0:08

Hi, and welcome to The Origins Podcast. I'm

0:10

your host, Lawrence Krause. Greg

0:12

Lukinoff was trained as a

0:15

First Amendment lawyer at Stanford

0:18

and very shortly thereafter,

0:21

in I think 2000, became

0:23

the legal director of the newly

0:26

established Foundation for Individual Rights and

0:28

Education, which was established

0:30

to fight attacks on free speech and

0:32

academic freedom and academia, of which there

0:34

are many. In 2006,

0:37

he became director of that foundation and

0:39

recently the foundation changed its name to

0:41

the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

0:43

because the attacks on free speech have

0:45

become much more ubiquitous in society. And

0:48

Greg is a passionate advocate for

0:50

free speech throughout our society for

0:52

many reasons, and not

0:55

only has fire, as

0:57

it's called, been involved in many court cases

0:59

trying to protect free speech from both the

1:01

right and the left. Greg

1:04

has also been a prolific author. He wrote The

1:06

Coddling of the American Mind with Jonathan Haidt, which

1:08

was a bestselling book. Well,

1:10

recently he's written, along with Ricky

1:13

Schlott, the canceling of

1:15

the American Mind. And I thought that would

1:17

be a great opportunity to have a long

1:19

discussion with Greg about issues of free speech

1:21

in academia and society more generally, what the

1:24

problems are and what we might do about

1:26

them. It's a sobering discussion, and I

1:28

think many people who are not aware of how insidious

1:32

the attacks on free speech have been,

1:34

especially how chilling it is for higher

1:36

education, which has really been transformed and

1:38

in many people say almost destroyed by

1:41

the fear that people

1:43

have about expressing their opinions,

1:45

but now also more generally in society. So

1:48

while it's sobering, we discuss

1:50

not just the origins of the problem,

1:53

what the origins of cancel culture are,

1:55

what cancel culture is, but

1:57

also his own interest and burgeoning in

2:01

free speech as an early, a nascent

2:03

lawyer, and even with his experience with

2:05

the ACLU. And then we end up

2:08

with talking about some of the things that we might do,

2:10

he suggests we might do to try and

2:12

overcome what's currently happening. While

2:14

it was a sobering discussion, it's incredibly

2:17

informative. He's a lively and vibrant and

2:19

very interesting speaker. And I

2:21

hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I

2:23

did. You can watch it

2:25

commercial free on our Critical Mass Substax

2:27

site, or of course you can watch

2:29

it later on on our YouTube channel,

2:31

the Origins Project Foundation YouTube channel. Subscriptions

2:34

to the Critical

2:37

Mass Substax site go to

2:39

help support the nonprofit foundation.

2:41

But you can also of course listen to it

2:43

on any podcast listening site. No matter how you

2:46

watch it or listen to it, I hope you

2:48

enjoy and are provoked and

2:50

informed by this particular podcast with this

2:52

remarkable man. And I also hope

2:54

you have a wonderful holiday and a happy new

2:56

year. Thank

2:59

you. Well,

3:06

Greg Lukinoff, I

3:08

am so happy to have you here. As

3:11

you pointed out when we

3:13

were talking before, this began, we met a

3:15

bunch of years ago at a Renaissance weekend, but I

3:17

have been admirer of yours for

3:19

a long time. And I still am an admirer.

3:21

And I'm so impressed with

3:23

the work that you've been doing. And

3:27

with fire, and I've wanted to talk to you

3:29

for a while and the publication of the new

3:31

book, which is really taking off, is

3:35

gave a good motivation for me to try and convince

3:37

you to come on, or at least ask you to

3:39

come on. I'm really happy. So we'll

3:41

talk about the canceling the American mind in

3:44

some detail, but this is an Origins

3:46

podcast. And I'm particularly interested in your Origins

3:48

in any case, but I always like to

3:51

know how people got

3:53

to where they began. There's

3:55

some quote I actually used in one of my

3:57

books that something like the most important... is

4:00

knowing how the traveler got to the starting place. And

4:04

I want to know that in your case. I know that

4:06

you trained as a lawyer

4:09

and you were born in New York. You now live in New

4:11

York. So you're a New Yorker heart going through all the... I

4:13

live in D.C. now. You live in D.C.

4:15

now? Okay, sorry. Okay, okay. And

4:17

I grew up on the burbs. I was born in

4:19

New York, but I grew up in the burbs. Burbs

4:21

of New York. And then you went to... Well, before

4:24

we talked about university, I'm intrigued. You

4:26

became a lawyer. I don't know anything about your parents.

4:29

What's their background? So

4:33

I've gotten used to saying this pretty fast. My

4:35

father is a Russian

4:37

refugee, grew up in Yugoslavia, and thinks of

4:40

himself as Russian. My mother

4:42

is Irish, immigrant,

4:44

grew up in Britain, but thinks of

4:47

herself as British. Which

4:49

makes perfect sense if you know either of those cultures. You

4:52

can't wake up one morning and decide you're

4:54

Serbian, but you can become British in a

4:56

way. Yeah, yeah.

4:58

So that was the brilliance of

5:01

the British Empire, giving people the

5:03

illusion they could become British. In

5:06

fact, it was one of its pluses, which is often... Now

5:09

you're not allowed to talk about it in history classes. But in

5:11

any case, as we

5:13

might get to when we talk about censorship. But

5:15

okay, so they were immigrants. So how

5:18

old were they? Your father, how

5:20

old was he when he came over? He was

5:22

in his 20s. He got

5:24

a scholarship at University of Wisconsin at Madison. So

5:27

that's what brought him to the United

5:29

States. And my mom came over to

5:31

be a nanny because it was

5:33

during the British nanny craze. So

5:36

realizing that Mary Poppins plays a role

5:38

in my being an American. That's perfect.

5:42

It's pretty crazy. The serendipity is

5:44

amazing in people's lives now. Absolutely.

5:48

But if he came over in his 20s, did he speak English

5:50

already? Did he have to... He came over

5:52

to the school. What did he study and what brought him over? He

5:55

had been... Being from Yugoslavia, he's...

6:00

speaks seven languages pretty damn

6:02

well. And so

6:04

he was trying to pick up English after

6:06

the war. And he

6:09

was a kid during the war. And

6:13

he came over to study economics.

6:15

But we were whites

6:17

in the Bolshevik Revolution. My

6:20

grandfather, not my great-grandfather, my grandfather

6:22

fought the Bolsheviks. And

6:24

sometimes like in New York, people would be kind of

6:27

like, ooh, aristocracy. And I'm like, not aristocracy. We

6:29

were kulags. We were serfs who made good. Like we

6:31

were serfs who were lawyers and

6:35

successful business people and that kind of

6:37

stuff. So we

6:39

go back to serfdom in 1858. And

6:42

so we fought the Bolsheviks. We lost. And

6:48

my dad was part of an underground

6:50

group that was trying to oppose both the Nazis and

6:52

the Soviets. He managed

6:54

to make it to the American zone of occupation in

6:57

the 1940s. And he

7:00

came over in the 50s to study economics here.

7:05

He met my mom at a UN

7:07

company dance, a

7:10

UN club dance in New York. And they

7:13

had kids, had a nice marriage for 17 years, got

7:16

divorced because I never had any business

7:18

being married in the first place, but

7:20

produced. I'm the youngest of four. Yeah,

7:22

you're the, okay, but you're the, now

7:24

I'm gonna still parse it a little

7:26

bit more carefully because he went to

7:28

Wisconsin, studied economics. And

7:30

then, but he met your mom in New York. What got him

7:33

to New York? When he

7:35

came over, the first place he went when he came over was

7:37

New York, maybe just because where

7:39

everyone goes. And he brought his little brother George,

7:45

my uncle, who died a couple of years ago. And

7:49

he, and he remembers spending his

7:51

first night in the US under

7:54

the George Washington apartment under the George Washington

7:56

bridge. So he lived up at 165th

7:58

street. later

8:01

on up until right before my

8:03

right after my sister was

8:05

born but it was late 60s and

8:07

they were kind of feeling time to get on New York.

8:09

Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Did

8:11

he work as an economist

8:14

or did he? My dad

8:16

is an interesting fellow. He's very smart

8:18

and kind of helpless in some ways.

8:20

Oh god I hope he doesn't hear this. But

8:24

he never

8:26

worked as an economist. He kind of took for

8:28

granted. I think he kind of thought that everybody

8:31

had a good grasp of science and could speak

8:33

seven languages because he was unemployed

8:35

a lot when I was a kid so we

8:37

were pretty poor for a

8:39

lot of that but when my mom divorced him

8:42

that encouraged him to go abroad

8:44

to find a job and so he worked

8:46

at the US mission in Geneva on nuclear

8:49

disarmament because he's very good

8:52

at speaking simultaneously Russian English

8:54

about science. So

8:56

that was about an eight-year period of

8:58

us doing a lot better

9:00

financially. Did you move to Europe with him or

9:03

did he just

9:06

send money? You lived with your mother? Yeah

9:08

my mom kept us in the divorce

9:11

and my mom went back to school to become

9:13

a nurse and so she was you know a

9:15

struggling nurse at the time so it was nice

9:18

to definitely make improvement. Besides

9:20

the interest in general, one of the reasons I'm asking is I'm

9:24

interested in people who have an

9:26

intellectual bent and what sort of

9:29

encouraged them reading. Who

9:33

in your family was it your father or

9:35

either of them encourage you? I

9:38

shouldn't put words in your mouth but I'm assuming you like to

9:40

read when you're younger. I

9:42

was more of a comic book kid but I

9:46

would sneak off to the I

9:48

mean okay I'm reading comic books

9:50

are reading by the way. Yeah

9:53

I know a lot of people say this

9:55

but I'm dyslexic you know so like the

9:57

which just means I'm a slow

9:59

reader for somewhat of my IQ. God, that's obnoxious

10:01

to say. But

10:04

the, but at the

10:06

same time, you know, I was kind of a tough kid,

10:09

you know, and I didn't want people to know I

10:11

was a nerd too. So like the comic books, I

10:13

would be more free talking about what they didn't know,

10:15

what my friends didn't know is I would go to

10:17

the library on Sundays, just to

10:19

sit down because I loved the old, the

10:22

microfiche with the old newspapers.

10:24

Yeah, and I would go to like, I

10:27

go to like, you know, World War One

10:29

and read the actual present sense, you know,

10:32

World War Two in the 1930s. That was, that was a

10:34

great Sunday, as far as I was concerned,

10:36

was just hanging out in the Danbury Public Library reading

10:38

old, reading old news stories. Oh,

10:40

Danbury. Okay. Okay. Okay. Is that where you

10:42

live? Danbury, eventually? Both former making capital of

10:44

the world. Yeah, I know. I since I

10:46

lived in New Haven for our, when I

10:48

taught at Yale for a long time, I

10:50

know Connecticut. Well, I worked at

10:53

the mall and everything. Really? We are now

10:55

known for our mall. It's

10:57

called the Danbury Fair Mall, which we all took

11:00

as sort of like a stab in the eye,

11:02

because we used to have a fair that you

11:04

actually got time off from school to go to.

11:07

And then they replaced it with something that they

11:09

had the temerity to call the Danbury Fair Mall,

11:12

which was like, but then of course, we

11:14

all complained about it, but we all worked there. I worked

11:16

in Friendly's, I worked at Sbarro's, one of my best friends

11:18

since I was three, worked at the Sears there until he

11:21

was probably in his late 20s. Now, that kind of, yeah,

11:27

working in Danbury like that, going to

11:29

the library in secret,

11:31

watching it, reading the microfiche. I

11:36

read it because I used to like to do history. I

11:38

actually did history before I did physics. I

11:44

don't know what you studied at American University. I mean,

11:47

did you decide? First of all, I assume you

11:49

already knew that you kind of liked history or

11:51

at least humanities and social

11:54

sciences instead of sciences. I always

11:56

wonder why people didn't become a

11:58

scientist. Since the end. No, no,

12:00

I, I, well, actually you'll, you'll appreciate

12:02

this. Um, my, my son is named

12:05

Benjamin for Benjamin Franklin and my, uh,

12:07

his younger brother is named

12:09

Maxwell for James Clark Maxwell because I'm a,

12:11

I, I feel

12:13

ashamed of not going into science,

12:16

uh, myself, but, um,

12:19

uh, but at the same time, like my biggest

12:21

passion was always history. Like, like I always thought

12:23

that I would, I actually even looked into getting

12:26

a PhD, um, after I graduated law school, but,

12:28

you know, couldn't do another nine years of studying.

12:33

And so like history is one of those things

12:35

that really always excited me. But since, you know, the

12:37

family business was international stuff. Um,

12:39

I, my going to Americans actually kind

12:41

of funny story. I started working in restaurants when

12:43

I was little, um, I, you know, it was

12:45

really important to me to know how to be a cook. So

12:48

I knew how to do something real. Um,

12:51

and I, uh, the summer after, um, high school, I

12:53

worked as a cook out on Black Island, you know,

12:55

like, so I knew I knew how to do something.

12:58

And I wasn't totally sure that I wanted to go

13:00

to college, you know, I like to read, but, you

13:02

know, that's not the same thing. And,

13:05

um, so I, I visited one

13:07

school. Um, and I

13:09

knew that one school had, uh, journalism,

13:11

which I was always interested in, cause I just

13:14

think it's important and very free speechy, um,

13:16

and international relations, but with this, but I

13:18

want to have a special focus on Eastern

13:20

Europe. Um, and I

13:23

visited American, uh, I told them what

13:25

my scores were. They, uh, gave

13:28

me what looked to me like a free ride for

13:30

the rest of my time there. So I was like,

13:32

okay. So I never really applied to any schools. I

13:34

just went, I went to the one I visited and

13:38

I feel mildly bitter about it though, because

13:41

they kept on every year, they kept on

13:43

shipping away at my scholarships. And

13:46

I was like, and so

13:48

in my, since I worked for the student newspaper

13:50

in my junior year, I wrote an article with

13:52

the title, I think it was something literally like

13:55

was I baited and switched. Um,

13:58

and they actually gave me all my. money back in my

14:00

senior year. Wow, that was kind

14:02

of almost felt like a confession, you know?

