Making Sense with Sam Harris - #100 — Facing the Crowd

Episode Date: October 9, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Nicholas Christakis about mob behavior, moral panics, and current threats to free speech. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm bringing you Nicholas Christakis. Nicholas is a sociologist and a physician. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University,

where he is appointed as the Saul Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science, and he's the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His lab focuses on the relationship between social networks and well-being, and his research engages two types of phenomena, the social, mathematical, and biological rules governing how social networks form, this is referred to as connection in his work, and the biological and social implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And this is often referred to as contagion. His lab also does experiments in how to change population-level behavior related to health

and cooperation and economic development. So it's very interesting work. And I would have wanted to speak with Nicholas anyway about his work, but another thing that reminded me of the need to speak with him was his experience at Yale, which you may have seen on YouTube, and you should watch it now if you haven't. But he was the professor a while back who was standing before a howling mob of students

and stood there with the imperturbability of a saint, really, as he was castigated by young men and women who were properly unhinged by their identity politics and some of the crazy ideas about speech that are rattling around in their heads. I'll embed a relevant clip on my blog. There are many, but I'll have one there where this podcast is embedded. And you will enjoy the first hour of this conversation much more if you've seen five minutes at least of that encounter because you will see Nicholas's patience.

You will see the untenability of the situation he was in, you will see a hostility to dialogue among Yale students that one could scarcely imagine possible. And this was, I believe, the first incident like this to come to national attention. This preceded the riots at Berkeley preventing Milo's speech, and it preceded Brett Weinstein's ordeal at Evergreen, and it preceded the attack upon Charles Murray at Middlebury. So this was, if not the first moment like this, the first that became very prominent in recent memory. It makes for very interesting viewing. So Nicholas and I talk about all that, and then we get into the dynamics of mob behavior and moral panic and related issues, and I think you'll find it an interesting and useful and

certainly timely conversation. So now, without further delay, I give you Nicholas Christakis. I am here with Nicholas Christakis. Nicholas, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Sam. So we met at the TED conference, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think we've met since.

I think that was in 2010. And if I recall, you gave the talk right after mine, or maybe it was just we were rehearsing together or something. But that's the moment I have in my memory where we shook hands and said hi was at TED just before or after one of us got off stage. Does that jive with your memory? Yeah, we were in the same session, and my memory is that you were sitting next to me as we were watching the speakers. And Sarah Silverman spoke, I don't know if you remember, and the woman from

10,000 Maniacs, whose singing I adore, whose name I'm spacing on, and you spoke. And what I remember of your talk was that remarkable slide, maybe that was the first time you used it, where you showed side-by-side photographs of a bunch of women wearing the hador and then a bunch of... Oh, yeah, the full burqa, yeah. The full burqa and then a bunch of women, you know, on... Scantily clad, yeah.

Yeah, on a pornography or whatever. And you said these are, you know, on... Scantily clad, yeah. Yeah, and pornography or whatever. And you said they, these are, you know, very different moral landscapes, but we should surely, and even they look like landscapes. I remember visually thinking, you know, there were these undulating heads in the way it was rendered, your image, and it really got me to thinking. And, you know, the topic of moral relativism and moral universalism is an old one, but I don't think the sophistication of thought that we've been bringing to that topic lately has been very strong. Yeah. That was a—you made a big impression on me, too.

So we're going to talk about your science and some of the science you presented there at TED and some of the stuff you've done in the intervening years. But first, just tell people, what is your background generally, academically and scientifically? Well, I am trained in the natural and the social sciences. I'm a physician. I trained as a hospice doctor. So I spent 15 years taking care of people who were dying. My first appointment was at the University of Chicago, and I worked on the south side of Chicago taking care of primarily indigent patients, although I had a few faculty and, you know, sort of more well-to-do people. And I worked there as a hospice doctor.

