The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Greg Lukianoff: : The Canceling of the American Mind. Free Speech and Academia

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

Greg Lukianoff is a First Amendment lawyer by training. During his education he began to see how, even among organizations ostensibly created to help protect free speech, how actual free speech was improperly being conflated with harassment or bullying. When he went to work as a legal director of the nascent Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in around 2000, he quickly discovered that in academia, the one place where free speech and open inquiry should be valued above all else, actual free speech was under attack. In the intervening two decades, during which he rose to become director of that Foundation, now renamed to encompass the fact that the attacks on free speech that began in academia have proliferated throughout our society, he has actively worked to fight these attacks. Beyond his legal work, he has become a prolific writer. His 2018 book, co-written with Jonathan Haidt, entitled The Coddling of the American Mind, was influential in encouraging debate and discussion regarding the origins of the victimization mentality that was becoming prevalent in Western Society.I have been admirer of Greg’s for some time, and have wanted to have a dialogue with him on the podcast. This year, with Rikki Schlott, Greg published The Canelling of the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions and Threatens us All, and it provided us the ideal opportunity to get together to discuss both his own personal experiences , and also the general concerns we both have about the issues that form the heart of the new book. What followed was a fascinating conversation about issues we should all care about. Regular readers of Critical Mass and listeners to The Origins Podcast will be aware of some of the examples and concerns we discussed, but I expect will nevertheless be surprised by the ubiquitous infiltration of cancel culture ideas into our society. We actually begin by defining Cancel Culture, a term that has often been misused and misunderstood in the popular media, and then discuss a variety of examples, before closing with a brief discussion of the ways that we can possibly combat it to produce a more tolerant, democratic society, and to save higher education as well. I hope you are provoked, enlightened, and energized by the conversation. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krauss. Greg Lukinoff was trained as a First Amendment lawyer at Stanford, and very shortly thereafter in, I think, 2000 became the legal director of the newly established Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, which was established to fight attacks on free speech and academic freedom in academia, of which there are many. In 2006, he became director of that foundation, and recently the foundation changed its name to the foundation for individual rights and expression,

because the attacks on free speech have become much more ubiquitous in society. And Greg is a passionate advocate for free speech throughout our society for many reasons, and not only has fire, as it's called, been involved in many court cases trying to protect free speech from both the right and the left. Greg has also been a prolific author. the coddling of the American mind with Jonathan Haidt, which was a best-selling book. More recently, he's written, along with Ricky Schlaught, the cancelling of the American mind, and I thought that would be a great opportunity to have a long discussion with Greg about issues of free speech and academia and society more generally, what the problems are

and what we might do about them. It's a sobering discussion, and I think many people who are not aware of how insidious the attacks on free speech have been, especially how chilling it is for high education, which has really been transformed and, and many people say, almost destroyed by the fear that people have about expressing their opinions, but now also more generally in society. So while it's sobering, we discuss not just the origins of the problem, what the origins of cancel culture are, what cancel culture is, but also his own interest and burgeoning interest in free speech as an early nascent lawyer, and even with his experience with the

ACLU. And then we end up with talking about some of the things that we might do, he suggests we might do to try and overcome what's currently happening. While it was a sobering discussion, it's incredibly informative. He's a lively and vibrant and very interesting speaker. And I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did. You can watch it commercial free on our Critical Mass Substak site, or of course you can watch later on on our YouTube channel, the Origins Project Foundation YouTube channel. Subscriptions to the a critical mass subset site go to help support the nonprofit foundation. But you can also, of course, listen to it on any podcast listing site.

No matter how you watch it or listen to it, I hope you enjoy and are provoked and informed by this particular podcast with this remarkable man. And I also hope you have a wonderful holiday and a happy new year. Well, Greg Luginoff, I am so happy to have you here. as you pointed out when we were talking before, this began. We met a bunch of years ago at a Renaissance weekend, but I have been an admirer of yours for a long time,

and I still am an admirer, and I'm so impressed with the work that you've been doing with fire, and I wanted to talk to you for a while, and the publication of the new book, which is really taking off, gave a good motivation for me to try and convince you to come on or at least ask you to come on, really happy. So we'll talk about the cancel of the American mind in some detail. But this is an

