Episode Transcript
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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
talk about the golden rule in the sense of like, wouldn't you
1:45:14
want someone to have your back as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
1:45:16
sure. The idea is something
1:45:18
as simple as stand up for your friends, which
1:45:20
kind of feels like it shouldn't have to be
1:45:22
said, but that's the whole thing
1:45:24
about canceling. So I wish when I've been on the
1:45:27
wrong side, have friends stand up for me as
1:45:30
such a means more to me than almost anything
1:45:32
else. Yeah, raising your hand and
1:45:34
simply saying, so-and-so is a
1:45:36
good person, you know, leave them alone. Puts
1:45:40
a target on your back, but I think that target
1:45:42
becomes less and less effective the more people actually are
1:45:44
willing to say, you know. And we're nowhere
1:45:46
near there yet, unfortunately, but yeah. No. You
1:45:49
get a lot more to thrive at, you get a lot more support in private
1:45:51
than public. Yeah, so definitely, you
1:45:53
know, we think that's part of it.
1:45:55
One thing that we interviewed
1:45:57
Pamela Paretsky in the... for
1:46:01
the book. And one thing that she
1:46:03
likes to point out is, you know, stop thinking
1:46:05
of your friends as allies, because even
1:46:07
though that's that's treated
1:46:09
as something that sounds very cool and nice
1:46:11
and something that people should strive towards, allies
1:46:14
aren't friends. Allies are, you know, temporary
1:46:16
tactical relationships in order to achieve a
1:46:18
political end that could be ended or
1:46:20
began at any time. Like that's
1:46:23
not a friend. A friend is someone who you trust
1:46:25
and who can say hard things to you if you
1:46:27
need to hear them and
1:46:29
that you get forgive or
1:46:31
forgiven or can be forgiven. You
1:46:33
know, we need genuine friendships, not not not
1:46:35
ally ships. And they can disagree too. That's
1:46:38
the point. They can also say you're wrong.
1:46:42
It's a key part of having friends. It's like how
1:46:44
often I rely on my friends to be like, am
1:46:46
I wrong here? You know, and how often it's like,
1:46:48
yeah, Greg, you got this one wrong. Well,
1:46:50
you're right. Revive the golden rule. Encourage free
1:46:52
and structured time. Emphasize the importance of friendships.
1:46:55
Teach kids about differences. Practice what you
1:46:57
preach. And and
1:46:59
then I think to avoid
1:47:03
the three great untruths, why don't you say what
1:47:05
the three great untruths are? Yeah, the
1:47:07
three great untruths, that's from Cod Lake of the
1:47:09
American Mind. And this is our idea of negative
1:47:11
advice, like the idea of people
1:47:13
won't listen to do
1:47:15
this precise thing, but they are a little more open
1:47:17
to the idea of, okay, whatever you do, I don't
1:47:19
care what you do. Just don't do the following three
1:47:21
really dumb things. Yeah. And and we
1:47:25
call these the great untruths. These are terrible
1:47:27
pieces of advice and they are in order. Wait,
1:47:32
what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always
1:47:35
trust your feelings. And life is a
1:47:37
battle between good people and evil people. And
1:47:39
if you believe all, you know, any of these
1:47:41
things, they're one, they're not backed up by ancient
1:47:44
wisdom, they're not backed up by current
1:47:46
thinking and psychology, and they will make you
1:47:48
miserable. And in this book, we actually add
1:47:50
a fourth, which is no bad people person
1:47:52
has any good opinion, which
1:47:54
is essentially the idea of the way we
1:47:56
behave. When you think of
1:47:59
cancel culture as an arguing tactic that my
1:48:01
goal is not necessarily to refute you. It's
1:48:03
just to point out that you're a bad
1:48:05
person and then somehow magically that means that
1:48:07
you don't have any valid opinions. And that's
1:48:09
so much the way we argue right now,
1:48:11
which of course you have to point out
1:48:13
and I always give the example of John-Jacques
1:48:15
Rousseau. John-Jacques Rousseau was an awful person. He
1:48:19
was probably mentally ill, but he was also
1:48:21
terrible to his friends. He was terrible to
1:48:23
his mistress. He gave up something like six
1:48:25
kids to orphanages to die, which I
1:48:28
didn't actually fully put together that that was the standard
1:48:30
thing that actually happened to kids given away
1:48:32
to orphanages. That doesn't mean he was wrong in
1:48:34
his philosophy. Now, I think disagree with him
1:48:36
a lot about aspects of his philosophy, but
1:48:38
the fact he was a
1:48:41
horrible person is not an argument
1:48:43
towards him being wrong. Yeah. And in
1:48:45
fact, the reason I want to bring them up, they come from
1:48:47
codling, but they really are the basis of a
1:48:49
lot of the cancel culture argument. They
1:48:51
are the untruth of fragility that somehow
1:48:53
words are harmful and
1:48:56
people are never going to survive being called
1:48:58
whatever word you want to call them. Somehow they're
1:49:00
not going to be able to survive it. And
1:49:05
then the untruth
1:49:07
of emotional reasoning, as
1:49:10
you say, bad people cannot
1:49:13
have good ideas and the untruth of us versus them,
1:49:16
which is power and oppression. All of
1:49:18
those are the basis of a lot
1:49:20
of what's going on in cancel culture. And
1:49:23
so, yeah, to do that, to try and avoid
1:49:25
those fallacies in kids. And
1:49:28
I would, once again, not just teach
1:49:31
kids about differences, but I'd
1:49:33
put that sixth one in, teach kids to
1:49:35
keep questioning and know
1:49:37
that it's based that not
1:49:39
knowing, that saying, I don't know is not a bad
1:49:41
thing, but a good thing. Absolutely. So
1:49:43
for me as a teacher or as a,
1:49:45
you know, with a history of teaching, that
1:49:47
to me is one of the most important things I think I
1:49:49
would add. And one thing
1:49:52
that where there's more detail outside of the
1:49:54
book than in it is that we have
1:49:56
a whole chapter on K through 12 reform.