And then when I moved to Harvard from Chicago in 2001, I was a palliative, clinically, I was a palliative medicine doctor. So I was trained as a physician, but then also I was trained as a sociologist, and I have a PhD in sociology as well. And most of my career has been devoted to research. So I'm primarily a research scientist and doing work in public health. And I stopped seeing patients about 10 years ago now. So I'm a natural and a social scientist.

And increasingly, we do a lot of computational science as well in my lab. science as well in my lab. We'll talk about the science because obviously what can be known about social networks and group psychology and many of the other topics you touch, you're now touching AI or human interaction with AI. So all of that's very interesting. But I want to start with your immediate background here because this is one reason why many people know of you and were eager for you to come on the podcast. You and your wife, Erica, were really the canaries in the coal mine for some recent moral panic, is the appropriate name we've witnessed on college campuses. You are the man that many of us have seen standing in the quad at Yale, or I assume that was the quad, surrounded by a fairly large crowd of increasingly unhinged

students. And this was really mesmerizing to watch. I can't imagine it felt the same to be in the middle of it. And I must say, you handled yourself as well as I could possibly imagine. And you have been much praised for the way you conducted yourself in that situation. And many professors have since found themselves in similar situations. There was Brett Weinstein at Evergreen recently. So I just want to talk a little bit about your experience at Yale and then move on generically to the problem on college campuses in general, as described by people like Jonathan Haidt and others who are focusing on the way in which there's a kind of authoritarianism emerging on the left, really exclusively, that is preventing free speech. And I want to get your sense of what's happening there and how big the problem is. And then we'll move on to the what we can understand scientifically about crowds and social trends. But insofar as you are comfortable talking about it, can you tell me about what happened at Yale?

Can you tell me about what happened at Yale? I think I have been devoted to, you know, in some ways I'm a little naive in the sense that I believe in institutions. I'm also skeptical of institutions and I am worried about institutions, but I also believe in social institutions. And so I've devoted my life to academia and to what I take to be their core commitments of modern American universities, which are envied the world over. And these commitments center around,

if you look at the motto of Yale, it's lux et veritas. I mean, that's an extraordinary commitment, light and truth. And these institutions are committed to the preservation, human beings, their capacity to perfect the world, the knowability of the world, or in my view, committed to a kind of a belief in the objective nature of reality. And I would strongly defend those principles and have devoted my life to them. And in fact, even in the narrow issue of free expression, have been defending free expression

often for disenfranchised populations for a very long time. So I, you know, even before I came to Yale four years ago, I was at Harvard. My wife and I had taken some unpopular stands defending the free expression of individuals who were on the side of Black Lives Matter, who were protesting. There was a high school student who had worn a t-shirt that says, Jesus was not a homophobe, and we came to his defense. There were some minority students at Harvard who had some concerns about the final clubs at that institution, sort of their kind of like elite fraternities. And they had posted a satirical flyer, and some people were unhappy about that flyer and wanted to squelch the free expression of those students. And we came to their defense. And so I am committed to this, I sort of maybe naively bought in hook, line,

and sinker to this belief that these institutions of higher learning in our society are important, that they are worthy of protection and respect. And so this is why when they fail us, I get very sad. I get sad for our society, I get sad for the students, and I get sad for the institutions. And I mean, I don't want to just keep talking endlessly, but I mean, there's a parallel set, and I'll come back, I think, to your question. There's a parallel set of ideas about universities in our society. If you think about these universities,

they are supported by tax dollars and the bequests of primarily wealthy people. And the reason this money is given to these institutions is to further the mission of the preservation, production, and dissemination of knowledge, not to provide faculty with easy lifestyles. I mean, it's a wonderful thing to be a professor. I see it as a calling. But that's not the purpose, right? I mean, the point is that we are supposed to be that place which discovers things, which preserves Sanskrit, which preserves Shakespeare, which preserves antiquities, which preserves mathematical knowledge and scientific knowledge, which produces discoveries. We're supposed to be the place that transmits this to new young people.

