The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Cancel Culture and Free Speech with Greg Lukianoff - Firing Hamas Supporters and Other Matters

Episode Date: October 21, 2023

Greg Lukianoff is the President & CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the co-author, along with Rikki Schlott, of the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Destroys Trust and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution. Get Greg's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Canceling-American-Mind-Undermines-Threatens-ebook/dp/B0BTZT9PLM/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20F3LOZXMQW85&keywords=greg+lukianoff&qid=1697910161&s=digital-text&sprefix=greg+lu%2Cdigital-text%2C77&sr=1-1

The Comedy Cellar Podcast, this week featuring free speech advocate and chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Greg Lukianos. Okay, good evening everybody, welcome to Live from the Table. This is Noam Dorman, I'm doing a one-on-one interview with someone who's become kind of a hero of mine Ricky Schlott, of the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind. Cancel culture destroys trust and threatens us all, but there is a solution. Welcome, Greg Lukianoff. FIRE used to stand for something else, right? It used to stand for, what was it? The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Sorry, in education. Yikes, I've completely converted. And it was because we were focused on freedom of speech and academic freedom in higher ed, but things got so bad for free speech, both on and off campus in, say, 2020, that we decided we needed to expand beyond campus. You know, when I first met you, you know, there's a few people I've met over the years who I was totally taken with. And they've all gone on to become pretty big. One of them was Harry Enten, who I just met when he was a kid and now he's one of the world's experts. Another one was Coleman Hughes, who I actually have, Nico, one of your guys, actually introduced me to him. My protege, my executive vice president. Yeah, who I, but I'd actually heard him first on the Sam Harris podcast. And you, who I first read, I think, in a Wall

Street Journal editorial you wrote about campus speech. And I invited you to our podcast early on. Before you knew John Haidt, I believe, who was also somebody that I had keyed into, although he was already pretty well known. And I remember saying, this guy's going to replace the ACLU. I remember saying it because the ACLU was just deteriorating before our eyes, and you appeared to be the heir apparent. And that's pretty much, I would say, what has happened.

Do you feel that you've replaced the ACLU, your organization? You know, FIRE has a general rule that we don't fight other nonprofits unless attacked. And I always make the point that we work with the ACLU on cases. They do take a lot of free speech cases to this day, you know, but are unlike the ACLU. We don't have 18 practice areas. Unlike the ACLU, we're not just about First Amendment law. We're about freedom of speech. So I think we're trying to learn from some of the things that we think, you know, diluted some of the ACLU's effectiveness on freedom of speech and one of those ones because remember I interned at the ACLU back in 1999. I didn't know that. Northern California and

already like the free speech kids were not necessarily like the cool kids in the office but the and the problem also in that office was that the juice really was with other practice areas people were much more excited about Michelle Alexander's racial justice project. And even the, you know, some of the lawyers in the ACLU in California, you know, they'd be arguing what the reasonable standard for harassment related to freedom of speech would be, which is the kind of thing that fires more kind of like, no, it's much better to be entirely focused on one cause rather than spread yourself out. All right, that's a nice diplomatic answer. In my opinion, the ACLU does not seem to prioritize the problematic free speech that used to be what it was known for, defending the people that no one else would defend in order to make the point that only by protecting that do you prevent the slippery slope from attacking all speech at some point or another

i will say in my new book canceling the american mind which i wrote with a 23 year old vunderkind named ricky schlott she's a journalist at the new york post um i talk about my experiences interning at the aclu and you, you know, I'm a First Amendment guy. Like, I went to law school. I specialized in First Amendment. I went to law school to do First Amendment law. I took every class Stanford offered on the thing. When I ran out of classes, I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty. This was my bag. And then I interned at the ACLU. And on the very first day at the lunch, I talked about how great it was to work at a place that would even defend, you know, the Nazis at Skokie. And I got dressed down by one of the associates there for, well, we don't support harassment.

I'm like, what just happened? Who was talking about harassment? And that was honestly the first real clue that I got that, oh, I didn't realize that harassment had been code for the previous 15 years for an excuse to get at speech you don't like. So why a book now on cancel culture? It's a very broad question, I know. Sure. Well, first of all, I've got to give a definition to cancel culture. Please. And, you know, like I said, I've been doing this 22 years.

Things were already bad on college campuses back in 2020, back in 2001. But man, have they gotten so much worse. And working with this, you know, brilliant young woman, Ricky, I was originally thinking, hey, you know, like Codley of the American Mind, my book with Jonathan Haidt, is disproportionately about an environment that actually is a disaster for the mental health of Gen Z young women. So the idea, but it's written by two Gen Xers. And I thought, Gen Xer men too. So I thought the possibility of writing with someone who actually was Gen Z and a woman could be a great follow-up. But as we were talking about it, I was watching these people still try to claim that cancel culture isn't even real, that it's like a right-wing hoax. And, you know, I've been working on campus. I watch this with my own eyes and being like, no, that's insane. That is, it's callous.

It's putting your head in the sand. Like the data is not on your side at all. So that's one of the reasons why the opening chapter of the book is actually called The Gaslighting of the American Mind. Because I think most of the rest of the public, when you look at the polling, they know what cancel culture is. That's why we called it cancel culture and didn't make up some other name for it. Liberal, Democrat, black, white, they know what it is. They're afraid of it. And the population that is most hostile to cancel culture, by the way, is Gen Z. So they know what it is, and they hate it as well.