14:05

Yeah, wow. That's before going on Twitter and

14:07

talk and using social media to

14:09

get your way. You use the campus paper. I'm

14:12

wondering if I was a psychologist, I mean, there's

14:14

a lot of discussion we're going to have about

14:16

the problems of higher education. I'm wondering if somehow

14:19

you had an axe to grind that was

14:21

created as a youth that somehow is

14:23

in there in the back of your mind still. They owe me.

14:27

You know, definitely is one of the reasons

14:29

why I'm not a big booster of American,

14:31

which some of my

14:33

classmates still get mad at me for not

14:35

saying nice things about it. I felt much

14:37

better treated at Stanford in general. You

14:40

know, that's where I

14:42

went for law school. And you know,

14:45

here's the funny

14:47

thing, that was

14:50

the most money I'd ever had in my

14:52

life because the stipend that they would give

14:54

you for being a law student was

14:56

just much more than I'd ever had before. And I'm

14:58

like, oh my God, this is amazing. They

15:00

gave you a style. I didn't know. I mean, I know

15:02

in science, you know, when I went to my PhD, yeah,

15:04

you get paid to do your PhD. I

15:06

still amaze anyone pays to do their PhD.

15:09

But I thought in law school, it was the other way

15:11

around. I mean, my stipend, I mean, I mean, living allowance,

15:14

but essentially, like you take out

15:18

loans, but one of the reasons why I chose

15:20

Stanford was because it had this great loan repayment

15:22

program if I went into nonprofit law. And

15:26

that's how I'm able to do, how I was able

15:29

to work at FIRE until I started. Interesting.

15:32

You knew, now, was it one of

15:34

these things where that influenced your decision on what you

15:36

do afterwards, or you always knew you wanted to go

15:38

into nonprofit law? I wanted to be a First

15:40

Amendment lawyer. I knew it right away. Yeah,

15:43

I went to law school specifically to do

15:45

First Amendment. Freedom was

15:47

one of those things that made me even more radicalized in

15:49

the direction of freedom of speech

15:51

because people come into your, if you're a student

15:53

journalist or any kind of journalist, people come into

15:55

your office all the time demanding that you punish

15:58

that guy or this guy or whatever. And

16:03

you start realizing that if you want free

16:05

speech in this country, it has to be,

16:07

or any country, it has to be really

16:09

broadly protected because if you make one little

16:11

exception to it, people will

16:13

exploit that to the hilt. Okay,

16:15

and we'll get there. That's a lot of the one of the

16:17

points. There's so many points in the book I want to and

16:20

in your life that I want to cover in that regard. So

16:22

you did your degree in history. And

16:25

it was it. Did you know you want

16:27

to be a lawyer before you or

16:29

did that arise at the end? I mean, or did

16:31

it arise at the end of a liberal

16:34

arts degree where you say, well, okay, it's nice to have a history

16:36

degree, but I need a job. I want to go. Yeah. Is

16:39

that it? Yeah, it was a little bit of

16:41

a mishmash. A couple of things happened.

16:45

One, can I

16:47

talk about this one publicly? My brother was arrested for

16:49

our bank robbery. Oh, okay. Sure, why not? He

16:53

didn't do it. He had nothing to

16:55

do with it. But he did pick up a

16:57

hitchhiker who did. And

17:00

the person who helped us get out of, helped

17:03

us out in that situation was actually

17:05

Jamie Raskin, who was then

17:07

at Washington College. He was at American University

17:10

Law School. And he helped us find a

17:12

lawyer. But I remember that feeling

17:14

of helplessness, you know, that I have my

17:16

brother who's been falsely accused. He's being held

17:18

by the LAPD. And

17:21

that's something that really made me want to be a lawyer.

17:23

The other thing was First Amendment. I

17:26

covered the Communications Decency Act for

17:29

my senior capstone, which was the

17:31

attempts to ban indecency on the

17:34

internet, which you don't have to

17:36

be a lawyer to know that's laughably unconstitutional. Yeah. And

17:39

then, you know, I also took a practice LSAT and

17:41

was weirdly good at it. Okay.

17:44

Sure, why not? If you're good at it. And,

17:48

but Stanford Law School, interestingly enough, as far

17:50

as I can tell from reading your

17:52

background, I was, I don't know what

17:54

they were going to say, radicalized you. It

17:57

radicalized you in the realization that, for you to be a lawyer.

18:00

speech was at risk, even in

18:02

the one place where you would think it

18:04

would be enshrined with

18:06

your law school and in particular your experience. So

18:08

why don't you talk a little bit about the

18:11

Stanford experience and how surprised you were at the

18:13

beginning? Yeah, I mean,

18:15

at American, I met

18:17

a lot of rich kids.

18:20

I hadn't really met like elite kids,

18:23

you know, until I got to Stanford. And

18:25

I have to say, I was, I

18:27

actually, no, I was going to say initially quite

18:30

impressed. I'd say I continue to be like, like I

18:32

picked my joke is it was my first experience

18:34

meeting quote unquote decent hard work and rich folk because

18:38

they were really, they were really impressive. This

18:41

was this was a caliber of people

18:43

from affluent backgrounds that I hadn't had a

18:45

lot experience with. Most of my life had

18:47

been rich kids were lazy

18:49

and stupid. And the

18:51

working class kids were they were

18:54

smart and virtuous and hardworking. And

18:57

American made that worse by being a place that was

18:59

very heavy on on scholarship students. But

19:02

but I get to get to a place like Stanford and

19:04

super impressed by them. The

19:07

weather is amazing. It's a wonderful intellectual environment.

19:09

I'm making more money than I ever have

19:11

just following my loans. But

19:14

one thing that was a little bit

19:16

weird was that particularly, you know, some

19:18

of the elite college graduates were much

19:21

more is much easier to say

19:23

the wrong thing and

19:26

be pilloried for it than at any

19:28

time I'd seen kind of in my life. And this

19:30

was kind of like a like a at

19:32

least a weekly thing that you'd see in

19:34

the law school, even back in 97, that

19:36

someone would say something at the time might

19:38

be called mildly on PC. And

19:40

it would be a big

19:43

moralistic deal, kind of like a nobody,

19:46

nobody was brought up in charges, at least not to

19:48

my knowledge. But it was definitely

19:50

already taking on this kind of

19:52

like one upmanship kind of environment where you

19:54

better watch what you say. Okay.

19:57

And that and that and that's I think. That

20:00

realization, as far

20:03

as I can tell, stayed with

20:05

you, ingrained in you early on,

20:07

that one has to

20:09

be, that an environment of free

20:11

speech and academic freedom

20:13

and free speech, that

20:16

one would have thought one could take for

20:18

granted, has to constantly be defended. And in

20:20

fact, more and more

20:22

so, and defended very poorly nowadays

20:25

in almost all areas,

20:27

as we'll talk about. And I

20:29

took every class that Stanford offered on First Amendment,

20:31

and then when I ran out,

20:34

I did six credits on censorship during the

20:36

Tudor dynasty, which

20:38

still informs a lot of what— I mean, the stuff

20:40

on the printing press is largely from my undergrad

20:43

research, my law school research. And

20:45

then I also interned at the ACLU of

20:47

Northern California, which was a formative experience as

20:49

well. Okay, yeah. In fact, didn't you also

20:51

say at the ACLU you found also a

20:54

little surprise in terms of being

20:56

a little less defending of free speech? It

21:00

was a disappointment. I mean, like, this was like when

21:03

I got the internship at the ACLU, this was

21:05

like the dream come true for me. You know,

21:07

like, this is—these were my people, and I was

21:09

really excited about it. When

21:11

was it, by the way, just so I know, what time was it?

21:15

This was after law school or— This

21:17

is in my third year of law school. Third-year law school, okay.

21:20

So they're actually called externships when you do them during the

21:22

year, so— Yeah, I just

21:24

wondered when—what point in your formative career?

21:26

Okay. Yeah, so it's in my

21:29

third year, my first semester of my third year. And

21:32

on the first day I was there, I got dressed down

21:34

by the Gay Rights Associate

21:36

for—in a way that I didn't

21:38

understand. Like, I was talking

21:40

about I'm really proud to be working for an

21:42

organization that would be—that was, you know, that defends

21:44

everybody, even if that doesn't not seem as skokey.

21:47

And I got dressed down for that because—and

21:49

what he was saying was, well, we don't

21:51

defend harassment. And I was like, what

21:54

are you—I didn't say anything about harassment. What

21:56

are you talking about? Yeah,

22:02

and while I was there, by the way,

22:04

Michelle Alexander, who wrote The

22:06

New Jim Crow, with the ACLU in California while I

22:08

was there, and we were all in awe of her,

22:10

she's an amazing person. But

22:14

the great free

22:16

speech attorneys who were there were kind of, it

22:18

wasn't where the juice was. We

22:21

weren't the cool kids. The cool kids

22:23

were doing the racial justice and the

22:25

gay rights project. And

22:27

the free speech was a little bit more – felt

22:30

like people were a little bit more mad. And that's when

22:32

I really – it really started to come home to me

22:34

that what I call in the

22:36

book, the slow motion train wreck was underway.

22:38

That essentially the left, which had always been

22:40

great on free speech and always been central

22:43

to the identity of calling yourself a liberal

22:45

meant to say you were pro free speech

22:47

as well, that that was

22:49

changing, and particularly in elite circles, was changing

22:51

first. And that it

22:54

was my job to do everything in my power to

22:56

prevent that from happening. And

22:58

as I confess in canceling the American

23:00

mind, we failed. Yeah,

23:03

yeah, no. But you're doing what you can do. And

23:05

writing the book is certainly a step. Did

23:09

you – I think I

23:11

read somewhere, but I don't remember. Did you

23:13

go directly from Stanford to FHIR, or did

23:15

you practice before that? I think you

23:17

practiced a little while before you went to FHIR. I can't remember.

23:21

I did one year

23:23

doing patent law, but

23:25

it was looking for a First Amendment job because

23:29

there aren't – that's why everyone thought I was nuts to

23:31

hyper-specialize in this thing that it's hard to find a job

23:33

in. And then FHIR

23:36

was there miraculously. It seemed like it

23:38

was sort of a perfect fit. And

23:41

did you seek them out? Did they seek you out? How did

23:43

that work? They sought me out. That

23:45

was Kathleen Sullivan

23:47

with the dean of the law school at the time, and

23:49

she was kind of my mentor, or she is my mentor.

23:53

And her old boss with this guy,

23:55

Harvey Silverglade, who is

23:57

a famous defense attorney and ACLU attorney.

24:00

guy himself. He had

24:02

just founded Fire

24:04

with Alan Charles Kors

24:06

back in the... Maybe we should explain to listeners what

24:08

Fire is in case anyone is listening. Oh, sure, sure.

24:10

Okay, so Fire was founded in 1999, and it was

24:14

the foundation for individual rights in

24:16

education. We're now the foundation for individual

24:19

rights and expression because we want it to

24:21

indicate that we go well beyond campus now,

24:23

and that that was actually an expansion that

24:25

we just took on last year. And Alan

24:28

is a more conservative-leaning libertarian who's

24:30

an expert of the enlightenment of

24:32

Voltaire. He was a University

24:35

of Pennsylvania professor, and

24:37

he was absolutely brilliant dude. If you

24:39

do any of the great courses, his

24:41

lecture on Blaise Pascal is incredibly inspiring.

24:43

He's just a great mind. And his

24:46

friend from Princeton, Harvey Silverglade, they decided

24:48

since they started seeing problems on campus

24:50

going back to the early 80s, and

24:53

they just seemed to be getting worse, they wrote a

24:55

book called The Shadow University, which came out in 1998.

24:57

Harvey jokes that I thought would blow the

25:00

cover of the whole thing and solve the

25:02

whole free speech problem on campus. And

25:05

then instead, they got thousands of requests for help from

25:08

all over the country. And so they

25:10

founded Fire in 1999, and I joined as

25:12

the first legal director in 2001. Okay,

25:15

that yeah, it was a match made in heaven, if

25:18

there were heaven. But anyway, and

25:20

then you became,

25:22

that was 1999, you became director in 2006 or 2007, or

25:24

you became president or

25:28

whatever. I became interim president in 2005,

25:30

because I mean, my dream

25:32

job was being legal director of a First Amendment

25:34

organization. And so when they when they actually asked

25:37

me, I assume this isn't a family show, I

25:39

can swear, right? Yeah, as far as

25:41

I'm concerned, anything goes. I've

25:43

had Ricky Gervais on so that you're not gonna

25:45

you're not gonna okay. Well, when

25:48

they when they first mentioned that

25:50

I might want to be, they asked me

25:52

if I wanted to be president of Fire. My response

25:54

was fuck no. Because I

25:57

love being legal director. Yeah, but I

26:00

I start getting worried that anybody

26:02

who didn't love the organization like

26:04

I did or really understand its

26:06

nonpartisan commitment would screw it up.

