The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Perilous State of the University - Jonathan Haidt

Episode Date: November 21, 2017

I recently traveled to New York University to talk with Dr. Jonathan Haidt about, among other things, disgust, purity, fear and belief; the perilous state of the modern university; and his work with Heterodox Academy (https://heterodoxacademy.org/) an organization designed to draw attention to the lack of diversity of political belief in the humanities and the social sciences. Dr. Haidt is Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business and a social psychologist.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self- who's a professor at NYU. And I'm here for a bunch of reasons. Jonathan is an extremely interesting researcher. I've been following his work on discussed and political belief for literally for decades.

He was one of the first people who started to do serious research on disgust, which is its own emotional system and therefore very much worth attending to. But we also have some other interests in common. Jonathan also started this institute called the Heterodox Academy, which is attempting to bring back a reasonable diversity of views, or what he regards as a reasonable diversity of views to university faculty and campuses and discussions. So I first met Jonathan.

It's going to be just about 30 years ago, 25 years ago, right? That is in 2014. Yeah, 20th I'm sorry. The 1994. Oh, it was in 2014. Yeah, 20th of sight. The 1994. Oh, it was in 1994. Yeah, yeah, right. So yeah, you came to do a job talk at Harvard for an assistant professorship position.

And I'd been aware of your work on Discuss Then and agitated hard for them to hire you, because I thought it was of great significance, which turned out to be exactly the case. So what do you remember about that? I remember I was so excited to have an interview at Harvard. It was my only interview. I didn't get that job.

I had no job for the following year. And it was a very strange day in which I didn't feel particularly welcome or wanted. And then I had my session with you in which here was this guy who had actually got a job at Harvard, and he was studying Jung, which is like almost taboo, and he was talking about dreams and creativity. And so that was the really bright memory of the day,

our Aaralan conversation. Yeah, well, I was also really interested at the time now in the biological basis of behavior, right? And so in the relationship between fundamental motivational systems and thought, because obviously, our thought is grounded in fundamental motivational systems. And your work on disgust, which maybe you can tell the viewers a little bit about, was really interesting to me,

because it was an emotional system that hadn't been studied much. I mean, you were really one of the pioneers in the psychological study of disgust. Well, the way to explain it is that Paul Rosin, my advisor at Penn, is the pioneer in the study of disgust. And he'd studied it as a food-related emotion. He'd written a bit about it being a moral emotion. And I was a graduate student at Penn,

and I was interested in morality. And I was reading the Bible, and I was reading anthropological accounts of different countries and different cultures. And at the time, morality was all about reasoning, about harm, rights, and justice. So Lawrence Colbert was the leading figure in the field. And because I was looking at morality across cultures, and when you look across cultures, it's not just about fairness and harm and rights, it's about menstruation and food taboos and skin lesions, and it's very physical.

And I was, you know, why, why do so many societies, why is it like the normal default way of being is to somehow bring the body into morality? Why is that? And so I just happened to be at Penn where the world's expert in disgust was. And I went to talk to him, and that started one of the best collaborations of my life. And what it led to is a broadening of the moral domain, basically. There's this sort of Western secular approach that you see in Western philosophers. Either morality is about harm and utilitarianism and it's minimized harm, or it's about

rights and principles, you know, manual Kant. And a much better way psychologically I think about morality is virtue ethics. It's just a lot of stuff. It's just we have just a lot of stuff that we judge on. And this led me eventually to realize that people on the left and people on the right care about different stuff. Everybody cares about harm and fairness. But the stuff about keeping boundaries around the group,

build a wall, protect the group, hold the group together, hate traders. Everybody can do that, but right wing morality builds on these additional foundations of these additional emotions and foundations. So that work on disgust that I was just beginning to talk about them when we first met in 1994, additional foundations of these additional emotions and foundations. So that work on disgust that I was just beginning to talk about them when we first met in 1994 led eventually to what we now call moral foundation's theory

and with my, with about five or six colleagues, that if you go to your morals.org, you can take our tests, you can learn all about it. But it led to the perspective that ultimately was, I think the right perspective as the culture were with heating up and as left and right, were essentially becoming like different countries, different cultures. So it's not obvious on first consideration why disgust would be a moral emotion.

So most of the work that's done, that's outside of the disgust realm, I would say, is predicated on the assumption that the reason that conservatives in particular, but perhaps people who are more authoritarian in general, draw boundaries around their territories because they're afraid of the other. But that isn't really how it plays out as far as I can tell, because conservatives, for example, are less neurotic than trade in the big five-trade sense than liberals, although it's a minor difference. But the discussed issue seems to be particularly relevant.

So, can you tell us a little bit about why discussed per se? Well, first, conservatives are a little less neurotic, but they also, if you do very low-level perceptual experiments, just like a puff of white noise in the ear, people who react more strongly to that, to any sort of very low level threat, are more likely to vote Republican in this country. So there are all these interesting personality differences that lead to different politics. But as for why discussed,

so I'm a Dirk Heimian, I would say. I love the sociologist Emil Dirk Heim. And I'm also a social psychologist. So I'm always thinking not about people as individual utility maximizers, but people as members of social groups, people who are totally focused on belonging in their social groups, and people who have some

pro-social motives about keeping the group together, about doing things that are good for the group. So as I try to argue in my book The Righteous Mind, yes, we're selfish. There's no doubt that we often will do things to advance our own self-interest at the expense of others. But we're also really groupish, which means we'll do all sorts of things to advance our group at the expense of others. Basically, we're tribal.

We evolved as a tribal species and we're doing we have all this software, all these predispositions, these mental predispositions for life in tribes that are battling other tribes and that's why it comes up so easily. If you look at the way boys organize themselves when they get a fraternity, the hazing rituals. When you look at the way, it's especially clear in boys, the way street gangs organize themselves. Girls tribalism is a little different.

But I would say this, and that's why, again, I love the Jungian approach of archetypes. There's just this weird stuff that is pan-human. Even if it comes out slightly differently around the world, there really is a human nature, and it comes complete with a whole bunch of like pre-designed ideas. So there is a new article, I think it was published in Nature, I'll try to find the link for it, it's about a year old, that was based on high resolution imaging of neuronal connections.

It's actually reviewed in Kurzweil's book How to Build a Mind, I think that's the name of it. And so it turns out that the cortex is made out of these column near structures that are pre-organized units of neurons. And they're replicated across the entire cortex, basically the same structure. And like the older, let's say, connectionist idea was that neurons that fire together, wire together, right?

That's have. And of course, that's pretty standard neurology. But the columns are already pre-wired. So it's actually columns that fire together, that? That's have. And of course, that's pretty standard neurology, but the columns are already pre-wired. So it's actually columns that fire together, that wire together. But there's even more with the high resolution scanning. So it turns out that underneath the columnar structure, there are these pre-built highways that are connective tissue that are pre-prepared. So the columns have the option to connect to the underlying highway, and then that highway can connect other columns.

So it's as if implicit in the brain organization, and this is at the cortical level, say nothing of sub-cortical organization, there's already pre-existent likelihoods that certain neurons will wire together. Yeah. And what else is cool is that this is actually architecturally quite regular.

So they found that these superhighways are arranged in lines and and and and and at right angles to one another. So it's almost like a three-dimensional structure of wired cubes that underlies the neuronal structure. So that's some neurological evidence for the archetypal idea. So let me just explain to the viewers here why this isn't just some like psychological geek conversation. This is actually really relevant to a lot of the things that we'll be talking about and

that your audience probably cares about, because one of the most contested ideas in the social science is the idea of enateness. And the idea is, well, if something is innate, then it can't vary across societies. And if it varies across societies, then it's not innate. And if gender varies if masculinity or femininity vary across societies, then it's not innate. It's socially constructed.

But that's the wrong understanding of innateness. The definition that I use comes from Gary Marcus, who's actually a neuroscientist here at NYU. He says, innate doesn't mean hard-wired NYU. He says, innate doesn't mean hardwired. There's almost nothing interesting that's hardwired. innate means structured in advance of experience, but then experience can still revise it. And boy, does that work for gender, for almost everything.

For fears. Yeah, that's right, almost everything. We're not a blank slate about anything. And something I used to tell my students at UVA, I taught at UVA for 16 years, is, you know, everything's a social construction. Masculinity, femininity, cancer, the sun, death, everything. There's a social construction for you.

You won't find a society that doesn't have thoughts about these things. But the fact that societies have social constructions tells us nothing about whether there's not also an underlying biological reality. And in almost all cases, there is. Well, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to communicate, which is one of evil Wilson's comments, right?

I mean, Wilson is the entomologist who studied answer to Harvard and also wrote a number of books about sociology that got him in trouble with the radical leftists. And he said, even if we could communicate with ants, there'd be nothing to say to each other, because their fundamental mode of being in the world is based on motivations and interests

that are so different from ours that there wouldn't be any structure for communication. And you can kind of tell that with regards to the animals that we make friends with, right? We're much more likely to make friends with animals who have a fundamental biological and social nature that's very close to ours, like dogs, because we can basically speak their language

even though not completely. A mammal language of love, and I miss you, and I wanna play with you. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. And that bonding. Yeah, so back to discuss, back to discuss. So the fundamental thing that I learned from Paul Rossin

is to see us as these amazing omnivores. This is part of our survival strategy, even more than other apes. We are just brilliant omnivores. And we have the omnivores dilemma, which is we've got to be interested in all kinds of new stuff. We're not tied to any place. We can roam on to a whole new continent.

