Modern Wisdom - #733 - Rikki Schlott - Is Cancel Culture Actually Getting Worse?

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Rikki Schlott is a journalist, columnist, free speech activist, and author. Saying "you can't say anything any more" is the internet's tagline. Cancel culture has been the hot topic over the last few years. But why has it taken over the discourse so much and just how much truth is there that it's getting worse than ever before? Expect to learn what Rikki uncovered from a mass analysis of Twitter bans, whether the rates of people being cancelled are increasing, if the cancellers actually enjoy the cancelling of people, what drove the increase in cancellations, if free speech is really dead in America, whether apologising works and much more.... Sponsors: Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 5.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout)  Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ricky Schlott, she's a journalist, columnist, free speech activist, and an author. Saying you can't say anything anymore is the internet's tagline. Cancel culture has been the hot topic over the last few years, but why has it taken over the discourse so much and just how much truth is there that it's getting worse than ever before? Expect to learn what Ricky uncovered from a mass analysis of Twitter bands, whether the rates of people being canceled are increasing,

if counselors actually enjoy the cancellation of others, what drove the increase in cancellations if free speech is really dead in America, whether apologizing works, and much more. There's a very formative book a couple of years ago called The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Height and Greg Lukyanov and Ricky and Greg have worked on this, which is the Canceling of the American Mind, which is their new book, and it's interesting to see kind of how the two are related and how a victimhood culture and an over a degree of coddling for children results in a society and a culture

which is hyper concerned about dangerous speech, dangerous actions. And it's very interesting, especially when they've dug into the data and actually looked at this from a statistical standpoint too. Don't forget, if you are listening, you should have also got a copy of the Modern Wisdom Reading List, which is 100 books that you should read before you die, that the 100 most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. And that list is completely free on the internet waiting for you. So go to chriswillx.com slash books to get your copy for free right now.

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might very well be it. So I'm not saying that you and Greg started all of this stuff, but I am saying that it seems to be conveniently timed. Yeah, we convinced all of the Ivy League and elite institutions to just self-detonate exactly as we were dropping this book about how terrible and dire the state of free speech is on their campus

and the state of discourse. So it's been an interesting time for sure. Also, often an unideal time to be a vocal free speech absolutist because it requires that you defend speech that is often very heinous even in the depths of an unfolding crisis. But certainly, I think we're seeing the consequences of decades of just these major elite institutions in America

just abdicating the value of free speech completely throwing it to the way side and then allowing radicalism and some really frightening, a liberal tendency used to fester in its place. What has happened to the rates of calls for cancellation over the last few years? It's been absolutely staggering. And since 2014, my co-author Greg Wukionov is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

And they have tallied more than a thousand attempts to get professors fired, 200 of which have been successful in getting them sanctioned. And that actually is twice the rate of the 10 years that roughly constitute what McCarthyism was. And so if we're looking back in historical context, we look at that as a horrendous blight on our record as a country in terms of, you know, firing people for ideological reasons. And we are now outstripping that at roughly twice the pace. So I think in the future historians will be looking back at this moment in time and studying it much as we did. And rightfully so, the 1950s.

What is driving this increase? Why is it ramping up so much? What are the undercurrents that are causing this thing to happen? Yeah, so I think the major catalyst here and why we define cancel culture as starting in 2014 and its modern iteration is because social media allows it to just take off like wildfire. And we kind of refer to Richard Dawkins' idea of a meme because cancel culture is very effective. You know, you don't have to actually engage with somebody's argument. You just attack them at hominum. You make an example of them. You make sure that no one

else wants to tread the same ideological path as them. And in the end, people see that and watch that and replicate that. And I think that social media has allowed for an unprecedented amount of scrutiny on institutions, ideas, and people, which of course is a good thing. However, we're in one of those post printing press moments of social unrest where we haven't yet figured out how to navigate this world in which now billions of people are in the cultural conversation

and anyone could be torn down at any moment, unceremoniously, fairly, unfairly. And so I think, you know, this is our book is an attempt to call, to attention to the issue and also hopefully get more people on board to figuring out how we get out of this mess because I think that there actually is a lot of just general desire and in a general understanding that things have gone too far,

that people are walking on eggshells and that that's not a healthy way to live. Right. So if you're saying that the distribution mechanism of social media, frictionless, free communication, ubiquitous, instantly, globally accessible, that is, that's almost like the delivery mechanism driving the virus in some way. Is there anything deeper than that? Or is the main driver of this just the fact that humans have perverse incentives, there are a bunch of strange things that go in in our psychology, and when the opportunity arises to be able to do this,

it activates something inside of us, or has there been a deeper cultural change to this driven the cancellation increase? Yeah, I mean, I think that the seeds have been sown for decades here, where we've just seen a general institutional creep away from free speech values, a generational creep as well. And we definitely believe that cancel culture started in its kind of fledgling form on American campuses. In the 80s and 90s, when the first wave of a political correctness was coming around, like Bill Mar was doing the politically incorrect show before I was even born. And it was kind of laughable at that point in time.

But then all of a sudden, as soon as social media came onto the forefront and Gen Z, unfortunately, my generation came to college campuses and began unceremoniously shouting down and tearing down their professors. It exploded out into the open in a way that it hadn't really, historically. However, the creep away from classical liberal values has been consistent. And one thing that was really frightening writing this book

is realizing how different Greg, Michael, authors, nearing 50 and I'm 23. So we have totally different generational span. And the old idioms and kind of foundational principles of American society that he grew up with, like to each his own and sticks and stones. I wasn't raised with any of them. I was raised with words can wound you and oppress people need to be protected and you need to be the warrior to step in on their behalf, less they be offended.