So I felt it came down to us, like the ones who had the most data on this stuff, the most experience on it, to be like, okay, once and for all, this thing is real, and it's insane to say otherwise but what it so how do you know whether someone's been canceled or simply properly fired for crossing a reasonable line in some way we talk about the our definition is the uptick since 2014 of people getting punished de-platformed fired expelled for opinion that would be protected by the First Amendment under First Amendment standards, say, like, we try not to get too in the weeds, but like an analogy to public employment and the culture of fear that has resulted from it. Now, if you are, you know, firing someone for their political point of view, we would say that's cancel culture, you know, as far as their definition is concerned. One thing I do want people to understand is you can also, since it's a cultural norm thing,

we're basically saying we don't want there to be a law saying that you can't fire people on the basis of the political viewpoint. And by the way, that would be damaging as all get out to an organization like FIRE. Because if I discovered that someone on my team now hates the First Amendment and they had a law that they could refer to saying, ah, you can't fire me because of the local law. You know, you have to keep me. That would be bad for an expressive association.

So I don't favor laws making this mandatory. I just want people to think more carefully about, even if it's private employers, about if you lived in a country where every corporation, and it started to look like we were headed in this direction, or had already gotten there in 2020 and 2021, where every corporation was not just a widget factory, but also a political shop. And if you disagree with the politics of the boss, you can get fired. That would be something where, yes, they'd have the

Freedom Association to fire them, and I don't think they shouldn't. But I want them to think about what that would mean for democracy. If, yeah, you have a technical First Amendment right, but you can't have a job if you actually have a political opinion. I think that would be very dangerous. And meanwhile, you know, people were seemingly cheering this on in 2020 and 2021, where people were losing their jobs for cracking jokes or sometimes just saying their honest political opinion. So what if you had somebody working for you who's an active Nazi and you find this and he's joined your organization because he wants to make sure that active Nazis are protected? So do you have any lines that you would draw? Well, yeah, sure.

I mean, like, it's not, there's nothing, like, simple-minded about it. That's one of the reasons why we work the First Amendment standards into it, because the First Amendment has all sorts of ways of dealing with this. But I, and by the way, I don't actually have to go to a theoretical case. There's Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at the ACLU in the 1950s. And I read all this stuff that, it's kind of funny, like reading stuff about the Red Scare from people who never took Stalin as a threat seriously. I'm a Russian-American, and I'm like, great, he's one of the greatest murderers of all time, and you don't take this seriously.

And there really were American and British spies who were helping super Hitler, as we call him in my family, get the bomb. So there was reason to be freaked out, people. American and British spies who were helping super Hitler, as we call him in my family, get the bomb. You know, just an absolute. So there was reason to be freaked out, people. But there was someone who was on the board of the ACLU named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. And she was leadership at the Communist Party. She even defended them, I'm pretty sure, during the Nazi pact with Stalin. There's plenty of evidence that the leadership of the CP was filtering information to Stalin.

And now when you read stuff about the decision of the ACLU to kick her off the board during the Red Scare as being like, oh, it's a shameful moment for the ACLU. I'm like, they're the American Civil Liberties Union, and they had someone on there who was pro-totalitarian monster dictatorship. There is nobody who is worse in the world for civil liberties. If I found out that, like, I had someone on my team who was pro-fascist, I'd be like, you don't freaking belong here. It's funny because

if I found out someone worked for me, I'm trying to ask devil's advocate questions, but I'm so with you. If I found out that someone who worked for me was a Nazi sympathizer, I would do nothing.

Wow. As long as he doesn't bring it to work, I would just say, well, listen, what am I going to do about it? What I've noticed over time, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, is that a lot of people say things and it doesn't necessarily represent

how they behave in real life. And I've never really been able to come to groups like that. I have a lot of Egyptians and Arabic people who work for me in the kitchen. I guarantee you they're sympathetic, or many of them are sympathetic, to much of the stuff that we're hearing to defend Hamas. That's the way they're raised. I could go further. I told a story recently.

We had a guy years ago who was a manager. I don't want to say his name because I'm still in touch with him. He believed openly most of the jihadi type stuff. He believed that as Jews my father and I would spend the afterlife

burning as if we were one mile from the sun. He believed that the Mossad did all sorts of horrible things to corrupt Egyptian women, all of it. And yet, he dedicated with all his heart his career to my father's business. He worried about him. He was kind to me. He found out one time that I was in Egypt and hadn't told him. He had his family track me down at every hotel in Cairo, bring me to a feast, take me on a tour.

He still keeps in touch with me this day. It's a total contradiction, total cognitive dissonance. So, what am I supposed to react to? The fact that he has these beliefs that he's, in some sense, parodying, or maybe that's being too kind? The fact that he has these beliefs that he's in some sense parodying

or maybe that's being too kind to him that he believes. Yeah. Or the guy who with all his heart has been nothing but one of the kindest, most dedicated people to me and my family. So I think about that. And I also know a guy who was in the throes

of this black Israelite stuff. Oh, wow. Who believes that white guys are this and the devil and maybe invented by aliens. I don't know. And yet I know that were I in trouble, even physical trouble, this would be one of the first guys in my life

who would drop everything and come to my aid. I've seen this over and over. So that also informs my thinking about this stuff. Like just because somebody says something, that's not the end of the matter. I don't know how you feel about that. No, I think that that's a refreshingly sophisticated way to think about this stuff that has fallen out of favor. That essentially the idea that, and we talk about this in the book, in Coddling the American Mind, we talk about there being three great untruths, like basically terrible advice and things that you could believe that will

ruin your life and make you unhappy. And in this one, we had a fourth great untruth that plays a lot into the way we argue today in the United States, which is that no bad person can have any good opinion. And by the way, everything we put in parentheses, and by the way, everything I'm going to put in parentheses, and by the way, everyone's arguably bad. Because so much of the way our discourse is, and it's been informed by K-12, higher education, but also social media and Tumblr and all these unhealthy ways of arguing, is

the rule seems to be, if I can prove you're a bad person, that means I don't have to listen to you anymore. And there's something profoundly childish about that. Because you look at history, like, I mean, like, like Rousseau, horrible person, absolutely horrible person. Like he had like six, like six children with his mistress and he gave them all away for adoption.

