Advisory Opinions - Nerds with Strong Opinions

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

In a special edition of the podcast, David interviews his former colleague Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The two discuss the state of free speech on college campuses and why it’s not just a higher education issue, but one that also impacts workforces and the United States in general. And of course, lacking Sarah’s moderating influence, there are also some (relatively minor) descents into nerdery over Star Trek. Show Notes: -The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure -Scholars Under Fire Database -FIRE’s 2021 College Free Speech Rankings -Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools―and What We Can Do About It Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. This is David French without Sarah Isker. Sarah, my brilliant co-host, is on vacation. She's on vacation taking a well-deserved leave of absence. Well, leave of absence for one whole week from the Advisory Opinions Podcast. But I know you guys are already disappointed in this podcast. I know you're already frustrated and angry, but do not press pause. Do not skip. I have a great guest, Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, my friend, FIRE Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. And this guest spot is particularly salient because his presence on this podcast is a demonstration in a tangible way

of how both Greg and I are responsive to donors and fans. So Greg, do you want to tell the people what happened? So we got this really troublesome... First of all, thanks for having me on. Welcome to the DC area. We got this email from a donor who said, I used to give $200 a month, and I've reduced it to $50 a month because you're not on the dispatch enough.

And so I wrote David saying, David, we're hemorrhaging money. This is unsustainable. And we're kind of kidding a little bit, but you know, so David immediately invited me on. So nobody can say we're not responsive to donors. I expect that $200 to go back, please. Thank you very much. Exactly. It was, I mean, the responsiveness was pretty frighteningly immediate, actually. So it's like we didn't have anything else to do. Maybe we didn't have anything else to do. It was, I mean, the responsiveness was pretty frighteningly immediate, actually. Yes, it was. It's like we didn't have anything else to do. Maybe we didn't have anything else to do.

Well, what was perfect about it is Sarah was going on vacation, and I was like, I need a guest. And then your email popped in my inbox. I was like, oh, problem solved. Donor satisfied. Fan happy. I mean, this is for you. Yes, free speech on campus solved. Donor satisfied. Fan happy. Free speech on campus solved. This is for you. Yes, free speech on campus solved. So this is for you, donor slash fan, this podcast. All right. So let's sort of set up what the podcast is going to be. So Greg, he runs FIRE, my longtime friend. We used to work together at FIRE. Gosh, we worked together at FIRE before I was at

FIRE because you were the legal director at FIRE. I was the first member, I think, of the FIRE legal network. I think you were, yeah. Yeah, it's funny. David and I became friends because he was doing litigation defending free speech rights on campus before this was cool, you know, like back in like 2001. And we would end up on the phone sometimes and we start talking about like Star Trek and stuff. You know, like, you know, we're nerds with strong opinions. Actually, that's kind of almost redundant. And yeah, so I got particularly angry

about the bad trolley problem example in one episode of Voyager that I thought was actually an immoral decision where Captain Janeway put 120 innocent people in her crew in danger to save the life of one super Hitler. I'd forgotten about that. I'd forgotten about that. It was outrageous. They basically made an apology episode for it on Enterprise. Anyway, sorry, we should get back to free speech on campus. Can I just say that nerds with strong opinions would be a fantastic podcast name? That would be so good.

The millions of listeners. All right, so what we're going to do, so Greg, from his perch at FIRE, probably has his finger on the pulse of free speech, not just on campus, but sort of the state of free speech in the United States, more than maybe any single individual. Because one of the things that, heck, we've argued for 20 plus years is that what starts on campus does not stay on campus. And you sort of planted your flag years ago, waving it in the wind, saying, wait a minute, none of this, all of you people are saying all of these free speech problems on campus, they're going to stay on campus once

people hit the real world. You're saying, no, wait, all these students are going to change the real world. They're not going to conform to it. They're going to change it. So let's just start with a question. From where you sit on your perch at FIRE at the beginning of a new school year, what is the state of free speech on campus in the United States of America? Oh my goodness. It's one of these things where you take criticism for saying this every year, but it's been true every year, is that 2020 was the worst year I'd ever seen for free speech on campus. We started developing a scholar database to see how many professors were targeted for being fired. And we tried to look back to 2015.

We found that there were 113 attempts to get professors fired just in 2020. And that doesn't count students. That doesn't count. That doesn't count students. That doesn't count. And the, and these, and this is also pretty remarkable in the face of the fact that some of these schools have literally no conservatives in some of their departments. And nonetheless, you have this many professors being, uh, being fired. So, um, I, I've never seen it this bad. Uh, we started doing, um, we, we, we released two bits of data, one on our scholar database and our school rankings. The thing that allowed us to do rankings, the capacity we never had before, was to be able to ask students directly, are you able to express yourself on this campus?

Because we knew what their codes looked like. We knew what their behavior looked like. We didn't have the one final thing that could actually let us say, go to this school if you want free speech and don't go to the school if you do. And, you know, the numbers there were kind of shocking, particularly about things like about acceptance of violence, about, but also about, there was another study that wasn't even ours, talking about 82% of self-describing liberal students saying they would report their professor for being offensive. So it's kind of like if you're a professor and you're not worried, although I don't think there's many of the, that aren't currently worried in the environment,

maybe you should be. Yeah. Now that, so, you know, I think that I follow, I try to follow the cancel, the attempted cancellations and the cancel culture stuff pretty darn closely. But that number surprised even me, the over 100 surprised even me. So those are cancellation attempts or terminations. And just professors, not students. Right, right. So that's stuff that happened that was stuff that didn't make the national media, that didn't really make it onto, at least prominently onto Twitter. So in other words, if you're monitoring this sort of cancel culture stuff on Twitter and think you have a handle on it, you're underestimating what's going on. Is that what you're saying?

