Ask Dr. Drew - Why “Freedom Of Speech” Means Defending Conservative Judges AND Drag Shows w/ Greg Lukianoff & Warren Smith – Ask Dr. Drew – Ep 339

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

The right to free speech applies even when the speech is offensive to you, and true First Amendment defenders will protect the rights of those who don’t agree with them – even if that means defending both conservative judges and drag shows. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has written defenses of a range of cases, including conservative Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan whose Stanford event was disrupted by protestors, an art history instructor who lost his job after showing a medieval depiction of Muhammad, and a Texas college that canceled a charity drag show. “FIRE will be there advocating for our clients and for the First Amendment freedoms of every public university student — no matter how they express themself.” Greg Lukianoff – president of FIRE – says their mission is to “defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought.” Greg is an attorney and NYT bestselling author. He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom From Speech, and FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus. He co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure with Jonathan Haidt. Follow FIRE at https://x.com/TheFIREorg and learn more at https://thefire.org Warren Smith is a writer, film producer, teacher, and volunteer firefighter. Follow him at https://x.com/WTSmith17 and learn more at https://wsmithmedia.com 「 SPONSORED BY 」 Find out more about the companies that make this show possible and get special discounts on amazing products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • COZY EARTH - Susan and Drew love Cozy Earth's sheets & clothing made with super-soft viscose from bamboo! Use code DREW to save up to 40% at https://drdrew.com/cozy • TRU NIAGEN - For almost a decade, Dr. Drew has been taking a healthy-aging supplement called Tru Niagen, which uses a patented form of Nicotinamide Riboside to boost NAD levels. Use code DREW for 20% off at https://drdrew.com/truniagen • PET CLUB 24/7 - Give your pet's body the natural support it deserves! No fillers. No GMOs. No preservatives. Made in the USA. Save 15% at https://drdrew.com/petclub247 • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew • PROVIA - Dreading premature hair thinning or hair loss? Provia uses a safe, natural ingredient (Procapil) to effectively target the three main causes of premature hair thinning and hair loss. Susan loves it! Get an extra discount at https://proviahair.com/drew • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 Portions of this program may examine countervailing views on important medical issues. Always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health. 「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician with over 35 years of national radio, NYT bestselling books, and countless TV shows bearing his name. He's known for Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Teen Mom OG (MTV), The Masked Singer (FOX), multiple hit podcasts, and the iconic Loveline radio show. Dr. Drew Pinsky received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and his M.D. from the University of Southern California, School of Medicine. Read more at https://drdrew.com/about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we are talking about free speech and free thought with Greg Lukianoff. After I speak to Greg, we're going to bring Warren Smith in here, who took some great risk to try to see if he could get critical thought woven into the thinking of his young students. We'll talk about that. But it is my distinct pleasure to bring Greg Lukianoff in here. I've been a fan of his for a long time. He's the president of FIRE.

Their mission is to defend, sustain the individual rights of all American. For free speech and free thought, this is his book. I'm going to talk to him about it. I've read it more than once. It's quite interesting. Canceling of the American Mind. I think you know the coddling of the American Mind. Well, this is the follow-on. And I urge you to read this book. If you want to understand the playbook for what's going on out there, all will be revealed in this book. All of a sudden, you'll realize what they're up to. But even since he's written this book and since I read it the first time,

things have continued to get more complicated. And I want to get into it with him. You can follow him on X, TheFireOrg. Also, go to TheFire.org. But the Twitter, X.com, is The Fire Org. So we'll get to it after this. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for.

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lukianoff as i said i'm a big fan uh i i his materials have uh informed me i i have been i'm going to give you all his uh particulars on where you can find him i gave the uh x site for the fire organization which is the fire org. You can follow Greg on Greg, sorry, G Lukianoff, L U K I A N O F F. And, uh,

the fire dot and the fire org on YouTube, the fire.org is the website as well. Please welcome Greg Lukianoff. There you are. Welcome, sir. Thanks so much for having me, but,

but a huge fan of yours uh you know my my whole life we're not see that's why we're talking about aging susan he's a young man but not that young so you were five when you started so so greg i've been going back to law school when i started listening to it fair fair enough fair enough it was You had some time at night. So Greg is the president of FIRE. FIRE is an organization that is one of the few organizations out there that is systematically defending our rights of free speech and thought, particularly on college campuses. The book is The Canceling of the American Mind.

I recommend it most strongly if you want to know what's going on out there. Greg, I came upon you probably on Rogan or something. Were you on Rogan one time? Is that true? No, but my co-author, John Haidt, has been on to talk about my previous book, Coddling in the American Mind. So I saw, and I'm a fan of his as well, and I saw Jonathan. Oh, he was great. Yeah, I think he brought up this book or something. And then Mark Andreessen recommended it.

So I immediately went out and got it. He also recommended a book on the biography of Lenin, which I also went out and read. And it was disturbing. The correlates with the present moment were deeply disturbing. And then I heard you on Lex Friedman's podcast. And then I reread the book.

And that's when I got the book and read it. And I was all in after that. I thought that was a great appearance. And I wonder if you can, without some of the detail that I know Lex got into, because I want to get into the present moment. They can always go listen to that Lex Friedman interview as far as I'm concerned. But just give them briefly your story. I know you had a major depressive episode in there and you had to find your way out there's a very interesting story and how you got to fire and where you are now yeah i mean you

know first thing was i'm the weird law student who went to law school specifically to do first amendment law um i'm a first generation american i you know my my family fled the Soviets. I take freedom of speech very seriously, like a lot of what every American should, but a lot of immigrants particularly do, because we know how bad it could be back in the old country. I went to Stanford for law school. I took every class that they offered on First Amendment. When I ran out, I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty. I worked at the ACLU of Northern California. And FIRE, which was brand new at the time, found me to be their first legal director. And I became president in 2006. But partially due to the pressure and how frustrating it can be to be in the culture war 24-7, I got suicidally depressed in 2007. I was hospitalized as a danger to myself.

And as I was recovering, I was studying cognitive behavioral therapy. And that's the way that you talk back to your own brain to not have these exaggerated ideas of catastrophizing binary thinking, mind reading, all of these things. And I was learning how to make myself not depressed and anxious. And then wondering, why are the adults on campus, they seem to be like they're telling the young people to catastrophize, to engage in emotional reasoning and overgeneralization. But at least back then, the students weren't buying it. But then suddenly, like lightning hit, right around 2014,

students started showing up on campuses, and they were hostile to free speech, but they were also justifying their hostility in a medicalized way. And it was all catastrophizing. It was all binary thinking. It was all these things that if you think this way, you're going to be anxious and depressed. So that was what led to my work with Jonathan Haidt and Coddling of the American Mind, where we made the argument way back in 2015 that the threats, the new threats coming from students to academic freedom and free speech were also going to make them miserable. And in my most recent book, we point out that the numbers are just overwhelming,

that when it comes to cancel culture, people, basically anybody who tries to tell you that cancel culture isn't real at this point, you just should never listen to again. Listen, having been the object of cancellation probably more than once, it doesn't take much before you realize, oh my God, this is not only a real thing,