And it's just a fundamental flip. And I think that as a culture, we've just moved more towards protectionism and a feeling that we're all feeble rather than this resilient sort of anti-fragile framework that used to be kind of core to the American spirit, I think. It's the British spirit. I think. And the British, it's the British spirit too, you know, like step up a lip. That's what we were known for, the step up a lip.

And, you know, musn't grumble, musn't grumble, things are going badly, but musn't grumble. Yeah, there's a increase in fragility, right, a rampant fragility. But it's, it's hollow because it's not like there's an actual change. People are living longer than ever before. People have got better health care than ever before. You're more able to deal with anything from the car accident, to the bad weather, to the heat, to the cold, to whatever it is. So it's odd that you have real world situations going in one direction,

whilst perceptions of how bad it is going in another. But just how bad is it now? Like what stats have you found to back up just how many people are being canceled or what the sense, the cultural thermometer is saying? Yeah, I mean, fire does these tremendous surveys of student sentiment around the country. And we know that roughly two thirds of students

on college campuses say that they're self-centering. We also know that roughly 90% of professors say the same and that one in 10 have been investigated for what should be protected speech. And so I think that one of the things that's interesting is their tends to consistently be ebbs and flows of cancel culture where people say, oh, it's behind us and like it's no, it's no longer an issue. 2016 was a rough moment, but like now we're back to normal.

And then the pandemic happens. And it's even worse in the wake of 2020. And then, oh, no, maybe we're back to normal. And then the Israel-Palestine conflict, it wraps. And it's just anytime there's a moment of social unrest, a culture that is not actually deeply rooted in its free speech values will tend towards a liberalism, censorship, attacking disagrees or dissenters from the predominant viewpoint. And I think that we see that time and again. And every single time it's been getting more severe. So if you look at the caseloads that fire

gets from students and faculty across the country, 2020 was a record breaking year, despite the fact that kids weren't even on campuses. So they had an unprecedented caseload, and if you also look at the raw statistics of the surveys of Americans, consistently roughly four and five Americans will agree that political correctness has gone too far, that cancel cultures a problem,

that they feel that they have to self-sensor. And I think it's genuinely a tyranny of the minority. It's just the problem is that that remaining 20% squeaky wheels who actually do tear people down have such an outsized impact on society where we're all self-sensoring. And I felt that myself being an NYU student in the recent past, for sure. What was your experience on campus like when you got there? I had gone to a boarding school that was almost like a mini college before. So I feel like I was kind of primed by the time I arrived at NYU.

My freshman year of high school was the first time that I realized I just did not agree with the prevailing viewpoint. When they on Martin Luther King Day, as put all the kids in different buildings based on their race to talk about their racial experience, I remember being like, this is kind of the opposite of how I've been taught to internalize the lessons of Martin Luther King Jr. And yeah, so that was, I knew by the time I arrived at NYU that I was kind of going against the grain. And when I did get there, I was understandably, I think, in retrospect concerned for my social standing. And so I was hiding Thomas Soulbooks and Jordan Peterson

books under my bad, which is really embarrassing and retrospect. And like, now I've been a Jordan's podcast and I'm super canceled and you know, booted from every group chat that I was in basically at NYU. But it was generally an ideologically oppressive environment, I would say. I rarely heard dissenting viewpoints. I took, I did it two years of a humanities degree before dropping out despite having a 4.0 GPA because, you know, full tuition presume school was not going to happen. But I would say that generally it was one way or the highway. Kids would even try occasionally to pop into philosophical conversations and say, you know, to play devil's advocate and then present some unpopular opinion, and they would literally be sculpted in his stat consistently.

So I would, it just, it made me self-sensor, and I realized once I started writing for the New York Post and being outspoken finally in the pandemic, that so many people around me reached out to me privately and said, you know, I completely agree with you and I've been in a classroom with them. And I would never have known because, you know, cancel culture and liberalism thrives by making everyone feel alone. But even at a school like NYU, there were a considerable number of kids who actually did feel similarly oppressed, but or ideologically oppressed, but didn't feel that they could speak out and didn't have any examples around them.

It's strange to think, if that's the case, 66% of students are self-sensoring in some former and other on campus, but that there will be a good chunk of those students that will hiss and mock if you try to even steal man, let alone actually have a different opinion. I know it seems like it's I'm wondering what is motivating those people to be so vehement in their enforcement of a particular ideology that 66% of them don't agree with or at least have criticisms of. Like what's the, I'm trying to work out what's the incentive, what's in it for the consular? Well, I think that the, there's like a kind of cluster B personality type that's really been empowered on campuses, I think, and people who are, I think genuine believers that

a place like NYU out there are a considerable fraction of people who who generally believe that if they step in on behalf of some, you know, oppressed theoretical group that might be offended by something that you say, which by the way, they're almost never the demographic of people that they're defending. But I think that there's a moral high ground to it and and and ascentive righteousness. And I would even go as far as to say like a bit of like a religious kind of attitude towards it. Like I think of John McWorders book, woke racism and the idea that this is kind of supplanting. This like this ideology in a in a post faith world is oftentimes occupying that same part of the human psyche, I would say.