Meanwhile, writing about the wonders of being about the wonders of children. You know, Karl Marx, horrible racist, you know, horrible anti-Semite. That doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything, you know. And I think like on the left, kind of like they tend not to examine those two people who had horrible points of view. They tend to go to like David Hume, who's one of my favorite thinkers of all time, but because he actually wrote a racist footnote in, I think, 1752, which is like, okay, 1752. You know, like, we know people were racist back then.

He wrote a footnote. Like, that doesn't mean that his ideas are not profound and we still have to engage with them to this day. But yeah, we have this way of arguing. It's basically kind of like, if I can find something, one bad thing about you, I can, I no longer have to listen to you. And isn't that convenient? Because we're looking for constant excuses to not actually have to engage with people who disagree with us. And that's why in the book, we talk about the perfect rhetorical fortress on the left, the efficient rhetorical fortress on the right.

And cancel culture, we try to get people to get that cancel culture is just the meanest, most extreme version of a larger approach to win arguments without actually winning arguments. That essentially, rather than engage with you and try to persuade you, I scare you to death. I bring up things you wrote 20 years ago to try to get you fired. I make sure that everyone knows that if someone takes this position again, we're coming for you. But the extra level of deep pluralism that you're showing, like appreciation for a society in which, wait a second, this person believes in their heart of hearts horrible things and as best I can tell, know for example they're still a great professor that's the end of the analysis for me you know like the um i this i remember having a

friend um from san francisco like flip out at me um because we were defending a um uh like a creationist who was a physics teacher um and that's all he read like he did he read like the first two lines uh and if he read and he got really mad at me. But if you read down, it's like there is no reports that he ever let his creationist views interfere with his physics teaching. He's excellent reports as a teacher. I'm like, that's that's what the analysis. And by the way, Isaac Newton was, you know, like was a creationist. Like basically, like when you look at the history of science, there's lots of people who believed in mystical things, but also could still be great scientists. So I wish everybody

thought this way about you, that even good people can have some horrible beliefs. And actually, historically, when we look back at this period, you always end up thinking that lots of people, maybe most people had horrible beliefs by the judgment of this time, you always end up thinking that lots of people, maybe most people, had horrible beliefs by the judgment of this time, but they weren't necessarily bad people. So you talked before about you want to essentially have the social norm aligned with First Amendment law, correct? I would say that the First Amendment law is good at informing what we should do in particular circumstances, but because it's a cultural norm, and a lot of my lawyer friends have a really hard time with the argument of culture or free speech,

and the argument seems to be, the worst argument against this, by the way, is actually someone saying, well, the right uses the term cancel culture, so you're engaged in political, you know, you're playing into their game. And I'm like, that's making the argument that, in your opinion, bad people make this argument, too, and I'm not going to be bound by something that's silly. But they also, lawyers in particular, have a hard time with the idea of it being like, yeah, but what are the precise parameters? When do you know exactly when you can fire someone and when you can't? And I'm like, I hate to break it to you, dude, but it's cultural. Like all culture ever is, is a series of weighing and values. So our larger goal here is that one, you can use some of the principles in First Amendment

law to help make your thinking better about these things. So for example, if you're trying to fire somebody and it turns out that they threaten someone's life, you know, it's like that's not even protected under the law. So like, don't even worry about that. Or someone engages in a, you know, a pattern of harassing behavior towards employees. Also, not really a hard call. Defamation, all of these things that are, so by having the First Amendment in there, we introduce a lot of nuance to the analysis. But what we're trying to say more than anything else is we'd be in a much healthier country if rather than, you know, push Jennifer Say out of Levi's genes because she argued that lockdowns will hurt the most disadvantaged kids the most, which then, of course, proving to be true. Levi's also,

even if they thought she was dead wrong on that, which clearly they did, and she wasn't, of course, ultimately, we talk about her case in the book, that there should have been a thumb on the scale for everyone's entitled to their opinion. Is that going to overcome someone who, you know, shows themselves to be completely insane? No. But might it actually help in these situations where people are being fired for retweeting a joke on Twitter? If the social norm or societal norm was sufficiently respected, we could even have people saying insane things. Lawyers should be able to understand this. We let people go who we know have murdered multiple people at once if the evidence has been gathered illegally.

And we live with that for the greater good of the system and that is at least as hard to accept you'd think there'd be some exception you know for for murder even the exclusionary rule but there's not yeah so what's so hard about living knowing that somebody says something ridiculous in in in the service of a society that's best able to live amicably with each other, best able to pursue truth and find truth, the benefits are so enormous to just sucking it up sometimes. I'm surprised that people can't see that. In the law, they say it's better to let 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man go to jail. Same thing with ideas, right? Better to let 100 dumb ideas than one good idea get stepped on. And we're stepping on good ideas all the time.

Just in the last few years with COVID and this and that, we've seen so many things that were, you know, squelched come back around to have been true. Yeah. Because we didn't have this societal norm of letting people spout off what appeared to be maybe at the time as being untrue. Yeah. I don't know. Well, that's something that I have a somewhat different theory on freedom of speech than most First Amendment lawyers, and I call it the pure informational theory of freedom of speech.

