what makes some of these people take because that that changes you're framing that essentially it's like not it's curiosity is the is secure for a lot of this stuff and we need a great deal more curiosity and a lot less unwarranted certainty.

And there's a question of like how do you conduct such conversations? And um I feel deeply under qualified.

What do actually especially good at that?

I feel like documentary filmmakers usually do a much Better job and the best job is usually done by biographers yeah so the more time you give to a particular conversation, they really deep thought in historical context and studying the people, how they think, looking all different prospects, looking at the psychology of the person yeah of bringing their parents, their grandparents, all of this. The more time you spend with that, the Better, the Better the quality the conversation is because you get to understand the you get to really empathize with the person with the people here SHE represents yeah and you get to see the coming he made all of the interviews are often don't do that work yeah um so like the best stuff i've seen is interviews that are part of a documentary yeah but even now, documentary is like there's a huge incentive to do as quickly as possible yeah there's not incentive to really spend time with the person.

There's a great new documentary about floyd problems that I really recommend. We did a documentary about ira glaser called mighty era um which was my video team in my protege a neoprene and Chris mobi and aon risk put IT together and IT just follows the life in times of of ira glaser the .

former had of the you because if you just on that's a .

star amazing I know he wasn't a lawyer. He working the N Y C L U in new york civil liberties union back and I think the sixties he was I think Robert Kennedy recommended that he go in that direction um and he became the president of the S L U. Right at the time that they are uh suffering from defending the united scope, y and I go and iron and Chris put together this and they ve never done a documentary before and that came out so so well.

And IT tells the story of the nations scope. Y IT tells the story of the case around IT tells the story of the A C L U at the time and what a great leader I regulator was. And what one of things that so great is like when you get to see the out is it's cookie. They come off like the idiots that you would expect them to.

There's a moment when the rally is not going very well and and the the leader gets fluster red and IT almost seems like he's going to like shout out kind of like you're making this, not siri, into a so IT showed how actually allowing the not used to speak its its scope y kind of took the window of the shells, like if they had the whole movement, like everybody was at all, kind of dissolved after that, because they looked like racist fools. They were. They were not even blues brothers made joke, you know, jokes about them.

And and IT didn't turn into the disaster that people thought I was going to be just by letting them speak. And I regard her, okay. So he has this wonderful story about how jacky Robinson joined the bricklin dodgers and how there was a moment when I was seeing someone at african american, as on their, literally on their team, and how that really got him excited about the cause of of racial equality.

And and that became a big part of what his life was. And I think I just think of that such great metaphor is expanding your circle and seeing more people is being, quite literally, on your team is the solution to so many these problems. And I worry, one, one of the things that is absolutely just a fact of life, and in america, like we do see each other more as enemy camps as as opposed to people on the same team. And that was actually something in the early days, like mean will clearly, 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 um that uh that when we started seeing the evidence of them doing stupid things that we might be shocked first but then eventually get more sophisticated and be like want to come on people are like that that never actually really seemed to happen um that I don't think I think that there are plenty of things we know about human nature, we know about dumb things, people say and we've we've made IT into an environment where there's just someone out there waiting to be kind of like a remember that dumb thing he said we were fourteen. Well i'm going to make sure that you don't get into the to your dream .

school because of that. This .

offence biology.

we steal from the best digin through someone's past commons to find speech that has an aged well. And that one is .

tactical like that. That one isn't just someone not being eaten tic. They're i'm going to partner ship for this or and that's when the reason I got depressed writing this book because, you know, it's it's already there's already people who don't love me because of coddling the american mind, usually based on a misunderstanding of what we actually said godling in the american mind. But but on this one, you know, like, i'm calling out people for being very cruel in a lot of cases. But but one thing that was really scary about studying a lot of these cases is that once you have that targets on your back, what they're gonna try to cancel you for could be anything you know, they might go back into your old h your old boat, find something that you said nineteen ninety five of you do something um where essentially IT looks like its the entire other thing but really what the what's going on is they didn't like your opinion. They didn't like your point of view on something and you're onna find find a way that from now on any time your name comes up it's like, oh, remember this this thing I didn't like about him and it's again it's cruel, doesn't get you anywhere closer to the truth and but IT is a little scary that to .

connect up okay, in terms of solutions, yeah, I can ask a few things. So one, a parenting. Yeah.

five and seven old.

i'm sure you ve figured IT all out then oh god.