I am. And it really profoundly worries me because, you know, I wrote a book with Jonathan Haidt called Coddling the American Mind. We noticed something strange happening on campus around 2013. Students who used to be really good on free speech, used to be the best on free speech out of professors and administrators and students, students got it the best. And that changed like lightning struck right around late 2013, 2014. And that changed like lightning struck right around late 2013, 2014. And it's just proceeded to, and the funny thing is you'll have critics who say, oh, 20, you know, 2016 wasn't that bad of a year for disinvitations. And it's like, no, it doesn't have to, it's not going to be exactly linear every single year. You only need to really scare a student or professor population like once every couple of years to get your point across. population like once every couple of years to get your point across. But something really significant had happened on campus. And if you told me the kind of cases I'd be seeing today,

you know, 10 years ago, I would have been like, you're catastrophizing, you're being ridiculous. These are no way people are, you know, getting in trouble for saying, you know, biological sex exists, for example. But it's amazing how bad it's gotten in such a short time. Yeah, that's the thing that's really fascinating to me because if you look back at our legal efforts, so going all the way back to, gosh, was it 2002, 2003? gosh, was it 2002, 2003? We started the speech code litigation project with a lawsuit against a public university in Pennsylvania. And we began chipping away at the speech code edifice around the country. And we knocked down codes here and there and everywhere. I'm almost about to go into the Roy Kent chant from Ted Lasso. I don't know if you're watching that. I love Ted Lasso. I'm almost about to go into the Roy Kent chant from Ted Lasso. I don't know if

you're watching that. I love Ted Lasso. I think the endings are getting maybe a little too silly, but the show's a genius. Yeah, it's so great. But anyway, so we were here and there and everywhere knocking down speech codes and winning and winning and winning. I think DJ Khaled wrote a song about free speech litigation in the early 2000s, which was, all I do is win, win, win, win, win. And so we were winning everywhere, knocking down these speech codes and really clearing sort of a legally protected super highway for free speech on campus. But then what ends up happening, at least from my perception in a lot of these instances, is that we had cleared away the legal protection so that

professors, students were more protected from the actions of public university administrators than ever before. But then the peer, this is what you're, you know, the culture of intimidation and shaming and anger, which is just as difficult to endure, if not more difficult to endure sometimes as an actual punitive action from a department began to rise. And you famously videotaped one of the first big incidents of this. Yeah, that was Nicholas Christakis. Now, of course, it was turned into conspiracy theory. Why was Greg Lukianoff secretly in the quad when the confrontation in Silliman Campus happened?

Because I'd been invited by Erica and Nicholas Christakis the previous spring to come that day to give a speech about free speech. It was just a complete coincidence. And I got to watch this professor who are two of the kindest people I think I've ever met who do more for their community, Erica and Nicholas Christakis. And I've heard this email so badly misrepresented, intentionally, as best I can tell,

by Yale professors saying, and Erica Christakis, David, I literally, at Bard College, I saw a Yale professor claim that what Erica Christakis was doing was telling people to dress up in Klansroom or put on blackface. And I'm always like, read the letter that Erica wrote, because it's an old-fashioned, you know, only recently old-fashioned, but defense of student autonomy. Basically saying, like, are we really, is it really our job? And it didn't even say it's definitely not.

It questioned is, like, is it our job to interfere with what students decide to wear for Halloween? You know, like, aren't they supposed to be able to navigate these kind of decisions on their own? Like, are we their parents? We're not supposed to be. You know, basically exactly what the previous generations of students would have thought was OK. And I was there for this confrontation in Silliman. And I videotaped it to make sure that everybody knew that Nicholas Christakis was behaving with almost unbelievable patience in the front of being called disgusting, in the front of being yelled at with people crying, demanding that he apologize or quit. in the front of being yelled at, with people crying, demanding that he apologize or quit.

And that was definitely a career low point for me, because what it showed was that our big fear that we saw going back to the late 90s, back when I was in law school, the big slow motion train wreck you could see was that free speech, there were efforts to turn free speech into basically a problematic idea on campus. And this goes back to people like Mary Matsuda, Richard Delgado, going back to the 80s. And it was clear it was going to happen. And it didn't seem like there was anything we could really do with it. And this was back when I worked at the ACLU, Northern California. You could already see free speech becoming the not cool cause. But what's essentially happened is that when you're in power,

when your ideas are ascendant, when your ideas are actually popular, free speech starts to look like an impediment. So basically, you had generations of students coming and saying, it's like, I want this speech code, I want this person punished. And people are like, no, no, no, free speech, free, free speech. But as universities became more became less and less, you know, ideologically diverse it Yeah, once you're the decision maker, it's pretty normal for people to start seeing free speech as part of the problem. But it's it sunk its teeth in so profoundly to this, like seeing some of the situations we've seen at the New York Times over the past couple of years. It's like they would have sounded like exaggerated stories that I would have rolled my eyes at, even in 2010.

seen this repeated, not just at the New York Times, but multiple other institutions where there seems to be a, there will be an internal revolt by younger, more activist employees. Now, they may not represent a majority of the employees, they may not, but there is a very strong internal reaction to speech that some folks on the staff find upsetting. And what's striking to me is that the older, more old school liberal, small L liberal kind of progressives in the staff seem unprepared to be hit so hard from their left. And that, you know, and often are quite willing to capitulate quite quickly. And there's an interesting parallel, you know, in when we look at accounts of what began to happen in campus activism, like in the late 60s and early 70s, there's a parallel.

You had much more radical students confronting largely democratic, left-leaning professors and administrators. And if you're, I think there's something interesting psychologically that goes on. If you're on the right, you're unaccustomed to being hit from the right. If you're on the left, you're unaccustomed to being hit by the left, and you are far more vulnerable to that. And I think that that's something that is these folks who are they're being essentially blindsided and don't know quite how to respond to it it's almost like it inflicts a kind of psychological ideological trauma on them and they respond with capitulation like that i mean just instant

capitulation yeah i remember going to speak at university of delaware um and this was actually secretly when i was going through i was just about to have my like mental breakdown that led to me going to go into the hospital and then getting into CBT, which ultimately cognitive behavioral therapy, which then led to, you know, coddling the American mind. And I remember just being yelled at by students. And it was amazing because like the students who were supported. So look up the University of Delaware program listeners. It's crazy. It's like the most aggressive ideological program we've ever seen. It really was like, I mean, literally one of the employees said, this will leave a mental footprint on your head unknowingly, like basically quoting O'Brien from 1984, but like approvingly. and from 1984, but like approvingly. And it was just a very aggressive way of getting students to be, you know, they had questionnaires about their sexuality

and what races they would date and all this kind of stuff. And it's just this absolutely crazy case. But when I went to go speak at University of Delaware, you know, just getting shouted out by students. And the amazing thing is the students would always begin by saying, yes, this program went too far, but.