If I'm being fancy, I call it the lab in the looking glass. And basically, it's more or less the argument coming from humanism, that essentially if the project of humanism is to know the world as it is and to continue to constantly push the boundaries of what we can know, then there's something really basic you always need to know about the society in which you live in. And that's what people actually think and why. You can't get even slightly close to understanding of the world without that crucial information. But partially because of some bad arguments on campus, we've constructed this really narrow kind of idea,

the marketplace of ideas, I think, thing, where basically, like, it seems like the argument has become, oh, that's a bad idea, and Fall City doesn't get any protection, so therefore it's not very well thought out, but it's politically convenient in a lot of cases. And, like, the way I put it is, no, the world is not run by lizard people who live under the Denver Airport. But knowing that your uncle or your boyfriend or your girlfriend think that the world is run by lizard people who live under the Denver Airport is really important information to know. Conspiracy theories matter not because they're true, but because they change the world. So I see a lot of what I consider to be primitive thinking around the value of freedom of speech and a lot of sort of ways to really just get back to this very fundamental and unfortunate human instincts that when you

hear something that really bugs you and someone has an opinion that really gets under your skin to ostracize them, to otherwise figure out a way to get rid of them, and historically to respond with violence to that person. So I think we're constantly – this is why my sub-sack is called the eternally radical idea because I think in every generation free speech is a radical idea because in every generation people stand up to oppose freedom of speech and like reliably and they're usually on the winning side and there's a lot of our natural instincts that actually incline us towards that it's much harder but it's much wiser to take seriously the possibility you might be wrong keep an open mind play with ideas even if they offend you because like the value sometimes of of that person who has that crazy thought is in the act of arguing against it you're like actually there's 15 other things i just thought about because i actually hadn't had to think that one through before the even though

that was wrong these 15 things are actually really valuable yeah uh if so then if you were to I'm sure you've thought about this. If you were to inherit Twitter from Elon Musk, how would you run it? Would you would everything go? Would there be any limitations? I think the I would be informed by the First Amendment for sure. I think that the I think one place where I'm more of a hawk on actually punishing people, which might surprise you, is true threats. I think that we have undermined people's faith in freedom of speech by the mistaken belief that true threats are protected because there are times when people on Twitter say things that are clearly saying, I'm coming to your home and I'm fucking killing you. Sorry. That's all right. It's a family show.

Free speech. That should actually be investigated when that comes up, because otherwise it makes people think that, oh, wow, that's protected, too. It's like, no, actually, it's not. However, this is something that we emphasize a lot in the book, arguing towards truth. So there's a lot of what we're saying in the book that's about free speech. And there's also a lot that's about how you actually produce knowledge. And we're really clear that if you go through the perfect rhetorical fortress, you know, for example, which is the sort of like way you avoid arguments on the left, that includes things like, first

of all, if I can label you conservative, I don't have to listen to you anymore. It doesn't matter if you are, you know, I can just label you it. And I know this from experience. I did the same thing when I was in law school that I, you know, I didn't even, I barely even realized I was doing it. Like if you could label, like I didn't have to read Thomas Sowell because he was a right-winger. I didn't have to read Camille Paglia because I was told she was a right-winger, which I found in retrospect is insane.

And I'm ashamed of this, but this is still very much something that exists on the left. Also, on the right, calling someone woke even if they're pretty conservative is a good way to avoid an argument. But the PRF goes down down this and we call it perfect because it's just layer after layer after layer of not having to listen to people and we take people down the demographic funnel you know what's your color what's your gender what's your sexuality what's your gender identity and we get down to if you follow it all the way down the rabbit hole, you get to about 0.9% of the population of the country are none of those things. So you've automatically eliminated 99.1% of the people you should be debating with. Of course, you can go further down on expertise and all these other ways to dismiss people.

But here's the trick at the end. It turns out that if you have the wrong opinion at the end of this exhausting process by which the clock has already been run out, you are still considered, you're still dismissed. So Coleman Hughes, our mutual friend, has a great quote in there saying, I am constantly being told that the color of my skin is the most important thing about how seriously my opinion on any number of topics should be taken. But then when I actually say my opinion and people don't like it, I get told I'm not really black. And I heard this from John McWhorter, Wilford Riley, et cetera. So what am I getting at about what I would do with Twitter? I think if there was, and I said this on the Lex Friedman podcast too, and I don't think this would be impossible to do. I don't want there

to not be Twitter for people engaging in cancel culture and cat jokes. I want that to exist. I want people cracking jokes or following sports or music or whatever. I would love there to be a stream within Twitter that's about actually

debating ideas with rules that involve, and where you can somehow maybe upvote or downvote when people are like, oh, oh, oh, that's a straw man. Oh, that's an ad hominem. Because we are wasting so much IQ and so much time on canceling each other and just figuring out ways to win arguments without winning arguments, about getting one over on the other side, whereas we could actually be fixing things. So I talked a little bit about how it could be done. If you'll let me expand on this a little bit.

One of the analogies I make to today to really get people to understand how unique this historical moment is, is remember I mentioned I studied the printing press. The printing press was incredibly disruptive to the entire world. And actually, I think if you were looking at it from the point of view of 1521, you'd be saying this thing wasn't worth it. It just led to bloodshed and witch trials and blah, blah, blah. But over time, because it allowed so many more people into the global conversation, it became this, well, that's the reason why it was so disruptive in the first place. But it ultimately led to disconfirmation. It led to all these many eyes on problems going like, that's false, that's false, that's false, which was a huge boon for humanity.