And that's the role we're supposed to play in society. And we have a deep commitment to light and truth. So I get very upset when fields of inquiry or ideas are proscribed. And I think that if our ideas are strong, they should win the battle of ideas. If you're so confident in what you have to say, you should be able to defend it. And your approach should not be to silence your opponents. Your approach should be to win the battle of ideas. I'm just going to interrupt you by reminding you of something you wrote, which appeared in the New York Times, which I think is the only thing you wrote in the aftermath of what happened at Yale addressing it. You wrote here, quoting you, the faculty must cut at the root of a set of ideas that are wholly illiberal.

the faculty must cut at the root of a set of ideas that are wholly illiberal. Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words, even provocative or repugnant ones, are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech. I couldn't agree more with that sentiment. And it's amazing to me that this even needs to be said and said as frequently as we now have to say it. How is it that the left, and again, I do want to come back to specifically what happened at Yale because many people just might not be aware of it or have forgotten the details,

but how do you think it is that the left primarily has lost sight of this principle that the antidote to bad ideas is good ideas and the criticism of bad ideas. Yeah, I think the right and the left take turns in this regard. I mean, let's not forget the history of McCarthyism on campus. And yeah, but we sort of we sort of expect the right to get this wrong at the extreme. Right. I mean, the left is I was I... I was talking to some students here recently. They happen to be conservative students. Again, I should say, politically, I'm left of center. I

mean, I'm very progressive. I have some libertarian ideas. I have some conservative ideas. But mostly, if I have done these surveys, I am significantly left of center politically overall. Anyway, I was talking to some of these conservative students, and I was about to say, you know, it's the left wing that marches in the streets, but that's actually not true. The right wing also marches in the streets at different points in history in different locations. I think lately it has been the left which has abandoned these principles. And for me, I should say that there are things like free speech or a non-corrupt judiciary or a strong defense, you know, which really should be apolitical. And I also think it's tactically idiotic of the left to surrender this free speech. I mean, after all, let's not forget the Berkeley free, that's where the modern free speech

movement was born at Berkeley. And to... Yeah. And that's where you cannot give a talk now without police protection at every moment. Yeah. I mean, I don't agree with many of the things that Ben Shapiro espouses, but the idea that $600,000 of police protection would be required for Ben Shapiro to speak on a university campus is preposterous. And it's a waste of money. I mean, I think this is the other thing that I think is astonishing to me is that if we could preserve and cultivate and recommit as a society to principles of open discourse and protest, I totally support protest. I support the right of students to protest.

I believe that many of the most important movements, the civil rights movement, the gay marriage movement, many of these movements, which I wholly endorse, the lead has been taken by young people and people protesting in the streets. This is also part of the American tradition, and it deserves respect and cherishing. But you cannot resort to violence or prevent others from speaking, and it's cost ineffective. Like, look at the money. That $600,000 could have been spent on dozens of students going to school for free. And when we lose sight of these core liberal commitments, I think we wind up spending money and eventually spilling blood, which is just heartbreaking. So yeah, I mean, I think it's nuts that many of these speakers need protection. We're going to go back to Yale because I have to get there, but I'll just give a little more color to how crazy this has gotten.

You sent me an article from The Economist prior to this interview, which I hadn't seen, describing recent events at Reed College. And it reads like an Onion article. I mean, it's just an unbelievable document. I'm going to read a couple of paragraphs here to give people a sense of it, because as much as I've paid attention to this, I was still surprised by these details. Yeah, and I'll interrupt you. Before I said, there's been a number of examples of almost stereotypical kind of cultural revolution, like almost Maoism, where the far left resorts to eating its own. So with Brett Weinstein, I mean, Brett is a completely progressive individual for his whole life. And Rebecca Tuval, who wrote that piece, you know,