So we're interested in stuff. But stuff has all kinds of toxins and microbes. We have to be careful about that stuff. And so these motives have to be intention. And this is actually an interesting way to understand the left-right difference. You have to have both motives. But if, so imagine two siblings,

one of whom is set more towards trying new stuff, seeking out new stuff. And the other is a little more fearful, a little more like, whoa, no, let's not try that, let's stay with what's tried and true. I mean, that's progressivism and conservatism, that's the origins of it. And if you look at kids' behavior at the age of two or three, it does predict how they'll vote much later, not hugely, but there is a clear prediction there. So, discussed is part of a regulatory system

about our engagement with the world. And whether we are just sort of out there and we seek out variety and diversity, we think diversity is just a great thing, or whether we want to do more order structure predictability, conservatives are neater than progressives. If you take photos of their rooms, you can actually of their rooms,

you can actually, you know, cleanliness and organization, you can predict how they vote. Disgust, it turns out what's really cool about Disgust in modern politics is if you look at all the different things that we're fighting over, especially in this country, our culture wars over, you know, going back, if you deck it, you know, sex, drugs, the flag, immigration, all of these things. I have a study with my colleagues, it was led by Senna

Koleva, in which we asked all these cultural war attitudes of people, and we also had their scores in the discuss scale, but one of the foundations of morality is sanctity and purity, and it relates to disgust. What we found is that if you know what people's left right, how they place themselves in the left right scale, you can pretty much predict where they fall on most culture attitudes, except for those that load on or implicate sanctity or purity. So what I mean is flag burning.

Do you think that people should have the right to burn the American flag or the country's flag as an expression, as a political action? What Do you think that people should have the right to burn the American flag or the country's flag as an expression, as a political action? What do you think? People just give some answer and it went to seven scale. And people on the right think, you know, more like they say no, people on the left, yes. People who are score high on loyalty are more like they say no, people who lower on it say yes. And that's even taking account of where they're on the left right dimension. But here's the cool thing. It's only if you add in the purity or sanctity thing that you can really understand what people are doing.

Because some people see the flag not as just a piece of cloth. They see it as having some innate essence, something sacred about it, which must be protected. And so, so this is true, you can think of it as a unifying center, exactly. That's right. So if there's something sacred, and this is the central piece of my work around politics and morality, is the psychology of sanctity. If you hold something sacred, then your team circles around it.

And it's only those who circle around with you. And sometimes literally circle around. Like Muslims at prayer in Mecca, they literally circle around with you. And sometimes literally circle around, like Muslims at prayer in Mecca, they literally circle the Kabah. Circling is a very primitive ancient. It feels right to circle something. But even if you do it symbolically, or you all bow at the same time, that binds you together.

Children do that with their mothers when they engage in exploratory behavior, right? Well, they use their mother as a center of the world. And children differ in the degree to which they'll move outward from their mother. So they move out until they trip over their uncertainty threshold. Oh, neat.

Is it a distance? Like a distance? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the more exploratory kids who are lower and negative emotion will go out farther before they come back to their mother. So the mother's a center. And that would be associated symbolically

with the idea of the center as a motherland or potentially as a fatherland. That's right, that makes sense. So this way that we're incredibly symbolic creatures. We're not just out to make as much money as we can. We're symbolic and social creatures. And this psychology of sanctity or purity has become really important, not just on the right.

It's always been important for especially religious conservatives. We're beginning to see it even on the campus left. And this is why I think we see some of the odd things we see on campus. That the campus must be kept as a sacred and pure space. One of the things that really alarms me about what's happened on campus in the last couple years is that the older idea we had, that it's a place for contesting ideas, it's a zone of enormous choice, people can take what courses they want, say what they want, it's kind of a wonderful, free-for-all with some, with norms of respect, it's now becoming much more of a religious zone, where

the perimeter of the campus is the boundaries and within it's they're almost they're blasphemy. And I really started noticing this when you look at the videos of the Middlebury protest when Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury. And as everybody knows he was shouted down so the students are chanting and they're chanting in unison and it seems like a religious revival meeting, and they're swaying, and they're saying they're sacred racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away, it's like a ritual incantation. So, to define the space as safe, and it's safe in a maternal way.

So far all this happening is they're binding together, they're moving, you know, synchronous movement and call and response. So it's using a lot of tropes from religion and religious worship, but here's the cool thing. When the administrator, I forget who it is, comes on to say, okay, we have moved, we're moving the talk, and then you hear a couple people screaming up, off campus, off campus, and he says to another location on campus, and there's like, oh no, no, because, you know, look,

no one had to go to this talk. So everyone could have just stayed home. And the students did succeed in shutting down the venues. They could have declared a victory, but it's not a full victory unless he is physically off the campus. We can't have him speaking on campus because that defiles us, that pollutes us. We must shut that down.

And that's where I started saying, wow, this is like full-blown psychology, religion, derkheim, sanctity, purity, blasphemy. And that I think, you know, that doesn't describe most students, that that describes as sort of the core those who really have their identities wrapped up in this movement. Okay, so, so with disgust, I wanted to, I wanted to ask you a couple of things about that. So, you know, the big five research into political differences basically shows that the liberals are high in trade openness and low in trade conscientiousness and the conservatives are the reverse. But we fragmented conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness with a big five aspect scale. And orderliness is strongly associated with disgust. So, right. It sounds like Freud, yeah. Right, exactly. It does sound a lot like Freud,

but it also is in accordance with your observations that conservatives have neater spaces, for example. So now... And their meetings start on time. Yes, exactly, right. So then the nexus for political belief seems to be openness. So that's that exploratory tendency that you talked about. Exploration of ideas and creativity and low orderliness. And so then I thought, well, why in the world would the political nexus go across those dimensions,

which are some relatively uncoorlated? Then I thought, and this is in keeping with your work on disgust, is that it's an issue of borders, which of course seems more or less self-evident in the wake of Trump's election when he talked about borders. But you might say, and I think this is reasonable, that the conservative is someone who wants the borders between categories to remain intact, no matter what level of analysis. So it's borders from the highest resolution level of cognition, all the way up to the actual physical borders of rooms, towns, states, countries, all of that. So the borders should be thicker. And the reason they want that, now there was a paper published in Plaus 1.

I don't know if you saw it. It was a couple of years ago. It was a mind-boggling paper. It should have been like front page news as far as I was concerned. And what the researchers did was between countries and then within provinces or states, within countries, they correlated the level of frequency of infectious disease with authoritarian political beliefs and found a walloping correlation. It was like 0.6.

It was one of the highest, for those of you who don't know, social scientists never discover anything that's associated with anything else at a correlation of 0.6. Other than heritability. Right. Other than heritability, yes. And so what they found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious disease, the higher the probability of totalitarian or authoritarian political attitudes, and then they controlled for governance, because one of the questions was, was this top down authoritarianism or bottom up authoritarianism? And the answer was that it was bottom up.

Okay, and so I thought about that in two, from two perspectives simultaneously, at the time. Okay, so we identified disgust sensitivity with orderliness. So it's say a fundamental sub-trade. And I was reading this book that was called Hitler's Table Talk. And it was the recordings of virtually everything he said at dinner from 1939 to 1942. Yeah, so it's a spontaneous utterance, say.

And it's full of discussions about Jews and gypsies and all the people he tormented. But what's really interesting is all the language is discussed. It's not fear. but what's really interesting is all the languages discussed. It's not fear. So Hitler's basic metaphor was that the Aryan race and country was a pure body, and then it was assaulted by parasites. And then I remembered what happened to the Native Americans when the European showed

up and shook hands. What happened was that 95% of them were dead within 50 years, right, because of small pox and measles. So that border issue that separates conservatives from liberals, let's say, is the conservatives say the novel is potentially contaminated. It's not so much that it's dangerous, that's different, that's fear, it's contaminating. And the liberals say, hold on a minute, if you make the borders too thick, then information can't pass through.

Exactly. That's the omnivores dilemma, right? Right, right. And then since we have a biological architecture on which our cognitive platforms are erected, we have the same attitude towards abstract information, which would be ideas that we do to things like food or illness, right?

And so we can think of an invading idea or a polluting idea or a contaminating idea. ideas that we do to things like food or illness, right? And so we can think of an invading idea or a polluting idea or a contaminated idea. That's right. I'm a big fan of George Lakeoff, metaphor as we live by, that we use our bodily, our bodily schemata to think about abstract things like politics and like what our policy should be about borders and immigration. There's a Canadian psychologist, Mark Schaller. He and his colleagues have developed what they call an account of these, the behavioral immune

systems. Right. We don't just try to, you know, microbes killed probably many more of our ancestors than did lions and tigers and bears. And so whoever can keep themselves and their children from being exposed to fatal illnesses wins the evolutionary game. And so a lot of that is judging carefully about people. Is he dangerous?

Is she dangerous? And that's both for sexuality, for contact, for all kinds of association. So yeah, in a lot of ways, our emotions and our bodily interactions structure how we think and feel about social and moral. Well, even with the Black Death in Europe, I mean, so the Black Death occurred in Europe when the Europeans started to move around the world and they brought back rats that were infected exactly. So what you saw there was both of those forces at work at the same time.

So the European expansion produced a tremendous interchange of ideas from all around the world. That's globalization, but it wiped out somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the population at the same time. So wouldn't it be good if in every society or every organization we had some people who specialized in, specialized in saying, hey, what are the opportunities? And then we had other people who specialized in saying, well, but what are the risks? And it just so happens that a lot of people have trouble doing all that in themselves. When we have systems that are well constituted with people who have different personalities and different motives and goals, we actually can get better outcomes.