origins podcast. And I'm particularly interested in your origins in any case, but I always like to know how people got to where they began. There's some quote I actually used in one of my books that something like the most important step is knowing how the traveler got to the starting place. And I want to know that in your case. I know that you trained as a lawyer and you're born in New York, you now live in New York, so you're in New York or a heart through and through all the I live in D.C. now. You live in D.C. now. Okay, sorry. Okay. Okay. And I grew up in the Burbs. I was born in New York, but I grew up in the Bermbs of New York. And then you went to him, well, before we talked about university, I'm intrigued. You became a lawyer. I don't know anything about your parents. What's, what's their background and where,

and so I've gotten East to saying this pretty fast. My father is a Russian refugee, grew up in Yugoslavia, and thinks of himself as Russian. My mother is Irish, immigrant grew up in Britain, but thinks of herself as British, which makes perfect sense if you know either of those cultures. You can't wake up one morning and decide your Serbian, but you can become British in a way. Yeah, yeah. So that was the brilliance of the British Empire is giving people, illusion they could come British. In fact, it was one of its pluses, which is often now you're not allowed to talk about in history classes. But in any case, as we might get to when we talk about censorship. But okay, so they, but they were immigrants. So how old were they, your father, how old was he when he came over? He was in his 20s. He came

over to, he got a scholarship at University of Wisconsin and Madison. So that's what, that's what brought him to the United States. And my mom came over to be a nanny because it was during the British nanny craze. So realizing that Mary Poppins plays a role in my being an American. That's perfect. It's pretty crazy. It's all the serendipity is amazing in people's lives. Absolutely.

But if he came over at his 20s, did he speak English already? Did he have to, he came over to a school? What did he study? And what brought him over? He had been, being from Yugoslavia, he speaks seven languages pretty damn, pretty damn well. And so he was trying to pick up English, you know, after the war. And he was a kid during, during the war. And he came over, you know, to study economics.

But we were, we were whites in the Bolshek revolution. My grandfather, not my grand grandfather, my grandfather fought the Bolsheviks. But we, and sometimes like in New York, people would be kind of like, ooh, aristocracy. And I'm like, not an aristocracy. We were cool, we were cullags. We were serfs who made good. Like, like we were, we were serfs who were. lawyers and successful business people and that kind of stuff. So, you know, we go back to

serfdom in 1858. And so we fought the Bolsheviks. We lost. And my dad was part of an underground group that was trying to oppose both the Nazis and the Soviets. You know, he managed to make it to the American zone of occupation in the 1940s. And, you know, he came over in the 50s to to study economics here. And he met my mom at a UN company dance, a UN club dance in New York. And they had kids, had a nice marriage for 17 years, got divorced because I never had any business being married in the first place, but I'm the youngest of four. Yeah, you're the, okay, but you're the, now I'm going to, I'm going to still parse it a little bit more carefully because you go to Wisconsin, studied economics.

Yep. And then, but he met your mom in New York. What got him to do? New York? When he came over, the first place he went when he came over was New York. Maybe that's just because where everyone goes. And he brought his little brother, George, Yura, my uncle Yura, who died a couple of years ago. And he, and he remember spending his first night in the U.S. under the George, Washington, an apartment under the George Washington Bridge. So he lived up at 165th Street, you know, later on up until right before my right after my sister was born. But it was late 60s and they were kind of feeling time to get on New York.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So did he, did he work as an economist or did he? My dad is an interest in fellow. He's very smart and kind of helpless in some ways. Oh, God, I hope he doesn't hear this. He'll never listen. He never worked as an economist. He kind of took for granted.

He just, I think he kind of thought that everybody had a good grasp of science and could speak seven languages, because he was unemployed a lot when I was a kid. So we were pretty poor for a lot of that. But when my mom divorced him, that encouraged him to go abroad to find a job. And so he worked at the U.S. mission in Geneva on nuclear disarmament because he's very good at speaking simultaneously Russian and English about science. So that was about an eight-year period of us doing a lot better financially, which was... Did you move to Europe with him, or did he just send money? You lived with your mother? Yeah, we live with... My mom kept us in the divorce, and my mom went back to school to become a nurse, and so she