she was stunned. And this professor at Reed, who, you know, who I might or might not agree with about a variety of things. You'll read, you're about to read the case. I mean, there's so many of these cases which are so hard to understand. And I hope we can talk a little bit about where they might be coming from as well, but go on. Definitely, definitely. Okay. So there's this Western Civ course that apparently has been receiving protests, it seems, in every single class at Reed. So that's the setup. And so now quoting from the article, Assistant Professor Lucia Martinez Valdivia,

who describes herself as mixed race and queer, asked protesters not to demonstrate during her lecture on Sappho last November. I mean, that's already an Onion article. And Sappho is a great poet and also, you know, a favorite of queer theory as well. I mean, that's already an Onion article. And Sappho is a great poet and also, you know, a favorite of queer theory as well. I mean, it's interesting. It's not a surprise she'd be lecturing on Sappho, but still. Her poetry on love is unbelievable. But anyway, go on. I'm going to get some hate mail from my reaction to that, but it gets better. Ms. Valdivia said she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and doubted her ability to deliver the lecture in the face

of their opposition. At first, demonstrators announced they would change tactics and sit quietly in the audience, wearing black. After her speech, a number of them berated her, bringing her to tears. Demonstrators said that Ms. Valdivia was guilty of a variety of offenses. She was a, quote, race traitor who upheld white supremacist principles for failing to oppose the humanity syllabus. She was, quote, anti-black because she appropriated black slang by wearing a t-shirt that said, poetry is lit. She was, quote, an ableist because she believes trigger warnings sometimes diminish sexual trauma. She was also a, quote, gaslighter for making disadvantaged students doubt their own feelings of oppression. And then this is a quote from her now, I am intimidated by these students.

I'm scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues up in any way. I'm at a loss as how to address this, especially since many of these students don't believe in historicity or objective facts. They denounce the latter as being a tool of white cis-hetero-patriarchy." This is just so insane on every level. This use of the term gaslighting, with which I'm familiar, which has been used ever since the film came out, whatever, 60 years ago. But I hadn't heard this being appropriated by the intersectional mob. But then I recently re-watched part of the video of you talking to students at Yale,

and I heard one of the students admonish you for gaslighting, which I hadn't caught the first time around. I have to say, Nicholas, that video is just astounding to watch. And I can only imagine what it was like to be there, not having yet been schooled in this trend that this is the sort of thing that has been happening to people. Am I right about that? Were you aware of this happening to anyone else before it happened to you? Or are you the first? else before it happened to you? Or are you the first? I honestly don't know the answer. I don't remember if at the time I was, because since then there've been so many similar episodes that I don't remember if two years ago I was then aware of other episodes. The, you know, part of the problem is here that there is some merit to some of the ideas, the grand philosophical ideas, and in my view, a lot of merit to some of the complaints of the students. And the problem becomes that these things have been so generalized.

And, you know, what Jonathan calls concept creep as well affects these phenomena. So what do I mean by this? You know, earlier, you and I talked about a commitment to the idea that there's an objective nature to reality. Now, there is a long philosophical debate about this topic. It's a deep and interesting set of ideas about subjectivity. You know, can we even see the world objectively? Does objective reality even exist? I think it does, but you can make an interesting philosophical argument. What about the notion of so-called social construction, the idea that the gender of the scientist or the racist beliefs of the scientist color their objectivity? Of course, they do. We have countless examples of this. We know this from research done by historians and

others. We know that it's difficult to be an impersonal observer, that every observer is situated somewhere. And I think there's validity to those ideas. Now, I also think there is an out there out there and that it is knowable and that we do our best to understand it. And so when you carry the rejection of objective reality to the extreme, that you call it a tool of cis-heteropatriarchy, you really have kind of jumped the shark. You've taken a core idea which says, look, we need to not always believe what we are told, or we need to understand how a person's position in society might affect what they see. And we know this affects even ostensibly objective phenomena. We know that scientists, for example, looking, so Emily Martin