Social media is a billion additional people in the conversation. There's literally no way that can't be disruptive. And we're at that stage where it's just disruptive, where it can just tear down. But I haven't entirely lost hope that, by the way, if we have that many people being a little more disciplined but looking at problems and took the rules of actually how you get to truth or at least how you get away from falsity seriously, we can actually solve stuff possibly faster than we ever have in human history.

Yeah, I agree with you. I have a couple thoughts. First of all, when I see anti-Semitism on Twitter, my instinct is not that they should get rid of it. I'm happy to be able to see it, and I'm happy to be able to show it to my kids so that they understand that it's out there. At the same time, I don't want them,

you know, they're like anybody else, unable to parse it. They see something on Twitter. They can't really gauge from that what percentage of the world is like that. It could just be a bunch of crazy people on Twitter. But there's also something in the way that, like at the comedian table at the Cellar,

which I'm kind of the arbiter of last resort, I would allow any conversation of any issue, but I would not protect she or he from a conversation where somebody is has an opinion about gender-affirming care or sports or anything trans or even whether it's mental illness, whatever they want to talk about. I'm like, well, this is what people are talking about. I can't protect you from that.

But if a comedian then turns to the trans person and then purposely misgendered her, I'd be like, get the fuck out of here. You're out of this conversation. And even if they misgendered her behind her back at the table, I would boot them from the table. Because to me, there's a bright line there between discussing issues and bullying somebody. I don't quite know how to make that standard written for Twitter to implement, but there is a difference there. So I would let anybody say anything

they want about the Jews, including, whatever it is, let them talk about whatever they think is true about the Jews, but I would not let somebody answer somebody, you fucking kike, blah, blah, blah. I'd say, no, that's not okay. Is that reasonable? I think that it's one of the reasons why I want this to be a stream within Twitter. I don't want to go to the point where people being insulting to each other, and even highly insulting to individuals, would be something that would get you kicked off Twitter, partially because I think that standard is too slippery and too subjective.

It is slippery, yeah. It's okay when I do it, but I wouldn't let someone else do it. Well, and you have every right to. If you're trying to have a good discussion, you're right. But I do think within this idea of the stream, that you would no longer be allowed in the discussion stream if you can't play by the rules. You just move back to regular Twitter.

You're outside of the actual world of ideas stream that's actually trying to fix things. Go back to your cat videos or your friends and talk your smack, but this is actually a serious place where we're trying to have an argument. To a degree, that's what higher education is and was supposed to be. Unfortunately,

it's doing a god-awful job of it at the moment. You must have access to Elon Musk somehow. Have you tried to get with him to give him your suggestions? I'm sure he's looking for good ideas. You know, I said it on the Lex Friedman podcast. I sent him a letter when he took over you know offering to talk about some of the stuff um you know i'd be i'd be delighted to contribute to it i'm also working with another company called

integrally about trying to create a social media platform specifically for you know arguing towards truth um but yeah i mean if you want to pick my brain uh i would be... Actually, that sounds very presumptuous. If you wanted to pick my comparatively tiny little brain, I'd be happy to chat with him. Do you think he's doing a good job, bad job? It's mixed. You know? I want to put you on the

spot. Say something insulting about him as you want to pick... No, I'm kidding. I'm saying I put you kind of on the spot after just saying maybe you'd want to speak with him, but he can take it. I can tell you one thing that actually gave me better appreciation for old Twitter that I didn't know they deserved on this one. Some of the attacks on free speech that are coming out of India, for example. Musk has a rule of, listen, free speech, but we have to abide by local law, which, you know, with my lawyer hat on, it's like, yeah, I guess you don't really have much of a choice in that.

But then discovering that in previous cases, when Modi had tried to get people to, or his government tried to get speech removed from Twitter, the previous administration fought. Like, they're basically like, no, we're not going to do that. And I think at least in part because they've so stripped down the size of the company, which certainly comes with some benefits for sure, they, in one of the most recent examples, didn't. And, you know, we were critical of him for that, for example. Well, someone else might say it's convenient for him because he has his car company and China to mesh together.

And this is an easy way to concede to China what local law is. I'm not saying that's the case, but it's certainly something that would come to mind. Yeah. And actually, this is a good opportunity for me to do a shout- out for my colleague, Sarah McLaughlin, who's doing a book. I'm not sure. We don't know yet when it's coming out, but it's about how China directly threatens freedom of speech in the United States, particularly on campus, and about horrifying stories about people. You know, if they say something that the Chinese government doesn't like and they're studying in the United States, they can find out that their parents have been arrested. It's worse than you think about how much China harms even free speech in the United States in a variety of ways.

All right, so now how does this all apply? I'm pretty sure I can predict your views, but I don't want to assume. These young adults who have had job offers rescinded or actually been fired because they expressed sympathy for the activities of Hamas, they signed statements. How do you feel about all that? How do I feel about it as opposed to what do I think about it? Well, however you want. However you want to engage with it. I think if you're making a blacklist of saying don't hire these people for their political speech on campus, that's an issue for me.

I think that fits within my definition of cancel culture. I do, however, also make the lab in the looking glass argument that keep in mind it's valuable to know what people really think. And if you spent the last 10 days horrified to learn how anti-Semitic many of these campuses has become, there's real value in that. Because, yeah, I remember going to Berkeley like 10 years ago and just being like, oh, wow, some of these people are not anti-Zionist. They are anti-Semitic. And that fact has gotten much, much worse. So there's a value in knowing that. And I want to be really clear here. One of the things that actually created an

environment like that is cancel culture itself. Because right now, university presidents, and many of whom I know, are sympathetic to Israel, were horrified by the Hamas attacks, were afraid to say that publicly because they were afraid of their own activist professors, students, and administrators canceling them or making their lives difficult or taking over the president's office, etc. So there's been some donor pressure on some universities to say something about this. Now, I generally think universities shouldn't be doing political statements to begin with, but for people saying they've done it on everything else, it's unforgivable that on something this monstrous, they're not actually going to say it. At this point, to stay quiet is a political statement, given the context of everything else.