was a struggling nurse at the time, so it was nice to... Definitely, it was a big improvement. Besides the interest in general, one of the reason I'm asking is, you know, I'm interested people who have an intellectual bent and what sort of encourage them reading well you know who in your family was it your father or either of them encourage you i i shouldn't put words in your mouth but i'm assuming you like to read when you were younger i was more of a comic book kid but i would but i would sneak off to the um i mean okay i'm i'm looking at something comic books are reading by the way yeah i i know a lot of people say this but i'm i'm i'm done

dyslexic, you know, so like the, the, the, which just mean the most slow, slow reader for somewhat of my IQ. God, that's a much to say. Um, but, um, the, uh, but, but, but at the same time, you know, I was kind of a tough kid, you know, and I didn't want people to know I was a nerd too. So like the comic books, I would be more free talking about. What they didn't know, what my friends didn't know is I would go to the library on Sundays just to sit down. Because I loved the old, um, the microfiche with the old, um, yeah, newspapers yeah and i would go to like i'd go to like you know world war one and read the actual

present sense you know it's amazing war two in the 1930s that was that was a great sunday as far as i was concerned was just hanging out in the danbury public library reading old read and old news stories oh danbury okay okay okay is that where you live danbury eventually but former hat making capital of the world yeah i know i know i since i lived new haven for our near when i taught at yale for a long time i know connecticut well but worked at the mall and everything really We are now known for our mole. It's called the Dambury Fair Mall, which we all took as sort of like a stab in the eye, because we used to have a fair that you actually got time off from school to go to.

And then they replaced it with something that they had the temerity to call the Dambury Fair Mall, which was like, but then, of course, we all complained about it, but we all worked there. I worked in Friendly's. I worked Sabarro's. One of my best friends, for instance, I was three, worked at the Sears there until he was probably in his late 20s. you know now so well you that kind of yeah and working danbury like that going to the going to the library in secret watching it going reading the microfiche did um i read it because i used to like to do history i actually did history before i did physics and um what you did you um i don't know what you studied at american university what i mean did you decide first of all i assume you already knew that you

kind of like history or at least the humanities and social sciences instead of sciences. Did you have any, I always wonder why people didn't become a scientist since he's for everyone. Well, actually, you'll appreciate this. My son is named Benjamin for Benjamin Franklin and my, his younger brother is named Maxwell for James Clark Maxwell because I'm a, I, I feel ashamed of not going into science myself. But, but, but it's. same time, like, my biggest passion was always history. Like, like, I always thought that I would, I actually even looked into getting a PhD after I graduated law school, but, you know, couldn't do

another nine years of studying. And so, like, history is one of those things that really always excited me. But since, you know, the family business was international stuff, I, my going to Americans actually kind of a funny story. I started working in restaurants when I was little. You know, it was really important to me to know how to be a cook, so I knew how to do something real. Yeah, sure. Important. And the summer after high school, I worked as a cook out on Black Island, you know, like so I knew I knew how to do something. Yeah.

And I wasn't totally sure that I wanted to go to college. You know, I like to read, but, you know, that's not the same thing. And so I visited one school and I knew that one school had journalism, which I was always interested in, because I just think that's important and very free-speechy. And international relations. but with a, I want to have a special focus on Eastern Europe. And I visited American. I told them what my scores were.

They gave me what looked to me like a free ride for the rest of my time there. So I was like, okay. So I never really applied to any schools. I just went, I went to the one I visited. Yeah. And I feel mildly bitter about it, though, because they kept on every year, they kept on chipping away at my scholarships. And I was like, and so, my.

I, since I worked for the student newspaper, in my junior year, I wrote an article with the title, I think was something literally like, was I baited and switched. And they actually gave me all my money back in my senior year. Wow. That was kind of almost felt like a confession, you know? Yeah, wow. That's before going on Twitter and talking and using social media to get your way. You use the campus paper. I'm wondering.

If I was a psychologist, I mean, there's a lot of discussion we're going to have about the problems of higher education. I'm wondering if somehow. You had an axe to grind that was created as a youth that somehow is in there in the back of your mind still. They owe me. Definitely is one of the reasons why I'm not a big booster of American, which some of my classmates are still get mad at me for not saying nice things about it. I felt much better treated at Stanford in general. That's where I went for law school. Yeah, sure.