And I'm like, I'm not saying anything more than that. But like, I'm not, but it was one of those things where it's, you know, it can be, um, I can understand why, uh, uh, there's a lot of sort of chilled speech at the moment, but what, what's going on right now. So I thought we had a moment, um, I'm working on a big feature piece for reason magazine at the moment. And, uh, one of the things I'm opening it up with is the much forgotten movie, uh, PCU, which came out in 1994, which was at John Favreau. And what of the things I'm opening it up with is the much forgotten movie, PCU, which came out in 1994, which was at John Favreau and Ari Gold. I forget what the name of that,

Jeremy Piven, Jeremy Piven, you know, what was the star. And it was not a good movie, but it was a signal that basically this had become so safe to make fun of. We could actually make a mainstream movie about it. And I can,

and the risk of insulting the, the viewers of the excellent program, The Chair, The Chair, to some degree, is kind of like our PCU in the sense that it became, it's kind of okay to like say, this is really happening and this is not, this is a problem. And in that very same month, we got a front page article in The Economist about sort of like repressive ideology. And then you have Ann Applebaum's incredibly moving piece in The Atlantic saying, listen, there's this whole category of professors who are just kind of erased and you're never going to hear their names because these hearings are secret and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, okay, you know, and then we came up with our data talking about, you know, we, right now we have about 26 tenured professors fired in the past, in the past, since 2015. generally like, but basically saying, well, the chair is just, you know, old white people feeling self-conscious and not getting with the program and also making the point that someone being fired for a Nazi salute, that's

just fanciful. And it's like someone being fired for a Nazi salute and the fact that it's sarcastic, it doesn't matter. Nobody cares about intent versus impact anymore. And they should, but they don't. And I'm like, that would be like, that would be like on a 10 point scale of outrageousness for the cases I've seen. That would be like a four, you know, like it just, a Nazi, did a little, yeah, Hitler, kind of like salute at him. And he was turned out. He was fired. So it's not only the fact that this is unlikely to happen is somewhat belied by the fact that it actually did happen. Yeah. And the interesting thing, and I would recommend The Chair. I watched it from start

to finish. And I thought one of the most accurate, I thought it was really good. I think there were two parts that were particularly acutely accurate. One was when the professor, believing that he can go and meet with the students and make everything okay, is instead just, it all goes to crap. I actually thought that was less accurate, though, having been in the audience for some of these situations, that the students were being unreasonable, but they weren't shouting, they weren't crying, they weren't shouting over him.

And when I've seen most of these incidents on campus, people come in with cowbells and will just, they actually portrayed the students as being, unfortunately, more reasonable than I've seen them in similar circumstances in real life. Yeah. Yeah. That, no, I mean, you raise a good point as far as like some of the mob scenes that we've seen videotaped, but what, what I did think was realistic about it, it was the way in which everything that the professor said was immediately taken in bad faith. In the least charitable way. In the least charitable, as if the presumption is, I'm speaking to a racist,

how would a racist talk if he was trying to hide his racism? And so there was literally no way for him to win. And then the other thing was just this sort of internal meeting where you have the chair, you have the dean, and you have the PR person. And they're sitting there looking at Twitter, and they're in this atmosphere of we have to do something drastic and serious to stop the bleeding. And there's just this kind of atmosphere of, for lack of a better term, you know, panic over sort of Twitter-driven micro-cycles. And yet, you have to have a sacrificial lamb. You have to do something. And I kind of had a similar hope to you that, okay, if it's getting okay in The Economist, if you're seeing powerful writing in The Atlantic, if you're seeing the chair, which is very, you know, it humanizes the person who's canceled,

humanizes him without infantilizing him. I think it's a really good show. But, and that, is there something turning here? And I still think something might be turning, but things don't turn on a dime. No, you're right. Well, and the thing is, it's just, how much more proof do people actually want that there's an issue? And of course, we're having this argument or this discussion when, like I said, viewpoint diversity at some of these schools is almost zero. Because the really gobsmacking thing, David, was that Adam Gurry, who is the son of Martin Gurry, someone for whom I have a lot of respect for Martin Gurry, was quoted as saying that of the

426 targeted professors just since 2015, 113 just in 2020, he said, if any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved. And I'm like, okay, you should have answered, I don't know a lot about this topic. So why don't you ask someone who does? Because it's just like, I think he might have took the total number of any place that's designated as having a higher education function and then divided it, or maybe every single person who claims they're a professor in the entire world. But when you transfer this over to, say, like the top 10 schools, you're talking about, since 2015, you're talking about like an average of like seven or eight events, attempts just at professors, like since 2015. When you look at the top 100 U.S. News and

World Reports, it's 63% of them have had one of these again, just since 2015. When you add in speech codes, when you add in litigation, you're approaching probably about 100% of the, uh, of the U S news world report students have had some kind of free speech controversy that at its core said that this person should not be allowed to say something, which is usually pretty in the grand scheme of things, pretty uncontroversial. And it's just like, I, I was just completely gobsmacked by that statement. I'm like, so what, under what circumstance is a 100% and I think, I think he, the funny thing is he actually, when he, when he, when I started talking to him on the internet, the thing that made me just be like, okay, this is pointless is he said, oh, so you're positing some kind of knock-on effect of students being punished, that professors would be hesitant to speak if they knew someone who was

actually punished for saying that. I'm like, yeah, it's called the chilling effect. It's about as well documented as a phenomenon in psychology. It's recognized in law. If you really think that you're going to be the professor who, you know, has a colleague who just got fired for saying something slightly non-doctrinaire, if you think you're going to be completely unaffected by that, you're really paying yourself probably an unearned compliment. You know, and I think there are two things that are true at once here. One is, there is a, the near, the reality that school after school after school is experiencing something like this indicates that there is a profound chilling effect at the same time

you do have a collective action problem and that there are a critical mass of professors on these campuses who are very uncomfortable with all of this who do not like this and will not say anything about it and and because because what ends up happening is if you're the single head over the foxhole, then you're going to take a hate storm. If there's 15 heads over the foxhole, if there's 20 heads over the foxhole, then it changes the dynamic. But where are you going to get the 20 people, the 25 people, the 30 people who genuinely don't like what's happening to free speech on campus?

But if you're going to say to them, do you want to go through what Professor Smith is going through? Heck no. Heck no. I used to represent professors, and I would have professors tenured, Greg, who would call me for legal advice and whisper in their office with the door shut. I wish that was slightly surprising, but. Yeah. And there, you have two things at once. Part of you saying, I totally understand this.