We can have a discussion between them. Yeah, well, that's exactly why. It's for that precise reason that I've been so interested in free speech as a value, because even on the economic front, it's pretty obvious if you look at things economically that the entrepreneur types who start businesses are lumped in with the liberal creative types. We've done a lot of work on the prediction of entrepreneurial behavior and ability, and it's openness that's the big predictor.

It's not the only one. It's openness and IQ fundamentally. But for managerial and administrative expertise, it's IQ and conscientiousness. So the liberals start businesses, but they can't run them, because their interests flit, and they don't have the organizational ability, and the conservatives can run them, but they can't continue to transform and expand them. Yet, yin and yang.

So one more thing about what happened in Nazi Germany, that's very relevant and interesting, because it's useful to get these motives right You know first of all if if something disgusts you if something if you're afraid of something then you run away from it Or you freeze but if something disgusts you you try to burn it or kill it right you try to get rid of it or expel it That's that's right. You want to get it away and destroy it it. That's right. You want to get it away and destroy it. So when Hitler first came to power, he put in a bunch of public health schemes like he had vans that went around and screamed people for tuberculosis. Then he went on a factory cleanliness campaign. So the factories were supposed to be tidy up. And he washed, he bathed about four times a day

by the way. And it's also a great worshiper of willpower, which is associated with orderliness. And seems maybe to be associated with disgust sensitivity in some way that isn't yet understood. Yeah, yeah. I don't understand that connection either. So, he convinced Factor owners in Germany to get rid of the rats and the mice and the insects in the factories and also to clean them up and beautify them. But the gas they used to clean up the factories was cyclone A. And it was the variation of that gas cyclone B that was then used in... Yeah, so you could see this ramping

update. So it was... Yeah, absolutely. So it was public health, then it was social cleanliness, then he went into the asylum and cleaned them up. And so it was just this expansion of who was contaminated and who was impure. And I think also his fascination with fire and his use of fire symbolism was also associated with that appeal to purification because the idea of purification by fire is a very ancient idea. So, okay, so how did your work on discuss change the way that you looked at things, fundamentally? I mean, you gave some indication of that already,

but what else has it changed? So since I was coming out of a psychological literature, it was very focused on sort of secular, secular ethics about justice and fairness. And then I began studying disgust and looking at the broader moral domain that almost all societies have. That then also led me to think about, well, okay, if disgust is a reaction to things that seem to be degrading.

So an interesting element of disgust is this notion of degradation. There are always these vertical metaphors in which disgust brings us down and disgust. So a lot of some religious practice and Judaism and Islam and Hinduism is about preparing your body to approach God and purification. And so that led me to think, well, if there's an emotion, which is about seeing our lower, baser animal biological nature, is there an opposite emotion? Is there an emotion that we feel when we see some manifestation of a higher, nobler nature? And I was just beginning to think this when I moved to UVA. I got my first job at the University of Virginia in 1995, and I read the set of Thomas Jefferson's letters.

And in one letter, he describes the feelings you get from reading great fiction. He advises a cousin of his that he should buy fiction for his library, not just serious works of law and philosophy. And he describes the feeling of having your sentiments be elevated. Does it not dilate your breast, giving an open feeling in your chest, when you see these acts of beauty and kindness and gratitude. I thought, wow, that's exactly it. And so because I've been studying disgust, I then started studying its opposite,

which I and some others called moral elevation. So this is kind of vertical metaphor of elevation and degradation. And maps onto the body too, with regards to the two. That's right, high low, clean, dirty. Yeah, it's a beautiful pairing. And so having this language of elevation and disgust just really has helped me see a lot of things.

I can just see a lot of things happening. It allows me to like, even manipulate, like, have them playing for a grant proposal, like, I can get very good at like having an elevating ending and to end with a note of uplift. And so it just brought in by thinking about morality and this was around 1995.

And so again, it just prepared me, and I'd already been to India by that point. I spent three months doing research in ERISA in Eastern India. So it just brought in my thinking. And that's what allowed me, finally, to understand conservatives. Because I had always been on the left.

I hated Ronald Reagan. I thought Republicans were stupid and evil. And it was only when I'd gone to India and really tried to understand a traditional, religious, hierarchical, gender-stratified society, tried to understand it in their terms. They didn't try to bring in my own Western left, you know, left-laning perspectives.

That I was, and this was all under the guidance of Richard Schwaeder, my postdoc supervisor at the University of Chicago where I did a postdoc, was only then that I was able to sort of get inside their minds and their moral system and see that there were alternative moral worlds that each had their own logic. And that was the metaphor I came to it, you know, the time, you know, the matrix movies were very popular.

So the metaphor of the matrix as a consensual hallucination made a lot of sense. It's right came up with the idea of just speaking about moral matrices, whichever different moral matrices. Better grounded in biology. There are biology in a sense that gives us the potential. It's like the building blocks of this matrix can't be just anything. It comes from our experiences, our embodied experiences.

And again, George Lakeoff is the master of that thinking. And so it was only then that I was able to now listen to conservative talk radio and Christian religious radio and see rather than just like, oh, those stupid terrible people. They're like, oh, wow. Yeah, I can see that they're striving for a certain version. Right, right. So you started to understand their metaphorical language essentially.

That's right. And that was like my, you know, I don't know, great awakening or scale falling from my eyes. But, you know, since, but it took a few more, it took a number a lot more years. But eventually, I kinda just like pulled out the implants from my eyes and I stopped seeing everything through a partisan lens and I'm not on any side now and just trying to understand what the hell is going on. Well, it's really useful, it's really useful

to understand that there are actual reasons why people see the world differently and that you can't just easily say that one is right and the other is wrong because the liberals are correct when it comes to borders, that if you thicken them too much and diminish the information flow, you risk making the society so static that any radical environmental transformation will sink it. It's the case. But the conservatives are right in that you pay a big price with regards to newcomers and new information with regards to risk, to exposure, to contaminating, well, to contamination period, but also to contaminating ideas.

And so then, I've always thought, you know, the environment itself moves back and forth like a snake in some sense. And what we're trying to do is stay on the center of its back. And the only way we can do that is by having people pull to the right and say, be careful and people pull to the left and say, well, yeah, but be open. With that dialogue and the exchange of information that that dialogue allows, we can maybe specify the center of that moving target and stay on the back. Okay, so that's a really complicated metaphor with the snake, but I think it's a perfect way in to what's going on on campus

and to why viewpoint diversity is so important. Cause that's, I agree with exactly with what you just said. And so what I, the view that I've come to in studying moral psychology is that we, is that humans are ultra-social apes. We evolved to live in these small groups that are fighting with each other. We evolved to have these low-level animistic religions. That's our

steady state. That's the way we were for at least 100,000 years or much more, probably close to a million in some form. So that's sort of our design, that's what we were designed for in a sense. And in that sense, as individuals, we're really kind of stupid, tribal creatures designed to do post-hoc reasoning. But if you put us together in the right way, with the right checks, with the right systems, the whole can be vastly smarter than the components that go into it, which is true of the brain, too. The brain is composed of neurons, each neuron is really kind of stupid little switch.

But you put them together in the right way and you get something really brilliant. And in the same way, I don't know all the history here, but my understanding is that science begins, or the culture of science, the scientific revolution begins in Europe in the 17th century. As you begin getting, you get the printing press, so people can share their ideas, but you get communities of people who are challenging each other's ideas. And that's what makes it so brilliant,

is that people have to do their best. We're really bad at disconfirming our own ideas. It's very hard to do that. But you put your ideas out there, and then everyone else has motivated to challenge them. And so if you put us together in the right way, the truth comes out. And so adversarial systems of law, journalists know this, they have to listen to both sides, scientists know this, social scientists should know this.

Okay, what happened? Well, the academy has always leaned left in the 20th century, but leaning isn't a problem. So people think, well, viewpoint diversity, we need everybody, we need Nazis, we need every, no, we don't need everybody. But we need is no orthodoxy. That's what's fatal, orthodoxy. So if you have a field like sociology or social psychology,

in which it's two or three to one left to right, that's totally fine with me. That's totally fine. Because if someone makes some claim that's just like ideologically blind, someone will say, you know, common sense, other evidence that you've missed, and then the system works. But what I learned when I started down this road in 2011, and I gave a talk at the big conference for social psychologists, I gave a talk about this big conference for social psychologists.

I gave a talk about this problem that we're losing our diversity, that I could only find one conservative in the entire field. And I gave a talk on this. And so what I've learned since then is that the ratio in psychology was between two to one and four to one left-right all the way up to the early 90s. We've gathered together all the studies we

could find so all the way up to the early 90s it's only three or four to one left to right which would be okay. But then between 1995 or four and 2010 it goes to 14 to one. Do you have any idea why? And why that time? Yes. So you get the same story. Whether you look at Republican Democrat ratios or liberal conservative, they tell the same story. So the big things going on, there are one,

is that the greatest generation, which had a lot of Republicans. So a lot of men go off to World War II, they're on the GI Bill, they enter the academy in the 1950s, a lot of them are conservative or Republican. So you have a lot of them, but in the 60s and 70s, one of the main reasons to go to grad school in the social sciences is either A, to stay in school, to escape the Vietnam War draft, or B, to fight for social justice and against racism.