And, you know, I, here's the funny is that I, that was the most money I'd ever had in my life because the, the stipend that they would give you for being a law student was just much more than I'd ever had before. And I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. Well, that's great. They gave you a stuff. I didn't realize. I mean, I own science, you know, when I went to my PhD. Yeah, you get paid to do your PhD. I still amazed that anyone pays to do their PhD. But, yeah. But I thought in law school, it was the other way around. I mean, my mind. By stipend, I mean living allowance. That essentially, like, you take out loans, but one of the reasons why I chose Stanford

was because it had this great loan repayment program if I went in a nonprofit law. And that's how I'm able to do, how I was able to work at fire is for until I started. This is interesting. You knew, now, was it one of these things where that influenced your decision on what you do it afterwards, or you always knew you wanted to go into nonprofit law? I wanted to be First Amendment law. You knew it right away. Yeah, I went to law school specifically to do First Amendment.

Journalism was one of those things that made me even more radicalized in the direction of freedom of speech. Because people come into your, if you're a student journalist or any kind of journalist, people come into your office all the time demanding that you punish that guy or this guy or whatever. And you start realizing that if you want free speech in this country, it has to be or any country. It has to be really broadly protected because if you make one little exception to it, people will exploit that to the hilt. Okay, and we'll get there. That's a lot of the one of the points. There's so many points of the book I want to,

and in your life that I want to cover in that regard. So you did your degree in history, and it was it, did you know you want to be a lawyer before you, or did that arise at the end? I mean, or did it arise at the end of a liberal arts degree where you say, well, okay, it's nice to have a history degree,

but I need a job and I want to go to law school. Is that it? Yeah. It was a little bit of a mishman. A couple of things happened. One, can I talk about this one publicly? My brother was arrested for our bank robbery. Oh, okay.

Sure, why not? He didn't do it. He had nothing to do with it, but he did pick up a hitchhiker who did. And the person who helped us get out of, helped us out in that situation was actually Jamie Raskin, who was then at Washington College. He was at American University Law School. and he helped us find a lawyer. But I remember that feeling of helplessness. You know, that my brother has been falsely accused.

He's being held by the LAPD. And that's something that really made me want to be a lawyer. The other thing was, First Amendment, I covered the Communications Decency Act for my senior capstone, which was the attempts to ban indecency on the Internet, which you don't have to be a lawyer to know that's laughably unconstitutional. And then, you know, I also, took a practice, L-Sat and was weirdly good at it.

Okay, sure, why not? If you're good at it and, and, and, but Stanford law school, interestingly enough, as far as I can tell from reading your background, I was, I don't know what they were going to say radicalized you. It radicalized you in the, in the, in the, in the realization that free speech was, was at risk, even in the one place where you would think it would be enshrined and yeah, with a law school and in particular your experience. So, so why don't you talk a little bit about this?

Stanford experience and how surprised you were at the beginning. Yeah, I mean, at American, I met a lot of rich kids. I hadn't really met like elite kids, you know, until I got to Stanford. And I have to say, I was in, I was, I actually know, I was going to say initially quite impressed. I'd say I continue to be. Like, like I, my joke is, it was my first experience meeting, quote unquote, decent hard work and rich folk. Because they were really, you know, they were really impressive. This was a caliber of people from affluent backgrounds that I hadn't had a lot experience with. Most of my life had been. Rich kids were lazy and stupid. And the working class kids were smart and virtuous and hardworking. And American made that worse by being a place

that was very heavy on scholarship students. But I get to a place like Stanford. And super impressed by them. The weather is amazing. It's this wonderful and intellectual. actual environment. I'm making more money that I ever have just following my loans. But one thing that was a little bit weird was that particularly, you know, some of the elite college graduates were much more, it was much easier to say the wrong thing and be pilloried for it than at any time I'd seen kind of in my life. And this was kind of like a day, like a, at least a weekly thing that you'd see in the law school, even back in 97, that someone would say something that at the time might be called mildly un-PC, and it would be a big moralistic deal, kind of like a, and nobody,

nobody was brought up in charge, at least not to my knowledge. But it was definitely already taking on this kind of like one-upsmanship kind of environment where you better watch what you say. Okay, and that, and that's, I think that realization, as far as I can tell, stayed with you ingrained in you early on, that one has to be, that, that an environment of free speech and academic freedom and free speech that one tends to, one would have thought one could take for granted, has to constantly be defended. And in fact, more and more so and defended very poorly in nowadays in almost all areas, as we'll talk about. Now, and I took every class at Stanford offered on First Amendment. And then when I ran out,