it's a dangerous thing. And you said it's medicalized in what was happening, and I want to lay a medical overlay on some of this. Black-white thinking, that kind of all-in, all-out thinking, is specifically the thinking of people with character illness, character pathology, particularly narcissistic disorders. And narcissists have empathic failure. They have unregulated rage oftentimes, and they project. Like I was saying, if you're in that opening sequence, if you hear somebody's a narcissist say, you are, they mean really listen and hear I am. They project it out into the world. And I would argue that there was a hell of a lot of childhood

trauma that was sort of coming to college around that time. So there would be a lot of character stuff, character traits, character illnesses. So, of course, that's what this is. But the fact that we lean into this rather than contain it is what's the opposite of health. Yeah, agreed. And that's one of the things we actually have that's something we talk about in uh canceling of the american mind this idea of hypocrisy projection um that and i see this all the time with regards to freedom of speech people will come at fire or come at me being like oh but

you know you're you're fine defending pro-palestinian points of view but will you ever defend pro-israel you know and they just assume that you never have, but they never actually do their homework. And fires were the real deal. We defend people all over the political spectrum every day. And what's so funny about the people who project hypocrisy is they're always hypocrites themselves. Of course, of course.

There it is. There's that projection thing. You are, actually, I am. The other thing that they do that narcissists do is they gather in mobs because they have a lot of unregulated aggression they feel a deep sense of relief when they can aggregate and then scapegoat and so cancellation is actually a scapegoating mechanism. It's very formalized, as you point out in the book, but it's actually mob action of narcissists scapegoating. No different than French Revolution or any other period of history

where there have been scapegoats who have been attacked by mobs. It's always the same thing. Yeah, and at first, we saw sort of a little trickle of students targeting their professors because it took, it took a certain amount of chutzpah to actually start being like, oh, we're going to get our professors fired now. But right around 2017, the numbers are nuts. Like it just takes off like a hockey stick graph and it keeps getting worse through all the way through 2022 in terms of

professors losing their jobs. And when I try to bring home how bad it's been, I point out the standard estimate of how many professors lost their jobs under McCarthyism, under the 11 years of McCarthyism, is about 100, about 62 communist professors and about 40 more for other ideological reasons. We're talking about more than, at this point, more than twice that in the 10 years that cancel culture has been around. So you can't claim that this isn't happening on some completely nuts scale, but people still try to brush it under the rug because it's an inconvenient fact. So 200 now have been lost their job as opposed to a hundred under mccarthyism is that about right yeah and by the way the law wasn't even established back then so so basically the better number to compare it to is like post 9-11 where three professors lost their job and all three of them by the way were for reasons it ended up being for reasons you

could actually fire them there's nothing like this in the last 50 years since the law has been established, even close. I wonder how many professors lost their job during the Cultural Revolution in Mao China. They lost their heads, honey. They didn't lose their jobs. They lost their heads. You were talking about earlier, the cultural purge. Well, some did, I'm sure. But the cultural purge, well some did I'm sure, but the cultural purge was intellectuals

being attacked, right? Were they killing them then? They disappeared. Well, maybe. In some cases they offed themselves, but the cruelty directed towards them was just absolutely inhumane and we're reflecting some of those behaviors on campus for the past 10 years

so what do we do so you guys are there sort of uh addressing it um it's interesting i i was watching the don lemon interview with elon musk parts of it again this morning and i was just i'm just gobsmacked at the way he was defending it's censorship frankly and Elon kept gently pointing that out to him and he could not see it and then we have a Supreme Court justice who you know during a hearing

said you know what are we supposed to do and whatever people are saying causes bad behavior it's like what do you do more like, what do you do? More free speech? What do we do? Well, we spent about a third of the book talking about potential solutions, but I want to be clear.

That's not because we think any of this is an easy fix. It's because we actually think it is so difficult. And for about 50 years, there's been natural forces that take over when groups become less politically homogenous. But there was also a very intentional idea that some people on the left, like Richard Delgado and Herbert Marcuse, they really wanted to delegitimize the idea of freedom of speech. They wanted to delegitimize the idea of small-l liberalism. That's where the first speech code movement came from in the 80s and 90s. And those ideas were kind of laughed at off campus in the 80s and 90s, off campus. And they're winning now. So this is not something that's going to be won overnight. And the problem is, when you look at the polling, particularly for young people on the left, their attitudes about

free speech, it's all this kind of doctrinaire idea that essentially if we just give the government more power to police misinformation and disinformation, then, you know, peace and puppies are going to happen. And of course, that's insane. It's bad history. So we really have our work cut out for us. Yeah, bad history is a great way to sort of frame what we're talking about here. I mean, I was, I've been going down the rabbit hole. Everyone knows, who knows me with the French revolution, because it just, it was just so familiar. It felt so familiar to me in terms of the dynamics that were going on. And I was listening to something.

I actually, I was doing it to sort of refine my French, you know, the language. And so I just got interested and started listening to lectures. And I got interested that the French seemed to be reconsidering their history. They were sort of saying, hey, what is it to be French? We're sort of losing, we're losing it. So maybe we ought to think about, you know, just because, and I'm saying just because in quotes, Napoleon reestablished slavery in Santo Domingo in the West Indies, should we cancel all of what happened during the Napoleonic era, which they were disavowing completely. And then they were going, well, that's part of us. It's part of who we are. It's part of our culture.

We look at it more carefully and more nuanced way. And I thought that was interesting. And then I kept going further down the rabbit hole. And just yesterday, I was noticing that the fundamental tension between the Jacobins and the Giridins were centralized authority versus decentralized authority. I mean, there it was all over again. And the people that want centralized authority don't know that it was monarchs that developed the administrative state. They were the ones that, you know, feudalism created the centralized administrative state. And then you want a bureaucratic version of that run by people. Well, there's tons of examples in history of that.

It don't work so well. What do we do to get people to understand that they're modeling bad history well first you got to teach history and unfortunately we're not doing a great job of that in k through 12 a lot of what i a lot of what i put my you know hopes in are um other ways of doing our entire educational system i mean like that's how radical i've gotten on some of this stuff i i became a fan of vouchers as of this book. But I think we have to rethink the way we do K-12 education. I think we have to think of cheaper and more rigorous ways to do higher education so you can raise your hand and show how hardworking and smart you are.

I think we have to teach freedom of speech and the philosophy behind freedom of speech at every possible level that we can. I think that we need to, I think something that would probably help is if we had associations where part of the job was to just point out how thin our research is increasingly getting, because when you have an environment where it's this difficult to disagree on hot button issues in the society without getting canceled, you can't really trust the research coming out of those institutions. And I don't think higher ed in particular or expert class really gets how much they've undermined their own credibility over the past 10 years. And it's a dangerous thing for a democracy.