No, from a free .

speech perspective, 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, it's like we're going to spend her all lives learning about stuff.

And it's fast and exciting and endless. And you will 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 know thank things that actually do some kind of old fashion. I say things to make 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 some of those old fashion virtues, the things I try to preach um counter intuitive stuff like outdoor time playing um having time that are not intermediate experiences really is really important and little things like I talk about on the book about when my kids are watching something that scary and i'm not talking about like zombie vie, talking about like a cartoon that is kind of a scary moment and saying that they want to turn the T V off and I and I talked to them and I say, listen, I mean IT next year and we're going to finish this show and I want you to tell me what you think of of of this afterwards. And I SAT next to my sons um and by the end of the every single time I you know when I asked them was as cause I thought I was going to be and there was like, no daddy, that was fine and not like that. One of the great lessons in life, the fear that you don't go through, becomes much big in your head than actually simply facing IT.

This one there is one find back against this culture. I'd love, you know, for all of our kids to be able to grow an environment where people give you Grace and, you know, except the fact that sometimes people are going to say things that pissed you off. Take seriously the possibility that might be wrong and and the be curious.

well, I I have hoped that the thing you mention, which is because so much of Young people stuff is on the internet that they're going to give each other break because then everybody's cancer worthy.

Generation z hates cancel culture the most, and that's another reason why it's like people still claiming this. You actually can ask kids they culture and they hate IT.

Yeah, what I kind of think of them was like the immune system. That's like the culture. Waking up to like that .

is not a good thing. I am glad, though, I one of those kids who know is really glad. But I was a little kid in the eighties and and a teenager in the nineties because having everything potentially online, uh, it's not a not bringing .

an envy well, I you can also do the absolute free speech I like leading into a yeah well, I hope for future were a lot of our insecurity flaws. Everything's out there yeah and to be raw, honest with IT, I think that leads to Better world because the flaws are beautiful OK. That's the flaws is the the basic ingredients of human connection.

R abbot, right? He went a book on on bodies. M um and I talked about trying to use social media from a from a budd's perspective 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. L you're get you just shut up and just kind of like letting them go go the same way was to watch your thoughts kind of IT off.

Would love to see that like visualized, whatever, whatever the drama going on, going on, just seeing the sea of a of the collective consciousness, just processing this and having a little like panic attack and just kind of like.

yes, reading and look at that the little sort of hateful, angry voices kind of pop up billing okay, here you are. And i'm still focus on that thing because that that is one of the things is okay. Yeah actually it's probably late the game to be to giving my grand theory on on this stuff but never too late so so what I was studying um in law school when I ran out of first emma classes, I decided to study sensor trip during the twitter dynasty uh because that's where we get our ideas of prior restraint uh that that come from the licensing of the printing press, which was something that Henry the eighth was the first to do where basically um the idea was that if you can't print anything in england unless it's with these are your majesty approve printers um IT will prevent herod's work in anti one hundred the eight stuff from coming out pretty tty pretty pretty pretty um efficient idea of nothing else um and I always so he started getting angry at the printing press around fifty twenty one and then pass something um that require point to be along with parliament in fifteen thirty eight uh and I always think of that is kind of where we are now um because we have this we had back then we had the original disruptive technology. You know writing was probably but the next one which which was the printing Price, which was absolutely calamities.

And I mean and I and I say kilometers on purpose because in the short term the which hunts went up like crazy because the printing brissel out you to behave to get that manual and how to find which is um that the religious wars went crazy LED ude all sorts of distress misinformation. Nathan ss and Henry the eighth was trying to put the genie back in the bottle. You know, he was kind of like, I I want to use this for good like like I feel like I I could be used but he was in an unavoidable period of epidemic anarchy.