And the other part is speak up and. And because we need more people to speak up, but then at the same time, you recognize the collective action problem. And that's where things like Heterodox Academy, I think, are so helpful as, you know, a gathering place for small L, liberal-minded professors. I mean, there is free speech pushback that exists, but it's still not reached the level where I feel like the balance of power is tilting back in the free speech direction. Yeah, the Academic Freedom Alliance that Robbie George helped set up at Princeton was a good sign that he wanted, and he described that as kind of being like a NATO pact of professors that a strike against one is a strike against all. And we'll see if that works. I think we had cases, I think the AUP, some local AUPs had a situation where they actually took the student side against a professor a summer ago. Like, so it's, and like I said, this is all happening in an environment where there aren't even that many, you know, open dissenting professors to begin with, like,

at least in the sense of like conservative, there are departments that have literally none. And then you, and then when people will bring up, oh, this is my favorite. And David, you'll especially appreciate this is when I write about this stuff, someone's like, oh, well, yeah, you know, there is no free speech crisis on campus, but the real free speech crisis on campus is what's happening to liberal professors and students. And it's like, okay, first of all, I don't think you understand who you're talking to because you probably know about those cases because of us, you know, like, because we were defending the liberal students and professors, you probably got something that we were literally quoted in about this. And the mind boggling thing is it shows the rot that Twitter does to your

brain. Cause it's kind of like, no, if they no, if it's actually coming from all sides, the PR department, the left-leaning students, and right-leaning trolls on the internet, that makes the situation for free speech on campus worse, not better. Worse, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the things I remember back in the day, back in the day, Greg, when we were in the same office together, back in the day, we would say there is a spectrum of acceptable speech on campus, and it has its limits to the left as well as to the right. Now, it had more room for speech on the left. There was more room there, but there were limits. And we would get involved and frequently got involved with people who were engaged in quite controversial speech from the left, defending that speech from attack. One thing that I think I've noticed from the right is this sort of rise of what you might call sort of professor hunting.

In other words, there's always a crazy lefty academic somewhere, and it's great clickbait for certain right-wing sites. And so what's ended up happening is you have the rise of sort of, hey, I can tape my professor, my lefty professor, and I can be on Breitbart, or maybe I can be on Fox. And there's been sort of that rise of that sort of professor sniping on the right that you've seen, I don't, you know, you know, the numbers better than I do. They've definitely claimed some victims. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I don't think I don't think it's at the scale, but they have definitely claimed victims. Well, we have a we have a scholar database at the Fire.org and we talk about whether or not the threats came from the right or from the left. You know, more come from the left, but a big chunk of them also come from the right. And that's usually, you know, donors calling in saying this guy has to be fired or this professor needs to be fired. So there are plenty

of examples of left-leaning professors getting in trouble. And it really started around 2013 when a professor sent this in response to the Newtown massacre. It wasn't the most temperate thing to say, but basically say, like, next time this happens, you know, it should be your kids. Offensive, I get. Like, I'm a dad. Yeah, I remember that. As soon as you bring people's kids in,

it's like, ah, that triggered something. But anyway, but we saw a lot of cases, you know, over the past, you know, eight years or so, where it's liberal professors being targeted for what they tweeted. And sometimes, but yeah, I call it the Overton peephole, you know, eight years or so where it's, it's liberal professors being targeted for what they tweeted. And sometimes, um, but yeah, but the, I call it the Overton people, you know, because it seems like, um, uh, particularly for conspiracies of the culture war working together, we've taken these sort of campus Overton window and sort of shrunk it and shrunk it and shrunk it

because the, you know, like people, I like that. Well, Laura, you know, Laura Kipnis is always, people come back to her a lot, but that's partially because one, she got charged by under Title IX for criticizing Title IX for being repressive about speech and then got charged again when she wrote a book about it. So that's crazy by itself. But most, but almost more importantly, she wrote this incredible book called Unwanted Advances that talks about this weird, creepy, parallel world of investigations that you're never going to hear about, that people like me and David and Scott Greenfeld and Ken White, we all know professors who have been in this situation. And it's oftentimes for something that's pretty, you know, would have been considered to a previous generation pretty minor. What's fascinating to me is how we've sort of seen a cycle.

Because if you go back and sort of read the founding document of FIRE would be the Shadow University. That's the book, Alan Charles Koros, Harvey Silverglade. It's chilling the stories in there. It's chilling the stories in there. It's chilling the stories in there. And so you go back, you read The Shadow University, and then you look at some of the modern fact patterns and you're thinking, wait a minute, it's all still there. It's all still there. And I think that we didn't really realize it, but we did have a period of time, I would say maybe even roughly a decade between 2004 and 2014, where I felt like we were really

on the offensive on free speech. And we were making real progress. And then it turned. Yeah. Then it turned. Well, this is a big part of my focus for the Reason article, is I talk about sort of the ignored years. And I don't mean literally ignored, but I'd say from 1995 to about 2014, 2015, this was not as well covered by mainstream media. And that's partially because something very real changed. You had the first kind of appearance of students who were demanding censorship, at least a critical mass of them, throughout my entire career. My career began in 2001. So something really did change.

But at the same time, you know, when you look back at the first great age of political correctness, like 1985 to 1995, the mistake we made was once this was a joke, that once this was a joke, and once it's been defeated sufficiently in court, um, you know, professors kind of, uh, lost their flair for, um, speech codes. A lot of them changed their mind about it, but then everybody kind of stopped paying attention. And all of this stuff that was going to make 20, 2013, 2014 worse, um, what got worse? Like, so one thing that was really gobsmacking to me when I was, um, doing the research with Jonathan Haidt was realizing the acceleration and the lack of

viewpoint diversity starting in the late nineties. It's basically like people took, take, took their eyes off the ball in 1995 after the Corey V. Stanford case, then suddenly, you know, like the, the, the rates of, um, of hiring people, you know, who were more left-leaning versus right, it just skyrocketed. And that's how you end up with departments where it's like 42 to 1. And it tends to be the humanities. I mean, the total number moved from 2 to 1 to now 5 to 1,

but I feel like that undersells how bad it is in particular departments, for example, where your ideology actually really does matter. And this was the period in which bias-related incident programs started up. This is where, if you don't know about that, that's oftentimes the just barely constitutional way universities try to enforce conformity by having literally people walk around the dorms and write down offensive things that your friends wrote on your dry erase board. And it's like, wow. And I've seen so many amazing...