So in sociology and psychology, in particular, political science may be a much more, you get a huge influx of left-leaning people who are there to pursue social justice. So the motives are fine. And if it was balanced, it would be totally fine. But as you get these young junior people on the left come in in the 70s and 80s,

and then you get the older people that are more politically balanced, retiring in the 80s and 90s. But the time you get to the late 90s, it's all baby bloomers. And so do you get a positive feedback loop developing in there? Like you said it's like three to one, it's okay. But maybe when it hits four to one, it goes to like 20 to one. Then you start getting hostile climate. So I wrote a review paper on this with Joe Duarte and Phil Tetlock and Lee Jussim, Jared Crawford. And we reviewed everything that

we could find and we concluded that most of what's going on is self-selection. That is, people on the left are more open to experience. They're always going have a good connection. So, it's got self-selection. But then there's really good evidence that there's also hostile climate. I mean, it's undeniable now that if you are not on the left in a grad program, there's just constant little subtle, or not so subtle, reminders that you don't belong.

And look, in the academy, we're all about saying, hey, if there are subtle hints here and there, you can't succeed, right? I mean, that's what we do for a living, is we say that little things will stop people. Well, little things are put in the way of anyone who doesn't fit politically. And so you do get hostile climate,

you do get over discrimination, there's evidence of that. And then there is also, it is part of the story here that what it means to be conservative in the 90s and especially 2000s has changed. So it is true that the conservatives were not in any way anti-science until much more recent times. Now, actually, both sides are anti-science about different sciences. But in America, the right wing, the Republican party, it's controversial, but I do believe

that the polarization starts with the right moving further out. So what it means to be concerned with? To be anti-evolutionary, which is actually what's happening on the left now, too. Exactly, that's what I said. You have so much modern left. I talked to Brett Weinstein the other day, and you know, he, one of his claims is that evolutionary biology has something in it to offend everyone.

So it's a science that's very likely to be targeted by extremists. You also brought up something that actually touches on the difficult problem of how it is that you might define someone who's ideologically possessed, let's say, or ideologically rigid. Because the idea was that you can make a valid case for the utility of free information flow and the free flow of

people that would go along with that, and you can make a good case for the danger of that. And so the idea might be that if you're only making a case for the danger of that, then you're tilted too far to the right, and if you're only making a case for the utility of that, then you're tilted too far to the left. Exactly. That's right. And so we can look at immigration as a nice example.

There's a recent essay in the Atlantic, I think it was by Peter Bynart, where he reviews, he starts with a lot of quotes that are pretty nuanced positions about immigration from Barack Obama, Paul Krugman, a bunch of other people on the left who used to be able to say, on the one hand, compassion, economic, on the other hand, we have to have a legal process and there's a threat to low wage workers. So people on the left used to be able to talk about immigration and talk about the pros and cons, plus and minuses. But BINARCH shows how in the last four or five years you can't.

If you so much as suggest that maybe immigration is unnet good, but it might have some deleterious effects on certain classes of low wage American workers. You could get in big trouble. Right, because that's instantly prejudicial. Wow. Because immigration has become a sacred topic. So this is the key thing that I want everyone to keep in mind. We are fundamentally religious creatures.

We're built for religion. And it's a great achievement to create a scientific establishment and an academic establishment that keeps that way of thinking out. Scientific thinking is not natural thinking. Religious thinking is natural thinking and what's happening to us in the last few years especially is a flooding in of religious thinking. And so let's get a bunch of social scientists to talk about immigration. What are they going to do? Look at the data, way up the pluses and minuses, no. They're going to, many of them feel they're on a team and that team is fighting the right,

the right is anti-immigrant, it includes racist elements. Therefore that justifies us in being pro-immigration. And social sciences are always, there's always ambiguity, there's always conflicting studies. And there's multiple causal factors as well. Exactly. Always in the social science study. That's right. So, Bynart's point was that the left used to be able to think straight about immigration.

Clearly it had a, you know, it was generally pro-immigration, but it used to be able to think straight. But in the last few years, a religious Orthodox mindset has overtaken it. Okay, so we might as well also point out that it's a primordial religious mindset, right? Because I mean, there are different... Yeah, I don't mean Christian or Jewish. I mean ancient tribal small scale lots of gods. Right, right. Well, so then one of the things that you might suggest is that when you throw out

a sophisticated religious structure, an unsophisticated religious structure comes in to fill the gap. I do so, that's true. Okay, so that's definitely worth thinking about. So that's right. So that's right, with religions, we have to clarify fundamentalism is the problem, not religion. And so if you get a fundamentalist, I'm happy to say, and if you have people applying to a grad program in psychology, and I find out that they're a Christian, that's fine, there's no problem.

But if they're fundamentalist Christian, I would think, well, let's say it's not psychology, suppose it's geology. So someone applies to a geology program, they're a fundamentalist, young earth creationist. Are you going to admit them? No, I don't think you should. They're not able to do the right kind of thinking based on what we know to be the case. They're not in the scientific paradigm. They're not in the scientific paradigm. That's right. So if we wouldn't admit a fundamentalist Christian to a geology program, why would we admit someone who is just as fundamentalist about

certain moral and political issues into a sociology program, or into a psychology program. If they come in knowing what the right answer is, committed to that right answer, likely to get angry at anyone who contravenes that right answer, and showing signs of close-mindedness. I don't think they belong in a grand way. Yeah, I guess the question is, how in the world do you set up mechanisms to ensure that you're not swamped by fundamentalists of any sort? So those are people who are reducing everything

to a single cause, it's something like that. How can you implement a structure that protects the organization against that without the structure itself becoming totalitarian? Because these things spin out of control so fast. Yeah. So, I think what we have to realize in the academy is that we face, I think we face an existential crisis.

We rely on enormous amount on public goodwill. We get enormous tax subsidies, direct research support. And recent polling shows that while Democrats have always had a higher opinion of the universities and Republicans, until two years ago, everybody thought universities are a good thing, they make life better. So Americans have been very supportive of higher education. They've been rising gripes on the right, but it's only between 2015 and 2017 that now Republicans go from saying mostly universities are good things, two years, they go way down and say, universities are bad things.

They're making things worse. Now, how is this news greeted? Pundits on the left are saying, oh, those Republicans are so anti-science. Look how ignorant they are. They now hate universities. Come on, anybody who's been watching the news, anybody who's seen the mobs, the shout downs,

the illiberal behavior, the metaphor I use is like, Americans on the right and left are really supportive of the military. We have one of the few institutions that we still hold and highest team on both sides. And so the Republicans more than Democrats. So suppose you had Gallup polling, showing Republicans like the military

more than Democrats, but both really like it. And suddenly, in 2015, we started seeing video from all over military bases, the military academies, in which the military leaders are overtly right-wing. They're saying terrible things about leftists and progressives, and the midshipmen and the cadets, and everybody is mobbing the occasional liberal and the behaving in a really despicable, scary and intimidating way. What do you think the left would now think about the military? Obviously support for the military would plummet. That's what's happening in the American universities. We are losing the support of half the country. This is unsustainable, especially in red states where they control the purse strings. So, I think we have a major crisis.

I think we've got to go into crisis mode and we've got to clean up our act. So, just as we're doing in psychology with replication project, we recognize that our methods weren't good enough and we're doing a crash course thanks to Brian Nosec and others, the Open Science Project, we're really trying to improve our game. Thank God, we need to. I think we have to do the exact same thing about partisanship and our duties.

Okay, so let's talk about heterodox academy, because you set that up, this organization, that you should tell everybody about, and precisely to deal with this issue. And so I'd like to know about it, how it's growing, what it's doing, what your aims are, all of that. So I gave this talk in 2011, laying out the fact

that we have no more conservatives in social psychology and why this makes it hard for us to find truth. And in the months after that, a few social psychologists resonated with the message. They said, wow, I think you're right. I have some data on this. So the five of us, six of us, wrote this paper, it came out in behavioral and brain sciences. Oh, Charlotte Stern, I'm sorry, was the sixth one that I forgot to add

in before. We got this paper published in behavioral and brain sciences. It came out, it was sort of online in 2014, but it came out for good in the summer 2015, which coincidentally was the same summer that my article came out with Greg Lukianov called the coddling of the American mind. That was about things going on with undergrads. But our concern was entirely faculty. It was just the nature of the academic community, the research community. So we got these two things going on, summer 2015. And then that summer, I hear from Nick Rosenkrantz, a law professor who says, we have the same problem in law. And it lost. It must be worse in law. Well, it's really bad in Canada in law.

Okay, because, and as he points out, we're training all these students, they never meet a conservative. Then they have to go argue cases in front of judges, half of whom were appointed by Republicans. They have no idea what a conservative thinks. This is malpractice. We've got a train. So, and I hear from a sociologist, Chris Martin, same thing in sociology. So the three of us said, hey, you know, this is a big problem for the whole again. Have you looked at faculties of education?

Oh my God. Those are the worst. I don't know the numbers, but in terms of the vindictiveness, the the incredible pressure put on any nonconforming opinion, my impression, I don't have data, but my impression from the letters I get is that education schools and social work schools are the worst. That's exactly in keeping with my understanding as well. It's hard to tell which of those two are worst. I would say it's the faculties of education because they have a direct pipeline to kids. In terms of their effects, yes, far more pre-nicious. But equally warped, let's say, far more pre-nicious. Yeah, but equally warped, let's say, but more pre-nicious.