has done some fantastic work, which I teach, on how scientists looking at, you know, at cell division or menstruation, you know, interpret the biology by virtue of who they are. But then it takes it to such a ridiculous extreme that it becomes absurd. And similarly, the notion of cultural appropriation. So the kernel of the idea there is that some communities of people are so denigrated that not only are they, let's say, killed and wiped out, but all of their ideas and culture is stolen from them, is expropriated. They are effaced. And that all that's left is a kind of caricature of who they are. And there is some truth to that, too, that it's like adding insult to injury. You know, not only do I engage in genocide, but like I take all your ideas, your culture as well, and don't even credit you.

And who am I to do that? The problem is that, again, it's carried to a preposterous extreme so that now, you know, the whole history of ideas and of culture, of art and music is endless theft. I mean, it's endless modification and transformation and exchange of ideas and of thoughts and musical and artistic forms and so forth. So to then start claiming that, you know, that like in the Reed College example, that, you know, that she couldn't teach these things,

you know, she couldn't wear poetry is lit because she's appropriating African-American slang is just a crazy caricature of what is otherwise potentially an interesting philosophical idea to discuss. And so I think, you know, this is the thing that has made it especially hard for me is that I believe that I have a more than passing understanding of the epistemology here. And I have a more than passing sympathy for some of the concerns that the students have about police brutality, about economic inequality, about racial justice. But I am deeply concerned with the Maoist abandonment of reason and discourse and the

kind of dehumanizing, atomizing of people. I mean, one of the things that has really depressed me in the courtyard that day, and I wrote a little bit about this in that one other prior, I think you're the only second public remarks I'm making about this, the piece in the New York Times. There was a young woman who I think was African-American, and she said to me very plaintively, and it pulled at my heartstrings. she said, you know, you cannot understand our predicament because you are a middle-aged and white and male. And I said to her that I understood what she was saying, but that I nevertheless believed in our common humanity. And I believe that all of us, and I still believe this, that

all of us as human beings can speak to and understand each other, united by our common humanity. And that even though I was a different gender and age and skin color than her, that I nevertheless could understand her, and that I was interested in making the effort to understand her, and I would hope that she could understand me. And the students jeered at this. And then there was another student, a minority student, who later wrote a post in the Yale Daily News, where he wrote that he had never been more disappointed in his colleagues than when I was then, the titles at the time were that we were the masters of these colleges. Now they're called head of college. The title has changed. And he said, I'd never been more disappointed when the master made the argument about our

common humanity and that his peers jeered. And so I think when, so my point is, when you abandon the commitment to our common humanity, when you atomize people, when you believe that only certain types of people have authority to use certain types of cultural ideas or tropes, you efface, for me, a fundamental reality of our common humanity and a fundamental tool we can have to interact with each other. So that professor at Reed, the claim that she can't wear a t-shirt that says poetry is lit, is to me just is preposterous and violates every basic principle in my view that should animate a civilized society.

To use the example of what the young woman said to you in the quad, that amounts to a naked declaration that meaningful communication is impossible. Yes, which I think is really self-defeating in the end. So what is your game plan if you're saying that you can't communicate your grievances... To anyone who is not exactly like you. Yeah, to anyone who doesn't suffer them along with you. Or, but it's... Yeah, but it's... What help are you asking for? There are other experiences that we all have had with pain and suffering and death and grief. And, you know, maybe I've not had exactly the same kind

of suffering as you, Sam, but I'm pretty sure you've had some knocks in life. And I'm pretty sure that if we had a drink together and we're talking about a topic that we would find common ground or shared understanding, even with dissimilar trajectories through life. One person struggled with poverty as a child. Another person struggled with the divorced parents. Another person, you know, escaped Vietnam on a boat. And another person, you know, witnessed violence. And another person, you know, there are gradations and differences, but I believe people can empathize with each other. I hope. I mean, I don't... But so what was so disturbing about that encounter you had was the insistence that none of that is possible and none of that is ethically or politically relevant.