Yes. And it's not just on the humanities. Science has been adulterated strangely through all this as well, which is shocking to me. Again, many different reasons and lots of layers to it, but a big part of it was suppression of alternative points of view during COVID. I mean, that was the same playbook all over again. Yeah, completely destroyed trust and expertise. We have a whole chapter on COVID. I actually just wrote something for my sub stack, which is named for free speech, which I call the eternally radical idea. Because in every generation, it's always a radical idea and not enough people follow it. three-year-old co-author, cover that we call the perfect rhetorical fortress, which is just system after system, an excuse after excuse to not actually address the substance of your opponent's arguments. And I pointed this out for my first book review on the site for Abigail Schreier's

new book, Bad Therapy, which in a lot of ways picks up where Coddling left off. It points out that a therapeutic approach to raising kids has been a psychologically therapeutic. Done poorly has been disastrous because we actually are telling them more or less to engage in cognitive distortions. It's become a terrible idea. But there are so many easy ways to dismiss Abigail, for example, or for that matter, me or Haidt or whomever. I call it fascicio casting. You just have to magically say, you know what? You're a right winger. It doesn't matter if you are, doesn't matter if you've never voted for a conservative in your entire life. As soon as you're declared

that, we do this incredibly anti-intellectual thing, which is say, well, I guess I don't have to listen to you anymore. And that's just step one of the perfect rhetorical fortress there are dozens of additional excuses that that we have in intellectual circles to not listen to you not based on the substance of your argument at all and we have to reject all of this if we want to find our way back so uh i remember you do you the rhetorical fortress is in the book right i mean that's what i remember. Yes? Yeah. Why don't you walk us through the, here it is, the fortress in action, Stanford Law School. But kind of review with us what is the perfect rhetorical fortress that they're using to cancel?

So the perfect rhetorical fortress is this idea that they're just interlocking barriers to actually getting at someone's argument. We call it perfect because it's so well thought out in a variety of ways that nobody can get through it. Basically, it's one of those games that you can't win, so you must not play. And of course,

level one is that you can declare someone, you can fasho-cast, you can declare them a fascist or right-wing. My insult by the way from the anti-free speech some of the anti-free speech scholars on campus is now people who believe cancel culture is real are either neo-confederates or they're dupes and by the way yeah it's amazing it's kind of like oh more advanced insult technology like very short so that's level one and you can do that confederate neo-confederate it's amazing and you can do that to basically 100 of the population you've already won on step one then we take the readers down the entire demographic funnel and we've watched this

in action you can dismiss someone because they're white you can dismiss someone uh because of the color of their skin whether they're gay or not or whether or not they are trans. And when you follow that demographic funnel down to the end, you get to something like, you know, more than 99% of the population of the entire country you've dismissed. But here's the trick. And if it actually turns out you are a non-white trans person and you have the wrong opinion, then you're really in for it. Because then you have internalized transphobia, you have internalized misogyny, you have the wrong opinion, then you're really in for it because then you have internalized transphobia. You have internalized misogyny. You have internalized racism.

And it just kind of shows like you can't ever win under this. They can get you for being – if you ever lose your cool in public, they can get you for – if they find that you've ever done anything wrong in your life, that's basically cancel culture is more or less based on the idea, based on this very primitive notion that no bad person has any good opinions. That essentially, if I can prove you're bad in this way, this means your other opinions on these other things over here no longer matter. And that's kind of the heart of cancel culture. It's a way of winning arguments without winning arguments. And the list just keep on going. And at the bottom of the list, the technique where you know you actually might be winning is when someone just starts darkly hinting that something – maybe they were right on this argument. But Dr. Drew, there's something – they're not telling you darkly behind the scenes why you shouldn't listen to him.

Right, right. They'll just point out something. And you mentioned in the book the archaeology of that, that they do a lot of mining of the past to try to find those things. Offense archaeology. That's not my own term, but it's something that you see come up time and time again. And certainly with your show, Love love line with Adam Carolla, you know, like they could find in there,

there's gotta be something in there, or they can also guilt by association. You feel like since basically say, well, you know, he used to host a show with Adam Carolla. I don't have to listen to him. They do that already.

They do that already because he and I are friends and we do a podcast. So therefore, therefore I must agree with everything he says. Yeah. And, and so it, and it, I must agree with everything he says. Yeah. And so it will never get you towards truth. It's just all ad hominem stuff, but it allows you to never actually have to get in a serious argument again

if you decide to use it. Which is awful because it is the opposite of argumentation, right? It's just ad hominem attacks. And so people aren't being taught to argue their points or even, and I would argue myself that with certain critical theories,

logic itself is under assault, right? Oh yeah. Logic is something that old white men from the past used to talk about things. logic is something that old white men from the past used to to talk about things that's something that really what matters is your politics and your feelings that's all that should inform your moment that is that is not a good way of thinking which is a reason to shut down uh you know like if you actually believe that then what's the point of academia uh but like essentially if you think that there's no way to actually get at truth and that it's basically all just power and politics and it's all and it's

all just the feelings of the people you prefer because it can't possibly be everybody's uh feelings because then they would cancel each other out um it it's an argument against the whole reason why we set up the academy in the first place so like surely and it's just a sign of like how little viewpoint diversity there is on a lot of these campuses that these ideas could could uh survive and not just be laughed out of the room where'd this come from do you think other than the trauma thing i was mentioning in terms of the black you know the the personality disorders that have caught on you know i think that think that's, there's a lot, it comes from a lot of different trends. You know, in my short book, Freedom From Speech, I talk about some of these as being sort of

predictable results of a more comfortable society and a more affluent society. Ronald Englehart in the 1970s would talk about how in this beautiful future, we'll be able to have communities that better reflect our values. And of course, in the 70s, that sounded lovely. But the dark side of that is we have that now, and we surround ourselves by people we politically agree with. And that is a perfect formula for greater radicalization in the direction of the group. And so there are certain impersonal factors to take over that kind of make people more radicalized against each other. But then there's also some really intentional stuff here that essentially the administrative class that has come to dominate higher ed, you know, a lot of them very much buy into some of the DEI ideology.

They believe this oversimplified narrative about the world where it's just a story of oppressors versus the oppressed and you're either good or bad, you're either black or white, either zero or one. And that under that overly simplified explanation, they can decide who the good guys and the bad guys are in any discussion. So in their own minds, they're saving the world, but they're also destroying the process of thinking. They're destroying the process of research and they're destroying the marketplace of ideas. It does get so depressing and frustrating when you think about it.

I get why you'd have a depressive episode. I mean, it's hard to, you know, there's aspects of it that are frustrating, the aspects that are gross and disgusting. There are just, I mean, and there's a part of it that makes you feel helpless, which I think adds to the mood problem. How do you combat that? How do you feel, you know, hopeful about the future?

Well, I'm hopeful for free speech because free speech works really well. And any society or any institution that is actually able to openly and frankly talk about their problems and not punish people when they bring problems to their attention and want to argue things through, they're going to have huge advantages over institutions, countries for that matter, that can't or don't. This is one of the big advantages that when we tried to figure out why America won World War II, one of the things that they realized was that the ability to actually talk internally

in the United States was a huge advantage that we had over all the totalitarian countries, including, of course, even the Soviet Union. Because basically, they had a real information problem in Nazi Germany because you couldn't be critical of the government without risking your life. So I'm hopeful for freedom of speech because freedom of speech works really well. I'm a little more pessimistic about particularly elite higher education without some major reforms. But at the same time, institutions decay. And every so often, you have to figure out ways to rethink them, to make them less bureaucratized, to get rid of the DEI bureaucracy, for example, and really try to reestablish norms of a free society, teach freedom of speech,

and have systems that better serve the discovery of truth rather than the propagating ideology. And the usual thing is competition. If we could bring in other alternatives, that might help hasten this. I have to go to break for a second here, but before I do, you told me the, what do you call it? The thought castle? What do you call it? The rhetorical castle? The perfect rhetorical fortress. Rhetorical fortress. Rhetorical fortress. On the left, how does it work on the right? Because both sides do it. We call it the efficient rhetorical fortress because the perfect rhetorical fortress is just layer after layer. The efficient is actually very simple because, one, you can declare someone woke or lefty.