26:09

So I decided to become, I became

26:11

interim in 2005, decided that I wanted

26:14

to be my real job, not

26:16

go back to be legal director. So I

26:18

became president in 2006 and I've

26:20

been doing that ever since. Yeah, and

26:22

growing it and yeah. And

26:25

so it's not so bad that you ended up

26:27

doing that instead of being legal director. I'm sure,

26:30

I assume you still, do you

26:33

still get involved in, I can't imagine you

26:35

don't somehow get involved in the legal issues

26:37

as well, even as… I do, you

26:40

know, but I got to tell you, you can probably tell from

26:42

my writing, these days I get

26:44

a lot more excited about psychology. I

26:47

love constitutional law, but now I actually, what I really

26:49

would love to do, when you have

26:53

two specializations, realizing

26:55

that these are, there's this great body

26:57

of constitutional law and there's this great

26:59

body of social psychology

27:02

and that they don't really talk to each other and that

27:04

they have a lot of things that actually undergird each other

27:06

really well. And if I had

27:09

more time, I would love to actually be pointing

27:11

out the various ways in which the

27:14

two fields actually complement each other. Yeah, and I

27:16

should say, I know we have a hard, hard

27:19

cutoff because there's so much I want to talk

27:21

about. I'll continue with some other point if

27:23

we don't get through, but yeah, well, I think the point is,

27:25

and in a variety

27:27

of contexts, that modern

27:31

intellectual world doesn't necessarily

27:33

mesh nicely with 19th century

27:35

disciplines. And so

27:37

one often sees the, you know, it's just

27:40

like the marriage of psychology and economics, you

27:42

know, which changed so much, and Dan

27:44

Kahneman and others pointing

27:46

out that the idea that people make rational

27:49

decisions is itself an illusion. Which

27:52

people are you talking about again? Yeah, exactly. I

27:55

have that, actually I have that same problem

27:57

when with, and

27:59

I just. did a podcast and I've thought a

28:01

lot about AI and the notion that somehow people say,

28:03

we got to have AI safety because we want to

28:05

teach them universal human values. And I keep saying, do

28:07

you want to show me those universal human values and

28:10

how it's going to be educated to find them? Because

28:12

I can't see them anyway. Um,

28:15

speaking of universal things though, before we get started,

28:17

you mentioned, that you mentioned one more, but I

28:19

want to just talk about

28:21

free speech at the very beginning, because

28:24

one of the biggest. Yes. I

28:27

admit I was influenced and I was influenced

28:29

by Hitchens here, not by the original author

28:31

who talked about this, but the notion, the

28:34

misconception people have that freedom of speech is,

28:36

it gives the freedom of the speaker. But

28:39

that's really not the important part about freedom of

28:41

speech, freedom of speech. And I think it might've

28:43

been Hume who first said it, but I learned

28:45

it from Hitchens was, uh, it gives

28:47

you the freedom to learn that you're wrong. And

28:50

you know, you give a quote later on in the book

28:52

that basically says the same thing maybe we'll find and we

28:54

get there, but that basically, you know, uh,

28:58

if you don't, if you don't allow free

29:00

speech, then you never have the opportunity to learn

29:02

that maybe what you're thinking is wrong. You

29:05

want to elaborate on that at all or no? Well,

29:07

I mean, it's

29:11

Jonathan Roush writes about this as well. And I

29:13

didn't actually realize I was a Charles Sanders purse

29:15

fan. Um, you know, yeah,

29:18

I have Jonathan on the program. He

29:20

said, we're both big admirers of his

29:23

spending. Yeah. And well, and fallivism, you

29:25

know, basically the, um, uh, the connection

29:27

between freedom of speech and liberal ideas

29:29

and understanding our own shortcomings as beings.

29:31

Yeah. And, and that's what

29:33

I, I don't think this is Harari's own

29:36

term. I could have sworn he, um, he,

29:38

he attributes to someone else, but he thinks

29:40

that we probably would have been better off

29:42

if the enlightenment was, was, uh, was described

29:44

instead of the, um, discovery of ignorance, because

29:47

in a sense that really what it is is that

29:49

it's, it's this. Holy wow. We

29:51

are wrong about this stuff. Like my, my,

29:53

my, my, my, my, my folklore, my intuitions,

29:55

all this stuff, they're all wrong. If you

29:57

actually test them is a.

29:59

moment of my one $5

30:02

word, epistemic humility, like the moment

30:04

when we're like, wow, and that

30:06

changed everything. The moment

30:08

of actually realizing the grand scheme of things we don't

30:10

know all that much was one of the most important

30:12

realizations in human history, and that we actually have to

30:14

have mechanisms in place to know the world a little

30:16

bit better. And

30:19

I apply this thinking

30:22

to everything, essentially, so

30:24

my defense of freedom of speech, my idiosyncratic

30:26

defense of freedom of speech, I

30:29

call the lab and the looking glass theory or just

30:31

the pure informational theory of free speech, which

30:34

is just simply and it's very much of a

30:36

humanist perspective, which is if the

30:39

project human knowledge is to know the world as it

30:41

really is, and you

30:43

have to understand and you do, but it

30:45

was profound actually understand this, simply

30:48

knowing the world as it is, is a never ending, arduous,

30:51

frustrating, difficult process.

30:54

And at a level that we that I

30:56

think previous societies didn't fully, you know, fully

30:59

accept. And part of knowing

31:01

the world as it is, is knowing what

31:03

people really think and why, and you don't

31:05

have any hope at all of knowing what

31:07

the world really looks like without some sense

31:09

of what people really think and why. And

31:12

this points out to me why censorship is

31:14

such a foolish endeavor, because it's depriving you

31:16

of the knowledge of, oh, yes,

31:18

you know, lizard people don't who

31:20

live under the Denver report don't control the

31:23

world. That's a fact.

31:26

But if there's all of the

31:28

fact that people believe that, that's a very important

31:30

thing to know about your society. Absolutely.

31:32

It's important that the world is, it

31:36

is a, it's the

31:38

world that you know, is just part of the whole world.

31:40

And, and, and it's that

31:42

part of free speech by restricting free

31:44

speech, you don't get any idea what

31:46

other people are thinking, without having any idea

31:48

of what the people are thinking, you really don't know the

31:50

world in which you're living, I guess. And, and

31:54

I will say, by the way, that, you know,

31:56

that I did my last book, I say the

31:58

first lot sentences, the, most important three

32:00

words and signs, but it's really everything. I

32:02

don't know. Yeah, exactly. And

32:05

I think when

32:07

I think about the, you're saying the enlightenment of

32:10

discovery and ignorance, it's really important because that's

32:12

what we've forgotten. It seems to me at the heart,

32:14

I made notes and I kept jumping. I don't doubt.

32:17

I don't know. I don't know. If

32:19

we just seem to me, when we, when

32:21

we'll get to talk about your solutions, that, that

32:24

one of the things I didn't see explicitly there so much

32:26

about what to teach kids is to recognize,

32:28

is to be, is for teachers and parents to say,

32:30

I don't know a hell of a lot

32:33

more and to realize that, you

32:35

know, it's that

32:37

sense of religious certainty, the secular

32:40

religious certainty that it's so pervasive

32:43

now that in, that

32:46

gets people to close their ears and, and, and

32:48

you talk about the perfect, we'll talk about the

32:50

various rhetorical fortresses that you've talked about being built

32:52

up, but it's that fortress is built on the

32:55

fact that you're certain, you know what the answer

32:57

is, just like religious fundamentalists, but I'm

32:59

going to be wary of trying to talk

33:02

too much here and not you. So anything else

33:04

about free speech? So free speech is this discovery

33:06

of ignorance in some sense, is that? Yeah,

33:08

absolutely. And, and that's, and that's

33:10

just my idiosyncratic theory is the pure informational

33:12

theory that you're not safer. You're not, you're

33:15

not safer from the world for knowing less

33:17

about it is one of those arguments that

33:19

I make a lot. But then there's also

33:21

the most basic, you know, ideas like the,

33:23

you know, the marketplace of ideas, which, which

33:25

I am actually critical of as being, you

33:28

know, about this much of the story of why

33:30

we talk and the value of freedom of speech. But

33:33

the place where the people are most suspicious

33:36

of the marketplace of ideas metaphor tends to

33:38

be higher education, the one place

33:40

where it's the most apt, whether the one

33:42

place where it's actually supposed to make the

33:44

most sense, but it's supposed to be, you

33:46

know, a battle about ideas, you know, discard,

33:49

you know, striving towards truth by chipping away

33:51

at falsity and now higher ed, depending on

33:53

like what department you're talking about and what

33:55

school and what professor you talk to tends

33:57

to be much more skeptical of this fundamental

34:00

than at any time in my career. Yeah,

34:02

I was surprised to read later on that

34:04

people were even redefining that idea. Yeah.

34:07

But I think that's why perhaps both you and I

34:10

are particularly attuned to the academic

34:12

disappointment because it's not

34:14

that it's worse there, it may be worse there than anywhere

34:16

else, but it's the place where you

34:18

expect it should happen the least. Oh yeah.

34:20

It's antithetical to the whole notion of scholarship.

34:22

And so when it happens, it's so much

34:25

more disappointing there than you might imagine somewhere

34:27

else where you might expect people that have

34:29

to buy into something in

34:31

order to make money or whatever it is they're doing. Yeah,

34:34

I mean, I think that awe and doubt

34:36

are, unlike a lot of

34:38

other people, are formulas for good lives, but

34:40

it's not central necessarily to the identity of a

34:43

business. I think it's hard for

34:45

a business to be, to realize in the

34:47

grand scheme of things it doesn't know everything, but

34:49

it's absolutely devastating. And actually renders

34:52

some entire disciplines, or

34:57

at least parts of them, kind

34:59

of dysfunctional. If

35:02

essentially, we think of that, and I'm gonna

35:04

be somewhat critical of the studies departments at

35:06

the moment. There's so

35:08

much dogma in those studies. It's

35:10

kind of like, listen, here's the thing that you

35:12

do with things that can't be questioned. You

35:15

put them in books and have people read those

35:17

books, but there's no point to teaching forces about

35:19

them. There's no point to actually having dialogue about

35:21

them if it's a dogma. Read

35:23

the book, see what you think. But

35:25

that's not, unfortunately, for

35:27

some of the more politicized and

35:30

originally politicized ones, it is supposed

35:32

to function more like dogma. Yeah,

35:35

yeah, yeah. Well, okay, good.

35:39

But you just brought up something else. Before I wanna

35:41

actually begin with some examples

35:43

as you do in the book, because one of the

35:45

illusions that some people have is that this idea of

35:47

canceling of the American mind, that cancer culture doesn't exist,

35:49

which is one of these

35:51

amazing fallacies that we overcome. But

35:54

you just mentioned something else, and I don't

35:56

remember reading it anywhere in the book, and I wanna ask you about

35:58

it. Because you said

36:00

your first experience was of

36:03

this, when

36:07

you got in trouble talking about the really

36:09

happy day, so you defended the right of

36:11

Skokie people to the Nazi

36:13

party to march. And

36:15

someone said, we don't defend harassment. And

36:18

one of the things that I'm

36:20

particularly aware of, maybe

36:23

because of writing and other things, but I

36:25

don't see here, is this illusion of harassment.

36:28

This legal notion of harassment

36:30

that somehow saying something

36:33

I don't like is harassment. And

36:36

there's no sense in which the

36:39

original meaning of harassment has been preserved.

36:41

And so what that guy said that

36:43

time is that somehow Nazis

36:46

marching and saying whatever they want to say

36:48

is somehow harassing people who have the choice

36:50

to not listen. Which

36:53

is therefore, to not go watch the march. I

36:58

mentioned that Ricky Gervais was on this program, but one of the

37:00

jokes that he gave there which is one of my favorite jokes,

37:02

he said it's like saying

37:04

that you're being harassed by that is like going

37:06

to the public square and seeing a sign, someone

37:08

saying guitar lessons, and you phone up the person

37:10

and say, I don't need any damn guitar lessons.

37:15

And in any case, talk

37:18

to me a little about harassment and abuse of that. Yeah,

37:21

so this is something that is

37:25

incredibly clear from my daily work and over

37:27

the past couple of decades, but most people

37:29

won't know, is that

37:31

harassment was, because sometimes if people

37:34

know a lot about this topic,

37:36

most people know nothing about it,

37:39

they might be familiar with the speech code movement of the

37:41

80s and 90s. And

37:44

they remember that there were these speech codes that were

37:47

passed and they were terrible and everyone laughed at them

37:49

and they were defeated in court. But

37:52

what they often don't know is that every

37:54

single one of those were harassment codes. They

37:57

just redefined harassment as speech that offends me

37:59

or offends me. And it's

38:02

like, okay, you're magically changing the

38:04

term. We

38:06

wrote an early paper maybe back in

38:08

like 2002 just saying that doesn't magically

38:10

inoculate you from constitutional

38:12

scrutiny, dumping it harassment. But

38:14

from a psychological standpoint, particularly for those of

38:16

us on the left, it really did because

38:19

immediately – because I started

38:21

Stanford two years, just two

38:23

years after the Stanford Speech Code had been

38:26

defeated in court. And the

38:28

Stanford Speech Code was harassment extended

38:31

to the idea of anything

38:33

that might victimize or stigmatize

38:36

somebody subjectively. Then

38:38

essentially if you feel victimized or stigmatized by

38:40

that, you've been harassed. But

38:42

meanwhile, when this would come up, when people would

38:45

talk about the harassment codes, I was a good

38:47

liberal and being like, no, no, I don't think

38:49

people should be harassed. I don't think people should

38:51

be racially harassed or women should be sexually harassed.

38:54

But it was this kind of control of language idea

38:57

that essentially if you dub this – if

38:59

this isn't a speech code but a harassment

39:02

code that just happens to actually implicate

39:04

speech, it's much easier from a political and

39:07

psychological standpoint to get away with it. Courts

39:09

never fell for this, by the way. And

39:12

Avron Cohen seemed to want to in

39:14

1989, Dovie, Michigan case, but still. But

39:19

this was an idea that was

39:21

developed in the 1970s of using

39:23

harassment codes as ways to become

39:25

speech codes. One of the first

39:28

big articles on this was Richard Delgado

39:30

and others. I

39:32

think the original article was 1980, Words That Wound,

39:35

of proposing a new way to go

39:37

after speech that

39:39

might be racially offensive or sexually offensive

39:42

by reimagining

39:44

it as harassment. And

39:46

this is amazing when you land this

39:48

stuff up in time. The

39:51

Free Speech Movement, 1964 in Berkeley. By

39:56

1974, the Free Speech

39:58

Movement had been wildly successful. already

40:01

with the final two parts

40:03

of the sort of Supreme Court equation

40:05

of four dominant cases, that being Sui

40:08

Thee V. New Hampshire, which establishes academic

40:10

freedom, Tichian, which says

40:12

no loyalty oath for professors,

40:16

the Healy V. James, which said you can't

40:18

refuse to recognize a student group, even if,

40:20

by the way, even if it promise, won't

40:22

promise to not engage in violence, but because

40:25

of the bad behavior of previous groups, and

40:27

Papeish, which is a case that

40:29

involved a cartoon with

40:32

police officers raping the Statue of Liberty. And

40:34

in that case, they actually said, like, listen,

40:36

we can't ban something just because it's offensive

40:38

on a college campus. So after

40:41

those four, you know, cases were established, the

40:44

productions of free speech and academic freedom were very strong in

40:46

the United States. By 1984 and 1985, campuses

40:49

across the country

40:51

were passing speech codes, which

40:53

is a remarkable success for the sort of

40:56

Richard Delgado wing of higher

40:58

ed. And they were all

41:00

conceptualized as harassment codes, sometimes a little

41:02

bit of the fighting words doctrine thrown in.