There's nothing you can do to make the period after the printing press come uh, came out to be a non disruptive, non crazy other than like total absolute totalitarian ism and destroy all the press 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, of several million people to the european conversation and that eventually the global conversation.

But eventually I became the best tool for this confirmation um for getting rid of falsity, for spotting bad ideas. And it's the benefits the long term benefits of the printing press are in calculate. great. And that's what gives me some optimism for where we are now with social media because we are in that unavoidably in alcohol period. And I do worry that that there that their attempts in states to pass things, to try to put the journey back in the bottle, like if we ban tiktok or we we say that um nobody under eight team can be on on the internet unless I have parental permission or going at something that no amount of sort of top down is going to be able to fix that we have to culturally adapt to the fact of IT in ways that make us wiser that actually um and allow IT potentially to be that wonderful engine for this confirmation that were nowhere near yet by the way but think about additional millions of eyes on problems um thanks the bring press helped create the scientific revolution, the enlightenment to discover your ignorance um we now have added billions of eyes and voices to solving problems and we're just we're using them for cat videos and counselling .

but that those are just the early dates of the printing press all starts with the cats in the cancelling is there something about ex about twitter which is perhaps the most uh energetic source of cats and cancelled IT seems like the .

collective unconscious of the species. I mean, like it's one of the things where the tendency to want to see patterns in history sometimes can limit the actual batched crazy experience of what history actually is. Because, yes, we have these nice comforting ideas that is going to be like last time we don't know IT IT hasn't happened yet and I think how unusual twitter is because I think of IT as like the uh because because people talk about you know writing and mask unica and a 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 filled just like our own brains with all sorts of like little crazy things that pop up and appear like virtual particles of all over the place of people um you know reacting in real time to things that never been anything, even vegan like IT and IT can be and its worth awful to see at its best sometimes seeing people like just getting a ufos over something going on and cracking absolutely brilliant immediate jokes.

H you know the same time IT can be IT can even be a joyful experience I I I feel like uh and uh I live in a neighborhood now on x where I I mostly deal with people that I think are actually thoughtfully if I disagree with them um and and it's not such a bad experience. I occasions run of those other sort of what I call neighbor ods on x words just all cancelling all nationals and it's always kind of an unpleasant visit to those places. I'm not saying the whole thing needs to be like like my experience, but I do think that the reason why people keep on coming back to IT is that reveals raw aspects of humanity that sometimes we prefer to pretend don't .

exist yeah but also is totally you like you said yeah it's just a very the speed the news travels, the opinions travel at the battle of ideas travels .

battle of information .

do yeah of what is true, not lies travel the little mark twenty thing pretty fast on the thing and IT changes your understanding of how to interpret information because stressed .

you out and know and I remember to get off and sometimes yes, stats are pretty bad on on mental health with the Young people. And i'm definitely in the camp of people think that social media is part of that. I understand, you know, the debate, but i'm pretty persuaded that one of the things that is hasn't been great for mental health and of people is this just constantly being exposed?

Yeah absolutely. I think it's possible to create social media that make a huge model money, makes people happy to mean like is possible to line the the the incentives. So in terms of yeah making teenagers, making every stage of life, giving you long term fulfillment and happiness with your physical existence outside the social media and on social media, helping you grow a human hoping chAllenge, you just the right amount, 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 to .

create a feed. So the easiest feed you could do is like maximize engagement yeah but I just like a really done algorithm yeah it's like for the for the i'll going 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.

You watch fleet bag, it's absolutely brilliant british um and IT sets you up on there. There is why like people love IT so much as IT sets you up that you're watching like a aranca british sex in the city except the main character is the most promiscuous one. It's like going going and you kind of really a little, but it's kind of funny and it's kind of cute, kind of spicy.