And I've watched like diehard conservatives be accused of being woke if they think it's – when their critics think it's useful. You don't have to listen to experts or journalists. And if you're really – if you're on the MAGA right right you don't have to listen to anybody who's critical of Donald Trump and so we have we take on both sides in the in the book and we talk and we go we've spent a lot of time talking about how the efficient rhetorical fortress works works on the right it's so crazy that we're doing this it is just so disturbing I you know I've sort of seen this happening for a while and I've sort of seen this happening for a while and your book sort of enlightened me to some of the mechanisms of this. And I sort of

spelled out the mechanisms. And I just, I'm always asking how much longer, how much longer is this going to go on? This can't go on forever. We have to, it has to morph and change. I suspect the next generation is going to be a source of change. I, you know, the, as usual, I was telling my son a couple of days ago, I said, you know,

he was getting, he was watching some of the CNN documentaries on the sixties and seventies. And I said, you know, most of the people that you're watching there that were so present and outrageous in that period of time, most of them ended up dead or stockbrokers.

That's where that went. It's like they became drug addicts and died or died of their own. I mean, just look at the Chicago 7. They're a perfect example of what happened when they became adults is really what we're talking about. Either the sickness got worse and we were looking at a sick person acting out, or they got their shit together and became part of society. And the way they did it was so stunning compared to what they were suggesting needed to happen in their youth, but okay, whatever works for you. But people do need to grow up and become adults. All right, let's take a little break. Greg Lukianoff, I want to

hold the book up again. I recommend it most, most, most strongly. You will not regret it. I've augured it, I've underlined it, I've read it a couple of times. And it is the mechanism of cancellation. And if you've been the object of it, or if you've sort of seen it happening, what's that, Susan?

You're over there muttering away. Okay, and she also wanted me to say, Dr. Drew TV is the free place to be. She likes that slogan now that Greg, you've inspired that. So Greg Lukianoff, follow him. Try to get us censored. G. Lukianoff and the Fire Org are both available on X. You can find him there.

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for faster, more noticeable results. And every order includes your choice of a free gift. Provia works, guaranteed, or 100% of your money back. Don't wait. Order now to save an extra 10% and get free shipping at ProviaHair.com slash Drew. Not Dr. Drew, just Drew. That is P-R-O-V-I-A-h-a-i-r.com slash drew i'm going to spend a little more time with greg lukianoff and then we're going to bring

warren smith uh in to talk about changing minds and how he's gone about that it's something that i'm uh very interested in as i was saying you can follow g Greg G. Lukianoff on X, The Fire Org on X, The Fire Org on YouTube, and thefire.org is the website. Greg, what's on your radar going forward? What's on your crosshairs now? Well, one thing that we're trying to get schools across the country to adopt is something called the calvin report which basically means that universities will take institutional neutrality seriously that we're essentially rather than talk about every issue that's going on in the world and showing their bias because they'll talk about some and not others to just say no like we're the host

to the critics we're not the critic ourselves this is not our job to decide, you know, what your politics should be. That's establishing an orthodoxy. So we're doing that. And one of the coolest things that we've been able to do over the past couple of years is our campus free speech ranking. You know, it's a big, expensive project that we do. And we've been able to do it with about 250 schools around the country where we do the largest survey of student opinion ever done each year because we get it's bigger each year and we evaluate schools according to uh whether their speech codes uh professor cancellations student cancellations and deplatforming uh and we did uh when we did it this year by the way harvard finished dead last of all the schools in the

country that we evaluate about 250 uh university University of Pennsylvania, second to last. But some other schools like Michigan Technological University and University of Virginia, Auburn University and University of Chicago actually did quite well. And I think that that's one of the ways by using some amount of market forces, we can really help the situation on campus by telling people, listen, if you want free speech, you might be barking up the wrong tree. Well, do you want to pay $80,000 to send your kid to an institution

that is going to suppress any critical thinking? Didn't University of Chicago end up towards the top in the book? Oh, yeah, yeah. University of Chicago is quite good. Not good. No, but it was not good in the book right no no no university chicago is number one actually a couple years ago oh yeah yeah university of chicago has been

great on academic freedom and free speech as of the most elite schools it's probably the best one you can go to and and that you you do rank them all in the book here i mean this is all this is that right this is that same phenomenon this is just that's yeah that's from two years ago because we could we couldn't you know get the new survey up in time but but uh university of chicago still does quite well harvard's never done well and you know as a as a as a reader you read you know average average average and i think to myself average in a amongst a a group where things are so bad, average is not necessarily good. You know what I mean? And so if I were sending kids to school again,

I would really be very concerned about spending all the money for that, for unclear purpose, particularly. And I was sorry to see scientific institutions like MIT didn't rank so great. I don't know where Caltech was or Harvey Mudd. But these are elite scientific institutions that have to be objective about everything. That's what science is, is objectivity.

A friend of mine, I work with a good scientist over at the wellness company. He said, we were talking about something that we were looking into. And he goes, as it pertains to this, the null hypothesis is non-informative. And I thought, that's how to think scientifically. That's all you can say. You can develop a theory when the null hypothesis is informative.

And when the null hypothesis is not informative, move on to another experiment or maybe another hypothesis. That's science. And this idea that you know science has a something in its crosshairs as it's as it's developing its its theories that that's that's terrible that's just the opposite of science i think there's a great when people say believe in science um you know like the oh my god best It's like, no, no, no. That's the most unscientific thing you could say. What I tell people is belief has no role in science.

You shouldn't use the word believe. It's either, you know, either the evidence bears it out or it doesn't bear it out. And if it does, you develop something that's a theory that may or may not approximate the truth. And it may not.

Be prepared that your theory may be antiquated at some point. And that's it. That's science theory that may or may not approximate the truth. And it may not. Be prepared that your theory may be antiquated at some point. And that's it. That's science, period. And there is consensus. There's such a thing called scientific consensus. But unfortunately, that's been so adulterated lately. I worry about that even. It's just been so thoroughly.

By the way, scientific consensus is built on, guess what? Free speech and attacking each other's opinions. I mean, it gets very vigorous in the scientific community. But now it's, no, you shut out anything that isn't part of the canon. That's not science. Yeah. And that's disturbing. The whole idea of Jonathan Rauch is liberal science. The idea that we can take from the scientific method ways to get that truth from not even outside of scientific truth.