And the things that are happening in the Canadian education system as a consequence of that are so reprehensible. And we should get to that because it's happening here too with these ideas fielding down to high school. I've been so focused on college, now we're discovering the problem is actually baked in, the liberal attitudes are often baked in by the time they arrived. Yes, and purposefully, like in Canada, increasingly, the radical leftists have control over curriculum development, and they're starting to develop social justice curriculums, which is what they

call them for kindergarten kids. So it's really... Let's finish up with the heteristic academy, and then we'll get back to the earlier grades. So originally three of us decided to put up a website. I invited all the other authors from the BBS paper. We invited a few other people who were working on this. And so for the first year, we have this project. It was called heteroxacademy.org. We put the site up on about September 10th, I think it was, 2015. And it was just a community of researchers who are studying the problem of the lack of viewpoint

diversity. Well, five days later, the protests start at Missouri, so these are racially motivated protests or protests about racial insensitivity and racial problems at Missouri. And at first, it seemed like this is just a Missouri problem, but coming in the wake, of course, of Ferguson and all the videos we saw of unarmed black men being killed by police. The lot of these concerns spread to other universities, the protests aren't just about race, but it was that fall of 2015, especially the Yale protest, when the president of Yale validates their narrative that the yales are racist place, we have to reform Yale, then

it spreads nationally. And now, suddenly, this is not just a faculty issue anymore. So even though it heteroxycatomy will mostly focus on the faculty, we're now seeing it's a complex ecosystem that all kinds of forces acting on universities so that between 2015 and 2017, the danger of speaking honestly by what you think about an academic or intellectual proposition has skyrocketed.

The risk of being mobbed, ostracized, formally investigated. By Title IX people, for example. I've had nine people. We're sitting here at NYU, go to any bathroom. I'll show you on this floor. Go to any bathroom. There's a sign telling students exactly what number to call to report you or me if we say something

that someone takes to be a bias act. Oh, so you have bias, you have bias investigation teams here. That's right. See, we haven't got to that point, that particular point in Canada yet. So I think we're farther ahead down that path in some ways, but not quite as far and others. So yeah, that's really, that's really unbelievable. So things are changing very, very fast. It's not at all schools, But then again, things are changing so fast. We don't really know. We don't have good data on what's going on. What I can tell you though, is that at heteroxicatomy,

when we started out in 2015, there was a lot of suspicion. A lot of people on the left were afraid like, oh, is this some right-wing group? Now, very few of us are actually on the right. But because we end up mostly speaking up for libertarians and conservatives who are attacked or silenced, people will think, oh, we end up mostly speaking up for libertarians and conservatives who are attacked or silenced, people will think, oh, we must be right. We ain't, but we're not.

I mean, I've never voted for a public in my life. I've never given money to a Republican campaign. I'm now increasingly calling myself a liberal now that we see liberalism flourishing. But so when we started out, there was a lot of suspicion of us from many professors. But now that it's clear that the problems, these are not just a few anecdotes. This is the new normal.

And it's not just in the university, so as you pointed out. That's right. It's spreading like mad. And it's not just in the US. It's spread. In 2015, I thought it was uniquely American problem. Yeah. Boy, it's in Canada and the UK. And Australia. It is. It is a uniquely Anglo-Sphere problem. This is really interesting. It's in Canada and the UK. And Australia. And New Zealand.

That's right. It is a uniquely Anglo-Sphere problem. This is really interesting. It's not on the continent very much at all. What about in the Nordic countries? No. I mean, they have, so political correctness, you have lots of places.

The unique thing that identifies this new culture is linking the political correctness with the sense of fragility. And this is something America has pioneered. The idea that, so in Britain, they've always had a no platforming, they call it. So if there's an actual British national parties and actual fascist party, so if a BNP member

is going to speak on campus, you mob him, you shut it down, don't give him a platform. So you've had passionate politics, certainly since the 60s, so that's not new, and that's everywhere. What's new is the American idea that if someone says something, and it could be a sincerely expressed idea, not a racist rant, just like,

well, I don't know, I think that maybe hormones do affect gender behavior. Can you say that? Well, what if someone takes that as somehow essentializing gender and then saying that women are inferior? Or whatever, if they know what that happened to James DeMor, for example. Exactly. Exactly.

So that's what's new is the idea that if someone says something that someone, a member of a protected or marginalized group, is offended by that person is harmed. If that person is harmed, we must protect that person. And more ominously, just in the last year or two, it's not just that they're harmed in their suffering. It's that this was violence. Yes, right. Violence.

Well, that's part of the post-modern narratives that this is so... And this would be so... This is so dangerous. The crossing the line into violence. It just occurred to me just like yesterday, I was thinking about this. We, the state is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, right?

But if speech, especially his speech and her speech and the people, the speech of those people in that academic movement, or on the, and that if their speech is violence, well, the state is supposed to have a monopoly on their speech then. And if it's violence, well, then we have a right to use violence back.

The state doesn't have an aptly on our violence, because our violence is more of the motivated. So just the orwellian and authoritarian implications of this move, once you say that speech is violence, you're unlocking your opening Pandora's box. I mean, you're five steps down the road to hell. And I'd say we're about seven steps down the road to hell. OK, so you're that concerned about it.

OK, so now tell me, how many members, you don't have to discuss any of this, obviously, but how many members of heterodox academy are there now? We have 1,300 members. So once we opened up, it's originally it was just for researchers who were studying this problem, but we had lots of people wanting to join. And so we said, well, okay, why not? And so we just said, all right, as long as you're a professor, that is, you have a PhD,

you're living more or less the life of a professor, you have a university affiliation. So we now take adjuncts, if they have a PhD, we take postdocs. Basically, if you're in the guild, if you're living the life of a professor, and you're concerned about the rise of intimidation, frankly, if you're concerned that our wonderful institution, I love being a professor, I love the academy, and I feel like it's not just losing public respect, it's losing its ability to function,

it's losing its ability to function, it's losing its ability to teach and do research on politicized topics. So there are more politicized topics all the time? That's right. And there are a few in the natural science, it's not nanny, but there are some in the natural sciences as well. Anyway, my point is we're now growing very rapidly and something I'm very excited by is since we've started having more violence on campus with beginning with birth in middle-breed,

we're seeing a pervasive sense among people on the left that there really is this problem here that something has to be done. And so we are finding much more acceptance now from professors on the left. So I like to think about there's the liberal left, which is the great majority, and there's the illiberal left.

We did a factor analysis of politically correct beliefs and found exactly that, and that the illiberal left was also high in orderliness. That's interesting. That's the authoritarian pre-disposition. And also kind of markedly declined, was also characterized by a marked lack of verbal intelligence. Oh, that's so incredible. Wow.

It was a correlation was about .4. Wow. Oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful, because one of the simplest populations I've heard of it intelligence. Oh, that's so incredible. Yeah, it was four relations about point four. Oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful because one of the simplest formulations I've heard, a really great formulation from Mark Lilla. So Mark Lilla wrote this fantastic op-ed in New York Times, week after Trump was elected, saying identity politics is a really

foolish thing to do. It pushes lots of people over to Trump's side. Identity politics is part of the problem. Well, he writes this op-ed, and one of his fellow professors at Columbia, I forget how she does it, but she basically says something about the mask with eye holes falls from his face, like he's a Kukuk's clan member, something like that.

And so Lilla, Lilla, who isn't the human beings, he's an intellectual historian, Lilla has this simple formulation. He says, that's a slur, not an argument. And once I had that simple formulation, I realized, wow, that's almost all the pushback I've ever gotten. It's somehow, you know, oh, you're winking at Nazi, or you are, you're talking to me over and over.

I was just, my neighbor was just poster, and saw that, the intimidation. So, this is really key. We're supposed to be all about, just my neighbor was just postured with all that. Yeah, the intimidation. So this is really key. We're supposed to be all about, you can say anything you want, you can make any argument you want, if you can support it, if you can back it with reasons. This is critical thinking.

This is what we're supposed to train our students to do. Well, and it's not only that you can say anything, but you can say it, there's a boundary on that, which especially if you're a scientist, less so in the humanities. But if you're a scientist, less so in the humanities. But if you're a scientist, the things you say have to be vetted by people who are going to be critical of them.

So not only do you, there's a possibility for work. There's accountability for work. There's accountability built into it. That's right. So I didn't mean to say you can say that. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, you can put forth any idea you want

if you can back it up. What we're seeing with anything politicized is it's not about backing it up. Students are learning rhetorical techniques to link their enemies to something racist. Well, something... ...contemptable. ...contemptable.

...dusting. And those are the things that are not only worthy of being destroyed, but that you have a moral duty to destroy. Exactly. So that's right. So it's almost like the immune system. I'm not sure how exactly it works, but there's some cell that tags a cell as, you know, enemy enemy, and once that tag is put on the cell, that attracts other, I think, what kind

of cell to ma bit. And so we should look into this metaphor of the immune system. Yeah. Because, you know, once you're labeled as a racist, students don't have to read you that it doesn't matter what you actually say, you will labeled as a racist, students don't have to read you that it doesn't matter what you actually say, you will now be attacked. Well, it's also, too, that once you're labeled that way, if someone defends you, the label is contagious.

That's right, and that's our dynamic of a witch hunt. That's how we know we're in this super religious territory of witch hunts, that if you stand up for someone, you are tagged, and then you will be mobbed. Right, and that's why there's so much disease. Right. And that's why there's so much disease. Exactly. That's why there's so much cowardice on campus among both students and faculty. People are afraid to stand up. Even if the majority think that what's going on is nuts or is unfair, they're afraid to stand up. And that's in part due to social media because

it's just, I mean, students today have been raised with various platforms that make it easy for people to join in, attack someone, they look at who liked what. So if in that article we just saw on Read, there was a bit of a counter-revolution at Read, the students had to get together somehow and decide should I like that post? How about if we all like it at the same time and we'll get in less trouble?

Okay, so to what degree, so let's talk about the aims of the heterodox academy. So you've brought people together who are in principle interested in a diversity of opinions. But, but in what manner is that going to be utilized to, to, to, I don't want to use the word combat, but do, but to deal with this emerging problem of ideological rigidity in the universities. So two useful concepts here. One is the Emperor's new clothes. We all know that story.