And then you realized that the person is actually kind of suffering and have a hard time. And IT gets deeper and deeper as the show goes on. And she'll do these incredible speeches about tell me what to do like I just I know there's experts out there. I know there's knowledge out there. I know there's an optional way to live my life. So why can someone just tell me what to do? And and it's this wonderful ly like um accurate, I think uh aspect of human desire that what if something could actually tell me the optimal way to go because I think there is a desire to give up some amount of your own freedom and direction in order to be told to do the ultimately right thing but that path scares me to death .

will see the way you phrase IT that I missed res me too. So this several things when you could be constantly distracted in a tiktok way by things that keep you engaged yeah so we're moving that and giving you a bunch of options constantly and learning from the long term what results in your actual long term happiness. So like which amounts of chAllenging ideas are good for you um that you know for for somebody like me .

that but there is .

a number like that for you yes, rag like for me that number is pretty high. I love debate. I love, I love the feeling of like realizing holy shit, i've been wrong, yes. But like, you know, I would love for the alga to know that about me, to help me, but always giving me options if I wanted descend to cat videos and so on.

Educational aspect.

yes.

educational like the idea of kind of like both going the speed that you need to and running as fast as you can.

Yeah you know I mean, there's that you know the whole flow thing I just feel youtube recommendation for for Better or worse, if you ws correctly, IT feels like IT is a pretty good job whenever I just refuse to click on stuff that's just dopamine based and click on only educational things. Yeah, the recommendation provides a really done good. So I feel like it's a solvable problem. Listened in the space of education, of chAllenging yourself but also expanding your realm of knowledge.

In all this comes, i'm definitely more than they were in escaped in article period and require big cultural adjustments. And there is no way isn't going to be difficult transition.

Is there any specific little or big things that you like to see? X do twitter.

do I have a lots of us on that with the printing press? And extra millions of eyes on any problem can tear down any institution, any, any persons, any idea. And that's good in some ways, because the automatic val s institutions needed to be torn down, and some people did to, and a lot of ideas need to be torn down.

Same thing is true now and extra billions of eyes on every problem can tear down any persons idea institution um and some again, some of those things needed to be torn down, but IT can 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 are also aware of the application crisis. It's one of the reasons why was also aware of how kind of shady our research is, how much our expert class is arrogant in in many cases. But people don't want to live in a world where they don't have uh people that they respect and they can look at.

Um and I think what's happening uh possibly now um but will will continue to happen as people are going to serve themselves as being high integrity, that they will always be hard to say you are establishing yourself with someone who who is high integrity, where where they can trust that person a fire wants to be um you the institution that people can come do is like if it's free speech, we will defend IT period and I think that people need new uh uh 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 council culture stuff or dumb cat, means where IT is actually a serious discussion, bounded around rules, no perfect control forces, no efficient oral forgers, none of the the bs ways we debate. I think you could start to actually create something that could actually be a major improvement in the in in the speed with which we come up with new, Better ideas and establish and separate truth from fall city.

Yeah, if it's done well, you can inspire a large number of people to become iron higher integrity. You can create integrity as a value to strive for. Yeah like you know, there's been projects throughout the internet that have a done incredible job of that but have been also very flawed. Like a cap is an example of a big leap forward in doing that is .

pretty dam impressed. What's your all take? I 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 declared, you know, i'm into politics and I really kind left leaning guy so I really shouldn't be editing political articles because I have bias. So they declare their bias, and they're often do a good job of actually declare the bias.

But there are still like they'll find a way to justify themselves, like something will pissed them off yeah, and they want na corrected because they they love correcting untruth into truth. But the perspective of what is true or not is affected by their bias. Truth is hard to know, and IT is true that there is a lethally ini bias on the editors of idea.

So for the what happens is on articles which I mostly appreciate, don't have a political aspect to them, you know um scientific articles or technical articles there, they can be really strong, even history, just describing the facts of history. They don't have a subject development, uh, strong. Also just using my own brain, I can kind of filter out if it's uh, you know it's something about january six, something like this.