But also, it's so institutionalized at these colleges as well. I think that even if not every professor agrees with it, certainly the administrators are extremely disproportionate, the left wing or left leaning. And when I was at NYU, for example, we on the back of our ID cards, it says, here's 9-1-1, here's the phone number for the campus police, which you probably could theoretically need in

New York City at any point in time. And here's the student health center and all these emergency numbers, and then also the bias response hotline where you could call if you felt aggrieved or offended by something that someone said. And it's literally an institutionalized snitch culture on these campuses. And it was literally on the back of the bathroom stalls, too. They'd have posters of like, has something happened to you

called the bias response hotline. And you're immediately on the phone with an administrator. So you're walking on eggshells. And even if it is just a small percentage of kids who will hiss or who will Call you any sort of ishtourism or a foe at any Any opportunity

Just one kid doing that is enough to shut an entire class down. I believe and I I saw it firsthand Yeah, it's a a very effective leverage one person that has that. What's that panopticon? It's kind of like the panopticon, right? That you have one person that's able to be in the middle and manipulate an awful lot of people around them's opinions.

And the fear, it's a race to the bottom in that regard. Like whoever has the highest purity level is the one whose opinion is going to continue to be pushed forward. What was that analysis of mass Twitter bands that you guys looked at? Yeah, they found this is this is data that we got from the National Contigian Research Institute. And they followed the growth of the platform GAB as Twitter did mass bands and purges of accounts that were at various times associated with like info wars or there were, I think post Charlottesville, there were groups that they'd identified

as weight supremacists and proud boys. And they would do these mass bands and purges of accounts starting around 2016. And then literally in lockstep, there would be a mass exodus to GAB every single time. And the percentage of GABS that included the word ban would go up by like a factor of 10. And so we analyzed that data basically to demonstrate that when we do fight ideas that could be very offensive and unsavory and I understand why people are offended by white supremacist views and proud-boy views. I'm not defending them. However, when you

remove them from the common square in places where they might interact with other viewpoints or where they might get, quote, tweeted and publicly shamed. You end up creating even deeper and more entrenched echo chambers. And so we were very fortunate to get this data from NCRI because we now can provably say that censorship does not make these ideas go away. It just puts them into more obscure crevices of the internet where people are more likely to agree

and have a positive feedback loop. So we were extremely fortunate that that had not been published before. We had done this book and I think it's a demonstration of the importance of a platform actually tacking towards free speech because those views are not gone. They're just somewhere else and none of us hear about them, but they very much exist in another crevice of the internet. What do you think cancellation is trying to achieve? And none of us hear about them, but they very much exist in another crevice of the internet. What do you think cancellation is trying to achieve?

Like, you just explained that, it doesn't seem to work, it pushes these ideas underground in some regard, it can throw them into wack out chambers where there are presumably no dissenting voices. What is it trying to achieve? I mean, I think it's just predicated on a, like a fundamental misunderstanding of how dialogue works and how minds are changed and hearts and minds are won over. I think there's been such an alienation from the classical liberal values post-enlightenment that made society free and made dialogue robust and made debate

healthy and in the realm of ideas and not at hominem. And you know, for, for example, I've never learned John Stuart Mills on Liberty. I never learned the importance of free speech growing up, even going to great schools and doing a philosophy degree at NYU. I didn't understand the importance and just how profound those post-enlightenment ideals are and how much they need to be bought into by the entire culture and community in order to thrive. And I think that those, some people who engage in cancel culture are genuinely need spirited, but other people I think do believe that if they shut down spirited, but other people I think do believe that if they shut down and I don't know, castigate anybody who has a bad belief that that somehow actually does expunge it from society,

which is provably untrue. I think it's polarized us even further, but I do think that it's just because people are no longer taught the importance of, you know, he who knows only his side of the argument knows a little of that. And the importance of being able to exist in the realm of ideas, and then frankly, it's just an easy, cheap tactic to win arguments without winning arguments. Because if I can attack you for being a cis-head white male, I don't actually have to deal with the fact that you might have an ideological argument that corners me or makes me uncomfortable

in my own predispositions. What are some of the mechanisms for enforcing cancellation that people might not realize are part of the cancellation machine? I would say one thing that people seem not to talk enough about is how early it's starting. And especially in the social media age, I grew up, I had an iPhone when I was 10 or maybe 11. I was on Instagram by the time I was 11, surely.

And I am now like the human receptacle for every parent's horror stories about what's happening to their middle schoolers getting canceled for like a two-second snapchat video or someone screenshoted something and now everyone's seen it and I think that one of the Enforcement mechanisms going forward in that age of everybody having this insanely excessive digital footprint and all of their adolescent blunders being Forever immortalized in a way that I think any older person should shut her at the thought of. That's one way that it's being enforced is that there's an entire generation of young people who are coming up just

surrounded by tripwires, even in their teenage years, that they're arriving on campus in college already primed for the fact that they have to self-sensor that they could be called out in any point in time. And I think that that's self perpetuating because that's making less and less people even want to stick their neck out in the first place. But then I also think that cancel culture is is so dangerous and so powerful, not just for the people whose lives are torn down and completely ruined, but also for all the people around them that see that and see them having been made an example of and then will refuse an

understandably so to tread that same territory. What's it called like a some kind of ideological bias test that people get asked and it's almost like the culpably deniable shit test of becoming, of working out where your politics are. It's not part of some induction. It's not even part of a code of conduct, but people just sometimes throw a little question, like, what do you think about Jordan Peterson? Like, you've ever listened to Ben Shapiro. They've even done this thing. And that's one of the more sort of soft introduction ways to this that slowly over time results in you being denigrated or disparaged or made to feel other.