When Samantha Harris was first investigating this, they would see these BRT reports. It would be like, you know, picture of a penis, picture of a penis, picture of penis, swear word, picture of penis. It was basically just offensive juvenile stuff that people write on their friends' doors when they're drunk.

Shockingly, they do that. But this is also when you started having a more politicized cohort of people graduating from teachers' colleges popping up. And I honestly think that the big cyberbullying scare of 2010 that involved a lot of high-profile cyberbullying cases, which Emily Bazelon did a good job of showing how actually a lot of those weren't really as simple as cyberbullying cases. It led to a lot of state legislation, which led to a lot more ideological programming in high schools. And a lot of the

stuff, if you look at the stuff that we're talking about in Coddling the American Mind, basically our theory is that it's as if we taught a generation three great untruths. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings. And life is a battle between good people and evil people. These are three things that Haidt and I both agree with. This is the worst possible advice you could give to somebody. But I think some of this programming gave precisely that advice. Yeah. Yeah. It's as if what began to be sort of received conventional wisdom is that exposure not just to what would be called and properly labeled harassment. In other words, something that would be harassment under Title IX, under Title VI, under Title VII,

but disagreement began to create a... The argument was if it was disagreement on specific issues that were particularly close to you, it inflicted a moral injury, that there was a moral injury, there was a wound. And that wound, even if it ever healed, it was sort of like an old football injury that you're always going to walk with a limp, right? And so the perception was that you then have to protect people from these wounds, which inflict permanent debilitating psychological injury on individuals. And I thought that was one thing about your, you know, coddling of the American mind. And I feel like we haven't really introduced coddling, although a lot of listeners have read it. So this is the book you jointly wrote with Jonathan Haidt that was,

you know, really eye-opening to a tremendous number of people on this very issue. That's where you get into sort of this safetyism point of view, because if disagreement on issues that are close to your heart are going to inflict permanent injury on an individual, psychic injury, then it becomes an absolute priority to try to prevent people from having that injury inflicted in the same way that you would guard against some sort of devastating physical injury that you can't fully recover from. And you're rejoinder to that, that you have to completely adjust your mindset from that which doesn't kill you, makes you weaker, from a different

and preferable formulation when it comes to disagreement and argument. This is a deep cultural thing because you're not just talking about administrators here. You're talking about parents, right? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's too early to announce this, but I am now looking into doing a follow-up to Coddling the American Mind, where we focus a lot more on solutions and try to figure out what parents can do, what would be better for K-12, what would be better for colleges, that kind of stuff. But go for ideas that include entirely new institutions, not cutting around the edges, just actually trying to figure out big, bold solutions. And when it comes to parents, one thing that we think we undervalued in the book was the role of parental anxiety

sort of creating childhood anxiety. And there was this wonderful piece by Kate Julian in The Atlantic also talking about how some of the best therapies for childhood anxiety, which is, you know, skyrocketing and has been for a long time, is CBT for the parents, which is with only like CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy. Yeah, I'm like the I'm a big proponent of cognitive behavioral therapy. I'm a big proponent of cognitive behavioral therapy. And for kind of like, you know, for... Is it right-brained? I don't know how to describe it. But basically, it's learning how to talk back

to your own exaggerated voices that everybody has. And what I mean by voices is, you know, when you have that voice in your head saying, this date is going to fail and you're going to die alone and, you know, like nobody ever loves you're going to die alone and nobody ever loves you. And it's amazing because it's not power of positive thinking. Sometimes people think that's what this is.

No, it's just using your prefrontal cortex. It's looking at what you just said and asking yourself, is this accurate? Is this really proof you're going to die alone? And saying to yourself, you know, actually, it was just a date that went bad. And I still feel sad about it, but I feel 90% less sad about it than when I thought this was the final verdict on me. And the point was that, and I started noticing this back in 2007, it was as if administrators were saying, do overgeneralize, do catastrophize, do engage in binary thinking, you're in constant

danger, the world is one big risk and you won't survive it. And from 2007 to 2013, students weren't buying it. They were rolling their eyes at it just like students usually do. And then again, 2013, 2014, like lightning hit, suddenly you have students coming on campus and they're making the medicalized arguments that speech needs to be shut down because it's medically harmful to have these, you know, hateful or hurtful ideas. Yeah. And, you know, look, this is my generation of parents here. And I think this is really important for listeners to understand because it's not like students are arriving on campus with a robust view of free speech and then having the administrators, the administrators are then teaching them to be snowflakes. That is not the way this is happening. It is, you have

helicopter parents who are kind of coming into, helicopter parents with their kids who've grown up in this helicopter parenting world. And it's as if then the parents are then handing over the helicoptering to the administrators and the kids are still looking who look to mom and dad to make the world safe for their feelings are now just sort of transferring over to another entity who's supposed to make the world safe for their feelings. And, and what ends up, and one thing that is really interesting to me, my peers, my parental peers raised their children profoundly differently from the way they were raised. Oh, absolutely.

And this is something that you guys got into. if my memory is wrong, sort of asked the audience, at what age were you allowed out of the house without supervision? And then versus at what age did you allow your children out of the house without supervision? And the difference in those numbers was dramatic. And the weird thing is, when I was young, I was kind of a free-range kid, even though I had pretty strict parents. kind of a free range kid, even though I had pretty strict parents at a time of life that was empirically more dangerous than things are now. And my parental peers, like the idea that their kids would be allowed to get out of the house on their own in a nice neighborhood at age nine, unthinkable. Yeah. Unthinkable. Yeah. John, I've watched on us. And for me, the answer for a lot of us is five or six. Could I grab some change, walk down to the corner store, try to get myself a comic book?