I know i'm going to be like not whatever is going on here. I'm going kind of read IT, but most i'm going to look to other source. I'm going to look to a bunch of different perspectives on is going to be very tense. That's probably going to be some kind of bias. Maybe some wording will be such, which is one where this is where we could be. Does he think the way the words stuff um will be biased, the choice of words but the kip dia editors themselves are so so reflective, they literally have articles describing these very effects of how you can use words to inject bias yeah in all the ways that you talk about .

that healthier most and it's .

incredibly healthy, but I think you can do Better. One of the big flaws za wikipedia to me the community uh notes an x does Better is the accessibility of becoming another um is is built to become an editor and it's not as visible the process of editing so I would love is like you said, a dream yeah everyone to build to observe this debate between people with integrity of when they discuss things like january takes a very controversial topics to see how the process the debate goes as supposed to being hidden in the shadows, which you currently isn't what kip dia, you can exercise just hard to access.

But and i've also seen how they will use certain articles like uncertain people, like articles about people i've learned to trust less and less yeah, because they are literally will use those to make personal attacks. And this is something you ve write about. They'll use discussions of different controversies to paint a picture of a person and that's that doesn't to meet these feel like an accurate representation of the person and like writing an article about einstein, mentioning something about uh, theory relativity and saying that he was a mizer and abuse in a like controversy.

No, yeah, he is fine, man. Also, you know you know, 我在 you there did not exactly the perfect human terms of women， but like there's other aspects of this human and to capture that human properly, there's a certain way to do IT. And they were the media 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 biased.

But again, much Better than the words I believe is much Better because wikipedia exists. But now they were in these at the license stages, were growing and trying to come up with different technologies. The idea of a stream yeah is really, really interesting. As you get more and more people into this discourse that where the value is, let's try to get the truth yeah.

yet in that basically, you know, you get full of cards for no wrong, no different .

real techniques they are being used to avoid actually discussed yeah and I think .

I actually can make a little bit fun, but you get a limited number of them. You like, what about us .

some cards you find thing absolutely yeah let me ask you about you mentioned going to some difficult moments in your life um what what has been your experience with with depression? What has been your experiences getting out of IT overcoming IT yeah .

I mean the whole thing the whole journey um with calling american mind began with me um in the of the belmont psychiatric facility in philadephia back in two thousand seven eight had called nine one one in a moment clarity because i've gone to a the hardware store to to um make sure that when I killed myself that I stuck I wanted make sure that I know had my head wrapped in everything so like a football of drugs I was to take didn't work that I want to build up claw my way out. It'd been in a really rough year always issues with depression um but they were getting worse.

And Frankly, one other reasons why this council culture stuff is so important thing is that the thing that I didn't emphasize as much in calling 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 um of how a of IT being like that my wife, i'd never seen IT and basically the only way was able to write that was by doing, you know how you can trick yourself if um and I was like i'm going to convince myself that this is just between me and my computer and nobody will see IT it's probably not the most public thing i've ever written um but what I didn't emphasize and that was how much the culture were played into how depressed I got because I was recently legal directer fire that I became president fire in two thousand and five moved to filled lpas where I get depressed um and uh interest. I don't have family there. There is something about the town. They don't seem like me very much um but the main thing was being in the culture world the time um there was a girl that I was dating um I remember you know SHE didn't really approve what I didn't 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 they'd fending someone left but they still would never forgive me for defending someone on the right and I remember saying what one point like listen, i'm like i'm a true believer on this stuff i'm going to defend that these i'm certainly wanted to defend republicans and he actually said I think republicans might be worse.