But one thing that you can't have is it can't just be limited to what feels nice. Like, that's insane. That will only get you further away from the truth. Or you believe. Believe, too, is another thing that doesn't have any place here. Or you believe. Believe too is another thing that doesn't have any place here. But you mentioned cognitive distortions a couple of times. And I've heard you talk about CBT

and the importance of the role it played for you. And I'm guessing you apply it in terms of your argumentation and the things out there in the world in terms of trying to get people to get out of their loops. But do you also teach about cognitive distortions? I've never been so consumed thinking about cognitive distortions

and watching cognitive distortions at play. And I don't know how you fight it. I just see them all over the place. Yeah, well, and that was the original, you know, kind of weird idea of coddling the American mind was just pointing out that these very same ideas that are going to be a threat to free speech are going to be a disaster for mental health. Because if you engage in, you know, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, all of these things, it's going to make you miserable. But, and the campuses, which are the absolute last places where they should they

should be teaching you to absolutely reject these ways of thinking even just as a matter of logic are engaging in tremendous catastrophizing and overgeneralizing and binary thinking and mind reading um at a way that's not just um you know disastrous for mental health but it's a disastrous for the scientific project i I just Googled cognitive distortion. I'm going to just go over the top 10 or top 10 common according to looks like Skyland Trail or something like that. So all or nothing thinking, right? That's a distortion.

I think people are all good or all bad. Overgeneralization, which is really just lazy thinking. Negative filtering, which is, I guess, sort of the fortress, right? Isn't that just sort of building your fortress? Mind reading. Now, mind reading is an incredible distortion. And that is so alive and well right now. I'm really disturbed by that one.

That's one that has gone so wild lately where people i know what you're thinking i this is this is what he's thinking this is what he did this is what he intended emotional reasoning you mentioned that should must ought that's not that's a distortion but there are there are just there are so many kinds of cognitive distortions. Let's see. Wait, hang on. Say jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing you mentioned, personalizing, always being right. That's a distortion for sure.

Global labeling. Do you know what that one is? I don't know what that one is. Well, labeling is just this person is this type of thing it's kind of it's very similar to overgeneralizing and people don't know they're doing it i i just call this lazy yeah the opposite of critical thought it's just lazy thinking as much as anything i i it's just i understand our brains have biases oh just i guess another to get into it is through bias too. Like I have a positive bias and my positive bias became very clear to me during COVID

because there were so many negative biases out there. Everyone seemed to have a negative bias. And once you have that distortion, it's hard to to fight it but well do what do you want people to do what are you people to know other than read your book and and get deeper into this uh you know by reading about it well go to the fire.org because one of the ways we win our cases um and one of our goals when we change from the foundation for individual rights and in education where we just focused on colleges, to a couple of years ago, we became the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. So we now actually have tons of cases that are off campus as well. But sometimes there are cases you can't

win in the courts, or it would just take too long to win in the courts. And in those cases, what we have to do is fall back on our free speech army or free speech nation, our network of people. And when we first started the expansion, we had about or free speech nation, our network of people. And when we first started the expansion, we had about 30,000 people in our network. We now have almost a million in our network. And our goal was to get to a million by 2025, by the end of 2025. Oh my gosh. So, but what we need are millions. So, you know, sign up for emails, help us when you get an email from FIRE, you know, like be one of the people who becomes the Twitter mob for free speech, not against it.

And you are taking on legal cases also? Oh, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Using the courts, okay. And is the ACLU of any use in all this, or have they been so adulterated and sort of distorted in their own position? It's, it's hard to, hard to know what they're going to do. I guess. We have cases with them over the years. You know,

like if we agree on a case we're perfectly happy to work with them. It just seems like some of the things they're doing are, it's hard for me to understand what, what their, what's their guiding principles are. Let's put it that way. Yeah, it was, it was disappointed a couple of years ago that when we were pointing out that some of the Title IX regs were, some of the anti-discrimination law was actually hostile to freedom of speech, they came out on the other side of the government's position on that,

which we were disappointed. What was their argument? That it was necessary to prevent discrimination, even though very clearly targeted speech. All right. Well, I guess this tension will go on for a while. The fundamental tension, of course, of centralizing versus decentralizing. People, please read your history on this.

It is a catastrophe when somebody out there, whether it's a monarch, a dictator, or a bureaucracy has control over your life and your thinking and your education and your speech. It's just such a freaking disaster. And you gave me a little bit of hope by telling me that your group, your army is building. And I think that's what we need

is people who understand what's going on, who support you or support an organization of their choice. And read the book, Canceling the American Mind. If you want to know what's going on, I really, I am grateful for you for writing this book because it did help me. When you can understand what's going on, you feel a little less helpless

and you can kind of see it for what it is and it's a little less scary too i'd say because it during during covet i was just like what is going on what is happening what i and oh the one last thing before i let you go that i guess there's been uncovered the the what has been uncovered recently is a a concerted government effort to suppress free speech through social media. Some stuff has come up, I guess, through the Twitter files and some of those journalists that work on Twitter files. Can you tell us about that, what was uncovered, and what we need to do about that? Sure. Yeah, and it's got a euphemistic name, which is government jawboning. And what that stands for is something much more evil than

it sounds, which is the government leaning on social media companies to engage in the kind of censorship that the government is forbidden from doing itself under the First Amendment. And there was a case that came down called Missouri v. Biden. It's now called the Murthy case. That's before the Supreme Court. We've been advocating that absolutely we need to limit the power of the government to lean on private entities to engage in censorship. And embarrassingly, there were other First Amendment lawyers who came out and said things like, well, we're really limiting the free speech rights of the government to what? Pressure TikTok, sorry, pressure Instagram to censor opinions.

They don't like that's insane. So I think that people really need to understand that this. Then a Supreme court justice said, well, what if the free speech makes people do something bad? It's like, Oh boy. She said,

this is really tying the hands of the government. I'm kind of like, what do you think the first Amendment is there to do? What the purpose of the Bill of Rights is, is to tie the hands of the government. How can people not understand that? That to me was, I mean, everybody, the limiting government, Bill of Rights. So we limit government's influence on us. That was the purpose of this country.

Are we saying this country is no longer having any usefulness? Is that what we're saying? The very principle? Of course, no one knows the principles upon which we were founded. Again, back to no history being taught. So are you, you know, Aaron Cariotti is a friend of this show and a friend of mine. And I would say, and so his march to the Supreme Court with the Missouri v. Biden thing has been top of mind for me all the way along.

And boy, he and Jay Bhattacharya, who I know is also involved with this and a friend, these are poster children for the excesses. These are monumentally exceptional, brilliant, ethical professionals who were profoundly mistreated by our government through its minion and the minion just happened to be social media uh what difference did it make if it was a bunch of people with pitchforks or a guy sitting behind a computer why is that different what is what is fundamentally different about that nothing i hope to god they do take some sort of action on this and watching how much like people who i knew i went to law school with who should have known better um would act as if you know in march of 2020 we knew for an absolute fact that the lab leak conspiracy the theory was not true and i'm like okay i don't know if it's true, but I can say for certain, neither do you.

And I don't think that it's true. By the way, it was also logically consistent to say, yes, that Nature letter, it was not even an article, it was a letter that made the case for a wet market source, was rather compelling. That doesn't mean it's the explanation. It's still an explanation it fits let's see as opposed to we know and that that whole we know thing this i still have concerns

about that there was something about this virus that they have not told us that actually scared them uh because i i saw some comments by fauci just today where he was like saying well it's a novel virus we don't know what that could potentially happen with this thing. Things could go. And I was thinking, novel viruses come and decrease in their virulence. We see it, it gets bad, and then it gets better. What do you mean we don't know what could happen? The only way it could happen is if this didn't come from nature. So I got very, very, very concerned about that. So interesting, isn't it? Well, listen, please do keep up the work and I hope you'll come back when you have more to tell us or things you would like to champion. You are certainly welcome here.