out. I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty. Oh, okay. Which still informs a lot of what, I mean, the stuff on the printing press is largely from my undergrad research. My law school research. And then I also interned at the ACLU of Northern California, which was a formative experience as well. Okay. Yeah. In fact, didn't you also say at the ACLU, you found also a little surprise in terms of being a little less defending of free speech than you would have imagined? It was a disappointment. I mean, like, this was like when I got the internship at the ACLU, this was like the, this dream come true for me.

You know, like this is, these are my people and I was really excited about it. When was this, by the way, just so I know, what time? Was this? This is after law school or? This is in my third year of law school. Third year law school. Okay. So they're actually called externships when you do them during the year.

So for, I just wondered when, what point in your formative career. Okay. Yeah. So it's in my third year, my first semester of my third year. And on the first day I was there, I got dressed down by the gay rights associate for in a way that I didn't understand. Like I was talking about I'm really proud to be working for an organization that would be, that was, you know, that defends everybody. Even spend on the Nazis at Skokie. Oh, yes.

And I got dressed down for that because, and what he was saying was, well, we don't defend harassment. And I was like, what do you? I didn't say anything about harassment. What are you talking about? And yeah. And while I was there, by the way, Michelle Alexander, who wrote the New Jim Crow, was at the ACL Northern California while I was there. And we were all in awe of her. She's an amazing person.

But the great, you know, free speech attorneys who were there were kind of like, it wasn't where the juice was. You know, it was kind of, we weren't the cool kids. You know, the cool kids were doing the racial justice and the gay rights project. And the free speech was a little bit more. felt like people were a little bit more mad. And that's when I really it really started to come home to me that what I call in the book, the slow motion train wreck

was underway. And essentially the left, which had always been great on free speech and always been central to the identity of calling yourself a liberal meant to say you were pro free speech as well, that that was changing and particularly in elite circles was changing first. And that, you know, it was my job to do everything, my power to prevent that from happening.

And, you know, as the way I confess in canceling the American mind, we failed. Yeah, yeah, no. But, you know, you're doing what you can do in writing the book is certainly a step. Did you, I think I read somewhere, but I don't remember. Did you go directly from Stanford to fire? Or did you practice before that? I think you practiced a little while before you went to fire. I can't remember.

I did one year doing patent law. But it was looking for her first. amendment job because I you know there aren't that's why everyone thought I was nuts to hyper specialize in this thing that's hard to find a job in yeah yeah and then fire was there miraculously it seemed like it was sort of a perfect fit and yeah and and did you seek them out did they seek you out how did that work they sought me out that was a you know Kathleen Sullivan was the dean of the law school at the time and she was kind of my mentor her she is my mentor and her old boss was this guy Harvey Silverglade, who is a famous defense attorney and ACIU guy himself. He had just founded

Fire with Alan Charles Corr's back in. Maybe we should explain to the listeners what Fire is in case anyone is listening. Oh, sure, sure. Okay, so Fire was founded in 1999, and it was the foundation for individual rights in education. We're now the foundation for individual rights and expression because we wanted to indicate that we go well beyond campus now. And that was actually an expansion that we just took on last year. And Alan is a more conservative-leaning libertarian, who's an expert of the Enlightenment of Voltaire. He was a University of Pennsylvania professor.

And he, you know, he's absolutely brilliant dude. If you do any of the great courses, his lecture on Blaise Pascal is incredibly inspiring. Like he's just a great mind. And his friend from Princeton, Harvey Silverglade, they decided since they started seeing problems on campus going back to the early 80s, and they just seemed to be getting worse. They wrote a book called The Shadow University, which came out in 1998. Harvey jokes that I thought would blow the cover of the whole thing and solve the whole free speech problem on campus.

And then instead they got thousands of requests for help from all over the country. And so they founded Fire in 99. And I joined as a first legal director in 2001. Okay. Yeah, it was a match made in heaven. if there were a heaven. But anyway, and then that was 1929. You became director in 2006 or 2007, or you came president or whatever?