Pretty young. And having people in the audience, when they raise their hand saying 12, 14, it's like, wow, this is intense. And it's like, wow, this is intense. And one of the things, Steve Horowitz, who passed away from cancer this past year, very tragic. It looked actually like he was recovering. We quote him at length in Coddling the American Mind, talking about the democratic value of play. That essentially unstructured free playtime is important to learn how to navigate interrelationships. But when that's entirely replaced by if you have a conflict-telling adult from your parents, and same thing in K-12, same thing in higher education, that essentially you can go to the BRT, which a lot, uh, which a lot of students do, uh, to, in order to report your, your, your fellow students for being offensive or your professors,

as we covered earlier. Um, and then you have the human rights, uh, HR department, you know, at corporations and the re and this should be worry people more than, uh, than you might think because freedom, you know, is this idea that, that, um, freedom is this idea that conflicts should not be intermediated. It's between you and your fellow citizen. You're at some level, as a matter of dignity, equal. That you can carry this out on your own. But when you're always looking up

to authority to figure out problems and you think that's actually the appropriate response, that's not training people to live in what we would consider a free society. It's a traditional society, but it's an authoritarian society, even if it doesn't feel that way.

And so the potential damage, I think it does here, it does literally keep me up at night. Yeah, you know, my goodness, we're in a rich, this is a rich topic right here, because for me, you know, again, I had strict parents growing up, very disciplined focus. I did not so much. And yeah, but I do not remember a time when I could not leave my house and go anywhere in the neighborhood. Yeah.

The joke among my friends was Josh has to call home by one. Wait, Josh has to call home by midnight. John has to be home by one. And Greg has to call home by one. Wait, Josh has to call home by midnight. John has to be home by one and Greg has to be home by Tuesday. For me, it was I had to be home for dinner because we all ate dinner together and then I could go back out. And then I had another time when I had to be home and it was like this. Where are you going? I'm, you know, Brent's house, you know, and then I'd go and then I, we would just do stuff all afternoon, all into the evening and then come back what you've been doing. And that's that, you know, but here's the fascinating thing is then, so let's say you're in

sports. Okay. So let's say you love basketball, baseball, football. When I was growing up, baseball, football, when I was growing up, school sports ended and you had the summer that was yours. There wasn't travel teams, all of this stuff. Now with my kids, my older two kids, well, all three kids, but my older two, throughout high school and throughout junior high, if we wanted to have them play high school sports and have this sort of free play lifestyle, not possible. Not possible. Because everything about sports, sports became all-consuming. I remember when my kids were in elementary school, talking to parents who had kids in junior high and high school, and this was when I was traveling around the country, fundraising a ton. I was still in the army reserves and I was doing that. And I just felt frazzled and busy. And I was like talking to these parents and they said, I would say, how are you guys doing? And

they would have this look like they, they just run a marathon and they'd say, I am just, we're just ridiculously busy. And I'd kind of internally roll my eyes. No, you're not. Then my kids got on that rat race. And it was like, you're making this decision. Are you going to play high school basketball and high school football? Are you going to play high school volleyball? If the answer to that is yes, then a whole lot of other things followed from that. And the other aspect was what you notice when all play becomes structured. All of it is through travel teams, school teams, school practices. All disputes are adjudicated by adults. Every one of them. You don't have that, we're going to kind of work this out in the

backyard and then we're going to go on. I'm going to say all disputes, but an enormous percentage of disputes. And you get in the habit of looking for the adjudicator the instant that there is a personal disagreement. I think that's a really, and I don't have a great way out of it, out of this rat race, to be honest. honest. Yeah. And, and the amount of, you know, one of the things that is, was also remarkable looking at the scholar database is that, you know, my overall argument of having to accept, um, that we give Harvard, for example, you know, way too much power over our kids' futures. Um, and Yale, you know, when you, when, when literally every single, you know, uh, Supreme court justice, uh, I think except Amy Coney Barrett attended either Harvard or Yale at some point, you know, Supreme Court justice, I think except Amy Coney Barrett, attended either Harvard or Yale at some point, you know, like there's something sort of uncomfortable going on. And we looked at the scholar database, the top 10 schools, the most exclusive schools in the country, which way punch above their weight in terms of like who, I sound like a Marxist, but I mean this,

who becomes America's ruling class. I think they were averaging something like seven or eight incidents of professors being targeted just since 2015. Like they were some of the worst ones that we saw. And they're also the ones that already had the lowest viewpoint diversity rate. We give these schools way too much power over our lives. And we have to figure out some way out of this trap because these institutions, you know, they feel no competition in a meaningful sense. Because if you're, you know, at Stanford or Harvard, like you get to say you have such power over where parents think their kids are going to end up in life.

You are the easy pass to actually probably a fairly brutal life working in a law firm, but that's another story altogether. But the extent to which we sort of like rely on the small number of elite schools for our leaders is we're overdoing it wildly. Well, there's an interesting cultural divide here. And I've written about this before, but I want to write about it more. Depending on where you are. So if you're in the Northeast, if you're on the urban West Coast, the parental culture

is hyper-focused, especially the upper middle class and wealthy parental culture is hyper-focused on elite school admission. It is a family project. It is something that they're thinking about from early ages. If you're where I am in suburban, the suburban South, it is not a thing. It is not a thing. And so what ends up happening is that you begin to have, and this is going to segue into some interesting numbers, you begin to have this cultural divide in college admissions, an ideological divide in college admissions, a cultural divide on college campuses. So, for example, in the Southeastern Conference area where I live, the big trend now on Saturdays is the student body chants F Joe Biden.

And so you will hear it. I was at University of Tennessee football game about two or three weeks ago. And six, seven times in the game against the University of Pittsburgh, the entire arena stadium, 90 plus thousand starting in the student body is the F Joe Biden chant. I doubt you'd hear that at Harvard. I seriously doubt it. And so you're sitting there going, wait a minute, whatever happened to woke college students? It is, but it's the University of

Tennessee. It's the University of Alabama. But then you go to Harvard and Harvard, this 87% of the incoming Harvard class of 2025 voted for Joe Biden compared to 6.3% for Donald Trump, 87 to 6. And I think a lot of that is a product of these very different cultures, these hyper focused on elite admissions, coastal communities compared to where I lived where, hey, yeah, University of Tennessee is fine. That's great. And that was my superpower coming in is that, you know, like I, my parents are immigrants. So there was this kind of vague sense I was supposed to go to college.