I'd be honored and delighted. All right. Greg Lukianoff, everybody. G. Lukianoff on X. And Caleb, unfortunately, this stuff stacked up on my screen, so I can't see the message you've sent me about Warren Smith. You said there's something to play beforehand. There's a video for us to play beforehand.

It's a clip that Emily sent that goes along with what he's going to talk about. Okay, I've seen this video and I think it'll be very interesting for all of you to watch this. It's very, very, gives me hope, by the way. It gives me hope for some of our young'uns out there. Go ahead.

This is Warren Smith, who's on X-Pace. One of these tweets that she came out with in 2019, she said, dress however you please, call yourself whatever you like, sleep with any consenting adult who will you um live your best life in peace and security but force women out of their jobs for starting that for stating that sex is real so you find that bigoted what do you find about it was it was deemed transphobic. Like, I myself... Do you find that transphobic, yourself? Uh, I don't really have an opinion on it, but I'm just going with what a lot of other people have said.

I think that's what she's saying by attacking someone for stating that sex is real. That is exactly what she's saying. Is that transphobic to you? So, to me, no. Stating that sex is real is not transphobic. It's just a fact of life. It exists. At the beginning of this conversation, you said, given the fact that J.K. Rowling is transphobic, how do you feel about Harry Potter? Now, retroactively looking at that statement, do you think that that was the best way to phrase it?

No, I feel like an idiot now. It's okay though, but this is why we do this to learn, to learn how to think. To learn how to think that is, uh, that is something that Warren Smith is committed to. And I, you can find him W T Smith 17 on, on X, uh, please welcome Warren Smith. Thank you for that video, sir. Hello. Thank you for having me. So the one thing I noticed about your, first of all, you're a good critical thinker and you're a good teacher, but you really keep your cool when you're sort of being, well, you're being

subjected to what my last guest calls the rhetorical fortress. They start looking for just ways to dismiss any conversation. How do you break through that? How is it going? What's happening? Tell me more about the process you're finding out there. The key to those encounters is specificity, figuring out when you get specific, it's amazing how the dynamic shifts because often presuppositions when they're presented,

they're just broader generalizations and people don't often have specific examples at hand or they haven't thought through it. That changes the entire dynamic. So that would be the beginning point to that. And what do you teach day in, day out? Day in and day out, I teach multimedia and filmmaking at Emerson College, multimedia full-time and high school as well. So that's how we ended up with working on camera. And are you finding students' interactions like you just presented to us there? Is that a common sort of occurrence now? Well, since that video, I'm not really able to film as much in

the classroom. I can't really film in the classroom. They would want to have everything run by them. And they were very supportive initially when this did happen, but it did take us all by storm. We were a bit shocked by it. No one expected this. So I can understand the sentiment of, whoa, we're glad that it went this way. It could have gone the other way. So we definitely need to tread carefully. It was essentially, congratulations, you didn't break any any rules so you're you're all good and congratulations i hope you don't make a mistake in the future good luck so it's so what does that mean is this the school is this the school being supportive of what you're doing or is it the school just being as much as protective of itself yeah okay that's good okay nice as supportive as they can be you know from a legal standpoint and i appreciate

their objectivity to what is written in the law that that offers a lot of clarity as opposed to a subjective interpretation if that makes sense where did you learn critical thought? That's a good question. I think it arose through, it came about naturally just given that through grad school at Emerson College myself, starting in 2016 and those years when things started to change, I started noticing things and started to question things myself. And I went on a journey, to be honest with you. And when you disagree with those that you're closest with in your life, your family and your friends, and you feel like no one around you, in the moment that you do speak on something, there's this shock, there's this concern, because in their minds, they're not used to

people disagreeing. And when they do see that, they think, oh, my goodness, my son is becoming an extremist or something. And it goes immediately to that place. So you naturally learn to navigate these things lovingly and carefully and having a reason when you do speak. And it's not about winning or destroying someone in a debate if it's a loved one right you don't want to beat them you it's about the pursuit hopefully of wisdom and objective truth you're trying to help them find what you the least bad option you found you found something you think of that is of value and you're hoping to help them see that it It's a different dynamic than saying, this is my claim, change my mind. No, I understand that.

And it's how people sustain change, right? Their outlooks change, their feelings change when they arrive there on their own, right? As opposed to you arguing and destroying something that they've held, some belief they held just doesn't hold up to argumentation. That shifts over to something else. That's something, what do they call that? The doubling down effect or something. There's an effect, a cognitive effect. And when people are talked out of one thing, they double down in other areas that are related. And it's

defense. While if you can reason with them and supportively, that's what I'm getting at, which I think you know you're doing, which is you said lovingly and caringly. That is the opposite of how people are used to engaging today, right? And so it came because you were working with your family. It didn't want to be objectionable. You just wanted to reason out loud with them about what you were seeing and what you were thinking. What is it about this sort of questioning things that are just sort of accepted, much like that kid in the video, just was, things are just so. What is it about that that's so radical? Why do people immediately jump run to you're a bad person

you're a radical person is that just part of what they're used to building in terms of their rhetorical response is that if i can convince myself that you're a bad person a radical person we don't have we don't have to get into this because you're just a bad person that's part of it that's part of it because when you can't contend with the logic and upon suddenly they're being faced with scrutiny where they have not been faced with scrutiny before because they've never encountered anyone to disagree with on that well when an argument can't contend with logic the most simplistic tactic is to neutralize the conversation we see this in various forms often so whether it's a discussion about jk row, well, that's forbidden.

That's you're transphobic or you're it's a, whether it's a conversation around the implementation of legal rights around trans identifying people in restrooms for the sake of a woman or a daughter, right? Can we discuss the legal implementations about this is not about your ability to, to identify as trans that just that very conversation is now when you expand the definitions of these words.

So transphobia, when you change the definition of transphobia, when you change the definition of racism, that's a tactic that then neutral. We've seen this in history as well. The first thing that happens is questions are forbidden where are you what are you what are you pointing out particularly what am i pointing at particularly well i'm thinking about history discussions around

oh well communist china right soviet right the soviet union Oh, well, communist China. Right. Communist China. Right. The Soviet Union. Rise of Germany. Let it take over. The war too. Nazism.

Absolutely. French. The Jacobins. The rise of any dictatorship. The Jacobins were the same thing. Anything centralized. Anything centralized. Anything ideological.