You know, agreed. So even though ultimately FIRE supports the Calvin Report, political neutrality, everyone's saying that it's kind of like, no, they're just hiding on this one. So cancel culture is enough to scare presidents into saying not what they really think. And some of these donors aren't saying, change your opinion on this. They're saying, say what you really think, you cowards. And I get that. Meanwhile, for Harvard, one of the reasons why you could have these Harvard students think that coming out pro-Hamas and saying that Israel had this entirely coming was something that there wouldn't be massive blowback against is in part because everyone was too afraid to disagree with them. Because, like, that's actually something that can get you canceled on campus. And fire, by the way, we have defended Palestinian have defended palestinian speech all the time israeli speech all the time we are completely

not non-partisan on this stuff but the um the certainty because it is it has become a situation where anything other than sort of like the palestinian side of the argument um on some of these particularly elite campuses is kind of treated in semi blasphemously. So I think that in some ways I have some sympathy for some of these students because it's like, well, this is just what I've been told since, you know, K through 12 on up, that anything that happens in the Middle East is Israel's fault. And everyone seems to agree with me, like, what just happened? So when it comes to, it was nice to see Vivek Ramaswamy also coming out and saying that he thinks that blacklists are bad. But again, when you're making a culture of free speech argument,

the best you can do is, you know, put the thumb on the scale of freedom of speech, you know, for even for people you don't like. I do have one caveat, though. In the book and in my experience, and this happened tons of times after Coddling the American Mind came out, employers will write us and say, me and Haidt, or call us sometimes on our cell phones, saying, oh, wow, these new employees, they cannot handle anyone disagreeing with them. They want to get the IT guy fired because it turns out our great IT guy is actually kind of Republican. They want to cancel anybody who disagrees with them. And it's a disaster. And I'm not hiring from elite colleges anymore. Or sometimes they name a particular college they're not going to hire from anymore. And my response is always, okay,

great. Tell the world that. Tell them that your big fancy company that I cannot name is refusing to hire from the Ivy Leagues. And they're like, no, no, no, that would be too, that would give us too much blowback. And I'm like, okay., one, if elite higher education mattered less in all of our lives, that would be really good for the country. I think that instead of, like, part of the problem is Goldman Sachs thinks it has to hire from some of these schools. And it's like, you can find a lot of geniuses at Ohio State, thank you very much. Like, you can find some really brilliant people at other schools, and they're not going to come with the same kind of political certainty. I also think that when they're hiring from elite colleges, they got to make sure they're not hiring cancelers. They're not hiring the kind of people who will make their lives hell for anybody who politically disagrees.

So, you know, if I was hiring from an elite school, of course, they're coming to fire. I'd be different. But let's say I ran a regular corporation. The main thing I want to find from an elite college graduate is, can you work with someone who thinks biological sex is real? Can you work with someone who actually thinks your opinion on Hamas is repugnant? And I'm sure that they'd be smart enough not to say I couldn't, but watch how they react. Because you don't want to hire someone who's going to show up and act like a typical elite student. And they don't get how typical they're being. The way elite student graduates have been from fancy finishing schools going back a century,

they think they're intellectually superior and they think they're morally superior and if you and if they show up actually saying it's my way or the highway when it comes to the political points of view of this um of this place you better you know you should look for someone from indiana state university instead i agree with so many things that you just said and you know one thing with these college kids is that they still have one foot in in years, even. They're at an age where they're the most naive, the most full of themselves, the most susceptible to peer pressure. And the universities have allowed them to be marinated in, I don't want to call it nonsense, but just one side of these issues such that to, and Coleman told me this about Columbia, to outwardly express sympathy for Israel is an act of tremendous bravery.

Yeah. It means you're going to be shunned. It means you're going to be identified. It. It means you're going to be identified. It means you might never date again. That's right. And teenagers buckle at this. There is Stockholm Syndrome in other contexts. This probably

in some way applies to this kind of dynamic as well. And firing these kids, no. You need to figure out what the hell is going on at these universities. Fire the people who taught the kids. They're just saying what it is they learned in school. It's absurd to fire people for saying out loud what they were taught is the correct position in school. But then there's another matter that the social norm is so

important because as a commercial enterprise, which a law firm is, you have clients. And if clients have the expectation that you shouldn't be hiring these people, you know, I mean, I would like to think that some law firms would say, fuck you, I'm going to hire them anyway. But they don't have to do that. People have families to feed. I, you know, I get it that they might say, I'm going to hire them anyway. But they don't have to do that. People have families to feed. I get it that they might say, I can't. I can't lose my clients over this. So the social norm is required

so people can say, what are you, backwards? You know we don't fire people because they have views you don't agree with. And there was a time that, I don't know if everybody felt that way but that was much more common like what are you talking about so what this is not yeah you know this is a contracts case who cares what this

person thinks that time was like 13 years ago you know when people got this better oh I realized we don't have too much time left but that's okay what one thing that I wanted to really get in here is that there's big donor moves against higher ed because they're just disgusted with how they're handling the current situation. What worries me is it seems like the big donor moves are like, okay, you said something on everything else, say something condemning Hamas. And I'm like, okay, that's small potatoes. You're free to make that argument. Sure. But please get that higher education, particularly elite higher education has profound problems. This is a symptom of a much, much larger problem. it to, I think actually the first thing, how many problems have been created on campus