Even if most people, even if everybody sees this as nuts, the Emperor is walking around no clothes, they're afraid to say it until one person says it. And this is also the ash experiment. Everybody says that that line is the same as that line. It's obviously not true. If one person says the truth, then nobody conforms after that. So the mere presence of a group of people who say,

you know what, we actually need a diversity of opinions. And the fact that on our site, we'll publish things. So sometimes when professors are a mob, like when Brett Weinstein was mobbed, so I wrote an essay that stood up for him. We've done that for some of them. It's happening so fast I can't keep up. I've got books to write, and every week there's

some new member who's getting mobbed. And so we're going to develop a team of people who will write. But just knowing that there are people who will stand up for you, knowing that there are people who will say, wait a second, this is not what we do in the academy. So that's one thing, is we just stand up for each other. Two is we develop products that we think can basically fix the situation. So one of our products is called the Campus Expression Survey. It's a survey designed to actually measure who is afraid of speaking up about what topics and why, what are they

afraid of? And it turns out everyone's afraid of the students more than the faculty. They're afraid mostly to talk about race. What about the administrators? Everyone's afraid of the students. They're afraid of the students. So I don't have, we have not studied them. I've only surveyed students. I don't like.

But from what we hear, people are afraid of the students. Well, that's also calling in its own manner. Like, was that really where, that's for sure, they let those kids come into the classroom, the actual classroom, and disrupt a class on an ongoing basis. I mean, yes, and I couldn't understand that exactly. I mean, my response to that would be, first, I would tell them to leave,

second, I would call campus security, third, if something wasn't done about it, I just wouldn't teach the class. So I don't understand, it seems to me that it's also up to individual professors to draw a line, which is that if you're being intimidated by students, why do you show up and teach the class? I don't understand that.

So, again, people are afraid to stand up if it means that people will call you a racist. Yeah, but God, I mean, it's weird in that situation. No, but it's carried to a certain- You're also afraid to go to your class. That's right. And there's a much more proximal threat there. That's right. That's what I mean. That's what I'm most alarmed by is the rise of intimidation. Intimidation is now a factor in many aspects of academic life, and that's just terrible. That's completely incompatible with what we do and who we are. Well, it's especially appalling given that whatever happens in the university campuses, you know, like one of the questions I've faced in Canada is, well, why should we care

about what's happening in the Ivy towers? That's going to hire these people next year. You are, well, yeah, well, there it's the heart. Like, what's happening in the campuses is going to's where you're going to hire these people next year. You are? Well, yeah, well, what's happening in the campus is going to happen in society in five years. That's how it goes. It's already happening. So this is actually an important point. I just gave a talk at a big law firm here in New York

where they're very devoted to diversity, but they're doing it right. They're really thinking about diversity. Why is diversity good? And say, I have a whole month on viewpoint diversity, which is just fantastic. And what I'm learning from talking to a number of people in the business world is that in the last year, there are now all these pressures on leaders to endorse this, condemn that,

sign this open letter. We'll start coming into human resources. That's right. That's right. But it's the same dynamic we have on campus, and the answer to it. So if anybody watching here, if you run a business, if you have friends who are in business, I think the only, there are only two stable equilibria.

One is that every organization is just either all right wing or all left wing, but that would be disastrous. So either you just say, okay, we're on one side. That would be terrible. The other is what we call the Chicago Principles of Free Expression. The University of Chicago has the best statement out there on how the university provides a platform

on which multiple views can contest. The university does not take anyone's side. That's the only other stable alternative. And I think leaders need to do this in business, certainly at universities. So we're encouraging every university to adopt the Chicago Principles because a lot of what mass action is

is an attempt to compel the authority to come in on your side and punish your enemies. Yeah, yeah. And so that has to stop. So how effectively is the Chicago statement on, how effectively is the Chicago statement being disseminated? How rapidly are universities signing up? Or, or.

If you signed on early in this whole crisis, Purdue, they're about 10 or 15 that have endorsed it or something like it. It's not enough to just endorse something, but if you have leadership that's committed to creating an open platform in which people can disagree, and, and one thing's very encouraging. I've been invited by a number of university presidents to come speak. We have all kinds of innovations that heteroxicademy to foster a more inclusive climate

in which people can actually engage with difference. There's a lot of interest. So I think the university leaders were very slow to react. They didn't want to alienate certain factions of students, but they're almost all reasonable people. They're almost all liberal left, not a liberal. They're horrified by what's going on. They know they're sitting atop a powder keg. They don't want things to blow up in their face as happened at Evergreen. So this brings us to our another product, the one that we're most excited by. So it just went online actually today.

It's called the OpenMind platform. If you go to OpenMindplatform.org, you can find we've developed an app. We have a whole library of readings and videos who developed an app that guides you through. We don't just say, here's how to engage with different viewpoints. We start by saying, why is it good? And we make the case that you need this, everybody needs this.

And two, we remind people that we're all basically self-righteous hypocrites. We have quotes from wisdom traditions around the world. And we've all heard this. So just a little bit of, you know, you can call it emotional manipulation if you like, but just get people into a mindset in which they're willing to say, oh yeah, whoa, you know, calm down. We're all, we're all on two self-righteous here. And then we then we teach them some psychology about motivated reasoning. And only then do we teach them to engage with views that are not their own. So we've already run this in about 15 or 20 classes. The results so far look promising that at the end of it,

the measures show that students are more open to other ideas. So the open-mind platform we think is a tool that we think a lot of universities are going to adopt. There's a lot of interest in it. And if there's leadership, if the professors generally do support viewpoint diversity and open inquiry, if we change freshman orientation so that students are trained first and foremost in how to step back,

give people the benefit of the doubt, be open-minded, if we do that first. That's like behavioral exposure to some degree, right? The idea would be that if you're afraid or disgusted by something that you don't understand, the appropriate first treatment, first of all, the treatment is necessary because otherwise you'll isolate yourself in the ways that you already described,

and second, that brief exposure, voluntary exposure is going to be the best curative. And that's the opposite of the safe space idea, where you need to be protected. That's what the safe space, the safe space idea is the worst thing you could possibly do for the very people you're trying to do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

I mean, the psychology behind safe spaces and microaggressions is just the exact opposite of what we should be doing if we want to create kids. Especially black kids, gay kids, women, whatever. If you think that they are vulnerable to more stigma, more conflict, if you think that they are vulnerable, that's especially when a safe space will be temporarily pleasant but in the long run bad for them. Right, and that's the critical issue too with regards to safe spaces, is that they're

sacrificing the medium and long term of the students' well-being, let's say, to the short term lack of fear and conflict. They're infantilizing them, essentially. So yeah, okay. So, all right, so I was thinking about the discussion idea, I've got a personality test online now that's based on this big five aspect scale, but it might be interesting as something for us to think about

to find people who are high in openness and low and conscientiousness are orderedliness, and offer them the opportunity to engage in dialogue with people who have the opposite personality traits. Because, well, first of all, because they're gonna run into people like that, always, right? And maybe even establish a relationship with them

inadvertently. And so being able to tolerate that might give them the kind of insight that you said you developed when you realized that the conservative ethos was based on a reasonable but not complete set of beneficial axiomatic presuppositions. So, all right.

So now this has pretty much taken over your life this heterodox academy, as well as the writing. Now you're writing a couple of new books, I understand. So since I was in the psychology department at the University of Virginia for 17 years, and when my book The Righteous Mind was coming out, I wanted to move to New York City for a year so I could do promotional work for it, and I just had my second child, it was just born, and I knew it would be hard to fly from Charlottesville. So I just happened to get a position, a temporary position

here at Stern at the business school. And when I first arrived, I wasn't that interested in business. But as soon as I got here, Occupy Wall Street happened. And suddenly it was like everyone's talking about morality and politics and capitalism and business. And then I started learning about the history of capitalism. And I knew nothing about it, it was fascinating. And I started seeing how free enterprise and free markets have helped raise living standards around the world, radical, the kind of poverty, in a staggeringly rapid fashion that's completely unprecedented,

especially since the year 2000. That's right. So here I was 48 years old, discovering I knew nothing about, it was like when I first learned about evolution, like, wow, this explains like everything in the natural world, and learning about capitalism, business, explained everything about the built world

and the world that we actually live in. And there was also all these business scandals, this was 2011, the wake of the financial crisis. And I saw a huge opening to begin applying moral psychology And there were also all these business scandals. This was 2011, the wake of the financial crisis. And I saw a huge opening to begin applying moral psychology to help corporations have better ethics. So everything I do involves applying moral psychology to help complex systems work better. So I've been focused on political polarization and governance for years before then.

And that led to the righteous mind. And then I got here to Stern, they offered me a job during that first year, and I took it, and it's been fantastic. It's been really exciting. It's like a whole new, I almost like being back in grad school, a whole bunch of new things to learn.

It must be kind of a shock, an existential shock, to be in a business school in some sense. No, it's not a shock. I mean, it's a different culture. It's much more open in the sense that it's so diverse, like the things people are doing, there's not like a way that we do things here, and it's much more open to applied projects, to actually, to apply projects.

Yeah, and so it was a perfect time for me, like I just, you know, the right just mind, that wraps up like the first half of my career, like everything I did is in that book, and now it's time for something new, and that new thing was going to be looking at how morality or moral psychology both underlines or is the foundation for our ability to do capitalism, like contracts, reciprocity, all sorts of things, and how our left right divide from the right's mind makes it hard for us to figure out what's true, like if you raise the minimum wage, does it help or hurt the working poor? Right.