And yeah, it's not just people calling for removal of accounts and bans and protests, it's, there seems to be sort of a softer kind of alienation of people that have different views, which importantly is culpably deniable, right. There's no point at which you've done the thing, because I think that people who are seduced by the prospect of being a white knight or who like the idea of performative empathy because it makes them look moral whilst having to do nothing moral,

or people who just want to enact power and enforce this over other people, the game is beginning to evolve in the way that memes often do, where if you, it's now low status to be seen as someone that calls for cancellation, because cancellation itself has become a meme, so now the methods of cancellation need to become increasingly subtle. They need to develop as the defense mechanisms develop as well. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think we've seen less coordinated sort of Twitter mob

tear downs, although I would say that 2020 was kind of an exception to that, but to your, to your example, or to your point, an example of that would be in 2020 and after the death of George Floyd, if you didn't post the black square, then that was a moral ideological more shock test. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, there were people who I have friends who were completely castigated and and unfollowed and blocked for not having done so. I mean, I didn't do it. And that wasn't didn't go over too well at NYU.

But that would be the perfect example of like a soft like do you buy into the prevailing ideology at that point in time? I would also say to that point, there's definitely a slow and subtle quarantining that I saw of when I was in classes at NYU and in my more philosophy-oriented courses where it would kind of become clear that maybe one or two people are a little more heterodox. And it was just like a slow, people are going to start kind of sitting on the other side of the classroom when they come in, if that person's over there.

To the point where it was like this kind of bubble is that we were ill or there was something wrong with us. And I've also watched how growing up that way has I think polarized young people even more because if you grow up, if you're being racially segregated when you're 14 on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and you're having political ideologies chugged down your throat from pretty much day one, it's understandable by some people, especially young people become the reactionary opposite or can go down some rabbit hole on the internet. And like, I'm fascinated to see, I'm sure you saw that statistic that girls and boys

are like forking politically right now. And I think there's- You make it that. You know, I think it's, I think part of it is a little bit of a reactionary thing for boys and understandably so. I think that I, I tacked right when I saw how weird the left was around me when I was in school, but I also feel like politics are, like there's almost a feminization of the

left a little bit. And a lot of, I think a lot of even cancel culture or attitudes about free speech and needing to protect other people from harmful speech, almost hijack the female perclivity to be more empathetic or to emotionally reason, more than rationally reason, which is obviously, you know, you do the whole like on average and of course there are exceptions to that rule. But I mean, even if you look at students, attitude on free speech, and the percentages of students at various schools who will say that it's sometimes acceptable to respond to speech with violence consistently, like the top five schools

are all women's schools, but the highest percentage of people saying that they would respond with violence to speech. And so I do think that our political binary is taking on a little bit of a gendered tone. And then you also just have the reality of growing up on the internet and ending up down rabbit holes, which happened to me politically. And I was like all the way on the right one year and then all the way to the left one year. And it's understandable how that could cause a polarization, I think, for sure. Have you looked at Corey Clark's work? Do you know who she is?

Name sense familiar, but... Evolutionary psychologist, phenomenal, and she sent an email to every psychology lecturer in America. She contacted them all to ask about trends around self-sensorship, specifically looking at what sorts of topics. This, put it in the second book, she's so great. She was on the show a couple of months ago. And consistently, female teachers skew towards there are certain things that shouldn't be spoken about. There are harsher judgments that should be for the lecturers that do talk about this sort of stuff.

And shock horror, the two areas that were the most derigated, the ones that you shouldn't talk about, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. Why? Because there are immutable facts or it posits that there are immutable facts. And sex denialism or sex difference denialism has no place to slot in in either of those worldviews

Yeah, that's interesting and I also to that Effect fire will ask students what issues are like the touchiest on campus that they feel that they can't speak about and consistently they're the most important political issues of the day Which is super disturbing like in 2020 all of a sudden it was racial issues, and then this year affirmative action was like all the way at the top, and the Israel Palestine conflict is always up there. And it's like the things that you would most want a college campus to be the forum of different ideas, colliding in a, in an intellectual and robust and healthy way, it's the ideas that are the most touchy

of transgender issues are always at the very top or post-Roa was the issue of abortion and it's super disturbing to see that the things that you'd most want to have kids hash out or at least hear and understand competing viewpoints on or consistently the ones at the bottom of the barrel in terms of what they're actually willing to touch as well.

Well, forget the fact that this is important to the development of a brain that's trying to work out what's true in the world. They're the most interesting things. They're the ones that are actually interesting to talk about. They decide to, thematically seal off a bunch of different things, and you're left with stuff that no one has a really strong

opinion on or that no one can become offended by it and you go, well, by definition, those things aren't very passion-inducing. They're not exciting to talk about. So I think back to, you know, I went to uni 2006 and I was at Newcastle for five years, so I did two degrees while I was there. There wasn't a single point while I was there

where politics even came in, I was doing business degree, I was regularly in lecture theaters with 250 or 300 students, and there wasn't a single time when it came in. It was pre-me too, so I guess, there was some reckoning kind of around social justice and male behavior and male female sex dynamics and politics as well. You know, it's pre-Trump, it's pre-largely pre-social media.

Facebook was available the year that I went if you only had a university email address that was when it was still gate kept by having a university email address that was only for people that were attended like accredited institutions or whatever. But that, my experience at university, despite being mostly boring, was completely bereft of any control that we were degenerate club promoters and like Jim Bros. So I guess we may have disregarded them had they've been there in any case, but I didn't notice any of this. And it makes me, regarded them as they've been there in any case, but I didn't notice any of this. And it makes me sad. It makes me sad to think that I still have faith,

and I still believe that university is a very good formative experience because I look at the transformation that I went through, absolutely 100% of it outside of the lecture theater, but I look at all of the changes that I went through, and I think if I hadn't had that, it would have taken me significantly longer to have got to the stage where I was socially, in terms of my life experience, in terms of my networking

ability, in terms of how much business experience I got, all of those things. It was like a crash course at Navy SEAL Hell Week of just learning to be around other people and losing your keys and getting drunk and having an argument with a friend at three in the morning. All of the experiences outside of the university thing were important, but if every single one of them is colored with this, like, sword of dameclese that's hanging over your head in case you say the wrong thing, and now the fact that you do have a gullible surveillance state co-opted by volunteers that don't realize they're doing it. Like, someone has CCTV footage at all times. We had this idea.