41:05

Like I said, courts did not fall for

41:08

this. It was they were defeated in decision

41:10

after decision, sort of like the fever for

41:12

enlightened censorship kind of started to dissipate

41:15

as you got closer to the mid

41:17

90s. And everybody thought, oh,

41:19

thank goodness, that's, that's all done for.

41:22

But unfortunately, it just the

41:25

students and the faculty became less enamored

41:27

with enlightened censorship. But the administrators kept

41:29

on chugging. Yeah, that's right. And you

41:31

know, you've done you anticipate, of course,

41:33

you know, we in the book,

41:35

you go through the history of this different periods of 64, 74, 84,

41:37

2000, you know, seven and set

41:42

to 2007 to 2022. And

41:44

I want because it's interesting

41:46

to see that evolution. And

41:49

where we get to today, and I think

41:51

it's important that your book and we discuss

41:53

the sad situation day just to point out

41:55

that this is an illusion. But what

41:57

but I can't resist based on what you said

41:59

asking one more question because this seems to me

42:02

to be at the heart that somehow the notion

42:04

that saying even saying something offensive once

42:06

to someone is harassment that's also

42:09

a different my understanding is that

42:11

harassment in the real legal sense

42:13

is a pervasive continual so just

42:15

saying something offensive once even even

42:17

even that even if you

42:19

want to define harassment as offense it's

42:22

not harassing because it's just a one-time

42:24

thing and and yet and yet somehow

42:27

I think if you went around and asked most people yep

42:29

whether it's harassing to say to someone you know

42:31

you're short or something like that I mean most

42:36

people say yes yeah no and that's

42:38

and that's been you know a

42:40

shift I think you know 20 30 years ago

42:42

people would be like no harassment they wouldn't necessarily

42:44

have the the right vocabulary for it but they'd

42:47

be like no it's a pattern of behavior you

42:49

know it it's a it's bugging

42:51

someone a lot is

42:54

more or less what harassment means but there's

42:56

been a you know a shift on that term that's

42:58

been very intentional we call it the anti-free speech movement

43:02

you know and it starts with people like

43:04

Herbert Marcuse you know on campus

43:06

but then is really picked up by interestingly

43:09

you know a lot of the founders of

43:11

critical race theory yeah of course what's

43:14

funny about this of course is that fire you know

43:16

went to court to defend the right to teach critical

43:18

race theory and we you

43:20

know defeated the thought woke act you know

43:22

it in court because it was unconstitutional and

43:25

then that's that's what we do yeah but

43:27

I do want anytime someone mentions critical race

43:29

theory who's supportive of it to also add

43:31

the caveat and by the way which is

43:33

the very first thing that the founders of

43:36

critical race theory did when they got together

43:38

was proposed speech codes which were

43:40

then passed at schools across the country because

43:42

it is it's not a free speech friendly

43:44

philosophy it's not a liberalism friendly philosophy by

43:47

its own explanation yeah to

43:49

the extent that is anything yeah it

43:51

is neither liberal nor free speech nor

43:55

sensible nor historically appropriate nor

43:58

scientific nor anything but But

44:00

a great way to win arguments without winning arguments.

44:03

Yeah, exactly. And I want to, yeah, we're dancing

44:05

around. I want to get to, because you give

44:08

specifics for a lot of this and I want to try

44:10

and get to it. But let

44:12

me just at least, less

44:14

people not think we're

44:16

in a current situation. 84%

44:22

of Americans believe it's a problem that some

44:24

Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations

44:26

due to fear or retaliation. 2020

44:29

poll found 62% of American adults of

44:33

all political persuasions did not feel

44:35

comfortable expressing their origins in public.

44:39

32% worried they'd miss out on job opportunities to

44:41

get fired if their political views became known. From

44:44

2014 to 2023, fire knows of more than 1,000 attempts to

44:50

get professors fired, punished, or otherwise silenced.

44:53

About two thirds of these attempts are

44:55

successful, resulting in consequences from investigation to

44:57

termination and even

44:59

unsuccessful attempts matter because

45:01

they're more than sufficient at chilling speech. 16%

45:07

of professors said that they've either been disciplined or

45:09

threatened with discipline for their speech. 29%

45:12

said they've been pressured by administrators to avoid

45:14

controversial research. And it's

45:16

especially alarming that this is concentrated in the

45:18

most influential universities of the country. These are-

45:21

Wildly disproportionately, by the way. These are just some statistics early

45:23

on in the book to give a sense of

45:26

the problem. Now, let's,

45:30

before we get to the history, and

45:32

I will say before I forgot, I

45:36

was telling you that I was also, the

45:39

second time we met, you won't remember because you wouldn't remember

45:41

so much because you were on stage, but I came up

45:43

to see afterwards, and you and Jonathan, was when you and

45:45

Jonathan were on stage in New York City at the Y

45:48

talking about coddling of the American mind. And

45:51

I was shocked. And I don't

45:53

know if Jonathan still admits

45:57

to this, but he said in that lecture that he- He's

46:00

changed the way he taught at

46:02

least one whole part of his syllabus for

46:04

fear of getting fired. Oh yeah. No,

46:07

I would have thought he'd say, I'm going to stand up for...

46:10

But he's actually changed his... So even people

46:12

who speak out against it are

46:14

terrified. Absolutely. And

46:17

I appreciate him doing that. He's

46:19

actually saying, listen, I know what the

46:21

rational response is here. And

46:26

the environment has become... The

46:29

extent to which professors admit to being

46:31

afraid of their own students is scary.

46:34

Now here's the dirty little secret though. They're not afraid

46:36

of their own students. They are

46:38

afraid of their students in collaboration

46:40

with some administrators. Because sometimes

46:43

people misunderstand one of the points of my

46:45

previous book, Coddling the American Mind, which

46:48

is that in my first book on Learning

46:50

Liberty, I talk about how the primary threat

46:52

to freedom of speech on campus are the

46:55

bureaucrats, are the giant speech

46:57

policing... They still are. Yeah,

46:59

an absolute bureaucracy. But

47:02

then in Coddling, and in my short book, Freedom

47:04

from Speech, we talked about a new sort

47:06

of cohort of students showing up who were

47:08

much less... Were

47:10

much more hostile to freedom of speech. I was lucky

47:13

enough for the first part of

47:15

my career to be dealing mostly with the kids of boomers

47:17

who were actually really good on free speech. And

47:19

then that changed dramatically in 2013, 2014. But

47:23

sometimes people think, oh, the problem used to be administrators.

47:25

And now the problem is students. I'm like, no, no,

47:27

no, no, no, no. That's not what we're saying at

47:29

all. The problem... The reason why it got so bad

47:32

is that the administrators were pretty... At least

47:34

some of them were pretty eager to clamp down

47:36

on free speech they didn't like. And suddenly they

47:38

got a much more willing cohort of students. And

47:40

together, man. Yeah. And then...

47:43

You see the result. And then,

47:45

I mean, as one who was in universities

47:47

for 40 years, something

47:49

I'm not sure, again, that one can appreciate so much

47:51

from here because you're seeing from the outside, is

47:54

that it's not just administrators. What happened

47:56

is it's this cancer. It's this self-fulfilling

47:58

thing because... and

50:01

rationality to the definition that

50:04

began in 2014 and accelerated 2017 and after

50:06

and the

50:08

culture of fear that results from it. It's

50:10

kind of a lawyerly definition, but

50:13

that's our definition of cancel culture because we're trying

50:15

to get people to think about it the same

50:17

way as people think about other mass censorship incidents

50:19

in American history, whether that's the 1798 Sedition Act

50:22

or the Victorian

50:24

era, much longer obviously, or

50:27

the first Red Scare, which was surprisingly

50:29

short, a lot of people don't know that.

50:31

Well, that's surprisingly short and you think of it, it's

50:33

amazing. As

50:35

you point out, in terms of its impact, it's in

50:37

fact that far fewer people, it's by the

50:39

fact that it's huge and movies have been made about it, far

50:41

fewer people than the current whatever

50:43

scare you want to call it. The second

50:45

Red Scare, that's McCarthyism and that's about 11

50:47

years. But

50:50

still, when we go through

50:52

those numbers, we're talking about, to

50:54

our knowledge, and we're very, very clear that

50:56

there are secret hearings, which we

50:59

hear about all the time at fire. There's been books

51:01

written about this. I've seen them. Oh,

51:03

I know. Every professor has this

51:06

massive sort of like title and

51:08

apparatus, which by the way, police's

51:10

speech. It doesn't just police inappropriate

51:12

interactions with sexual

51:15

interactions with co-workers

51:17

and staff and the co-eds.

51:20

It police's speech. And at

51:23

fire, we're on the receiving end of calls about what do

51:25

I do in the circumstance? They won't let me have a

51:27

lawyer. They won't let me know what I'm charged with. And

51:31

we do our best to help. So the fact that we

51:33

know of 200 firings with

51:35

40 plus

51:38

of those being tenured professors since

51:40

2014, to put it in perspective,

51:43

that's twice as many professors who were fired

51:45

under McCarthyism, at least by the best

51:47

study conducted at the time. Yeah, absolutely.

51:50

Yeah, you make a point that in a variety

51:53

of different estimators,

51:55

it's two, three, four times as

51:57

significant in terms of impacting. directly

52:00

on people's lives than McCarthyism.

52:02

And nothing even vaguely close

52:05

to it since the law was established by the

52:07

way. And that's one thing I always have to

52:09

point out. It's like people will be like, oh

52:11

the higher education industry was smaller in the 1950s.

52:13

Absolutely true, no doubt. However, it wasn't clear that

52:15

you couldn't fire somebody for being a communist

52:19

back in the 50s. And by the

52:21

way, a lot of university presidents said,

52:23

these guys are crazy ideologues. They're completely

52:25

doctrinaire. Of course we're gonna fire them.

52:27

What was basically the defense on a

52:29

lot of these things. And

52:31

it was only 57 that it became clear that you couldn't

52:33

do that. Yeah,

52:36

that's remarkable. And

52:42

I would say you just forgot what I

52:44

was gonna ask you there about that. Because it really

52:46

is... Oh yeah, you

52:48

point out it's more insidious in a way because

52:52

McCarthyism was externally

52:55

imposed. Whereas

52:57

the current cancer culture is

52:59

internally imposed. So it was

53:01

imposed upon academia by whoever

53:03

you want, whether it's McCarthy and a bunch of

53:06

rabid Congress people. But this one

53:09

is not coming from the outside. I mean in certain

53:11

parts of cancer culture is,

53:13

the right legislative part is as you

53:15

talk about. But the left

53:17

part is internal. It's coming from

53:19

within and therefore more recent. So

53:23

we break it down on the political

53:25

leanings of where the

53:27

different attacks come from. And of

53:31

the punishments handed out for speech

53:34

among these professors, about one third of

53:36

those initially start on the right. And

53:38

that's important. We take a

53:41

lot of flaps from the right on this. I'm like, no,

53:43

I'm sorry. We're gonna follow what the facts say. And

53:48

what do we mean by on the right? That almost always is

53:50

off campus because there just aren't that many people on the right

53:52

on most campuses. Sometimes it

53:54

starts as Fox News, Turning Point

53:56

USA for example, you know, Todd

53:58

Starnes at Fox. sometimes like the Carlin

54:00

Newman Society or something like that. But

54:04

I also do allow

54:07

that the person actually doing the firing still

54:09

is usually someone on the left when

54:11

it comes to the people on

54:13

the right because the left are utterly

54:16

dominant among administrators and professors in

54:19

higher ed today. But we

54:21

are very clear there is a threat from the right and it

54:23

tends to come from off campus. But

54:25

when it comes to threat from the left, and

54:27

this was very interesting, we did an interview with

54:30

Nicole Hannah Jones about her case at UNC Chapel

54:33

Hill and which fired defendant proudly

54:35

when they were saying that she couldn't get tenure

54:37

because a donor didn't like her

54:39

politics, we were like we will absolutely fight this

54:41

case. In these cases, you and I know, why

54:43

don't you just mention that case? I

54:46

don't want to go into too much about this. We

54:49

could spend eight hours giving every case an

54:51

example. But why don't you mention her example

54:53

just so people get an idea? This is

54:55

the case that on severity,

54:57

I probably place it like maybe a

54:59

six because it was this kind of

55:01

unusual circumstance where UNC Chapel Hill had

55:03

this like honorary

55:06

professorship thing that basically was

55:08

like an award, but then you become a

55:10

tenured professor at UNC Chapel Hill School of

55:12

Journalism, which is kind of unheard

55:14

of to be honest. And

55:16

she won it, but they didn't want to give

55:18

her the tenured professor part because the donor was

55:20

like nope, no, we can give the award, we

55:22

are not giving the tenured professorship. And

55:25

from a first amendment perspective, we are like

55:27

no, actually sorry, you can't treat someone

55:29

differently on the basis of viewpoint. So

55:32

we defended her in that case and

55:34

we did an interview with her afterwards.