And what was in its place was a desire to essentially shame you into silence. And this is, again, coming from Yale students, objectively some of the most privileged people who have ever lived, whatever the color of their skin. I mean, this is just undeniable. Again, you know, taking on board everything you just said about who knows what suffering even privileged people have had in their lives. But the idea that these were some of the most aggrieved people on earth, this was like the wailing of the widows of Srebrenica. I mean, it was just, it was madness. And so again, this is, I'm speaking as someone who just watched this from outside, who's not, you know, doesn't know these students and hasn't lived with them

and dealt with them subsequently. And so it's just, but just to see the breakdown of discourse through the lens of what you experienced there, again, from the outside, was pretty startling. So I just want to, before we get more into this, and again, we're going to talk about the more general insights we can glean here about crowd dynamics and social contagion and all the rest, but before we do anything else, I want to back up and just remind people how this kicked off at Yale. What happened? You can be as abbreviated as you want, but just describe the sequence of events. Well, I would rather have you describe the sequence of events. wife, Erica, who was also a professor at Yale, responded to an email that came out from the school admonishing people to dress in the most tasteful, possible, and politically correct

Halloween costumes. And your wife, Erica, if memory serves, wrote a response to this to the some hundred students who were under her charge in, what was it, their dormitory or their house? Yeah, I mean, I think the original email was sent by a dean, a person in the dean's office here, a man by the name of Birgewell Howard, who had previously been dean at the Northwestern University, and he had sent the same Halloween costume email there, and then sort of decided to resend it five or 10 years later at a different university and at a different time. There had been, to my knowledge, no episodes of students wearing blackface at Yale or pushing the boundaries in that such an extreme way. But nevertheless, this email was sent out.

And actually, in the New York Times, the previous month, there had been a whole exchange about this Halloween costume guidance. So in the zeitgeist, people were talking about how this was getting a little out of hand and seemed a bit silly

that universities were providing official guidance on Halloween costumes. I think there were six people who wrote in that article and five were against Halloween costume guidance and one was for it. And so there had been a number of emails that had come out at Yale at this time in the run-up. And I think this one that Dean Howard sent was maybe the third and broadest, most detailed. It had links to acceptable and unacceptable costumes or recommended and non-recommended costumes. And, and, and it was, it was coming from a positive intention. And that is to say that,

you know, it's not necessary to set out to cause needless offense. You know, I'm not, I think in a free society, we have to tolerate offense, but it's not like I'm interested in deliberately offending people or, you know, and, and we can talk about some examples on college campuses where this can be hard. Anyway, and what had happened is we had been hearing from the students, and Erica in particular had been hearing from her students, that the students felt infantilized by this email. So many of the students were objecting to this, that they couldn't believe this. And Erica that day had taught a class, this was in late October, where the students in the class was about child development. She taught a class about child development. And there was an animated and intellectually rigorous conversation about

what stage of development are college students at and are they capable of choosing their own costumes or negotiating among themselves, you know, if they have taken offense, talking to each other and so forth. And because we had, it's more detailed than you want probably, but because earlier in the year, so this was in October, in August, I had sent an email to the students, the 400 students in Silliman. That summer, there had been the murders in Charleston where this man whose name I'm blocking, thank God, who went into the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Mother Church in Charleston, and slaughtered nine or 10 people at close range who had welcomed him into their midst. So he was white and the victims were all black and, you know, a vile and despicable carnage motivated by racial hatred. racial hatred. And there had been a lot of discourse in the public space that summer,

and that was the summer where all the Confederate flags began to finally come down. And I was very concerned about these events, like many people were, and I had organized a series of speakers at Silliman. We had a famous African-American historian from MIT who came and spoke about the history of slavery in American institutions. We had some people talking about other aspects of this. We also, I had booked months earlier, Greg Lukianoff, who had come to speak about free speech. You know, there was a series of public speakers. Anyway, I sent an email in August, late August, beginning of September, to the students in the college about the aftermath of Charleston. And I talked about how, as a public health person, one of the things that I found most distressing was that Walmart had stopped selling Confederate flags, but not guns.