This is like the least academic insight into the proliferation of smartphones. Back in the day, we used to do a t-shirt bar crawl called Carnage. And this was 2007, 2008, 2009. It was a license to print money. You put one of these things out, and it just sold out immediately.

And there was tasks on the back, things like pulled a peg, got off with three randoms, swapped shoes with somebody. People would write the first half of the alphabet down the right side of the room, and the second half down the left side of the room, and they'd try and kiss one person

from each letter of the alphabet. Like this is classic Mid-Northy's American pie style, like university behavior. But one of the questions I asked a friend was like, where did that sort of Larry British sort of student culture go? And he said as soon as the smartphone came around, no one could make mistakes on a night out without fearing that it would define them for the rest of their life, that you have, you know, you kiss some person that's like uncool or embarrassing or whatever. You do it in 2006.

People laugh about it and then it's either forgotten about or you can deny it outright and do whatever. But in the age of the internet, it's, you know, cemented online for the rest of time, and it defines you. Absolutely. I mean, and I think that the impacts and young people are so much more profound than we've even really started to talk about. I mean, I'm 23 and I'm just at the beginning

of just burgeoning into adulthood and being the first cohort of people who are able to reflect back on what it means to have a smartphone when you're 10 and to have the threat of anything popping up at any point in time. And any one born post-2002 tells you that they don't have something on safeties somewhere

that they would rather not have come back to haunt them is absolutely lying to you. I think we're ultimately going to have a ceasefire on this front because it's going to get so bad. We're never going to have a politician who can survive op-o research for the rest of time now that we've been so overly online. And I think the sad thing to me is that young people demonstrably know this. Like, the amount of concern that I've heard from my peers and from people reaching out to me about their own children. And also the polling, if you ask generations

what their view is of cancel culture, positive or negative, the most positive view is millennials, and then it gets more negative as you get older, except for Gen Z completely reverses that trend. So even though millennials have the most positive view of cancel culture, Gen Z has the most negative view, even more negative than boomers because we grew up with it. Like we grew up looking behind our shoulders, but the problem is it's a very small squeaky wheel, wheel minority of our generation that is at the helm of these cancel campaigns and will like Twitter shame their boss. But the rest of us have not been given the restorative kind of free speech-oriented, classical liberal

set of values to supplant cancel culture. We just know we don't like this, but we're not quite sure how to fix it or put our finger on it or stop attacking people at hominem and living in the realm of ideas. So I think there's a tremendous amount of anxiety and unrest and being a young person who grows up unable to make social faux pas as everyone does when they're in adolescence or have their Marxist phase and then realize a couple months later that that wasn't for them.

But that's part of growing up and exploring. And, you know, I think young people just really have not been taught that the values required to interact in the intellectual world with the epistemic humility of realizing that you might be wrong at any point in time and that anyone that you talk to knows something that you don't know, and that your opinions aren't part of your personhood and extending that same generosity and grace to somebody who you might be disagreeing with. And I think that's really profound. And I also just took it back to what you were saying on the university front. Like I dropped out of NYU with the 4.0 GPA,

not because I have some sort of disdain for education and learning, but the really sad reality at that point in time in such an ideologically homogenous environment was that I had to drop out for my love of learning and defense of it, and it's not because I don't believe in the importance of education, but I think in its current form,

it is so distorted. And these institutions of higher education have just appointed themselves the sole gatekeepers to success in plate society and have had absolutely no market pressure placed upon them. And it's going to require more young people proving that it's not the only pathway to success to actually, I think, shake society from its complacency and challenge these institutions to actually be better and to serve people who are their patrons. Talk to me about the relationship between free speech laws and free speech culture. Yeah, I think that this is one of the most interesting insights from the book, where, you

know, there are three countries with extremely robust free speech laws on the books, which aside from the US, almost two, if you were to read them, you might think that it's the first amendment, and they are Turkey, North Korea, and Russia. So having a free speech law on the books means absolutely nothing if your culture and practice is not divided by them. Whereas on the flip side, one of the most vibrant points in intellectual history was the French enlightenment at a point in time where there was absolutely no legal protection for free speech on the books at all but so ever. But because there was a a salon culture and a culture in which elites were interested in the free

exchange of ideas and leaning into an intellectual society, free speech was able to flourish. And I think that it's really important to realize that merely having the first amendment on the books or merely having its equivalent on the books in another country is not adequate to actually fostering a culture that operates in a free speech way. And there's a great quote by a judge named Learned Hand, which does not really sound like a real name to me, but I'll bungle it, but roughly. Roughly, the quote is that, you know, liberty lives in the hearts and minds of every man and woman. And if it lies there, it doesn't need a court or a law to protect it, but if it dies there, no court or law can save it.