55:36

I think people

55:38

should watch the interview because it's kind

55:40

of funny in one way in that

55:42

she is very aware of the attacks from

55:44

legislatures. And by the way, there has been

55:46

one law in

55:49

the entire country that went after curricular

55:51

decisions in higher ed. The only one

55:53

that was clearly unconstitutional was the Stop

55:55

Woke Act, which fires so far as

55:57

defeated, it's on appeal, all defeated again.

55:59

But I emphasize this because you might

56:01

be surprised here. There's only been one

56:04

that had higher education. But

56:07

when it came to the students demanding that

56:09

professors be fired, well, that was okay. You

56:11

know, like that was kind of no big

56:13

deal. And it's like, yes, because you agree

56:16

with them. And

56:19

by the way, I feel

56:21

like a lot of times people

56:25

hide behind the students when really, like I

56:27

said, it's not actually just the students. It's

56:29

administrators being like, hey, you

56:32

know, this happened at Sarah

56:34

Lawrence College. Sam Abrams

56:37

– I'm going to give this one example because I

56:39

think it's very revealing. Sam

56:41

Abrams, who is a statistician, he's

56:43

a professor at

56:46

Sarah Lawrence College, he wrote an

56:48

article in the New York Times making

56:51

a very grounded basic argument

56:55

from his additional research showed that

56:57

administrators were even further to the

57:00

left than professors, and more monolithically

57:02

so, something like 12 times

57:04

as many administrators from the left than

57:06

from the right. And

57:10

should that – it was in the New York Times.

57:12

Should this have been controversial? No. Everyone knew this. It

57:14

was just a question of severity. Suddenly,

57:18

students, for some reason, start

57:20

protesting Sam Abrams,

57:22

even though students aren't really mentioned in

57:25

the article. Just coincidentally, and

57:27

they vandalize his door. They do

57:29

all sorts of things that

57:31

he's going to be writing more about that are pretty terrible.

57:34

They take over the president's office, which, by the

57:36

way, I think was another case where it was

57:38

catered. So it was really

57:40

an unfriendly takeover of

57:43

the president's office. And they demand

57:45

that he be fired. And as far as

57:47

something be a tell, that it's like, no, administrators

57:49

clearly put them up to this. It's because it

57:52

wasn't even about students. It was about administrators feeling

57:54

like, oh, this is an attack on us. We've

57:56

got to get rid of this squeaky wheel. Fire

57:58

got involved. We helped with the case. he's

58:01

still at Sarah Lawrence, but talk

58:03

about it. Just something that's like, okay, yeah,

58:05

I see what's going on here. Administrators are

58:08

defending their turf in this case and putting students

58:10

up to doing their dirty work. Yeah,

58:12

well, or yeah, well, in fact, boy,

58:15

every time you say something, it prompts like six

58:17

things in my mind. Well, it'll be interesting to

58:19

see how much we get through. I

58:22

will say that when you, it is interesting to

58:24

point out, you say, yes, there are things in

58:26

the right, roughly 30% come from the right. And

58:29

I don't know if you

58:31

were attuned to this much before me. I

58:34

come from the left, political left. I'm

58:36

now called a right-wing pundit all the time

58:39

because I defend things like free speech. But,

58:41

but- Aren't we all? But yeah,

58:43

but it's amazing. But I remember I used to write during

58:45

the, when Bush was president, I mean, I

58:48

wrote as a scientist about science

58:50

policy and the efforts to shackle

58:52

scientists. And at the time,

58:54

it seemed to me that the real villains were

58:57

from the right. And it's been an epiphany

59:00

to see over the years that

59:05

in fact, that that's a small fraction of what's going

59:07

on, that the left is unfortunately, and

59:11

at fault. And one of the things you

59:13

talk about, we either talk about the perfect

59:15

rhetorical fortress or even the efficient one, is

59:17

that people like you and I are

59:19

now claimed to be conservatives because we happen to

59:21

criticize certain things that the left are

59:23

doing. And therefore, we're conservatives, and therefore, it

59:25

doesn't matter what we say. It's

59:27

not worth listening to. Yeah, and that's something we

59:29

talk about. So in

59:32

terms of things we're trying to do in the book,

59:34

one is prove cancel culture is

59:36

real, which seems asinine to have to do, but there are

59:38

still people out there claiming it doesn't exist who basically, as

59:40

far as I'm concerned, no one should ever listen to again.

59:44

You know, show with data that it's real. Yeah.

59:47

But then part two is to get people

59:49

to reimagine kind of what the function of

59:51

cancel culture is and how it works in

59:53

like, in knowledge producing industries. And

59:56

cancel culture is just the meanest, nastiest

59:58

way to win arguments. about winning arguments,

1:00:01

that essentially I could try to

1:00:03

persuade you, I could disapprove your argument, or

1:00:06

I could make you too scared to make it or

1:00:08

get you fired from your job so you don't have

1:00:10

a perch anymore to make it. And that's cancel culture.

1:00:13

But we try to get people

1:00:15

to think about it as part

1:00:17

of a giant panoply of options

1:00:19

to defeat your opponent without

1:00:22

addressing their argument. And so in

1:00:24

the book, we talk about what we call the

1:00:27

obstacle course, which is basically standard logical

1:00:29

fallacies that everybody uses. We

1:00:31

then talk about the minefield, which is the

1:00:33

ad hominem approaches that everybody right

1:00:35

and left use and make the point that if you,

1:00:39

we all argue like we're on social media 24 hours a day

1:00:42

using these techniques that

1:00:44

we know are never going to get

1:00:46

you towards truth, that they're considered illegitimate

1:00:48

in actual debate, but nonetheless are very

1:00:51

useful to score a cheap

1:00:53

win. But then we talk about

1:00:55

the efficient rhetorical fortress on the right, which

1:00:58

is four steps that you don't have to listen to someone that

1:01:00

you can dub, a liberal or

1:01:02

a woke journalist experts, or

1:01:04

if you're very hard right, anyone

1:01:07

who disagrees with Trump, but on

1:01:09

the left, it's the perfect rhetorical

1:01:11

fortress, which partially because it grew

1:01:13

up on academia, it's layer after layer after

1:01:16

layer after layer of ways to rationalize not

1:01:18

having to listen to you. And

1:01:20

step one. Good, well, actually, it's

1:01:22

amazing to me, it's going through each time I do

1:01:24

it, my next note is perfect

1:01:27

rhetorical fortress, but

1:01:29

I want to go there in some details.

1:01:31

So I want you to rush through this

1:01:33

because that and the official

1:01:36

rhetorical fortress, I think are really worthwhile just elusive.

1:01:40

And I'm glad you have it at the tip of your tongue, I have

1:01:42

the notes on which pages in your book to go to to read it.

1:01:44

But when you say, but

1:01:46

I want to come back to administrator issue you mentioned

1:01:48

earlier, I don't want to lose track of

1:01:51

that. Because it's not just

1:01:53

administrators agreeing with students.

1:01:56

And that's interesting that you point out to me, what

1:01:58

worries me more? And

1:02:00

we're jumping to things I thought

1:02:02

we'd get to at the end, but since we may not get there, might

1:02:04

as well do it now. What

1:02:07

worries me more, and I've seen this happen

1:02:09

at universities and some of your examples in

1:02:11

other industries the same, is not

1:02:13

that people, the administrators necessarily agree with any

1:02:15

of it. They just look and say, what

1:02:17

side is my bread buttered on? And

1:02:20

I'm going to virtue signal if necessary,

1:02:22

or just simply capitulate because it's easier.

1:02:26

If you're an academic, I mean, I view when you,

1:02:29

you pointed out the two first parts of your book is one,

1:02:32

showing a cancel culture exists, then talking about what

1:02:34

it is and how we got there and the

1:02:36

last part, which is really worth pointing out is

1:02:38

how, what can we do about it and I

1:02:40

want to try and get there. But

1:02:43

one of the, in my mind,

1:02:45

the real, one of the deep

1:02:47

problems which will make this so

1:02:49

difficult is that at the heart

1:02:51

of this are leaders,

1:02:53

be the academic leaders, business leaders or

1:02:56

government leaders who simply do not have

1:02:58

a spine, or else make

1:03:00

a calculated decision that this

1:03:03

person's free speech rights or academic

1:03:05

freedom aren't important. If I look about, well,

1:03:07

letting, throwing that someone on the bus is

1:03:09

not as important as the

1:03:12

good press I'll get for doing it, or

1:03:14

whatever it is, whatever calculated decision

1:03:17

making. And so I think that

1:03:20

no matter what one does at the low, from

1:03:22

the ground up, that academic

1:03:26

leaders and business leaders are

1:03:28

really the central part of this problem.

1:03:31

It's not necessarily that they even agree. I'm

1:03:34

not sure they know what they agree with anymore because

1:03:36

they, in order to raise

1:03:38

a million dollars a day or $10 million a day

1:03:40

or whatever a president has to do now, you have

1:03:42

to be a salesman, which means you stop knowing what

1:03:45

you believe in and

1:03:47

you decide what is going to, you know,

1:03:49

what's going to work and if

1:03:51

throwing, if agreeing with someone one

1:03:54

day is fine in private, but you'll throw them

1:03:56

under the bus the next day if

1:03:58

it looks good for your campus. So I

1:04:00

want to comment on that because I think

1:04:02

it's a deep, deep problem because I've sent

1:04:04

known so many university presidents, almost none of

1:04:06

whom have a spine, the same with scientific

1:04:08

leaders from the National Institutes of Health to

1:04:10

the head of the Department of Energy. I

1:04:12

mean, I've been involved with all this and I

1:04:14

just watched them either having drunk the Kool-Aid and

1:04:17

saying what Francis Collins says, the

1:04:20

National Institutes of Health has been systemically

1:04:22

racist for years and yet I'm the

1:04:24

director of it and I'm not going to resign. Yeah.

1:04:28

So do you really believe this? Yeah, do you really

1:04:30

believe it or are you just saying it? To seeing

1:04:32

university presidents and you give so many examples and I

1:04:35

know people individually who the

1:04:37

minute the mob turns on the university president says, okay, you're

1:04:40

out of here because I don't want to deal with the

1:04:42

mob. So before we get

1:04:44

to the perfect tutorial fortress, I want you to comment on that

1:04:46

a little bit. Yeah, I mean, there's

1:04:48

just example after example of it because

1:04:50

sometimes you do have the university president

1:04:52

who just believes it all. But

1:04:56

more often they have a somewhat more nuanced view

1:04:58

of it that they will

1:05:01

not defend in public when it's easier just

1:05:03

to get rid of somebody. Yeah, continue. And

1:05:06

that was something that you saw. I mean, getting

1:05:09

out of academia, James Bennett has a very

1:05:11

long piece in the account, maybe a

1:05:13

little bit too long, but an amazing

1:05:15

piece about his time at the New York Times and

1:05:17

about Salsberger being very

1:05:20

much on his side until he

1:05:22

wasn't. Until the Bennett story,

1:05:24

which you go into in detail here is a really

1:05:26

interesting one. Sir, go on. It's a powerful

1:05:28

one. And there was an email

1:05:31

that Rauch shared

1:05:34

from Yale about Dean

1:05:36

Salovey during the Erica

1:05:38

Nicholas Christakis fiasco back

1:05:40

in 2015 that

1:05:43

is now public that he's saying, like, listen, these

1:05:46

fragile, they seem completely,

1:05:48

you know, like, I think

1:05:51

he uses the word crazy, but kind of like he doesn't

1:05:53

know how to cope with them. He's afraid

1:05:55

that they're too easily damaged. But

1:05:57

it was it's very much like showing sympathy. The

1:08:00

group of didn't realize that. Small. Nice

1:08:02

a group just lem gone for a while

1:08:04

now, gone anywhere and and it will pass

1:08:06

yet that essentially like those groups to that

1:08:08

bates one of the best ways to sort

1:08:11

of frustrate a castle mobs decides. Oh,

1:08:13

so you're saying that there's a serious problems

1:08:15

employ. Okay, war policy is to actually have

1:08:18

a three week cooling cooling off period Before

1:08:20

we investigate this animal, launch a discussion three

1:08:22

weeks. And it'll die off because the

1:08:25

move on health. He. But here's but here's

1:08:27

the thing I have been on campus is that

1:08:29

add add to that though the administrator who might

1:08:31

actually literally be in the room. that is very

1:08:33

much you know talking up the idea of ago

1:08:36

the disaster for the university in the since will

1:08:38

be so angry and all of this kind of

1:08:40

stuff like that. So I think that the the

1:08:42

in have some of the and it was most

1:08:45

on display after October Seventh because after the October

1:08:47

Seven attacks. and you know from what I know

1:08:49

of a lot of his university breath professors on

1:08:51

what of presidents and what I've heard I know

1:08:54

a lot of them are actually very pro Israel.

1:08:56

And they were actually disgusted and horrified

1:08:58

by the attacks. And they came out

1:09:00

with nuance sort of squishy opinions on

1:09:03

this stuff initially not because it's what

1:09:05

they really thought, because they were afraid

1:09:07

of their own students, administrators and faculty.

1:09:09

and if that doesn't speak volumes about

1:09:12

the environment or for castle culture on

1:09:14

campuses the weirdly oppressive when you have

1:09:16

some of most powerful people in the

1:09:19

country university presidents afraid to say what

1:09:21

they really think because they're afraid of

1:09:23

the chilling in of of effect of

1:09:25

their own. People, it really shows

1:09:28

you like how dysfunctional his whole things

1:09:30

become. And and the norm that

1:09:32

they were afraid to. So the think that

1:09:34

of the up but never again we talked

1:09:36

about friend but we must will get to

1:09:38

Adkins The October Seventh and yeah demonstrated the

1:09:40

you know it it it was came after

1:09:43

your book appeared but it's very timely and

1:09:45

I know it's one of the reasons that

1:09:47

the talking earlier than so much instant book

1:09:49

lately is it exposes this are are are

1:09:51

utter hypocrisy. Of. The university presidents

1:09:53

who in this particular case. Are.