Um and that didn't the relation to go very well and then I nearly gotten five fights a couple times with with people on the right um because they found out I defended people who crack jokes about nine eleven like that more than once about that time my twice i'm not this fighting again um but yeah I was always like that you you see have the critical people can be you can see how friends can turn on you if they don't like your politics so I got up early preview of this uh of of what the culture we are heading into by being the president of fire and IT was exhAusting um and that was one of the main things that made me to be a suicide depressed at the belmont center if you told me that that would be the beginning of a new on Better life for me I would have laugh if I could have but I would you know I don't like you can tell them OK if i'm so laughing and I wasn't laughing um at that point so um I got a doctor and I started doing cognition, have vial therapy. I started having all these voices in my head that were catastrophes and um you know giving over over generalization and um um fortune telling you know mind reading all of these things that they teach you not to do and what what you do in C B T is essentially you you have something makes you upset and then you just write down what the thought was and you know something minor could happen in your response was you know like, well, the they didn't seem to go very well and that's because i'm broken and will die alone and you like OK okay what what what are the following you know that's catastrophes that's mine reading. That's fortune telling that's all the stuff um and you have to do this several times the day forever I actually need to brush up on at the moment um and IT slowly over time voices in my head that I ve been saying horrible you know horrible internal talk IT just doesn't sound as convincing anymore.

Which was a really kind of like subbed effect like I was just kind of like, oh, right, I don't buy that i'm broken. You know like that doesn't sound true. That doesn't sound like truth from god like like I used to and nine months after I was planning to kill myself, I was probably happier than i'd been in a decade um and that was one of the things that the C.

B. T. is. What LED me to notice this in my own work, that I felt like administrators were kind of selling cognitive distortions and student for buying IT. And then when I started noticing that, they seemed to come in actuality believing a lot of the stuff that would be very dangerous and that LED to calling american mind and that stuff. But the thing that was rough about writing hands ing in the american mini have mentioned this already a couple of times.

I got really depressed this last year um because I was studying you know there's a friend in there that I talk about who killed himself um after being cancelled. I talked him a week before he killed himself and I hadn't actually I hadn't actually checked in with him because he seemed so confident I thought he would be totally fine because he he had an insensitive of tweet in june of twenty twenty and got got forced out um in a way that didn't actually sound as bad as a lot of the other professors. He actually at least got a seven packet but they knew he zoom win because he had for.

And so I I waited to check in on him because we were so overall with the request for helps and he was sent people coming to the house still and then he shot himself next week. And I I definitely and because everyone knows i'm so public about my struggle to the stuff, everybody who fights the stuff comes to me when there are have 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 all all the vault res. They'll have fun with that just like the same way when my friend, my team killed himself there were people like celebrating on twitter um that that a man was dead because they didn't like his tweet and but somehow that made them compassionate for some abstract other person so I was getting a little depressed and anxious and the thing that that really helped me more than anything else um was confessing to my staff that I you know books take a lot of energy so I no they didn't want to hear that not only was the taking out of the bosses this time this was making depressed and anxious. But when I finally told my the leadership of my staff um you know people that even though I try to maintain a lot of distance from I love very, very much IT made such a difference you know um because I could be open about that and the other thing was if you had this conference dialogue, oh yes, it's like an invite only thing it's all in hofman um runs IT um IT intentionally tries to get people over the political spectrum um 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 all I think god, someone taken on cancer culture and where I felt like I felt like maybe this won't be the disaster for me in my family that I that I was starting to be afraid I would be that taking the stuff on might actually have a happy ending but .

one thing I just stands out from that. Is the the pain of cancellation can be really intense and that doesn't essay, I mean losing your job. But just even in call the buying, you can go whatever name, but just some number of people on the internet and that number can be small kind of saying bad things to you yeah, that can be a pretty powerful force to the human psyche, which is was very surprising. And then the flip side also of that IT really makes me sad. How cool .

people can. It's such a thinking that your your cause is a social justice, in many cases, can lead people to think I can be as cruel as I want and pursuit of this when IT a lot of times it's just a way to sort of that some aggression on on a person that you think of. The one is an abstraction.