It goes bad. Are you finding, you know, you brought this up up is that something you're bringing up with your students i'm very i think there's a lot of value in studying world war ii studying winston church especially as i've been being come being labeled as kind of a critical thinking guy or whatnot and I'm trying to formulate all this and write it down. And really, I mean, it's always intrigued me. I never thought I would, when an opportunity presents itself suddenly, obviously I want to make the most of what's given to me. If I do have an opportunity, I want to try and pursue all that is possible with it. And in that process, I've always been a student of World War II. Both my grandfathers were in World War II and I've just been fascinated by it. As a grad student, I've always been a student of World War II. Both my grandfathers were in World War II,

and I've just been fascinated by it. As a grad student, I wanted to do my thesis film was about World War II and Harvard during that time. And I think there's a lot just understanding critical thinking using Winston Churchill as an example of the ability to make a difficult decision for the sake of the long term as an illustration of the difference between intelligence on the surface and actual wisdom well you just packed a lot into that i agree with you i i agree with you wholeheartedly that that wisdom people have lost track of knowledge versus wisdom wisdom is something that comes from experience and the entire body is involved in a wise decision literally you're an autonomic nervous system how you feel about everything goes into the instinct and the intuitions and then the and then the mind application of a really good decision um that that is a lot um you said you have an opportunity but

you know not only you've been given opportunity this is an opportunity that could have tremendous good a lot could be done for people uh you know you could a lot of benefit to to many by pursuing this what you're calling this opportunity i hope so i hope i don't know what it means yet you know i don't know where it's going to go i don't know what will happen and by opportunity i just made it was pure dumb luck that that video happened to do whatever it did it It wasn't, I never could have anticipated any of that. So then it just happens. And then you just have to figure out what to do next.

And there's two avenues presented to do what's easy, which would be easier. Just let it blow over, which it will, right? And okay, or to try and do something like what you were saying and try and, because I received a lot of messages from other educators and I know there's a lot of concern out there and I've just through my own personal experiences, it's, but I don't, I don't want to just throw, I don't want to just be a person with an opinion.

That's like, that's why that video I think was interesting because no one really, there's so many people out there expressing their opinions. If I had been just talking to that student and expressing an opinion that would not have resonated with the audience or the student. Yeah. And because you're such a careful thinker, I wouldn't presume to know your opinion on anything until you had thought it out. You know what I mean? I don't think, because I know you're not going to be attached to dogma or ideology or a tribe. You're going to just think it out. You know what I mean? I don't think, because I know you're not going to be attached to dogma or ideology or a tribe. You're going to just think it through and you'll have your opinion. That's the, it must be, I imagine you can sort of protect yourself with that because

they can't accuse you of being a part of either side, whatever. But by the same token, this is what people need to be doing a lot, lot more of. Now, you said you're having these kinds of conversations without being filmed, without them being public. Are they changing? How's it going? You're kind of the critical thought guy, so they may want to engage with you in ways differently than before. But what's the experience as it's moving along what do you see change go ahead i think i to be honest most of my students are pretty oblivious to all that they don't really think of me as the critical thinking guy it's just something online

people that are you know if they're looking at that stuff they might be interested in but i find that students when we do this when i do start talking about winston churchill or a student asks me what's the difference between i keep hearing this word socialism and fashion what do these things mean when we do talk about these things their eyes kind of just light up and they suddenly you'll have six students in the in my little multimedia room they're you know normally not that suddenly they're stopped and they turn and they're watching carefully and they're just quiet. And so I, I'm not sure how to articulate what's happening there, but you can feel it. It's a film class, right? It's essentially a film class. At Emerson, I teach, I teach film producing from script to screen, which includes screenwriting.

So that's where my fascination was storytelling and how we make sense of the world through stories and story structure and archetypes, you know, studying that. But I mean, my first year of high school teaching, I was teaching things like journalism as well, you know, just because they needed someone to teach those things. I was never really expecting to do that. But it's really just how to work with this ever-changing landscape of working with technology, art using technology, digital art, you could say, but working with camera, podcasting. It's an exciting format, though. But think about it. Perhaps that's why it leads the conversation.

It's just interesting to me, and the reason i had you describe the class that that this is the class where critical thought is having having sway and has an opportunity to take hold you know it's not where it used to be which was but they don't even know what the difference between socialism and communism and capitalism i understand i know but it's not taught in high school. But the window is open in this creative endeavor to be thoughtful. And it's just interesting to me that everything else has become dogma and indoctrination. And they're not being taught to think about things. I think history is just overlooked in the high school setting.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Go ahead, Warren. I've been thinking about this because critical thinking, any teacher could incorporate this into their curriculum. Sure. Math, science, it could be,

these students want to have conversations around all sorts of things. It comes up spontaneously. It's just a matter of allowing them to go there and allowing them to happen and engaging with it and guiding a little bit here, asking the right question here, poking a little bit here. What do you mean by that? The opportunities, I never expected.

Yes. There's all kinds. That's how I was educated. There's all kinds of versions of it. For instance, my calculus class, I was at a liberal arts college. My calculus class literally was at a liberal arts college my calculus class literally was a a hit a newtonian history class they just said well you know here's what he was looking at a graph and here's what he thought next what do you think he concluded from that how would his thinking have

gone next what might he have done with those thoughts and and we just we tried to come up with the calculus in the room and and then as we came up with the calculus, well, look what he found next. And huh, here's what he was thinking. What might he have thought after that? And oh my God, I had trouble learning calculus until I was in that class. And I've never forgotten anything because of it. Rather than trying to memorize differential equations or integral equations, I had a historical arc. And by the way, I struggle with problem solving along the way, which is another way to get your brain to change. But it was a historical arc of where this came from.

And this thing we're applying, I'll go apply it in physics class later. It doesn't matter. Where this thing came from, no one teaches anything like that anymore. Yeah. And it all connects to philosophy as well. You could ask a student, okay, when we're doing mathematics, is a mathematician, when they make a mathematical breakthrough, are they creating that mathematical breakthrough or are they discovering something which already existed in the same way an archaeologist discovers

something? How is it that these patterns exist within our world? And these patterns are no different than the things that we're talking about, whether you're debating a political conversation or critical thinking around jk rowling it's these patterns exist beneath the words that we're using and that's fascinating and you and there's me too and there's many ways and then you could get into neuroscience with that and talk about the brain and what the patterning is in there i mean this is the this the point. This is how these things connect together. Look, Brett Weinstein, you know who Brett Weinstein

is? Speaking of canceling, Brett was canceled. So Brett was telling me that when he was at Evergreen College, every semester, it was one class that you spent the whole day doing exactly what you're talking about. It was like a symposium where you'd go from one thing to the next to the next, how all these things connected. His thing was evolutionary biology, but I'm sure he ended up with philosophy and had to be in math. I mean, you can enter all of that through – look, it all used to be philosophy, right? They used to call the physics was in a philosophy text, right?

And the psychology was in a philosophy text. So these things have very close relationships and it's all this thing this this instrument up here in our skull that sets most of it up uh but listen i i just wanted to say thank you for allowing us to share in that video i hope that the young man that was the object feels good about it does he oh yeah yeah and i made i asked him before i even i never expected anyone to see it i just shared it on my little youtube channel which is kind of my little teaching portfolio some past teaching and some film projects and he was he was fine with it before i shared it though we didn't expect anyone to really see it we thought maybe 50 people

would see it yeah and and what is your youtube channel if you'd like people to go there yeah it's warren smith secret scholars society or at secret scholars which one would be easier to search okay at secret scholars is that also what are you showing us there caleb oh 33 million views highlighted in what 33 million views on that clip. I was going to just ask. I was going to go, by the way, how many views did it have? That's just Elon's retweeting of it. That's the entire world.