1:09:56

you in on behalf of free

1:09:58

speech for repulsive ideas Which

1:10:01

is an appropriate thing. I'm in favor of

1:10:04

who on every other case Have

1:10:06

done exactly the opposite in particular. You

1:10:08

know, I mean this President

1:10:12

and this very unimpressive president of Harvard

1:10:14

and she is unimpressive. I'm sorry Everything

1:10:18

I've learned about her and the impressed by

1:10:20

her less as I read You

1:10:24

know has took an active role as you probably know

1:10:26

in in in suppressing

1:10:30

free speech rights of people with whom she

1:10:32

might have disagreed the Was

1:10:35

that economist name and at Harvard

1:10:37

who who Roland prior? Yeah, Roland prior who

1:10:39

was who was a black economist who was

1:10:41

who was and Roland Sullivan and Ron Sullivan

1:10:44

exactly who were both Claudine

1:10:46

gays played a huge role in basically

1:10:48

canceling them and and and Because

1:10:51

she disagreed with them or they disagreed with her

1:10:54

But but I mean it's just but it's but at

1:10:56

the same time it's not just playing gay It's the

1:10:58

fact it's and and so many cartoonists have made Examples

1:11:01

of this that somehow it's okay

1:11:03

to I saw a spoof. I forget

1:11:05

somewhere, you know to someone was

1:11:07

gonna have to leave the the

1:11:11

seminar on on Misgendering as

1:11:13

violence to go to the hill the Jews

1:11:15

rally The

1:11:19

double standards are spectacular

1:11:22

In a in a neutral way and and that was

1:11:25

the thing that um That

1:11:27

the testimony, you know the anti-semitism

1:11:29

hearing testimony It was a

1:11:31

little bit of a boy who cried wolf moment

1:11:33

is that so much of it relied depended on?

1:11:36

Those witnesses and that was of

1:11:38

course pen MIT and and Harvard

1:11:41

To be taken seriously on on on

1:11:43

being serious and consistent on freedom of

1:11:46

speech and nobody could because they're not

1:11:49

and so McGill stepping

1:11:51

that it was interesting thing for a

1:11:53

First Amendment defender because The

1:11:57

concern about the hearings was that the message

1:11:59

sent by the hearings would be that you did

1:12:01

not One,

1:12:18

Penn was second to last on our

1:12:21

campus free speech ranking right above Harvard,

1:12:24

which is a very rigorous study

1:12:26

that we do of 13 different

1:12:28

factors, including the largest survey of

1:12:30

student opinion ever done, the four

1:12:32

biggest databases on professor cancellation, student

1:12:34

cancellations, deplatforming, and speech codes. And

1:12:36

Harvard really did earn its dead

1:12:38

last place and Penn was right

1:12:41

behind them in terms of that. So

1:12:44

our ranking actually came up in the hearings a

1:12:46

couple times. You can't

1:12:48

actually be taken seriously on this stuff because

1:12:50

you weren't singing this kind of pro-free speech

1:12:52

tune when it was professors and students you

1:12:54

didn't like better. The other thing that people

1:12:57

missed was the fact that the

1:13:01

donors who were pushing to get

1:13:03

rid of McGill actually had said some

1:13:05

really great stuff about free speech, academic

1:13:08

freedom being the path out of this

1:13:10

ideology, the path out of this kind

1:13:12

of mechanical way of thinking, the path

1:13:14

out of cancel culture. And

1:13:17

we knew that that was actually the proposal

1:13:19

for fixing Penn. And worst

1:13:21

of all, McGill actually came out and

1:13:23

said after the hearings, and this is

1:13:25

why her going was absolutely a good

1:13:27

thing. Oh, I was wrong. We're

1:13:30

going to de-link our policies now from

1:13:32

or we're gonna start we're going to

1:13:34

consider de-linking our policies now from constitutional

1:13:36

standards. And it's like, so

1:13:40

your administrators have always had way too much

1:13:42

power over free speech on campus. You're

1:13:45

now arguing that you're going to give them even

1:13:47

more unlimited power over

1:13:51

free speech on campus. This is going to

1:13:53

be like a genuine disaster. And

1:13:56

the good news is the alumni

1:13:58

groups, The. Older

1:14:00

their mission statement and we're going forward.

1:14:02

I have it up on my substantially

1:14:04

eternally radical idea is great, Like and

1:14:06

about. We need better viewpoint diversity. We

1:14:08

need freedom of speech. We need actual

1:14:10

discussion. We need less ideology. All of

1:14:12

these are things that the hiring desperately

1:14:14

needs. So we saw Mcgill stepping down.

1:14:17

As. Actually a positive development and even more so

1:14:19

because of the the vision same and when

1:14:21

it comes out when it came to clotting

1:14:23

Gay in, I think there's lots of concerns

1:14:25

about gotten Gaelic, he said, and and for

1:14:27

plagiarism one is really, really striking to me.

1:14:29

The idea that she has eleven papers and

1:14:31

five of the eleven pipers I've. Grabbed.

1:14:34

Her since her more and that been a

1:14:36

way as I'm in physics was inappropriate but

1:14:38

still young and five of them with with

1:14:40

Lou with play with series plagiarism and of

1:14:43

yeah man is is pretty bad fact we

1:14:45

actually a if she stepped down directly after

1:14:47

the hearings you know like our concern was

1:14:49

that than that would have sent the message

1:14:51

that I've mainly what what what she did

1:14:53

wrong with that might be down on free

1:14:56

speech and I'm but let's see how she

1:14:58

does does next year I figure that or

1:15:00

I kind of think the credibility long run

1:15:02

and we'll see. We'll see. It have any your

1:15:04

to. It you know, and and. That

1:15:07

will indicate. That

1:15:09

it's important to. I may

1:15:11

as well. We'll get in trouble

1:15:13

for this, but I'm ah, that.

1:15:16

When. It comes to appointments at universities. Factors:

1:15:19

Like an intellectual depths and

1:15:22

and scholarship. Or. At least

1:15:24

as important as identity when it comes to. An.

1:15:26

Appointed to someone like the president of a major

1:15:29

university. And. And I

1:15:31

think that and maybe that will be the lesson. In fact, that's

1:15:33

why I was gonna ask you when we talk but for. The.

1:15:36

The The. As. Horrible.

1:15:39

and it is the hosts for at what happened

1:15:41

october seventh and is nothing intrinsically good about what

1:15:43

happened. but if somebody worse if something's going to

1:15:45

come out of it. Would. Hope

1:15:47

that this up besides hopefully the people who. Will.

1:15:50

Be released, etc and venture them again since

1:15:52

of all of the things one might have

1:15:54

for. But but when bad things happen one

1:15:56

can hope at least the some lesson that

1:15:59

makes the future. better. And maybe,

1:16:01

could this be the Sputnik moment that

1:16:03

exposed when you see the ridiculousness of

1:16:06

what's going on on campuses and the

1:16:08

student groups and shouting people down and

1:16:11

at the same time as we

1:16:13

have the Congressional testimony

1:16:15

issue, it does,

1:16:17

I think for many people who weren't aware of how

1:16:20

utterly problematic it

1:16:23

is in higher education right now and

1:16:25

this hypocrisy of claiming

1:16:27

free speech for speech you

1:16:30

like and not free speech for speech you don't

1:16:32

like, it's really come to the fore. Could this

1:16:35

be a defining moment in terms of changing

1:16:38

the direction of where things are going

1:16:40

higher? I really hope

1:16:42

so. I mean, I got very frankly

1:16:45

depressed writing canceling of the American mind.

1:16:48

One, I didn't realize I was sticking

1:16:50

my neck. I actually, sorry, it started really dawn on

1:16:53

me that I was sticking my neck out once again

1:16:55

on a position that will

1:16:57

be hated by the kind of people who like

1:16:59

to cancel people. Yeah, yeah. And the sheer nastiness.

1:17:01

Every time I write about it, I worry about,

1:17:03

yeah. Yeah, and the sheer nastiness

1:17:05

and drive and the thing about council culture

1:17:07

is they're, you know, they

1:17:10

might hate us on these opinions, but

1:17:12

they'll find something else, you know, like

1:17:14

dig something up from decades ago, misrepresent

1:17:17

it, like, you know, like, so you're

1:17:19

making yourself, you know, very vulnerable.

1:17:21

The other thing that got me

1:17:23

depressed was, and it particularly comes through in

1:17:25

the conformity gauntlet chapter, which is

1:17:27

where I just kind of like layer the

1:17:29

pressures on top of each other. Yeah. And

1:17:32

then like looking at it, I'm like, man,

1:17:34

like, how does anybody get, you know, that

1:17:37

I actually have the specific idea of someone

1:17:39

who wants to be a scientist going to

1:17:41

MIT and all the different conformity inducing pressures

1:17:44

they would have, and then still not be

1:17:46

able to get published if they're, even if

1:17:48

they're incredibly rigorous research, you know, is found

1:17:51

to be harmful. Well, yeah, you're happy to

1:17:53

be trying to publish her nature of human

1:17:55

behavior. If it might harm someone. Yeah, let

1:17:58

me make I don't know if you've Heard or

1:18:00

read anything by me rate lately but but

1:18:02

in a while in the Royal Society of

1:18:04

Chemistry journal is even worse. Say editor on

1:18:06

our Rock did. Oh. I h it's

1:18:09

outstanding Example I was in the stock is if.

1:18:11

They. Were instructed to to look at

1:18:13

anything and if anything was offensive on

1:18:15

the basis of. Of on.

1:18:18

Gender. Political. Up.

1:18:22

At you meet you could live and

1:18:24

at the height of physical attributes of

1:18:26

any to I mean you anything anyone

1:18:28

could be offended by. His. Editors

1:18:30

were were advised to consider whether

1:18:32

to publish that. Whether. That should

1:18:34

be published if if it offended a on the

1:18:37

basis of anything could think of anything ever have

1:18:39

any one big offended by this is the recited

1:18:41

chemistry. Amazon of is an example that's

1:18:43

even worse I think than the nature behavior one I

1:18:45

think. But anyway, There. Are gone and just

1:18:48

the odd a got me really like wow

1:18:50

this like higher it is it is Eve

1:18:52

is it an even worse shape than I

1:18:54

thought which is saying quite a thing of

1:18:56

it. I've been watching the worst of Hired

1:18:58

for twenty two years now are at but

1:19:01

one thing that you know that would have

1:19:03

with at the same size of the same

1:19:05

thing when we're on Sylmar and he said

1:19:07

the same that of the has were all

1:19:09

saying here is that maybe this is a

1:19:11

moment where people got this is not okay

1:19:14

this is not sustainable. We have a you

1:19:16

know clearly. Extremely unreflective. Any logical

1:19:18

environment that is utterly dysfunctional like something

1:19:20

needs to be done. I hope that

1:19:22

this moment makes us realize that situation

1:19:24

normal and higher at is not sustainable

1:19:26

either. Make the point. I would go

1:19:28

go back to the point like yeah

1:19:31

or part one there now arguing that

1:19:33

it costs one hundred seventy thousand dollars

1:19:35

to educate a single student for a

1:19:37

single year at many of these schools.

1:19:40

Which. Is insane arm And and if that's it,

1:19:42

that's admitting you've done something wrong with the tested

1:19:44

of. But by or admitting as you point out,

1:19:46

that many the schools have more. More.

1:19:49

like jail has more administrators and they have

1:19:51

students write what did they have more employees

1:19:53

lot more employees yeah because they have almost

1:19:55

as many administrators may have students on the

1:19:57

but they but when you add and professors

1:19:59

again administrators. Yeah, they have more

1:20:04

administrators. They have more employees than they have teachers. That's

1:20:06

where the bulk, I mean, I know when I've been

1:20:08

writing about DEI, if you look at universities, the bulk

1:20:10

of the increase, yeah, not, you know,

1:20:13

the huge increase in that infrastructure,

1:20:15

vast increases hiring of faculty, student

1:20:17

scholarships, any of the other expensive

1:20:20

universities are dwarfed by the increase

1:20:22

in this massive, useless and counterproductive

1:20:25

bureaucracy. Yeah, to

1:20:28

mention Colana Jones again, she called

1:20:31

us out on not being, not jumping to

1:20:34

the defense of schools in Oklahoma, who have

1:20:36

been told that they have to reduce their

1:20:38

DEI departments, their administrative

1:20:41

DEI departments. It's like, you

1:20:43

did catch that what we've been saying is that

1:20:46

DEI administrators time and time again are the ones

1:20:48

who are repressing academic freedom

1:20:50

and freedom of speech. Like, so I can't

1:20:52

really be like, oh, don't shut down the

1:20:54

sensors department. Like, it's like, no, of

1:20:56

course, like, we're for

1:20:58

that. To be clear, I think

1:21:01

there are people who are incredibly sweet

1:21:03

and kind people who do DEI work,

1:21:05

probably, like many things. Yeah, probably some

1:21:07

of them even have like an ideology

1:21:09

that's very different than the ideology that's

1:21:11

the most problematic. But if you're going

1:21:13

to fix higher education, and you can't,

1:21:17

you have to reduce the

1:21:19

administrative class. And the first thing you

1:21:21

have to start with are the people

1:21:23

who are enforcing political orthodoxy. Speech codes

1:21:25

and everything else. Yeah, exactly. That's the

1:21:27

only, I mean, that's the only way,

1:21:30

as I say, in my opinion, doing

1:21:33

something about leaders who somehow have

1:21:35

spine. The other thing that was

1:21:37

said that touched me on people have asked me

1:21:39

in advance, how will this change? And I thought,

1:21:42

well, maybe the other way is when

1:21:45

most faculty members, having

1:21:48

been a faculty member a long time, most faculty members

1:21:50

just try and stay below the radar. They

1:21:52

Just try and get through their stuff.. They Don't, they think

1:21:54

what's going on is nonsense, but they don't want to speak

1:21:56

out because they know there's a problem. They Just want to

1:21:58

get their money, do the research. The do and and

1:22:00

go on with it. I'm. When

1:22:03

when the bulk of those factly realize that

1:22:05

there but for the grace of god go

1:22:07

they they're that that it's become so insidious.