And I think that we're seeing this slow and subtle cultural shift away from free speech norms that all of a sudden, like, throw social media in the mix and you can burn any heretic at the stake. And it'll happen like that because it's really hard to grow up in the West today and realize just how crazy it is that we don't burn our heretics at the stake in the scheme of human history. We live in like the teeny tiniest little sliver of time where we actually don't do that. But all of a sudden now we're doing it in the digital sphere because that is mankind's instinct. And so just having along the books doesn't really matter unless

everyone buys in and actually abides by the cultural code that it is really required. There was a really interesting insight I saw from the New York Post article that you guys did where it was talking about how free speech culture and ideological diversity can make the world more chaotic. And because most humans don't like this, a good contingent of those people will happily trade their freedom for increased predictability. That if you're exposed to new opinions and ideas that don't conform with you, you have to confront the fact that maybe you're wrong. And accepting that you are wrong to the ego is tantamount to destruction. It's almost an invalidation of you entirely. Oh my god, if I'm wrong about this, what else might I be wrong about? And this denial of ever having to admit that we're wrong, especially in a world where everything

that we do and say is permanently cemented on the internet for all of time. For all of the sudden, to scrutinize. I thought that was very interesting. And I think from my perspective, that seems to be right. A more chaotic world with a multiplicity of ideological viewpoints and diversity of opinion is unsettling in many ways to people. And they will happily trade the accuracy and the truthfulness and the freedom that they have in order to increase the reliability and predictability that they have about the world going forward. Yeah, absolutely and I think that that's made even worse by the fact that polarization has I think made politics so much more tied to individual identity

than it has been in the past as well. So an assault on your ideas feels like an assault on you as a person. I think also to the point of chaos, I mean, if we look back historically, we're in the very beginning ages of what it means to now have billions of people in the cultural conversation, thanks to social media, it's been roughly a decade since it's been massly adopted and if we look back historically, I think the best analogy is the invention of the printing press. And when the printing press was invented, Henry the Eighth was trying to license who can

print a pamphlet and there were hundreds of years of religious wars as a result. And that was a really chaotic and uncomfortable time where I think it's actually pretty understandable why the powers that be and the people that were beholden to them wanted to squash out all the new voices that entered the cultural conversation and challenged the norms. And we look back and we think, well,

that was a great thing. And literacy rates rose, and that created the enlightenment. And the world as we know it. But we're still in that early kind of chaos days of social media. And I think the fact that things haven't gotten worse than they are at the moment is actually kind of amazing. And a testament to the fact that there are still some people who do believe in free speech and the wisdom of the populace. But I think like the Twitter files just go to demonstrate how how threatening new voices in a cultural conversation can be to the social fabric and to the kind of levers of society. What do you say to the people who claim this isn't cancellation culture?

This is consequence culture. This is just people being brought to account for having heinous reprehensible views. I mean, I think that the swath of views that have become cancelable offenses has grown so considerably. I mean, we just have like case after case in our book of there's one woman Carol Hoven who was a Harvard professor who God forbid one on Fox News and she and she's lovely and she's tactful and she's careful with her words and she went on Fox News to discuss some issue of gender she wrote the book T about testosterone and she extremely tactfully said you know we can respect people's gender identity and

use their pronouns. However, we have to also acknowledge the fact that biological sex is real and on a fundamental level. And for that, she was effectively squeezed out of her job to the point where, and I know you know this story, but to the point where she told us in an interview for the book that she was actually suicidal for the first time in her life. And so if the group of cancelable offenses is now including acknowledging biological reality as a professor in your own field, or going all the way down to now middle schoolers, whose parents call me constantly and reach out to me or email me to say that their seventh grader has now been canceled for something which I mean it's seven in seventh grade that just shouldn't even you shouldn't even be politically aware you're worried about boys and acne and not politics at that point in time. I think the truth that a lot of people who've witnessed these cancel mobs form can attest to

is the fact that apologies do not make it better. It's not about saying, oh, I did tweet that 10 years ago, but I completely disagree with it now and I apologize for offending you because that doesn't fix it. It's not actually about making people account for any error that they might have made or any misstep. It's about making an example of them and shaming them. Yeah, it's having your morality stand on the shoulders of someone that you can easily accuse. I mean, the Carol thing, we went for breakfast, me, her William Costello a couple of months ago. And that woman cries more easily than anyone I've ever met. She's like the

most empathetic. I think she cried six times on Rogan, like four times on Misha. She's just such a touchy, fairly lovely person that's really delicately trying to move through this. She's a really perfect example of whatever we want to call it, like soft mechanisms of cancellation. Because at no point did anyone come to her

and say you can't teach anymore, but every teaching assistant that she was supposed to be working with refused to Help in her class. So if you don't have a teaching assistant like how are you gonna? You can't do your class and I think you had one of the most popular. Is that quite a well-attended class at Harvard? So it's like, okay, well, I guess I'm kind of like on the bench for now. And then when you're on the bench for that so long, you just end up kind of falling away. So and it's so interesting to think that the apology doesn't make any difference because

if that was what you were after, then the apology would fix the problem. It's like, hey, that's interesting. How interesting. I didn't know about this particular statistic about this thing, because no one from an ideologically pure, purity spiral driven world can believe that someone would be sufficiently epistemically humble to actually ever be able to say that. It's like, no, no, no, no. This is you. Your identity and your opinions and your ideology are one and the same. You know, we saw this with Rogan, the variety of cancellations that he went through a couple of years ago.

And what people do, I thought, is really formative. People try and say, here is an individual instance or a collection of instances that may seem small here, but we know that they are representative of this big iceberg that lies below the surface. This is the smoking gun that tells you that this person is the bigoted racist, transphobic, homophobic, whatever thing that we always knew that they were, and this is finally the crack. The Fisher has shown through this facade that they were, and this is finally the crack. The Fisher has shown through this facade that they've created.