Did J.K. Rowling respond to this at all? Did she interact at all with this? I'm not sure. I didn't see anything from her. I mean, there's so many people watching it. How would you know? But yeah. She seems't see anything from her. Okay. I mean, there's so many people watching it. How would you know? But yeah, I would, yeah. That'd be really cool.

She seems to be on this topic. She's so awesome. I think they used to call your position verisimilitude or something like that. Or they were words they used to, verisimilitude is a little different, but it was, well, it was just, no, it was words about keeping,

in medicine we called it equanimity. Just maintaining your cool during all of this and just going through it with people. Yeah, Caleb. The best thing about this, Drew, is that I have no clue anything about Warren's politics. I don't know anything about which side of the aisle he's on. That's the point.

This is the whole point. Absolutely. This is what education should be. It shouldn't about like the beliefs of the teacher it should be about what's right like freedom of speech and think how how how truncated their education is if they've never been given an opportunity to think stuff through like warren is the way warren has challenged him so listen keep it up there should be a whole school behind you please write it down or create a video or more movies or more something. You have an opportunity here to make a difference.

Obviously, if Elon Musk is retweeting your video- Use that brain power for good. And a lot of people appreciate it too. And again, it's not just teaching critical thought. It's the manner in which you're going at it, which is what makes it digestible, which creates the opportunity for people being able to adopt what you're doing and begin to re-engage. And

this isn't even argumentation. It's just thinking together, really. I wish more colleges had great thinkers like this, even in the podcasting class or whatever. You're not going to get the brightest bulb in the pack in that class, but no offense to all the podcasters out there, but podcasting class. Yeah. I mean, he's teaching media and stuff like that. Like, but I wish more professors really thought about stuff like this and weren't so far to the left and all their glorious. I don't care which side, frankly, I don't care. Well, but they're, but they're always pushing the beauty of communism and socialism in these colleges. And they're not even.

You know what I mean? They don't teach everything. They're willing to arrive there, but they've got to just tell them what this is and how it works and what the alternatives are. Right. It's not just all. And why Winston Churchill had such a different idea? Why did he not go for socialism? Why was he not?

And to what extent did he think it was a decent idea? It'd be interesting to hear his thoughts on that. That should be a class in every college. So, all right, Warren, keep it going, my friend. I hope you'll come back when you have more to share. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. You bet.

Well done. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you very much. You bet. And it was a perfect, I think the Italian word is anchilla for for uh for greg lukianoff which is you know addressing what is going on with free speech i mean what if what if somebody tried to cancel him for daring to to have that conversation that he had but

i i think again it's it's hard if you if you you maintain a good, if you don't get defensive, it's harder to go with the ad hominem stuff. I went to college later in life, and I'm just going to personalize this because I'm not that well-educated, but I did get a BA at UCLA when I was almost 30 years old. And I remember just having to give back whatever the professor said in order to get a good grade. I remember you saying that. And I was just like, well, I have to go to the left, even though I don't agree with everything,

but I know what he wants me to say. And when I saw my kids go off to college, they all came back indoctrinated a little bit more to the left because of their professors. There's nothing wrong with that. I think that everybody should see that side. I wouldn't have seen that side coming from Newport Beach ever in my life. There's a lot of Go Bruins going on on the

restream. But I did see we kind of had to reel them back in to you know, to say reality did that. They're smart. Well COVID did because then they realized that we were all being excesses of COVID, the excesses of COVID got through to people. Yeah. Fortunately, but, but I.

Caleb. Oh no. I was saying, I, I remember in college, my favorite professor, he, his, his classrooms would always get full. Like these, those miniature little stadiums at the college. The college itself wanted to kick him out, tried to get rid of him every year, but the students learned so much history in his classes that they couldn't get rid of the guy

because the students would always rally and support behind him. So there are students out there. I mean, I guess that was 10, 15 years ago, but professors like Warren, I hope his students are rallying around him to defend him right now. Well, he,

he apparently is being well received. That's what he was saying. It's one of the things I was worried about that he was going to get silenced in some way, but it's great. So or something, I don't know. It's,

it's hard to, it's hard to know. Yeah. But I just saw this big push towards communism and our kids were back, and they're like, you know, communism is great. I was like, what's great about it? You know, tell me. I don't know. Better than wait.

I don't want to have to work ever again. You know, it's like, hmm. Interesting. All right, well, listen. Let's get the schedule up for upcoming guests. There we go. Keith Abloh is an old friend, psychiatrist. Jennifer Say is going to come back.

She's got some new clothing lines. Drea DeMatteo, you know her from The Soprano. She will be in the studio with us. Robert Barnes on April 2nd. It's Yvanne Fleet. Ed Dowd, Kelly's going to step in and take over on April 3rd with Ed Dowd. Vivek Ramaswamy comes back. Ivor Cummings, again.

Emily Barsh has been hard work killing it with the schedule. And I don't know how she does it, but you guys all are the beneficiaries because she ended up booking. I am certainly a beneficiary. And I really want everybody to see this studio, okay? Because we have a new, we were fortunate enough to get a sponsor named Nanlight.

Let's see, that's this. No, that's, is that this camera? And Caleb is, we have a few cameras now. We're going to have guests. This one. So that'll be my shot when I'm talking to Drea when she's in here. Actually, I'm going to have a different microphone. I'll have this microphone over here.

Yeah, and we'll have that shot as well. The mic's not on. There we go. We'll have that shot as well. And then go back to Caleb or Susan to the other one. So when I'm talking to Drea, who's going to be sitting right there, you'll be looking right down the barrel at us. So there we go.

I'm so excited that it's- All carefully lit and structured. It's finally there. A bunch of people, and Susan has been killing it. Yeah, we want to have some good guests in studio and not be embarrassed. Not be embarrassed.

It's not the Wayne's World studio anymore. It really did kind of start that way. With the tan couch. We had a couch in here, me and Bob Forrest just sit on it with the holding mic. Oh, we actually had headsets with a microphone on it at that point. And it was interesting and it evolved and COVID sort of pushed things along a little bit. That's what helped it evolve into something. And then Caleb had an idea and he got Susan on board. I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. But thank you, Nanlite. And we hope that if you're building a studio or

if you need lights, check it out. Go to nanlite.com. N-A-N-L-I-T-E. That's the lights behind us here. And are these up here too? Yes, everything. It's all new. Oh my goodness. This is an incredible every angle and we had somebody come in and really tune it up and then there's these sort of long

nan tubes i don't know if that's what they call those uh nano tubes and they're long fluorescent lights so now we have instead of the 25 outdoor lights we led lights. We actually have the... No, it looks so cool. The whole room is just lit up like Christmas. It's so beautiful. So there we go. But thank you, Nanlight. So we will be in here tomorrow,

tomorrow at our usual time at three o'clock. That's Jennifer Say and Keith Abelow. I've been talking to Keith for a long time. I'll be really interested to pick his brain on what he thinks is going on these days from a psych. I think he's even has some psychoanalytic training. It's gonna be interesting to hear what he thinks about the sort of American mind.

We'll get into that and other things. Manana. We'll see you at three o'clock Pacific time tomorrow. Thank you, Joe. Think it was. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky.

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