1:22:10

The. That they could be next. I.

1:22:13

Wonder if that's the it's if that's another?

1:22:15

If that's if. That's. Another sort of.

1:22:17

Bit. Of pressure that may change things

1:22:19

you think Noel ear to eat here.

1:22:21

Here's a here's the case for pessimism

1:22:24

now. Ah good about above the future

1:22:26

of higher education and that my yard

1:22:28

And though that sometimes people caution megan's

1:22:30

talking about because we're trying to actually

1:22:32

fix things are but I do think

1:22:34

that it does this is more more

1:22:36

the argument. but if we have to

1:22:38

be considering other institutions smaller cheaper ways

1:22:40

of doing this because I'm higher education

1:22:42

is is it is in trouble long

1:22:45

term is that by all the polling

1:22:47

that we seen. And some of that we've done

1:22:49

ourselves at Fire. We have a great research department. Fire.

1:22:52

The younger cohort of professors is

1:22:55

more politically a margin us. And

1:22:57

more hostile academic freedom to spam and and

1:23:00

free speech. And so the idea that kind

1:23:02

of like if don't take this moment, it's

1:23:04

definitely going to keep getting worse. And a

1:23:06

even if we take this moment, it might

1:23:08

keep getting worse when a way that makes

1:23:11

it. Well. I mean again, you

1:23:13

would I think you'll or two about it said

1:23:15

that. look if if the whole infrastructure is designed

1:23:17

to hire people, If if these people

1:23:19

have to do a avert the I state minority get

1:23:21

the job. You have been a lot of

1:23:24

them are just doing it to get the job and and

1:23:26

I'll believe it. but you're going to naturally self select for

1:23:28

the next generation it's going to be then. Having.

1:23:30

Bought into this? I mean having. Bought.

1:23:32

Into that that that the the

1:23:34

secular religious notion. And and and

1:23:37

of course, they're going to be more homogenous and

1:23:39

they're also be less. They

1:23:41

make got a job by being in a

1:23:43

in a within a structure that that didn't.

1:23:45

Promote. Free speech but did quite the opposite.

1:23:48

Restricted and so they're therefore it's less likely

1:23:50

they're going to be receptive. The idea that,

1:23:52

right. Yeah. a was end

1:23:54

at i at and there we we spend

1:23:56

some time in that conformity gauntlet chapter talking

1:23:58

about i mean i think most dell people

1:24:01

understand that there's no way to evaluate someone's

1:24:03

quote-unquote commitment to DEI that isn't

1:24:05

a political it must us. But we

1:24:07

even, Nate Honeycutt actually even did an

1:24:09

experiment, you know, about would you get

1:24:11

past the reviewers

1:24:13

if you had anything other than the most

1:24:16

forgive the expression woke version of the of

1:24:18

a DEI statement and unsurprisingly he found out

1:24:20

that that was the only one that would

1:24:23

actually get you through. What's the

1:24:25

one that sounded the most like the ideology that's you

1:24:27

know. Just being sympathetic

1:24:30

is not good enough it won't get you through. You

1:24:32

quote the Berkeley study of 76% of

1:24:34

the people for that biology position didn't

1:24:36

even make it through to have

1:24:39

their research credentials looked at because they didn't

1:24:41

do the DEI statement. I assume you're aware

1:24:43

of the recent study that came out of

1:24:46

the National Association of Scholars I guess of

1:24:48

the DEI statements at Ohio State. You

1:24:50

know, I think it was in the

1:24:53

computer science department 30% of

1:24:55

the score of a candidate was with their DEI

1:24:57

statement. I think it was in astrophysics 50% of

1:25:00

the score when you assessed

1:25:03

people was not was their diversity statement. So

1:25:05

if you didn't if you just were sympathetic

1:25:07

and got zero there's no way you could

1:25:09

ever get a position in it may not

1:25:11

have been physics but it was one of

1:25:14

the science departments and it's just it's

1:25:17

remarkable. Yeah and I think

1:25:19

about the kind of personalities that would never even

1:25:21

fill one of these things out to begin with.

1:25:25

I think about like what you know give Feynman

1:25:28

like fill out this DEI thing. You tell

1:25:30

you to go to hell. Yeah yeah no

1:25:32

absolutely tell you go to hell and it

1:25:34

was well that's a long

1:25:37

yeah exactly and and I've

1:25:39

had so many colleagues who overtly tell you that

1:25:41

they're the people graduating they're more worried about their

1:25:43

DEI statement than their research statement even though they

1:25:45

don't buy into it but they're much much spend

1:25:47

much more time on it they're much more worried

1:25:49

about it. It's the universal not it's not the

1:25:52

it's the norm not the exception. Oh yeah

1:25:54

look we have about a half an hour left before

1:25:56

I know you have to go. There's two things I

1:25:58

mean you know I only have 37

1:26:01

different points here which is okay. I

1:26:04

mean people can read the book and but

1:26:08

what I would like to do probably is spend

1:26:10

a little time on your notions of

1:26:12

the left's perfect, I interrupted you before

1:26:14

because I knew I wanted to get

1:26:16

to it, the perfect rhetorical fortress which

1:26:18

is really the way that I mean

1:26:21

as you point out cancel culture is really it's

1:26:23

bad for many reasons but it's bad because

1:26:25

it stops the process of intellectual discussion, the

1:26:28

debate that's so central for a

1:26:31

functioning democracy in principle

1:26:33

and a functioning academia. So the perfect rhetorical

1:26:35

fortress and the efficient rhetorical fortress which takes

1:26:37

us to the right and left and the

1:26:39

rest of the time I want to talk

1:26:42

about the last part of your book which is what to

1:26:44

do which I think is what I want to

1:26:46

get to. Sound okay? Yeah absolutely. Okay.

1:26:48

So the perfect rhetorical fortress is something I've been

1:26:50

talking about since 2015 when

1:26:52

I started to notice that people on, well

1:26:54

actually noticed it going quite a ways back

1:26:56

particularly in San Francisco and places like Stanford

1:26:59

that there were all these different easy dodges that

1:27:01

people on the left could use to actually not

1:27:03

have to address someone's argument and

1:27:06

I remember you know I think it wasn't until 2016 that the

1:27:08

first time you know I

1:27:10

was told to check my privilege was told to me by

1:27:12

a non-white person because I

1:27:14

got very used to, oh check your

1:27:17

privilege that's something that's a tradition among rich white people

1:27:19

to tell each other to do. You

1:27:21

know it was and

1:27:25

so step one of the perfect rhetorical fortress is

1:27:27

just dubbing someone on the right. And

1:27:31

I say dubbing someone because I don't mean the 36% of

1:27:34

people who are self-described conservative although surely they

1:27:36

count actually they'd probably be you know you're

1:27:38

far right fascist or something like that. It's

1:27:41

all the rest of us if it's tactically convenient

1:27:43

to not have to want to listen not to

1:27:45

want to listen to us. That

1:27:48

you just go boom you're right wing

1:27:50

and like the best example of this

1:27:52

you know it most recently is this

1:27:54

amazing article by Marianne Franks in

1:27:57

the free speech journal. She'd previously

1:27:59

written an article saying cancel culture

1:28:01

isn't real. She just

1:28:03

asserts this. It just, you know, it

1:28:05

doesn't actually look bad. It just says it's not real.

1:28:08

And the previous one cited no actual case law, by

1:28:11

the way, and had citations to alternate. And it said

1:28:13

this is a right-wing Fox News plot. I

1:28:16

guess that she didn't think that was, you

1:28:18

know, intense enough because people still tend to believe

1:28:20

this thing believes, so she has to insult us

1:28:22

even more. So in this

1:28:24

article that came out, we're now referred

1:28:26

to as we're not just right-wing. We're

1:28:29

not just far-right. We're not just fascists.

1:28:31

We're neo-Confederates if we believe cancel

1:28:33

culture is real. And it's a mind-blowing

1:28:35

article to read. I really actually recommend

1:28:37

it to everybody. And

1:28:40

guess who are among the ranks of

1:28:43

neo-Confederates and their dupes? The

1:28:46

New York Times and the ACLU, because they both recognize

1:28:48

that, you know, cancel culture is real and sometimes the

1:28:50

left is part of the problem. And

1:28:52

they've been part of the problem, both of them. Certainly,

1:28:55

yeah. But why is

1:28:57

this, you know, why are they actually extending

1:28:59

this attack to the New

1:29:01

York Times and the ACLU? Because it's always

1:29:03

worked before. So step one of the perfect

1:29:06

rhetorical fortress is incredibly effective. People

1:29:08

hate me, and I don't like being cold conservative. I'm

1:29:10

not. But at the same time, it doesn't stop me

1:29:12

anymore. It doesn't make me want

1:29:14

to apologize to anybody. And it's just a tactic. I'm

1:29:16

getting used to it myself, I know. It weighs

1:29:18

on me less than it used to be. Whatever, you

1:29:21

know. And that's just step one. Then

1:29:23

we go through the demographic funnel, are

1:29:26

you white? Are you cis? Are you gay? Or

1:29:28

any of the, are you a man or a

1:29:30

woman? Yeah, yeah. Et cetera. And

1:29:32

we give examples at each step of people

1:29:35

being dismissed, usually for things that aren't related

1:29:37

to anything that really should matter to that

1:29:39

category. But then after

1:29:41

you get through the demographic funnel, you're down to

1:29:43

about 0.9% of the population that

1:29:45

is transgender and

1:29:47

non-white. But

1:29:50

guess what? If you're even in that 0.9% and

1:29:53

you have the wrong opinion, you

1:29:56

can be accused of internalized misogyny

1:29:58

and internalized racism. or

1:30:01

internalized transphobia, which

1:30:03

makes it perfect. Because it's like, that's 100% of

1:30:05

the entire population. And by the way, you could

1:30:07

also call them right-wingers to boot.

1:30:09

So already by step six in

1:30:12

the perfect rhetorical fortress, you've got 100% of the

1:30:14

population ways to not

1:30:16

actually address their argument and ways to dodge

1:30:19

out. And we're just getting started. We get

1:30:21

to the, if people get angry in public,

1:30:23

we get to the darkly hinting that someone

1:30:25

might, that something else is afoot. Yeah, you're

1:30:27

at 0.6, you got 0.7. Guilt

1:30:31

by association, which is always amazing

1:30:33

thing. You know, I

1:30:35

get accused of many

1:30:37

things because the people I know and they

1:30:40

just think, well, you know, I know some Republicans and

1:30:42

I'm not Republican, I know some, you know,

1:30:44

I mean, it's amazing to think about it.

1:30:46

We all know people who are not us.

1:30:50

Yeah. Well, there was a more

1:30:52

weigle article that

1:30:56

was critical of coddling in the American mind that

1:30:58

we just thought was amazing because all it was

1:31:00

doing, it was just, it made one substantive argument

1:31:02

that we didn't talk enough about student debt. And

1:31:05

I'm like, okay, you know, one of the reasons why we didn't

1:31:07

is because much to my surprise, that

1:31:09

was much lower on the list of concerns in

1:31:11

student polling. But the rest of

1:31:13

it was, oh, site

1:31:17

and luchian offer soft right, which means of course that

1:31:19

we don't have to be listened to because we're right

1:31:21

wingers, et cetera. And the way this was proven was

1:31:23

by the fact that, for example, we

1:31:26

quote Solzhenitsyn in Coddling in the

1:31:28

American Mind, but guess who

1:31:30

wrote the foreword to the new version

1:31:32

of the Gulag Archipelago? Jordan

1:31:35

Peterson. And

1:31:37

therefore we don't count. And meanwhile, kind

1:31:39

of like, my job is to

1:31:41

get the word out. Jordan Peterson asked me to be on the show for

1:31:44

this. For my book, we go

1:31:46

on the show for this. Sure, sure. Actually,

1:31:48

I've got Jordan Peterson, he's in mine. Yeah,

1:31:51

which is like, yeah, I'm trying to reach people.

1:31:53

I disagree with him, but a lot, but yeah.

1:31:55

Absolutely. But at the same time, the

1:31:58

tactic though of just being like, you know. this person

1:32:00

or you were on this person's podcast or whatever,

1:32:03

that also gets you once again to a hundred percent of

1:32:05

the population of the plants ever lived. And then

1:32:07

this innuendo, you point out that number 11

1:32:10

is that you were just getting to hinting

1:32:12

darkly that something else is really going on.

1:32:14

Yes. And that's, I find that perhaps the

1:32:16

most, well I don't

1:32:18

know, there's so many words and things, but

1:32:21

I think it's so effective because especially in

1:32:23

this modern neo-puritan

1:32:25

moral panic, all you

1:32:27

have to do is allude that maybe there's something

1:32:29

going on sexual. That because, you know, that when

1:32:32

I'm thinking of it, you didn't in your book,

1:32:34

but I'm aware of it because I know

1:32:36

him, there was a great story by Michael Powell of New

1:32:38

York Times about the James Webb

1:32:40

Space Telescope, how there's a group

1:32:42

trying to have the name

1:32:45

change because they felt he was homophobic and

1:32:47

racist. And a black physicist who was head

1:32:49

of the National Association of

1:32:51

Black Physicists, you know, who

1:32:53

else was at NASA at the time, looked at it

1:32:55

and discovered that there was no basis for any of

1:32:57

that. And he was, not

1:33:00

only was he excoriated by these

1:33:02

people who didn't know, but they said, well

1:33:04

we think there may be, maybe he was

1:33:07

involved in this physicist with, might have been

1:33:09

involved in some harassment at an old university

1:33:11

because he moved university. All you do is

1:33:13

say that and and

1:33:17

that I see as, you don't

1:33:19

mention in your book, but I see that the

1:33:22

same thing with with Roland Fire, or,

1:33:24

you know,

1:33:26

the notion that somehow there's a

1:33:28

scientist David Sabatini who was who

1:33:30

lost his job. Oh yeah, yeah.