If you're an economist on the left, it obviously helps them, if you're an economist on the right, it obviously hurts them because if you were them minimum wage, does it help or hurt the working poor? If you're an economist on the left, it obviously helps them. If you're an economist on the right, it obviously hurts them because you are them have jobs. And you can jury-mander the measurement devices to produce the conclusions that you want, which is a big problem.

That's right. So I'm supposed to be writing a book called Three Stories About Capitalism, the Moral Psychology of Economic Life. And so I started traveling around the world, looking at how development is going in various countries. I did a three month trip to Asia in 2015. I came back from Asia.

My article came out with Lukyan off the Kotlin American mind. The BBS article was published. And I thought, OK, now I can get back to this, keep writing this capitalism book. And then the university's kind of, again, melting down in the fall. And then we started at heteroxicatomy. And so yes, it has taken over my life.

It's basically a full-time job in addition to trying to write the, I'm also working on it. So, Lukiana, if I didn't want to turn our article into a book, because we thought we'd said everything, but men have things been happening now. We've learned so much more since we wrote that article. And you wrote that article when? How long it was?

Well, we wrote it in late 2014, and then we edited it in early 2015, and it finally came out in August of 2015. And so in last October, Greg wrote to me and said, John, I think I do want to turn the article into a book, because we know so much more now. And it's the problem is so much more serious than it was. And the evidence, my God, the evidence about mental health crisis and adolescents. When Greg and I wrote the evidence, my God, the evidence about mental health

crisis of adolescence. When Greg and I wrote the article, we saw lots of hints that depression and anxiety were going way up. And we think that's related to the overprotection. Yeah, that's OK. So let's talk about that just for a second, then go back to the book. So I've got a potential demographic explanation

for that in part. Well, and I don't know if you guys have looked into this or not. Well, there's two things that I think might be contributing to it. One is two or three things. One is the average age at which children are, the average age at which people have children has gone way up. That's true, okay.

So why does that matter? Well, because I think people get more conservative than cautious as they get older. A little bit, but that's true, but it's a very small effect. And it's, wait a second, it's the having of the kids, which is what makes them more conservative. When you have kids, you are more threat sensitive, you're more likely to vote for the right-wing party.

So just delaying childbirth wouldn't. OK, what about fewer siblings? That would, yes. that's part of it. And this is what we're seeing in Asia too. When you have a lot of kids, you're not quite as worried. You don't have all your ex-emone basket. Well, and you can, you can. You can.

You can. And the siblings raise each other, right? And then there's a lot of hominital orchestras. And they play a lot of fight. Exactly. It's the free play and the fighting, the working things out for themselves. Those are essential skills of adulthood.

Okay, so then, all right. Yeah, because all the family size is part of it. Right. Well, and then also what's happening increasingly in schools is that kids aren't allowed free play. And there's certain not allowed rough and tumble free play. Exactly. That's right.

That's one of the biggest things about. So, there are three giant. There are a lot of causes. I mean, this is such, actually, it's really fun puzzle because's one of the biggest things about. So the two, there are three giant, there are a lot of causes. I mean, this is such, actually it's really fun puzzle because it's like the biggest social science puzzle of our age. What is happening that's making so many of our systems go haywire and I'm focusing on the university. The big three I would say are one is the loss of unsupervised replay.

And Peter Gray has been brilliant on this. He's at Boston College showing how even among young animals, they have to practice the skills for adulthood and getting in conflict. So getting in conflicts and then dealing with it and sometimes losing and you come back having game in which there's a problem, but you have to work it out with the game stocks. That's what kids always did. It's only recently in in the 90s, that they're always supervised. Because we're afraid if we take our eyes off them, they'll be kidnapped, and it was never a risk.

It was never a risk. You know, I've kind of wondered about this gender flexibility issue as a form of delayed fantasy play. You get it for writing on me. Go ahead. Well, because it looks to me like that, is when kids are little, and say three to seven, they do a tremendous amount of identity play.

You know, they pretend they're animals, they pretend they're parents, they pretend they're girls, if they're boys, they pretend they're boys, if they're girls, like they really do a tremendous amount of identity play. And one of the things that's been really puzzling me is, well, what happens if that isn't, if they never have an opportunity for that, because they're not engaging in fantasy play. Maybe it's just delayed till adulthood. Oh, that's interesting. So because play, it's almost impossible to overstate the importance of that rough and

tumble play, and then the fantasy play that enables you to adopt different identities, and then then negotiated games that you talked about that enable people to handle both victory, but even more importantly loss That's right. So that's plausible that could well be I've known that I have no no opinion on but the big three factors that I think are Explaining explain what's happening on campus are one the loss of the unsupervised play so that the kids Have always there's always an adult president and so they come to college and they expect there to be an adult or deen somebody if there's a conflict. That's one. Two is social media, which hit just as Igen,

so Igen, internet generation. This is Gene Twangy's work. We used to think that the millennial generation ends in 1998 or 2000, but Gene Twangy shows, looking at four large data sets sets that birth year 1995, kids born in 1995 and after are really different. Their values are different. They have much higher rates of anxiety and depression, especially the girls. Boys have gone up, girls have gone way up. And the reason seems to be that Facebook lowered its age.

So in 2005, you had to be a college student at a certain number of colleges to get Facebook. In 2006, you could be any 11-year-old who lies and says that she's 13 and you've got a Facebook account. But then you're using on your parents' PC. And in 2007, the iPhone comes out and it saturates the market fashion any consumer product ever has. So by 2010 or 11, a lot of adolescents have Facebook and other social platforms.

And this is just devastating, especially to girls because it's not texting. Texting is just me to you, you know, that's back and forth, that's fine. That, you know, when we were kids you called your friends on the phone. That's fine. The problem seems to be according to Twangie. It's especially platforms in which you put something out and then you wait and see what everyone says. Right. And that especially is damaging to girls who already are at risk of eating disorders and image disorders.

Okay. Okay. So girls become more susceptible to negative emotional when they hit puberty. Well, they're, they're, the way it's going to be. But then there's another issue, too, with regards to female aggression. So it's clearly the case that males are more likely to be physically damaging, slash aggressive than females are. But what females use is reputation-safaging. That's right. That's Nikki.

That's Nicky. That's Nicky Crick's work. Nicky Crick has to wait wait a couple years ago, showed that if you added all up, boys and girls are equally aggressive, but the boys aggression is more physical, the girls are more relational. So if you imagine a bunch at 13, 14-year-olds in their middle schools, and then you parachute in a whole bunch of iPhones, everybody's got one in their pocket. What are the boys going to do? They're going to play video games, and that doesn't hurt anybody. But the girls are going to do? They're going to play video games. And that doesn't hurt anybody. But the girls are going to use it to amplify

the social interactions. So this is Twingy's explanation. I think it makes a lot of sense. So it's a catastrophe. It's a crisis. And we're really hurting, especially the girls. So we've got to change something about that. Anyway, but social media is possibly the largest single reason

why things are going haywire on campus. The third big factor. And do you think it's primarily Facebook or can you tell? Well, the kids use a lot of different platforms. But from what I hear, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, again, the thing is it's one to many. That's what's bad. Anything, if you put something out there and you see how many people like it, that's what's bad.

Right, and there's always the threat that it'll go viral in a terrible way. So that's like hammer exactly There's a sort of damage that's unlimited that's unlimited damage unlimited downside to saying something so what he did So they're all careful right, so I don't know if I want to like that post because you know I could get in big trouble for it right Well, the benefit to liking it is minimal and the potential catastrophe for distance unless you're expected to like it, in which case you better like it because if you don't like it, you'll get in trouble. So it's a much more of a mob mentality. Kids are free. You know, I'm not blaming the kids. I'm very sympathetic to them. And these are my kids. They're, you know, my kids are 11 and 7. They're going to come up into this.

So the kids have been raised in a social environment that's much more about mob formation and mob attacks and defenses against mobs. And then the third factor then is the political polarization and the purification of institutions. So if you imagine coming up in the 90s when political polarization is going up, we're beginning to hate each other more across party lines, but it's not that hard, not that nasty,

but it's been getting much, much more hostile so that now if someone goes to a campus Republicans meeting, if it's a Democrat, who goes to a meeting of the campus Republicans, has happened at UC Santa Cruz a couple weeks ago, and someone finds out, so the cross-party hatred is so much stronger now, and many by institutions are much pure. So if you went to college in the 90s, there might have been a few conservative professors around, but now there aren't.

So as you said before, it's like exposure therapy. If you've never encountered a conservative idea, and then a conservative like Heather McDonald comes to speak on your campus, well, this is like a major immune response problem. We got to get the tribe together and mob her and shut her down. So, there are many other reasons,

but the loss of unsupervised play, social media, and rise in polarization. Those are the three big ones. Right, well, those are big problems, especially the loss of unsupervised play. It's not obvious at all how that might be addressed. Yes, it is. Okay, good, good.

Everyone should buy. Everyone should just buy Lennore Skinnezy's book, Free-Range Kids, and then they should loosen up and give their kids more unsupervised time. Now, you can't do this alone. You'll be arrested. I've tried to get my son to go out across the street to, you know, by groceries when he was nine years old.

And he'd say, like, but, like but you know daddy people look at me funny there are no other kids out there and so the nor has started a fantastic organization called let grow so if if you was go to let grow dot org okay we'll put all this in the description all of these things right so I'm on the board of it is an advisor Peter Gray next for it on on play'm on the board of it as an advisor, Peter Gray, an expert on play, is on the board. And they're doing these simple things, simple, simple things, like you convince a school to just open up the playground an hour early or keep it open after school. Why should kids always have organized activities and soccer practice? Just give them a place to play where there's a nurse available if someone gets hurt.