So all right, well, what you had with Joe, and what, you know, increasingly I would like to think people will see with other online contact creators or writers or anybody. All right, well, that might be true, but I also have 5,000 hours of him talking to people on podcasts, and it didn't come up then, so he's either the best liar

and deflector of his bigoted racist views in history, or that's unrepresentative overall. And I don't know, it seems to me like, I would like to think people give what used to be called the benefit of the doubt, but I don't know, that seems to be increasingly right now. Yeah, I mean, I think that also to that point, the benefit of the doubt is often given to anybody's ideological friends, but then it's precisely the opposite if they just don't

like someone instinctively. And I think, you know, it's been instructive to see, like, Rogan survive cancellation attempts and Barry Waste to make a career out of it basically with the free press and the awesome stuff that she's doing there. Or she pal and seeing Netflix finally actually toughen up and say no to their employees that we're trying to wreak havoc over a single joke. I mean, I do think that there have been examples of cancellation going so far that there is a band of people

who are willing to come around and actually support you and champion you as a result. And I think that that Joe Morgan's a perfect example of that. But I worry that those are only people who are in a powerful enough position when it first happens to them that people know. And there's so many just like unheard stories or even, I think that one of the problems is on a college campus it's much easier to quantify how often this is happening because people

often have legal recourse, but in the private spheres it's impossible for us to tally how many people have been canceled not only because some people will just shut down and never say anything, but also because there are so many examples of people who will talk to you off the record about it, but they've signed an NDA because that was their severance agreement with whatever company they were squeezed out of. And, you know, Jennifer Say who left Levi's, she refused to sign an NDA and turned away a million dollars of payout to because she had criticized COVID policies and school lockdowns, which apparently means that you can no longer be an executive at Levi's. But she refused to sign an NDA and we only know that that even happened because she had

the spine to actually say, no, I want to maintain my intellectual autonomy. But yeah, I mean, I think that there's so many high-profile tear downs that thankfully people are starting to land on their feet and support one another. But, you know, I fear that the 2024 election will be another way of all of the same stuff. And I'm not feeling great about the future of cancel culture and the near future. So. Oh, yeah. What are your projections? Give me the weather report moving forward for the storm front of cancellation? Yeah, I think I am hugely concerned about 2024 as is my co-author. I especially considering that we have such polarizing options on both sides of

the aisle. I am very concerned that 2020 and 2016 were just like little trial runs for how polarized and how ad hominum we're about to get, at least in the US. And I think that, you know, the ripple effects of American politics are really felt across at least the English-speaking world and often just the cultural, Western, general. So I am not feeling fabulous about the near future. I'm extremely nervous as we seem to be kind of just powering ahead towards an election

between two historically unpopular incumbents. So I don't know, I'm not feeling great. But what are your predictions on that front? Do you think that the social unrest is going to continue? It's a difficult one. I would guess yes, because the memes of production for creating trends online and going completely super viral have become more sophisticated. This is one of the things that's interesting. People look at the algorithms on social media as if they are the things that give us the content, but they also train the content creators. If you think that the memes that came out in 2016 were sophisticated and built to

limbically hijack you, and if you thought that the things that happened in 2020 were, oh my god, like look at all of this, wait until 2024. Each time that it comes back around, there is a new iteration of people and sometimes AI, now creating stuff that is even more compelling, that's even more outrage-inducing. So, I don't know, I'm mean Texas, so I feel a little bit like insulated from anything sort of too crazy, even being in Austin. People call it a blue dot in a red ocean, I've never seen any of the blue dots here. It just seems to be like just a red up. But yeah, it's going to be very interesting. And I don't know, it's so right to say that most of the people that survived their cancellations

were people who already had tons of momentum, you know, Chappelle, Rogan, JK Rowling, etc. And there's definitely a part of some size of the cancel mob picking fights with people that they know can't fully defend themselves. You know, like Carol Hoeven, again, is a good example of that. Like she's so kind, it was obviously going to emotionally impact her. If you're someone that even knows,

has even seen five minutes of her on a podcast, you know that this isn't someone that's gonna come out of the gate swinging like Dave Portnoy, right? It's someone who's going to be very impacted by this and also doesn't have a million person Twitter where they can wrangle a huge audience of people that come around. And also, like, what's the lesson to take away from that?

Everybody should have a huge mailing list of email address. Everyone should build up a massive sub stack as like a great, blasting case of cancellation thing. That's not realistic. Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, and I think that, I think that we're only seeing just the beginning of how profound that's going to get.

I worry about 24. I worry about every single moment of cultural unrest that we have going forward and less. We actually return to the values that make a diverse democracy possible. I think that that's pretty much impossible. And we will end up going towards a Marxist sort of divide and conquer situation, which makes enemies of everyone, unless we actually can start looking at viewpoints and living in the realm of ideas and the realm of

of personhood in two separate planes. And so I think until we really have a cultural reckoning and it gets really ugly, which I think it's coming in the near future, I don't think that that things will get much better. But I'm curious, so Austin is not as blue as they say it is. I don't know if it's me just spending time with lots of bigoted, reprehensible people, like neurodivergent degenerates, but they all seem to be relatively free speech,

relatively open to new ideas. I mean, yeah, I mean, see, I mean, there's like some stuff stop having kids.org does like this goth parade every year down Broadway. There was some stuff to do with like pro-lifi things, but that's not, that's not because it's just a variety of opinions being shown via street protest. What else have I seen? There was a pro-natalism conference here two weeks ago. There's a lot of different stuff. It doesn't seem to be very heavily controlled. Thinking about that, the complete unlikeliness of people building up some huge online platform