It was important, but I didn't entirely understand why. And I visited one university, one big American university. They gave me basically a full scholarship. I was like, sure, okay, I'll go there. And by the time I went to Stanford for law school, it was amazing to see the cultural difference that these were, this was something people have been preparing for, for their whole lives. And I kind of felt like almost like an insult to like, like to that. But I will say that one thing that was a little disturbing was how the, the exaggerated additional regard you

got for going to one of these fancy schools seemed way out of proportion to what the accomplishment actually was. And we've only gotten sort of worse in that direction. And I think that, you know, also one problem I don't know how to solve is that we have students coming into hitting college at having passed fewer sort of maturity milestones, um, than they would have been in, in, in a previous generation. So this is something that, that Eric, um, what was his last name? Um, Eric, I forget. Um, but he was arguing that, um, uh, uh, university of Chicago professor who has a famous dad, I can't remember his actual name. But saying that, you know, students are less mature, therefore we need to get rid

of free speech on campus. And it was a really remarkable piece. But at the same time, like what do we do about this sort of like this lack of sort of locus of control, of agency, of all this kind of stuff. And one thing we definitely came strongly,

we came to strongly support would be the idea of some kind of working gap year that essentially like if people, if students had a chance to get out and make some decisions for themselves and feel autonomous and meet different people, that could make a big difference, not just to, you know, polarization, but also to mental health. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think about my, my upbringing. So I grew up, I mean, my parents, very educated. My dad was a college math professor and my mom was a teacher, but at a rural Baptist college in Kentucky. I went to Lipscomb University. Good school, but it's not the school that like parents in Boston are working their kids towards their whole life, you know. that like parents in Boston are working their kids towards their whole life, you know? And it didn't even occur to me to think about going to Harvard Law School until literally I got my LSAT scores back. Same, same. Total same. I was like, oh, look at that. I'm weirdly good at this thing.

Yeah. Hey, let me swing for the fences. And so, but I am of the view now that that path that you and I took is almost closed. Yeah, you're probably right. Or it's closing. Yeah, it's closing. And so it has to be sort of this all-consuming life family project. the other thing is you have the elite cultural institutions off campus, the Silicon Valley, Goliaths, the elite journalism, you name it, and where are they going to recruit? They're going to Harvard, Stanford, Yale to recruit. They're not going to the University of Tennessee necessarily to recruit, even though there's a pile of very smart kids there. They're not going there to

recruit, and it just reinforces this whole cycle. And that was something that Haidt and I keep hearing is from people who run, you know, companies coming to us. And they always, you know, preface, I can't, don't tell anybody I told you this, but that a lot of the elite college graduates that are coming, they're kind of recreating some of the situations they saw on campus where sort of minor squabbles between students now have to be a major sort of between employees have to be sort of a major thing at an individual company and it was actually like a a a friend of mine who's um also who was actually very progressive um and i she wanted to quote unquote talk to me about coddling about my book i was like oh no she's really going

to give me what for and this was and instead and instead, this is what she was saying. She was saying that essentially the, you know, the new crop of activist students who are coming in think the organization that helps people is actually the problem itself. And it ends up leading to this sort of dysfunctional situation. You know, and we're hearing from some,

some, you know, corporate heads that they're just not going to hire from the IVs anymore. And I got to say, some of our best employees at FIRE come from the University of Indiana. Yeah. Oh, for sure. I mean, I think there is a corporate mistake that is being made to assume that the IVs are going to have the most elite minds.

Because I know for a fact, I know for a fact, so for example, the University of Alabama has a program where if you are a national merit scholar, you go to Alabama for free. Okay. So all of a sudden, Alabama has this massive concentration of national merit scholars who are going to college for free. It's a great, I mean, if you're a parent and your kid is, especially if you're a you're a parent and your kid is, you know, especially if you're a middle-class parent and your kid is a National Merit Scholar, heck yeah, free college, are you kidding me? And so, but I think it's past time for employers to realize there are concentrations of kids at a lot of these universities around the country who are every bit as qualified and capable

intellectually. And then the other thing that they would have is if you, let's say you have 100 kids coming into this elite institution or 100 new hires, and instead of 78 of them coming from the IVs or IV equivalents, you've got 40 or 45, and you've got 25, 30 kids coming from the Big Ten or the SEC or the Pac-12 or whatever, you're going to have, it's going to be more diverse. It's just going to be more. Yeah. It's also going to lead to more cultural conflict though, because there'll be such different expectation from the kids who went to the fanciest schools. And this is the funny thing. It is that I tried to work this through at one point, and I think Samantha Harris wanted to

write a book about this as well, and I probably will never actually use this title. But I think the best parallel to what we're seeing, frankly, is more like the Victorian era. And I remember I spoke at Haverford, and this is one of the things that led us to do the speech rankings. Oh, I should talk about speech rankings. To do all these surveys of schools. Because I spoke at a lot of working class schools and I knew that they'd be better for free speech. But experiencing it, I came away much more kind of like, okay, maybe things aren't that bad. Maybe things are improving. I spoke at Haverford and it was like I was in a society where people were like, anytime they could get me alone, they're like, everybody's afraid to say anything here because you will basically be unpersoned. And, you know, and people forget that

also means nobody's going to date you. Like the place has like 1700 students or some like really small number of students. And it just felt like such a tense environment. And I couldn't, I was so kind of horrified by how many, you know, reporters for the student newspaper who were telling us how sort of nervous people were that I kind of gave a, one of my less sort of charitable speeches, but like, listen, you guys are acting like the, you know, elite preparatory school that people think you are. I know that you think you sound very progressive, but to my ears, you sound very Victorian. You sound like the upper class kids always sound to the working class kids, which is, I know how you should think.

I know how you can be better. And the funny thing is, by kind of chastising this group, I got a lot more nodding, you know, like from people who came in hostiles, like, oh, there is something wrong with this. This is not a particularly accepting way. This is kind of assuming that, you know, my institution is the lone arbiter of truth is actually not a very sophisticated way to look at the world. Well, and the other, one other thing that's happening that I think is underestimated by folks on, in many of these Ivy and Ivy equivalent schools that

are very, that are ideological monocultures, in many ways, they also end up radicalizing the right-wing students that are there. Sure. So, yeah. So, you know, one of the things that you have is a sympathy for sort of brute force kind of state interventions and a sympathy for the professor hunting and a sympathy for sort of the punch him in the nose view of politics because a lot of these students had, frankly, miserable experiences in college and say, if this is what the cultural superstructure is, it has to be smashed. It needs to be. So not only are they sort of Victorian in that mindset, they're also radicalizing their opposition in some interesting ways. And I think it's one of the reasons why, after I debated Saurabh Amari and the David Frenchism thing, I had a young student come up to me and say, Saurabh is right because you have no idea how horrible it is on these campuses. And I was thinking...