There is an adult, but he's not supervising. He's just over there. Right. So don't worry parents, there is an adult. But beyond that, kids do what they want. And they just started this a few weeks ago and the results are fantastic. The kids are having so much fun.

They are becoming more independent. They're more willing to do projects on their own. It's working out great. So that's really good. You can't do this on your own, but the thing is, we all know something's wrong. So those are very practical. That's very practical piece of advice for schools. It's like, open up the unsupervised play facilities and facilitate their use.

That's right. Give everyone a place which is safe and by safe, I mean physically safe. Right. Never use the word safety to describe emotions and ideas. Safety means physical safety. So you've got to provide a physically safe place for the kids to play and beyond that you let them go. Now there will arise problems of bullying. So if it's repeated harassment or you know. Well I know a book about that. Which what it's by Dan always called bullying what we know and what we can do about it. And it was written, it's got to be 30 years ago.

And always cut the road, the, the, the, the incidents of bullying in the Scandinavian countries down by 50%. And he really, really targets what bullying means. So he's not a safe space guy by any stretch of the imagination. Um, I don't know by any stretch of the imagination. I don't know what the origins of it are. I know that evaluations of his program in America show anywhere from 0 to 20% reductions.

Yeah, well, I don't know. So they're much smaller in the US. In the US. Yeah, the question is whether or not they were able to implement them with the rigor he did in the US. Yeah, but bullying programs are part of the problem, because bullying clearly is a problem.

We need to do something about it. But because we have what's called concept creep. Yeah, so it's now a large point. Concept creep looks like even. Yeah, that's right. So now it's the case that if kids don't invite, if some kids want to do something and they don't invite another kid,

they've excluded that kid. Well, that could be bullying. Right, I've read of schools in Europe that don't allow kids to have do something, and they don't invite another kid, they've excluded that kid. Right. Well, that could be bullying. Right. I've read of schools in Europe that don't allow kids to have best friends, for exactly that reason. Yeah, well, because this is also something that really bothers me about the misuse of the IAT, because it's not that easy to distinguish in-group preference, which no one can,

no one when the right mind would want to eliminate in-group preference, given that it governs your choice of mate and your behavior towards your family members, let's say, to distinguish that between out-group exclusion is no simple matter. And to tell kids that they can't have a best friend is another thing that interferes with an important part of their development. That's right. I think both of us have spent a lot of time looking at ancient wisdom at the writings of people long ago. And I often come back to Aristotle's claim that any virtue carried to extremes becomes a vice. So inclusion is a good thing if people are being excluded because they have a physical stigma or they're overweight or they're skin color. So we need to be looking at the reasons why kids are excluded,

but if you say inclusion is the primary virtue, inclusion over everything else. And so if those two best friends are excluding others, no more best friends, this is madness. This is a vice. So I think that inclusion, again, it's a virtue unless it's carried to extremes. Well, that's probably a pretty good place to stop, I would say, unless you have you have anything else that you wanted to talk about.

We were we talked about the role of religion and in the fact that people are naturally religious thinkers. We talked about the heterodox academy. We talked about your work on disgust and your plans for the academy. You talked about your books. Is there anything else that that that might be of interest that you can think of? Just that I'll just say that I'm actually optimistic about what's going to happen on campus. I think things might continue to get worse this year. But I think there's an interesting phenomenon called preference falsification. When you have people not speaking honestly, as you had under communism, when you have a whole system, almost everybody thinks this is terrible. I hate this, but I don't dare say anything.

When you have preference falsifications, it's the work by Tim or Kauron. And everybody, here's everybody else's preferences. And so they think, okay, that's what everybody thinks. When you have an unraveling, it can unravel very quickly. And that's what happened in the communist countries, because everybody hated it. And it fell amazingly quickly. And I think the pushback at Reed last week

or there was written out last week. So I think the pushback at read last week or there was written last week. So I think because most people, when we're starting to see, is that a lot of people of color, also, you're not speaking for me. I mean, every group is diverse. And so, when you have a variety of people, and you have progressive speaking, you have a variety of people, I think we're going to see more and more people standing up saying, what's happening is, this is not right. This is illiberal. This is opposed to the values of the academy.

This is not what I want for myself, for my kids, or my students. So I do think that we're going to start seeing a lot more people standing up. And one of our goals at heteroxicademy is to just help put out the ideas that people need. And this is what you're doing, too. Just put out the ideas that people need. And this is what you're doing too. Just put out the ideas, critique the bad ideas, and put out concepts that can contest in this case of ideas. Get good information.

So if people go to Hydrox Academy.org on our research pages, we have all the information about what are all the polls say, what's the current information about students attitudes. We have the history of this. We have a lot of research on who is more biased left to right. Well, it turns out both sides are about equally biased. So we think that by just doing what we actually do well as academics, that is research, making arguments, being common civil, we actually think that we can turn this around. So if anybody watching this as a professor, I would invite you to join. Go to heteroxacanemy.org. Okay, so let me ask you one more question. I mean, that sounds good, and it's good to hear that you're optimistic. I mean, I waver, although I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic, I just think we're in one

of those situations where things could spiral in either direction very rapidly and that worries me. What about the disciplines on campus that seem to be primarily devoted to the activist cause? Because my view or my theory is that we've subsidized the activist disciplines. Let's say women's studies as a good example, but we could say social work and then the faculty is of education now as well. I think they're in the same bin. Let's put it that way.

The women studies programs in particular, their express goal, expressed on their websites, is to produce social justice, radical left-leaning activists. And so for a while, one of the things I proposed in Canada was that the conservatives, in particular, cut the university funding by 25% so that the universities would have to sort themselves out.

But then that was a provocative claim, obviously. But then I thought, well, that's not a good idea, because it opens up the door to political interference in the academy. And that's bad. That's the evidence left. No, that's not a good idea because it opens up the door to political interference in the academy. And that's bad. That's the evidence left. No, that's right. That's right.

But the academy's done a very bad job of policing itself methodologically. And we have these disciplines, women's studies, I think, as a prime example. That's been very much criticized in Canada by Janice Fiamenko, who used to be, yeah. Yeah, she is. And she's not under natural milieu when she's doing such things. She's a brave and tough person. And she's gone after the women's studies types on methodological grounds, particularly.

But there are people who are working full time at doing nothing, but producing the kind of polar, so what do you have any thoughts about that? Yes, I do. I think. So here I teach in business school here and I teach a course called Professional Responsibility and I teach my students about their fiduciary duties.

Their duties to their employers, the duties that we have to each other. And fiduciary duty refers to a very, very high standard of care. If you're managing someone's money, you know, you really have to be committed to doing what's in their interest, not in your interest. And I think we need that concept in the Academy. We have a much referred to called fiduciary duties or just professional duties.

But I think we have two primary professional duties that we must never, never betray. One, the most important one in our role as scholars is our duty to the truth. We must never say things that we think are false,. We must never say things that we think are false or allow people to say things that we think are false because we're afraid if we challenge and we'll get in trouble. So we have a fiduciary duty to the truth and political ideological commitments clearly warp us. They make us do things. They make us push us. So we've got to recognize that if we let our systems get out of whack, we are betraying the truth. We are systemically, we have a systemic truthism problem.

We are, systemically betraying the truth in many of our disciplines. So I think we need an awareness of that and we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard. Then in a role as teachers, we have, and here, we really can call it a fiduciary duty. These are people's children who are sent to us to educate, to enlarge their minds, to teach them skills.

If we were to use them for our sexual pleasure, it's obviously a horrific crime. But what is it if we use them for our ideological purposes? If we say, you've given your children to educate, I'm waging a political battle, I'm going to try to get used to this. Use the tools. Use the tools. That is horrific.

That is unacceptable. We are violating our duties. So I think we need to see the right. Right, but the response to that, especially from the postmodernist types, is that that's all there is. There's only ideological and climate change. Perfect. Perfect.

So back to the original question, are there problem departments? Absolutely. So I wanted to put forth these two commitments to truth and to educating not indoctrinating. And universities that embrace these highest goals, like the University of Chicago, I think, is the best candidate, will probably find that they need to do something about departments that don't live up to those goals. Other universities, and I think Brown is leading the way on this one so far. I mean, early in 2015, the president had all kinds of statements about Brown is committed to social justice, a fundamental bedrock commitment to social justice, she said.

So if some universities choose to devote themselves to social justice, that's fine. Just be upfront about it. Say so. So students will know if you want social justice training, you go to Brown. But if you want to actually be trained to find the truth, to do research, you go to Chicago. And I think we're going to see people flooding to Chicago and schools like it. So what I'm hoping, what I'm hoping.

So that's the mechanism there. If they make their statements public, that the choice of the students will be to go to the universities that hold the principles that you just described over the other ones. It will be a marketplace choice. Exactly. That's right. So that's why I said when I talked about the Emperor's new clothes, we have a situation. We have a gigantic market failure in which our top universities are offering a product that most consumers don't want.

And so my prediction is that Chicago is going to see a huge surge of applications this year. And if that's true, I think other universities are going to take notice. So I'm hoping that we'll see a schism in the American Academy between those universities that stand up and say, this is madness, we are committed to providing a platform. We don't discriminate based on viewpoint and politics. That's the Chicago way. And those that say, no, where about social justice? Come here and we will train you to fight for social justice

and against the right. So if people have clear choices, then I think we're gonna see a big change. And that's why I'm optimistic, because I think we're going to see a big change. And that's why I'm optimistic, because I think we're going to see that. All right. Well, thank you very much. It was a great talking with you. you you