so that they can then deploy it to protect themselves in case of being cancelled, so that they can then deploy it to protect themselves in case of being canceled. What are the potential solutions to this? Beyond make it worse so everyone hates it more and then it gets better. Are there any more fluffy solutions than that? Any less apocalyptic ones? Of course. Yeah, so the final section of her book is solutions oriented. And I think a lot of it is just throwing everything at the wall and hoping that something sticks. But we think that parenting is a large portion of it, especially with young people, and that a lot of the, the sense that words can be violence and wound you are the result of helicopter parenting and a just completely abandonment of the sort of ideas of anti-fragility that

prior generations were raised with. Gen Z was very coddled and protected and made to be anxious and feel as though they're feeble and endangered by the world around them. And my co-author his previous book is The Coddling of the American Mind, which concentrated quite a lot on parenting and its impact on politics and Gen Z. And so we think that there's a lot about leading by example as a parent and raising kids who will not be cancelers and understand their own vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of their friends. And I do find a tremendous amount of hope in the fact that young people are so put off by cancel culture, that if they were just given the positive

restorative framework to fight back against it and kind of a social pact that would be mutually protective, that there's some hope there going forward. We also think that divesting away from the elite university system, just being the only way that people end up in positions of power in society is a healthy thing. And that people who are hiring should consider kids coming from large state schools and kids from different backgrounds or people who didn't finish college or people who went down a different path in that we shouldn't just have this funnel of kids coming from consistently the most elite schools or the schools, but the worst attitudes towards free speech, which I think it's no surprise that we're seeing absolute chaos

erupting on campuses like Harvard right now, because if you abdicate free speech and you suppress students and send bad ideas underground for decades on end, all of a sudden in a moment of cultural unrest, they're going to explode explode and that's precisely what we're seeing right now. And so we believe that you know opening our minds to alternative education systems and not allowing these schools that seem to breed cancel culture and counselors to you know take the reins of society consistently with every graduating class that's a positive. And also even people who are running corporations can, I think, take one note out of Netflix's book after the

Dave Chappelle controversy where they said, you know, if you can't tolerate the fact that we are going to publish viewpoint, that you disagree with as a platform for ideas and expression, then you can leave. I think that was a remarkably unique and brave stance to take. And actually Coinbase did that a while ago. Their CEO, Brian Armstrong, was like, we're just not going to make any institutional statements. And if that's a problem for you, you can go. And like 10% of their employee base did actually go. But that's not the 10% of people that you want to work for you. So I think on the level of corporations,

we can, I think there are a lot of, we hear frequently Greg and I both from corporate leaders who are terrified of their 23 year old hires. And that's just such a bizarre power imbalance. And it's very fixable if you just create a free speech culture from the get go.

But I also think weirdly, after October 7th, there's a lot of people rediscovering the importance of institutional neutrality and of free speech and free expression. And I think it's a really revealing moment for schools to suddenly say, oh, you know, we had a statement about Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal and BLM and all these completely irrelevant things to the inter-working of a university, but we can't make a statement on this. Of course, I think it's shocking that this is the moment that they've finally discovered that institutions are full of people with viewpoints and do not have viewpoints themselves. But maybe there's a silver lining that this moment of just absolute chaos and institutions where free speech was not valued for so long, where they're suddenly hiding behind

the valence of free speech. Like maybe this is where we actually buy in and we realize that we're all vulnerable in a world where a liberalism is allowed to reign supreme. What would you say is a piece of advice to someone who is threatened with cancellation or is going through it? Have you got to do and not to do checklist for those people? Yeah, I think obviously it's so dependent on the level of support of people around you, but I think the most's so dependent on the level of supportive people around you, but I think the most important thing for everyone

who is concerned about cancel culture to say now as an individual before anything happens to them or anyone that they know, is that if someone that you know and care about and like is attacked, you commit that you will stand up for them. It's not that I agree with their viewpoint,

but they're a good person and tearing them down is not the right thing to do. And I think that if we afford that to other people that, and hopefully expect that in return from them, if the mob comes for us, that's one way to fight back. I think the power of someone else standing up for you is really profound and unfortunately, cancel culture thrives because everyone else is scared to stick their neck out there.

And like when I was writing about free speech at NYU for the New York Post, which is not really the most popular thing to do surprisingly, you know, I have so many people messaging me and saying, oh, I completely support you and I completely agree with you, but just don't tell anyone that we have this conversation. And that that's got to stop when we have to short circuit this. But on the front of if you actually are targeted with a cancel culture attempt, it's funny. This is actually a point where my co-author and I have a little bit of disagreement where he says never apologize

under any circumstances period. And I don't fully agree with that. I think if it's something that you would apologize to a friend for or something that you genuinely didn't mean, I don't think you apologize and try to placate the individual who's treating you unfairly. But if you genuinely don't agree with the tweet that you sent when you were 14 because who does, then I think you say that's not me. But I don't think that you ever try to placate the mob. That's the number one thing, is if someone is attacking you unfairly,

you don't try to respond to that with undue rationality, when or ever compromise, and apologize for something that you don't actually feel any remorse for, for sure. Ricky Schlott, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They're only keep up to date with the things

that you're doing, where should they go on the internet? My Twitter is just my name, Ricky Schlott, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They'll only keep up to date with the things that you're doing. Where should they go on the internet? My Twitter is just my name, Ricky Schlott, and Ricky Schlott.com. And I think probably by the time this comes out, I'll be launching a new podcast under Bill Mars and Brella at Club Random. So that will be forthcoming in 2024. Very cool. I enjoy the prospect of you joining me

in the muck and the mire of the podcasting world. I am super excited to. I've been learning from you, I'm doing all my homework, waking up to modern wisdom, so thank you. My pleasure, I really appreciate you. Thank you for today. Thank you so much.