1:49:58
And that's largely sort of the bit. based
1:50:00
on an article I came out
1:50:02
with called Empowering of the American
1:50:04
Mind, which are principles for higher
1:50:06
education reform, sorry, for K through
1:50:08
12 reform. And basically, you know,
1:50:10
virtue number one is epistemic humility and
1:50:12
intellectual humility. And this is, you know, people will
1:50:14
do this to me sometimes because I'm a First
1:50:16
Amendment lawyer, it's like, Oh, you know, First Amendment
1:50:18
lawyer, but your parent, how do you
1:50:21
like how much free speech do your kids have? And
1:50:23
I'm like, well, I'm training them to understand that the
1:50:25
first step in utilizing free speech and
1:50:27
really appreciating it is knowing how little you know. And
1:50:30
it's nice that I could ask my
1:50:32
kids is like, what kind of person
1:50:34
thinks I know everything? They're hesitant to
1:50:37
say stupid people, because like, that's, that's
1:50:39
the s word now. But they're like,
1:50:42
well, nobody who claims that actually knows all that much, like,
1:50:44
yeah, I have to tell you this story that a friend
1:50:46
of mine, I won't say who was on
1:50:48
who was on The Apprentice with Donald Trump,
1:50:51
or me, one of the things that amazed him the
1:50:53
most is Donald Trump came up to me and said,
1:50:55
you're one of the three people in the world I
1:50:57
know who is smarter than me. And
1:50:59
he's and as he pointed out, anyone who is smart
1:51:01
would never say anything like that.
1:51:03
Yeah, it's just anyway. Next,
1:51:07
leadership, you know, I'm amused that
1:51:11
that in your quote at
1:51:13
the top of this case study of publishing,
1:51:15
you quote Adam Bello, who is
1:51:17
a warm spot in my heart, because when when
1:51:20
Tom one of the times I was
1:51:22
cancelled from publishing, I the
1:51:25
only I was almost self published after that. But
1:51:27
that him bello eventually agreed to publish my
1:51:31
book and the last two books
1:51:33
actually, I've written. So so I'm, you
1:51:36
know, he practices what he preaches in
1:51:38
that regard. But the idea of this,
1:51:40
when you talk about executive leaders and,
1:51:42
and penguin and basically the awful experiences
1:51:45
that people have had from that woman
1:51:48
Gina, Gina Cummins, who wrote American dirt,
1:51:50
and somehow because she was Mexican, her
1:51:52
book was, was was destroyed.
1:51:54
And then and then, you know, to
1:51:56
to Woody Allen, who, who, who, who
1:51:59
wrote book that was going to be in big
1:52:01
demand and then the publisher sort of kowtowed to this
1:52:04
mob by saying somehow people shouldn't be
1:52:06
allowed to hear what he has to say. But
1:52:09
that publishing example was just a microcosm
1:52:12
of what goes on in academia.
1:52:16
The fact that, and
1:52:19
I guess the lesson I have, you
1:52:22
give a bunch of rules for executives, hire
1:52:24
more broadly, define what you stand for, face
1:52:27
problems in small groups, practice what you preach.
1:52:30
But again, I would be a leader and grow
1:52:32
a spine. I
1:52:34
mean, not these people are afraid to be
1:52:36
leaders in many places for whatever reasons, whether
1:52:38
it's economics or their own fear of
1:52:40
being cancelled later on. Yeah,
1:52:43
no, no, definitely. And leadership
1:52:45
matters all throughout. That
1:52:48
chapter on how to keep your corporation
1:52:50
out of the culture war. One
1:52:52
thing that I want to sort
1:52:55
of turn that into an article and
1:52:57
emphasize the fact, and also make sure
1:53:00
that you're not hiring cancelers because that
1:53:02
is something that after
1:53:05
Kotlin came out, business leader
1:53:07
after business leader contacted me
1:53:09
in height, you know, saying
1:53:12
that the new students that you're
1:53:14
talking about, the coddled, you know,
1:53:16
I don't live that word, are
1:53:18
showing up at our corporations. And
1:53:20
it's disastrous. Like small interactions are
1:53:23
shutting down the organization for days as
1:53:26
they lead to hand-wringing sessions and those
1:53:30
town hall meetings that are really just being shouted
1:53:32
down kind of and brow beaten.