by very wealthy people just giving out of habit to schools, to their alma maters, writing massive checks to them without saying, okay, how many administrators do you have? Do they police speech? Are they the people in some cases not preventing or in some cases organizing the shutdowns and by the way some oftentimes they are that are actually you know getting a campaign against say Carol Hoeven at Harvard you know started with a DEI administrator there are DEI administrators like in the audience when a Nicholas and Erica when Nicholas Christakis during that shutdown we've seen of course the the DI administrator was part of what happened

at my alma mater, Stanford, that there should be investigation every single time there's a shout down to figure out, did any administrators do anything to stop this? And more importantly, did they do anything to encourage this? Because this is actually creating an environment where you can't have a marketplace of ideas. So they should be demanding freedom of speech. They should be defending, explaining to people actually having a part of orientation about how to actually like, how to actually hear people out for one thing and how to actually have, you know, discussions across lines of difference. They should be eliminating administrators who are enforcing political orthodoxies. They should be, you know, figuring out if professors are doing the same thing.

But so there's massive reform opportunity, and I'm happy to talk to anyone who wants to figure out how to do it. I wrote something that just got rejected from the Wall Street Journal basically exactly on this, which I would really like to find a home for. But at the same time, possibly the most important thing they could do is say, listen, buddy, I'm not writing you the massive check this year. I might never write that check again. I'm going to write it at the University of Austin, University of Austin, Texas. Not UT Austin, but the experiment that Pano Canales is doing.

Or I'm going to write it to Minerva University in San Francisco that really is trying to be like a cutting edge school. Or I'm going to write it to FIRE to help with their campus free speech rankings. Or I'm going to start an entirely new project that actually does a better job of telling me who the hardest working, best and brightest kids are. The ones who, you know, weren't the kids of legacies at Harvard who actually are the best readers and thinkers and hardest working. I think that it would be squandering an opportunity to just focus on this incident to not actually realize that there's no way you have a situation like you had in the past 10 days on college campuses without the rot being

really, really deep. Yeah. I know you do that list. If your kids were applying to college, what would be the three schools, the sweet spot of getting everything you want for them academically, while at the same time, the best atmosphere for free speech? What are the top of my list would be University of Virginia. University of Virginia finished in the top 10 this year, and they actually do walk a good, you know, talk a good game and walk the walk on free speech. And I really want people to understand, our campus free speech rankings, they're very, very rigorous. They're based on like 13 different factors. It's the largest study of student opinion on whether or not they can talk on campus ever done. It relies on the four largest databases of professor cancellations, student cancellations, deplatforming, and speech codes. Harvard, by the way, earned its position as dead last this year. I got a little irritated when people were trying to say, oh, it's like a, well, I mean, that's going to get you a lot of attention. And it's like, no, that's where they fell. We don't put a thumb on the scale for it. And by the way, it seems like you haven't noticed

that Harvard is always in the bottom. Just the difference here is when you factored in, you know, professor cancellations, for example, they were dead last instead of in the bottom 10. But when it comes, so yeah, University of Virginia is a good one. Purdue is a good one. University of Chicago, you know, they went from first place to 13th because of what we thought was a badly handled case involving a chapter of the conservative Turning Point USA. But overall, I don't balk at the idea that they're excellent at that.

So those are three of the top schools. Living in D.C., you know, George Washington does not very well. I think they're like 180-something out of 240. Georgetown is third from the bottom. The bottom is Harvard, Penn, Georgetown, University of South Carolina. And that's the thing about kind of like if you really look at the numbers, you can actually see why everybody ended up in their various spots. But, yeah, so those are the schools I'd recommend probably the most are University of Chicago, UVA, Purdue, and a couple others. What about George Mason?

You know, all these really iconoclastic, heterodox people like Tyler Cowen and Brian Kappelwerke, George Mason. But then I saw something in the news about something at George Mason the last couple days. I don't remember what it was, but maybe you remember what it was. I wish I remembered off the top of my head where Mason landed, but it wasn't as good as I would have hoped. And I taught First Amendment at George Mason as well,

but we've had some disappointing cases over there. They're certainly not the worst, but I would have hoped they were better. All right, so before we go, tell us about, just for fun, and include the porn star, what are some of the best examples of cancel culture at work to really get people riled up who want to leave this interview and go buy your book? Give us a few.

What's the porn star example? Well, Nico told me that there's a porn star, Mia Khalifa, who was announced in Deplatform. Oh, man, yeah. I should ask you about that. Yeah, that case is actually... So it's Playboy decided to fire Mia Khalifa, who does porn for

Playboy because of her pro-Hamas statements. Obviously, Playboy can do that still. Basically, I try to make the distinction, like, listen, don't say this isn't cancel culture. Your argument is that you think this person deserves being cancelled but I can't help but find it kind of funny

of being kind of like and therefore we're depriving you of naked pictures of her you know like it's like okay that's funny like is that there's a whole porn channel for pro-Israel people who want to see the porn with pro-Hamas people this is

like being angry at the person you're attracted to yes yes that's why my wife likes to have sex with me but go ahead so in terms of but in terms of cancel culture that we talk about in the book you know like we we go into psychotherapy we talk about it in medicine we talk about in publishing and journalism i actually gotta say no the thing that scares me the most was talking to people who are getting their degrees in psychotherapy and people are actually practicing out there and hearing stories about, you know, young psychotherapists, clinical psychologists being taught that if your, you know, patient says