I think you had a little bit of a lesson of it. Yeah, I think I might know more than you think, but there is a radicalization that is going on, not across the entire right on campus, but in segments of the right on campus that is in response to this radicalization that's happening on the left. It's, you know, one of our cultural trademarks now is that you only counter extremism with opposing extremism. And we're stampeding in that direction. Yeah. Oh, and I wanted to mention the free speech rankings while we still have time. So we were never able to do this previously. But now that we're actually able to ask students what they think of the environments themselves, we're still working out the methodology. But last year, we did 55 schools, and somewhat unsurprisingly, but I'm always surprised when something confirms kind of like

your existing biases, University of Chicago placed first. This year, the number one college, believe it or not, was Claremont McKenna, which is funny because Claremont McKenna in California was previously really bad. And they had some really bad free speech incidents, including surrounding and cutting off Heather McDonald when she tried to speak there. And it was terrible. Threats of violence, yeah. Threats of violence. They chased her to the alternate place where she was having the event. It was crazy. But Claremont McKenna

was the last place I visited before COVID. And they really clearly got down to business. I talked to probably a dozen students who were talking about I came here because they were serious about free speech. So the top five were Claremont McKenna, University of Chicago, University of New Hampshire, Emory, and Florida State. Not all kind of surprises. But the bottom, we did 55 last year. This year, we did 150. This is something that I hope to keep doing every year and get up to at least 300, 400 schools.

But the bottom, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which if you go to thefire.org, has some of the most ridiculous free speech cases you've ever seen, including there was at one point they were trying to tell students that they couldn't like protest in a particular area and they claimed they couldn't because of eminent domain. And we're like, no, you're not understanding that. Boston College, 151. Louisiana State University, shockingly, 152. Marquette University, not surprising at all. And here's a school that I just, maybe I thought I knew a lot of schools, but I never hear anything about this one. But two years in a row, it has hit dead last,

is DePauw University. It was 55 out of 55 last year and 154 out of 154 this year. Goodness, that's fascinating. Well, we'll put in the show notes a link to the scholar database and the free speech rankings so that people can check those out. So I've taken enough of your time, but I do have a question for you. You bet. In our mutual nerds with opinions, have you started foundations yet on Apple TV? I have not. We're actually doing For Mankind. Basically, we're doing what a lot

of other people do, is we don't have an app. We buy an app and then try to binge everything we want to watch on it. So I actually got Apple for shock upon shock, Ted Lasso, which I love. I think it's brilliant. The episode with Beard left me feeling like I've actually had a pretty good life. I felt genuinely inspired

by that brilliant, brilliant episode. So we're watching For Mankind. I'm dying to watch Foundation. We only watch one hour of TV a day. And the funny thing is you can polish off everything if you have a show that you watch with your spouse every night. So I'm going to make a big pitch for Foundation. I might not be able to pull it off. Is it good? I'm hearing nothing but bad. Oh, no. So I haven't watched it yet. But I believe none of it until I see it with my own eyes. I do not trust a lot of Twitter's assessment of sci-fi content. These might be the very same people who try to convince me that Thor was like one of the worst Marvel movies.

And I'm like, no, Thor is an elegant work of art. Like it's a beautifully, it's lighter and it's sweeter. But the idea that Kenneth Branagh was able to transform the completely ridiculous story of Thor in the Marvel universe into something that kind of made a little bit of sense

and was also funny and touching and action-packed, I thought he did a brilliant job. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I'm going to check it out and make my own independent assessment of Foundation,

but I'm looking forward to it. And hey, Apple has spent an enormous amount of money on this, so at the very least, the special effects are going to be fantastic. Well, you know what else they spent a lot of money on this. So at the very least, the special effects are going to be fantastic. Well, you know what else they spent a lot of money on?

Waterworld. And Waterworld has literally at the beginning of the movie, I think the first line is, well, nothing's free in Waterworld. And I'm like, ooh, wow, that's terrible dialogue, and you're starting it right at the very beginning. Well, I'm going to... I have a

limited defense. I won't bore the listeners with my Waterworld defense. I had a feeling you'd have a Waterworld defense. I actually like the world-building aspect of it and sort of the first two-thirds. But then the idea that there was

sitting out there a super tanker in Waterworld that jet skis were in close enough range to human settlements. I just didn't quite get that. But yeah, jet skis and wave runners were in close... Yeah, no, no. But the world building I thought was cool.

And the idea of a person evolving with gills in that kind of world. That's not how evolution works, though. That was cool. That was interesting. You don't just wake up with gills one day. Yeah, I wasn't a huge fan. Oh, but let's end on a positive note. How do you know, Greg? We haven't had a water world.

Fair point, fair point. So I think we should probably leave with a recommendation of a show they met, a movie they haven't seen or a nerdy thing they haven't seen. Did you see Ex Machina? Oh, the,

the movie. Yeah. The movie. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's one that for people who are sort of more size sci-fi skeptic. I thought that was just, that was a excellent film and it's really dark, but it's kind of amazing. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's very good. It's very good, but you better be ready for dark. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's very good.

It's very good. But you better be ready for dark if you're going to watch X-Machina. It's all about the worst about human nature in it, but very, very impressively done. And for lighter fare, Shazam has now become my favorite Christmas movie. Shazam is super solid. All right. All right. Unless we go down this rabbit hole much

longer, we need to cut it off. But I thank you, Greg. Really appreciate you filling in, answering the call, and unnamed fire donor. I mean, we expect you to, we expect you after an entire episode, because of you, we expect you to up your donation to FIRE from 200 a month to, I don't know, 400, 500? Maybe 220. I don't want to be greedy. All right. All right. That's fair enough. Fair enough. I did want to say one thing. Bonnie Snyder at FIRE has a new book released called Indoctrinate, talking about problems in K-12. It's a really compelling book, and it just came out.

Yes, yes. I'm glad you reminded us of that. So check that out, Indoctrinate by Bonnie Snyder. Hey, let's put a link to the book in the show notes. And thank you, Greg. We really appreciate you joining Advisory Opinions. And guys, tune in. We're going to be back on Thursday. Don't know who the guest is yet. And Sarah will be back next week. So as always, please go rate us on Apple Podcasts. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And please check out thedispatch.com.

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