And that, in my view, this had it backwards, that there was all this focus on symbolism, but not on practical concerns, you know, that really we need to address, let's say, issues of inequality and issues of violence in our society, and that these symbolic things, while important, were distracting, potentially distracting us. So I had an essay about this, which is, I think, still somewhere online. And it's a couple of pages. And the student feedback was tremendous. Dozens of students wrote to me and they said, wow, this has got me to think, and it was so interesting. And the masters at Yale, you know, previously we hadn't been spoken to in this way. And for me, this was normal. It was like writing an essay, like a thoughtful essay where you're trying to defend a point of view.

And we had done this previously when I had been at Harvard. My wife and I had a similar role there. And I, you know, we would regularly communicate with our students in this fashion and some would agree and some wouldn't agree. And, you know, we had debates there about religious symbols in public places and vegetarianism and, you know, could we roast a lamb at Greek Easter in the college courtyard using university money to purchase the lamb? I mean, you know, they raise interesting sort of questions for the students to debate. And anyway, so we got all this positive feedback for this. And there'd been a lot of students complaining about the Halloween costume guidance email. And that was the history in the background. The New York Times article was

in the public sphere. Yale students thought it was infantilizing. Previously, we had gotten some praise for engaging the students with ideas. And that's what motivated my lovely wife, who has spent her career taking care of battered women and inner city children and, you know, homeless substance users. And this has been her life. We're very progressive people. Got her to send this email, which said, you know, do you students? And the email, just to clarify, my wife's argument was not actually taking a stand one way or the other on whether the guidance was necessary and one way or the other on the costumes. She was saying, you students should probably consider whether you wish to surrender this authority to superordinates.

It fundamentally was a left-wing position saying you should be deeply skeptical of surrendering power to the state, to the administration,, you should be deeply skeptical of surrendering power to, you know, the state, to the administration, and you should talk about that. That was the intellectual essence of my wife's very gentle email, the aftermath of which you summarized earlier. Yeah. I mean, I should say that the email was utterly balanced, as was Rhett Weinstein's email to his administration. There's no trace of racism. There's no trace of bigotry. There's no trace of failure of empathy. Or lack of sympathy for the students. It's showing respect. I believe we show respect for the students when we say, we are interested in engaging you in ideas.

Again, we're talking in engaging you in ideas. And again, we're talking about people who are old enough to be shipped off to fight a war. We're talking about people who, in a few short years, will be on the job market as some of the most highly educated and in-demand young adults in the country. I mean, these are people who should be able to talk about a Halloween costume that offends them. Yes, but you see, the problem is, again, there's, see, this is, again, where I have some empathy and sympathy for the students, too. And so this is what was so challenging, because, again, you see, there's a kernel of, like we discussed earlier with this notion of cultural appropriation and these claims that

science and objectivity, claims to objectivity are tools of oppression, you know, these ridiculously extreme claims, there's an element of truth as well to the student's sense of alienation. And part of it, again, is developmental. You know, 18 to 22-year-olds feel a sense of alienation. We all did, different ways. And now, you know, if you're a minority student in these institutions, there may be an extra burden of alienation that you feel. And I think there are ways that we can discuss that with students. I think there are ways we can reform our institutions. And I'm not, I don't lack sympathy for that. But I, as Jonathan Haidt has said, you know, I think the fundamental commitment of these institutions is to

lux et veritas. And this has to be done in a way in which we retain a deep and abiding commitment to speaking the truth and having open expression. So then what happened? She sent the email and some furor erupted and then you stepped out of the building to talk to an assembled group of students. How did the YouTube video we've seen... I'm not sure I want to go into all the details, because it's, you know, it's censored. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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