1:33:33

And remember he went, he

1:33:35

was offered a job at NYU and

1:33:37

all the people walked out. This is

1:33:39

a guy had a relationship with another

1:33:41

woman and for reasons that may have

1:33:43

been inappropriate, he was let go. I

1:33:45

happen to think they were inappropriate. But

1:33:48

we went to NYU and all these people walked

1:33:50

out because they said, oh it's an unsafe environment

1:33:52

if he's here. And they caved

1:33:57

in. All you have to do is say that

1:33:59

is cast. sexual aspersions

1:34:02

in the modern times and they're not even

1:34:05

questioned, they're just automatically. And I think that's

1:34:07

an additional factor that's sort of being used

1:34:09

here as a real weapon,

1:34:12

the weaponization of accusation. Yeah.

1:34:15

Now, we had more about

1:34:18

sexual harassment in there. It became

1:34:20

such a rabbit hole. We ended up making it

1:34:22

up because it was going to end up being

1:34:25

its own chapter. And

1:34:27

we're like, okay, we want to buy this.

1:34:29

Well, and other people have done books on

1:34:31

it, like Heather and other people. Yeah. So,

1:34:33

okay. Yeah. So those are the tools that

1:34:35

are used primarily by the left to basically

1:34:38

disqualify anyone who doesn't agree with you,

1:34:42

not just disqualify you, but just stop

1:34:44

the conversation, not allow the conversation effectively

1:34:47

to cancel. Yeah. Cancel the

1:34:49

discussion even if it's not just canceling the individual.

1:34:52

Yeah. The right has been doing

1:34:54

this in different ways for a while. And as you

1:34:56

point out, and it always amazes me, I like the

1:34:58

fact that you use the word efficient because

1:35:01

it always amazes me that in many ways the

1:35:03

right is much more efficient than the left. Yeah.

1:35:06

And maybe because they're more homogeneous, I don't know. But

1:35:09

why don't you talk about what the efficient

1:35:12

rhetorical fortress is that the right uses to

1:35:14

disqualify people? Yeah. So

1:35:16

we have three chapters on cancel culture from the right,

1:35:18

including book banings and some

1:35:21

of the legislative stuff in addition to that. But

1:35:25

we also talk – we have a chapter talking

1:35:27

about the efficient rhetorical fortress, particularly

1:35:29

– and we – in that

1:35:31

chapter, which I think is very interesting, we talk

1:35:33

a lot about Trump trying to cancel people in

1:35:35

the news media, for example, and some

1:35:37

of those kind of scary anti-liberal movements on

1:35:40

the academic right, which were – which

1:35:43

worries as well. And the efficient rhetorical

1:35:45

fortress is efficient. It's three things.

1:35:47

Can I W-Woke? Are

1:35:50

you a journalist or an expert? Or

1:35:52

are you anti-Trump? And

1:35:55

in just four steps, it's efficient because you get rid

1:35:57

of an awful lot of people you should probably look

1:35:59

at. listening to. And

1:36:03

one thing that might surprise some of your

1:36:05

listeners is that Haidt

1:36:08

and I get orders of magnitude, orders of

1:36:10

magnitude, more hate mail from

1:36:12

the right for calling the American mind

1:36:14

than we do from the left. Why?

1:36:17

Because we're hard on Trump for

1:36:19

Charlottesville, which I will

1:36:21

never apologize for, because

1:36:23

that's appropriate. And we

1:36:25

wrote something in

1:36:28

persuasion sort of explaining this, you know, how

1:36:30

we were right about this again. But

1:36:32

we, you know, that still is where we get the most, get

1:36:35

the most hate mail from. And we have

1:36:37

had some people, you

1:36:39

know, like pan the book for

1:36:42

the fact that it's engaged in,

1:36:44

you know, both Ciderism, like mindless both Ciderism,

1:36:46

because we all see it on the right.

1:36:48

And it's kind of like, well, no, we're

1:36:50

pretty clear that, you know, when it comes

1:36:52

to corporations, when it comes to universities, particularly

1:36:54

when it comes to students, that's, you know,

1:36:56

that's wildly disproportionately cancel culture from the left.

1:36:58

That doesn't mean that we're not going to

1:37:00

take on cancel culture from the right when

1:37:02

it happens as well. But we're not saying

1:37:04

this happens at the equal amount. We are

1:37:07

concerned about the legislative stuff. Yeah, that's where

1:37:09

you that's what you're not seeing. Well, not yet. Actually,

1:37:11

it's not quite true. I you don't mention it, but

1:37:13

I do think there's legislative stuff on the left. That's

1:37:15

worrisome. But the more the more

1:37:18

the legislative work, especially where I

1:37:20

live in Canada now, but anyway,

1:37:24

the most explicit, worried some aspect from

1:37:26

the right is the legislative the imposition

1:37:29

of rules on what you can and cannot say in

1:37:31

academia. And, and, and again, one of

1:37:34

the things that you raised here, when

1:37:36

you talk about the right, and you talk about the efficient

1:37:40

fortress, that I hadn't that hadn't hit

1:37:42

me. And it's an interesting point I want to

1:37:44

bring up for people to think about. I never

1:37:46

thought about the decision between K, K to 12

1:37:48

and universities. I'm

1:37:51

always hesitant in any case to restrict

1:37:53

what kids are supposed to. But the

1:37:55

arguments that be made that kids are

1:37:57

captive audiences when they're K to 12 because

1:37:59

they're not they're required to go to school and

1:38:02

therefore maybe one should be therefore

1:38:05

have one has more right to therefore have

1:38:08

governments or parents say what

1:38:11

they can hear and not hear but no argument

1:38:13

for sort of go on you'll say that.

1:38:15

And it's more than that you know I'm

1:38:17

a parent Maxwell and Ben

1:38:19

who I mentioned before they're

1:38:21

at public school. My middle name by the way. I

1:38:23

was embarrassed about

1:38:25

it till I became a physicist. Well but what

1:38:27

that means is Maxwell smart and Maxwell Silverhammer ruined

1:38:30

one of the greatest things of all time. It

1:38:32

was James Clerk Maxwell that did it for me. Wonderful,

1:38:36

fascinating man and absolute genius. Einstein's

1:38:38

favorite scientist. And dead when he was by

1:38:40

the time he was your age. 48. I

1:38:42

was reading his biography when I was 48 like I didn't

1:38:44

know that. Oh

1:38:48

my god. It's like Mozart you know that by

1:38:50

the time yeah it's just amazing. Anyway go on.

1:38:53

Yeah so oh

1:38:55

yeah so public colleges sorry

1:38:58

public education is taxpayer

1:39:01

funded. It's mandatory like

1:39:04

so you have to send your kid to some school you

1:39:06

can get you can get out of it now in a

1:39:08

variety of ways but it's

1:39:10

mandatory it's publicly funded and

1:39:12

it's your kids and on those

1:39:15

three circumstances you bet there there should

1:39:17

be some say from parents and the

1:39:20

democracy itself. The democracy that's paying for it.

1:39:22

That's paying for it to say about like what

1:39:24

what should be taught. So it's always been the

1:39:26

case always been the case that politics has been

1:39:29

part of what the curriculum is in the United

1:39:31

States and so like people pretending like oh my

1:39:33

god politics is now it's like no it's just

1:39:35

politics you don't like. Yeah and actually to be

1:39:37

clear some a lot of politics I don't like

1:39:40

is now actually part of the curricular debate but

1:39:42

the idea that kind of like oh it's it's

1:39:44

between this and free speech it's like no it's

1:39:46

just a question of whose politics actually dominate it

1:39:49

and one thing I want to caution everybody about

1:39:51

if you think you're mildly sympathetic to the

1:39:53

idea that K through 12

1:39:55

teachers should be the only ones deciding this

1:39:58

kind of stuff that's insane because biggest

1:40:00

problems that we've seen in higher

1:40:03

education and K through 12 have

1:40:05

come from education school graduates. To be clear, I

1:40:08

know a lot of lovely, wonderful,

1:40:10

thoughtful, caring, smart education school graduates.

1:40:12

But as far as being incredibly

1:40:14

ideological and narrow and sort of,

1:40:16

you know, forgive the expression, captured,

1:40:19

education schools are like the sine qua non of

1:40:21

that. Oh yeah, I have to say, when I

1:40:24

was last taught at ASU, I started to work

1:40:26

with the education school because I thought that would

1:40:28

be a good thing to do. And

1:40:30

boy, was it an awakening. I stopped that

1:40:32

pretty quickly. Tell me more,

1:40:35

what your experience? Well, I

1:40:37

just, well, this

1:40:40

is for you. Well, you and I'll chat for the, I

1:40:42

want to hear from you. You and I'll chat more. I

1:40:44

hope we'll have a lot more time to chat because there's

1:40:46

a bunch of things I want to talk to you about,

1:40:48

aside from what we're doing now. But yeah, but it is

1:40:51

a problem. So go on. Yeah. So yeah, so K through

1:40:53

12 curriculum are

1:40:55

decided in a combination of parents,

1:40:57

votes, etc. And honestly, I

1:40:59

think they should be as long as it's

1:41:02

still mandatory. Like they've basically, public education became

1:41:04

something that wasn't publicly funded or mandatory, then

1:41:06

that's an entirely different ballgame. Yeah. When

1:41:08

it comes to libraries, though, that's a

1:41:10

little more interesting because there's a case

1:41:13

on point called Pico from 1982. Yeah,

1:41:15

I was always moved in 1983. And it

1:41:17

was a it

1:41:20

was a decision that didn't have one clear opinion.

1:41:23

But what we take from it is the idea

1:41:25

that you shouldn't be removing books from libraries just

1:41:27

because you don't like the political point of view.

1:41:30

Now, no, no, and we think that's

1:41:32

a good policy. Now people on the road also get

1:41:34

mad at us because you're saying like, so you're saying

1:41:36

that people should be, you know, and this is

1:41:38

referring to a real book here, you think our kids should be

1:41:41

reading, you know, a book where that teaches you with

1:41:43

a very graphic graphic about how to use a butt

1:41:45

plug? Yeah, like no, actually, because

1:41:47

you could actually you could always always

1:41:49

and you actually are required to consider age

1:41:51

appropriateness. So age appropriateness is the normal part

1:41:53

of the discussion about what should be in

1:41:55

a K through 12 library. And that's most

1:41:57

of the debate right now. I

1:42:00

do think it makes a lot of sense that

1:42:02

if you're sending, you know, police officers to arrest

1:42:04

people at public libraries for having, you know Books

1:42:06

which does happen by the way, not very often,

1:42:09

but it does happen That's a

1:42:11

problem for free speech perspective to

1:42:13

say the least and the places early go to

1:42:15

the library Yeah,

1:42:17

well and this is Kind

1:42:19

of like the hierarchy of the greatest concern

1:42:21

when you're having limitations on bookstores on private

1:42:24

bookstores That's the biggest First Amendment issue when

1:42:26

it comes to public libraries That's the big

1:42:28

issue to K through 12 libraries There's

1:42:30

a lot more to sort of give and take on what's supposed

1:42:32

to be allowed But we still don't like the idea of

1:42:35

you know Removing books,

1:42:37

you know and just on the basis

1:42:39

of not of disliking the political point of view However,

1:42:42

some of those cases are frustrating as well

1:42:44

because there was one that got written up

1:42:46

where it was a poem for the inauguration

1:42:48

I think it was Amanda Gorman's poem from

1:42:51

like Obama's Inauguration

1:42:54

and it was available to third

1:42:56

graders and And

1:43:02

what the school looked into it because they look into all

1:43:04

the complaints and said, you know what this is Third

1:43:07

graders aren't even gonna understand this. Yeah, this is

1:43:09

more appropriate in the in the part of the

1:43:11

library for the seventh and eighth graders And

1:43:14

this got treated like it was a book band and it's

1:43:16

like well No They

1:43:18

make decisions on the basis of whether or not

1:43:20

something's appropriate for third graders and eighth graders all

1:43:22

the time Like you're really reaching on this one

1:43:24

But we do believe we do believe book bands

1:43:27

are real as but as far

1:43:29

as like when you actually factor in age Appropriateness

1:43:31

like the actual there there are less of them

1:43:33

than sometimes he might be led to believe Okay,

1:43:36

let's let's move because we only have 15 minutes

1:43:38

left about yep Let's you let's talk about what

1:43:41

to do because I mean, it's I

1:43:43

wish there was a magic bullet or a silver

1:43:45

bullet Basically there

1:43:47

as far I went through and you know listed

1:43:49

the different sort of There's

1:43:51

you know raising kids Somehow

1:43:55

dealing with leadership and executives reforming

1:43:58

higher education and and

1:44:00

ultimately growing

1:44:03

up. So let's go through them. You

1:44:08

talk about raising kids. Why

1:44:11

don't you give some of the examples of what one can do? Some

1:44:14

of which are out of coddling, it's true. Yeah,

1:44:17

a lot of that is out of coddling

1:44:19

everything from like making sure that they have

1:44:21

unstructured play, making sure that they actually have

1:44:24

some modicum of independence, that they're not

1:44:27

shielded constantly from anything that might be

1:44:29

difficult for them because that's a

1:44:31

terrible policy. But for stuff that's

1:44:34

specific about canceling, we focus a

1:44:36

lot on trying to raise kids

1:44:39

who are not cancelers. And that's a little

1:44:41

different because most people usually ask us, how do I

1:44:43

keep my kid from being canceled? Yeah. And

1:44:46

it's more important in our opinion to make sure that

1:44:48

they're not cancelers. Yeah. To have the

1:44:50

kind of kid who believes in the golden rule,

1:44:52

you know, the idea. I think

1:44:54

the platinum rule, that's one thing where I get away, I

1:44:56

don't like the golden rule, I prefer the

1:44:58

platinum one. Is that treat people as they would prefer to

1:45:00

be treated? Yeah, instead of, yeah, because how do you know

1:45:03

how they want to be treated? Yeah, I prefer people as

1:45:05

they would prefer to be treated, not as you think you'd

1:45:07

like. Anyway. Yeah,

1:45:09

I definitely do know that distinction, but we

1:45:12