something that, you know, isn't PC, PC essentially that you should intervene to correct them. And I'm like I was suicidally depressed in 2007. I had to be hospitalized as a danger to myself. One of the things that got me depressed was the culture war and being in this

awful situation where the left hated me when I defended the right and the right hated me when I defended the right and the right hated me when I defended the left and I didn't seem to be around other than my my work colleagues people principled enough to understand that um and so if I I was seeing a shrink like during that period and if my shrink had decided to intervene to correct uh my offensive points of view i don't know if i'd be here and and so like as far as like a chapter that that uh we had to you know we wrote this relatively quickly but we still cover an awful awful lot of ground in the book um including data uh including i mean the data in there i'm so

proud of my research team and how much we were able to find to just prove this is real it's on a historic scale people this isn't subtle um but also uh you know the psychotherapy chapter is something that should and can be blown up into its own book actually i think there is i think critical therapy i think i should i think there is actually a book out there but that that i need to read but that that was the one that disgusted me the most. All right. I think this has been a great interview. There's one other thing that's fascinating about you, and because I have other people in my life that this pertains to,

is that you're also, I don't think I'm spilling the beans. I'm pretty sure you've spoken about this. You're also dyslexic, correct? I am, yeah. No, it's funny um the i don't talk about that too uh too much because then i start sounding i remember mentioning this to height and it's kind of like so you're my depressed co-author the guy with you know who had the tumor which is why like i have a titanium plate in my face i um you know i started sounding

like too much like a sad sack about like all all the that I have. But I'm dyslexic. It meant that when I was until you're about sixth grade, it really sucks to be dyslexic, because most of the things you're learning, like the processing issue. But one thing I will say that's incredibly helpful is it teaches you to be a delegator, which is one of the reasons why dyslexics are disproportionately business leaders, in my opinion, it gets you all sorts of good habits, it makes you a great audio learner, which I absolutely am. But most importantly, it gives you a tremendous amount of humility because I spent, I just thought I was dumb, but weirdly good at a bunch of things, but dumb otherwise. And knowing that you're not that great at something is so important for a manager to understand

because everybody's not that great at something. Just some people who are generally highly capable think that they're equally good at all things. And knowing that you're not that great at things opens up all of these, you know, curiosity, humility, all of these kinds of things that can be hard for other people knowing that at some level you're profoundly stupid, is a good way to check yourself, to remember that in the grand scheme of things, you really, all of us, know very little. So I actually think dyslexia, although being a big pain when I was a kid, has been something that has enriched and improved my life in a variety of ways. Well, that's a really profound point. My father described to me many times, he wasn't dyslexic,

but I think because he immigrated at a particular age and had trouble with the language, he grew up thinking he was not smart. And he was very, very smart. But that always stayed with him and I think I recognize exactly what you're saying. He always had this humility about him that very well could have come from not believing,

not having confidence in his own intelligence for his formative years and the opposite side, the people at Harvardvard these are the kids who have always been told they were geniuses right that's how they got into harvard or the overwhelming majority of them and that would then predict a tremendous lack of humility yeah which would explain yeah and meanwhile you know getting to like i joke that i got was a scholarship student for american university and if you already have a class chip on your shoulder it was kind of the Yeah. And meanwhile, you know, getting to like I joke that I got was a scholarship student for American University.

And if you already have a class chip on your shoulder, it was kind of the worst place I could go because it it was a school where the other scholarship students were hardworking, smart and virtuous. And the rich kids were dumb and mean. But then I got to Stanford and I always describe it as my first experience with decent hard work and rich folk. And I was kind of impressed like, like, like that, uh, that nobody who gets into law school, everybody has to be at least a hard worker at minimum. And all of them, almost all of them are, are, are very smart. Um, but I did occasionally run into the fact, and actually this is something I never stopped presenting, um, is that there were suddenly people who looked at me like I was a legitimate human being all of a sudden when they'd hear where I went to school. And that irked me. And that suddenly we're in the elect of the smart people. And I'm like, you know who's smart? My buddy Anthony Rodriguez, who had every freaking job. He was the other kid who was working with me,

but he was shimmying up trees. I worked at Sbarro's when we were 13. He's brilliant, and he went from not necessarily looking all that promising to now he's a professor at Providence College, which we both find very funny about how he's actually ended up. I think people in that environment can really underestimate how many freaking brilliant people will never get never have any access or any ability to be in that environment and who could run circles around them yeah it's absolutely true i have some other stories but dealing with um the parents of my at the jcc my children went to in scarsdale when they didn't know who i was and I would say, I own a restaurant. They would literally start speaking down to me.

Should I speak slower? Two times this happened where somebody said, I'm a lawyer. I would say, I went to law school too, actually. Then with just

dripping at the mouth, they'll say, oh really? Where did you go? And then I'll tell them where I went. I went to a good law school and then they shut down because they weren't expecting that and likely I went to a better law school than they went to. So they don't even offer Where did you go to law school? University of Pennsylvania.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Second from the bottom though. But great law school. Okay. Second from the bottom, though. But great law school. Yeah. But just, you know, you could see how much pleasure they were hoping to take in the fact of making me feel small. That's gross. Anyway, but that's human nature, right? Anyway.

Okay, listen, Greg, it's fantastic to reconnect with you and have you on this show. I'm a huge fan of yours. One of the pleasures of my life that began with starting this podcast is that I've been able to make friends with such amazingly interesting and nice and generous and I don't know what all the

other adjectives I want to use, people like you. It's really an enormous pleasure in my life right now to be able to speak to people like you and have these kind of conversations. I wish my father were alive to see it because he would have, he lived for that kind of thing. All right. I'll get this out as quickly as possible. Thanks, Nome.