So I think important for people to realize that there whatever like whatever whatever negative energy, whatever negativity want to put out there, like there's real people they can get heart like you can really get people um to won't be the worst versions of themselves or too possibly take their own life and its not as real yeah well .

that's one of things that we do in the book um to to really kind of address people who so try to claim this isn't real. We just quote, we quote the pope, we go obama, we James carvel, we caught Taylor swift on council culture and tailor swiss quote is is essentially about like how behind all of this there that when he gets particularly nasty there's this very clear you know kill yourself kind of undercurrent to IT um and it's it's cruel and the 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 this representation getting back to the audit ams, sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never never hurt me has been reimagined in campus debates in the most ascelin way. People will literally say stuff like, but now we know words can hurt. 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 won't even make sense the same. It's the saying that you repeat to yourself to give yourself strength when the bullies have noticed, you're a little weird. Be a little bit the and IT helps IT really does help to be like, listen, okay, assets are gonna assess things um and I can't let them have that kind of power over me yeah yeah .

it's still as a learning experience because IT does IT IT does heard but for the .

good people out there who actually know just sometimes think that their vent you think about IT remember that there .

are people on side of yeah for me this hurts my kind of faith in humanity um I know shouldn't but IT does sometimes when I just see people being cruel, each other can it's IT floats a cloud over my perspective of the world and I don't I wish didn't have to be there yeah that .

was always my sort of flipping. But the answer to that if if mankind is basically good, are basically the evil being like the biggest debate in, in, in philosophy, and being like, well, the problem. The first, this is something 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 um and that's really you know what censorship is basically telling you don't be yourself, don't actually be to 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 a bit.

But one thing I definitely was that your audience is. IT can just be up to us argues to try to fix this. Um and I think that in this may sound like it's a unrelated problem. I think if there were highly respected, let's say, extremely difficult ways to prove that you're extremely smart, hardworking, that cost little or nothing that actually can give the harvard in the yields of the world run for their money, I think that might be the most positive thing we could do to to to do all the lot of these problems.

And why I think the fact that we have become a weird amErica with a great anti elites tradition has become weirdly illegal in this in the respect that we not only, again, our leadership coming from these few fancy schools, we actually have a great admiration for them. We kind of look up to them. But I think we'd have a lot healthy of a society if people could prove, you know that their excEllence in ways that are coming from completely different streams and and that are highly respected.

I sometimes talk about there should be a test that anyone who passes IT gets like a you know A B A and the humanities that like a super ba, like something, like someone another. Gd, that's not what i'm talking about. I'm talking about something that like, you know one out of only a couple, like a hundred people compassed some other way of actually um uh of not going through these massive, bloated, expensive institutions that people can raise their hands and say i'm smart, hard working.

I think that could be an incredibly healthy way. I think we need additional streams for creative people to be solving problems, whether that's an extra place cells. I think that there's lots of things that technology could do to really help with this.

I think some of the stuff that silicon is working on a eon academy could really help. So I think there's a lot of ways, but they exist largely around coming up with new ways of doing things, not just expecting the old things that have, say, forty billion dollars in the bank that they're going to reform themselves. And and here's might pick on harvard to and I pick a little bit more. Um I had talk a lot about class again and that there's a great book called poison ivy by evan Mandy which I recommend everybody outrageous that sounds like me and or and at stanford um which was and and I think the state is you know elite hier education has more kids from the top one percent then they have from the bottom fifty or sixty percent of on the school um and when you look at how much they actually like replicate class privilege, it's it's really discussing so everybody should be poison .

ivy and above all else, if you're weird, continue being weird yeah then you one of the most interesting, one of the weird in the most beautiful way people have a greg, thank you for the really important work you do. This was, this is everything.

Watch kid kind.

I appreciate the class, the holly that you brought here today. And 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 IT in the harvard accountable for doing right by the people that walk their holes. So thank you so much for talking. Thanks for listening to this conversation.

Greg lucky to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me believe you with some words from known chokey.

If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech reviews, you don't like gabbles was in favour of freedom speech reviews he liked. So we stone, if you're in favour of freedom of speech, that means you're in favour of freedom of speech precisely use you despise. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.