1:53:37
And one of the things that they kept on
1:53:39
saying to me was like, and you know, because
1:53:41
of this, we're not hiring, we don't hire people
1:53:43
from the Ivy league anymore. And
1:53:45
every time someone says something like to me, I'm like,
1:53:47
do me a favor. Say
1:53:50
that out loud, say that so everyone
1:53:52
can hear it. Because if Harvard starts
1:53:54
getting that they're producing a product that
1:53:56
people don't want to work with, that
1:53:58
actually might be the thing. thing to get them to
1:54:01
take reform more seriously. Now
1:54:03
I think the parents, I mean the point is the
1:54:05
Harvard's trying to get the parents to send their kids
1:54:07
and if the parents don't think sending their kids to
1:54:09
Harvard is an automatic road to whatever
1:54:11
they want, they might not send them to Harvard.
1:54:13
And you say something there too and I know
1:54:15
we're really getting close to the end here and
1:54:17
I'm sorry because we could go on, but you
1:54:20
talk about with employers, hire people who
1:54:23
don't necessarily have university degrees. And
1:54:25
one of the things you don't stress, and I wanted
1:54:27
to add and get your press for this, there's another
1:54:29
good reason to do that because as
1:54:31
you know, it's coming
1:54:34
close to two to one, it's now 50%. Young
1:54:37
males are not going to college
1:54:40
anymore and we're going to
1:54:42
have a society where young males are
1:54:44
severely disadvantaged if people are only
1:54:46
hiring people with university
1:54:48
degrees. It's
1:54:51
60 to 40, 60%, 40% in most places, but it's even higher in
1:54:53
a lot of places. Young
1:54:57
males are for whatever reason, I think there are
1:54:59
good reasons, not deciding that university is
1:55:01
not the right place for them. You're
1:55:05
closing yourself to an important segment of society
1:55:08
if you start only hiring people who have
1:55:10
university degrees and point out that
1:55:12
maybe there are alternatives. When I
1:55:14
lived, I spent a year in Switzerland when I was
1:55:16
at CERN and I was shocked because I thought everyone
1:55:18
should go to college. I mean I just had bought
1:55:20
the Kool-Aid and then I saw in
1:55:22
Switzerland, they stream people. Now of course, it's
1:55:24
not they don't force you, but they
1:55:27
stream things, only 15% of the undergraduate
1:55:29
population or the high school population
1:55:31
is directed towards college because they
1:55:33
also have apprentice schools. For
1:55:36
most people, those are
1:55:38
the right places to be, but
1:55:40
we have this notion somehow that
1:55:42
college is the only
1:55:44
way to learn what you
1:55:47
need to learn to be an adult, which is certainly
1:55:49
not the case. Yeah, and
1:55:52
at the same time when you're paying this much to
1:55:55
go in the first place and everybody gets a 3.9, which is
1:55:57
the average GPA in Harvard. which
1:56:00
I can't say loud enough. When I
1:56:02
taught at Yale, I was going to add this. I
1:56:04
once got called to the mat by a dean, a
1:56:06
college dean, for giving a student a C, saying,
1:56:09
you know, he's a Yale student. Yeah. Well,
1:56:12
look, and that's part of growing up. They're the best in the
1:56:14
world. Look, I know it's the end, and I want to thank
1:56:16
you for this and everything else.
1:56:18
And I want to have a long conversation
1:56:20
with you about a bunch of things, so maybe we'll have a chance
1:56:22
to have a Zoom you and I. But thank
1:56:24
you for the work you do. Thanks for writing this. I hope
1:56:27
we did a little bit of justice to it. There's
1:56:29
so much more we could go through, but it's been a real pleasure.
1:56:32
Thank you, Professor Krauss. That's
1:56:34
a Catholic school in me. Yeah,
1:56:38
yeah. And, yeah, and
1:56:40
hopefully your viewers will check out thefire.org. We're
1:56:43
doing amazing work. We're doing great research. And
1:56:45
certainly if you do still want to send
1:56:47
your kid to a college, our campus free speech
1:56:50
ranking will show you which ones to avoid and which
1:56:52
ones are still pretty good. And as
1:56:54
my, and I've said this before, but as my
1:56:56
late atheist friend, Steve Weinberg, a
1:56:58
well-resuming physicist, said, you're doing God's work.
1:57:02
I am an atheist who loves religious imagery, too.
1:57:04
I hope you talk about that. Take care. It's
1:57:07
a real pleasure. I look forward to getting you to take care. Bye-bye.
1:57:15
Take care. I
1:57:19
hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This
1:57:22
podcast is produced by the Origins
1:57:24
Project Foundation, a nonprofit
1:57:26
organization whose goal is to enrich
1:57:28
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1:57:30
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1:57:32
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1:57:34
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1:57:37
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1:57:39
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1:57:41
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1:57:43
more, please visit originsprojectfoundation.org.
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