I became interim president in 2005 because I mean, my dream job was being legal director of a First Amendment organization. And so when they actually asked me, I assume this isn't a family show, I can swear, right? Yeah, as far as I'm going to, anything goes. I've had Ricky Jervais on, so you're not going to, you're not going to, okay. When they first mentioned that I might want to be, when they asked me if I wanted to be president of fire, my response was fuck no, because I loved being legal director. Yeah. But I started getting worried that, you know, anybody who didn't love the organization like I did or really understand its nonpartisan commitment would screw it up.

So I decided to become, I became interim in 2005, decided that I wanted to be, you know, to my real job, not go back to be legal director. So I became president in 2006 and I've been doing that ever since. Yeah, and growing it and and yeah. And so it's not so bad that you ended up doing that instead of being legal director. I'm sure, I assume you still, do you still get involved in, I'm, I can't imagine you don't somehow get involved in the legal issues as well, even as. I do, you know, but I got, I got to tell you, you can probably tell from my writing, I get a, these days I get a lot more excited about psychology. I love constitutional law, but now I actually, what I really would love to do, when you, you know, when you have two specializations, realizing that these are, there's this great body of constitutional law and there's this great body of social psychology and that they don't really talk to each other and that they have a lot of things that actually undergird each other really well. And if I had more time, I would love to actually be pointing out the various ways in which the two fields actually.

compliment each other. Yeah, and I should say, I know we have a hard, a hard cutoff because so much I want to talk about. Maybe we can continue at some other point if we don't get through, but yeah, well, I think the point is, and in a variety of contexts, that, that modern, the modern intellectual world doesn't necessarily mesh nicely with 19th century disciplines. And so one often sees the, you know, just like the marriage of psychology and economics, you know, would change so much. and Dan Kahneman and others pointing out that the idea that people make rational decisions is itself an illusion. Yeah, which people are you talking about again?

Yeah, exactly. I have that, actually, I have that same problem with, and I just did a podcast, and I've thought a lot about AI and the notion that somehow people say, we've got to have AI because you want to teach some universal human values. And I keep saying, you want to show me those universal human values and how it's going to be educated to find them because I can't see him. Anyway, speaking of universal things, though, before we get started, you mentioned one more, but I want to just talk about free speech at the very beginning, because one of the biggest,

I admit, I was influenced, and I was influenced by Hitchens here, not by the original author who talked about this, but the notion, the misconception people have that freedom of speech gives the freedom of the speaker, but that's really not the important part about freedom of speech, freedom of speech, and I think it might have been Hume who first said. it, but I learned it from Hitchens was it gives you the freedom to learn that you're wrong. And you know, you give a quote later on in the book that basically says the same thing and maybe we'll find and we'll get there. But that basically, you know, if you don't allow free speech, then you never have the opportunity to learn that maybe what you're thinking is wrong.

You want to elaborate on that at all or no? Well, I mean, it's Jonathan Rouch writes about this as well. and I didn't actually realize I was a Charles Sanders purse fan. You know, yeah, me too. I had Jonathan on the program. We're both big admirers of his. Anyway,

going on. Yeah, and fallibism. You know, basically the, the connection between freedom of speech and liberal ideas and understanding our own shortcomings as beings. And that's what, I don't think this is Harari's own term.

I could have sworn he attributes this to someone else, but he thinks that we probably would have been better off if the Enlightenment would, was described instead as the discovery of ignorance. Because in a sense, that really what it is is that it's this, holy, wow, we are wrong about stuff. Like my folklore, my intuitions, all this stuff, they're all wrong if you actually test them is a moment of, you know, my one $5 word, epistemic humility, like the moment when we're

like, wow, and that changed everything. The moment of actually realizing the grand scheme of things, we don't know all that much, was one of the most important realizations in human history, and that we actually have to have mechanisms in place to know the world a little bit better. And mechanisms to, sorry, go on. And I apply this thinking to everything, you know, essentially, like, so my defense of freedom of speech,

my idiosyncratic defense of freedom of speech, I call the Lab on the Looking Glass theory or just the pure informational theory of free speech, which is just simply, and it's very much of a humanist perspective, which is if the project of human knowledge is to know the world, this really is. And you have to understand, and you do, but it was profound to actually understand this. Simply knowing the world as it is is a never-ending, arduous, frustrating, difficult process

at a level that I think previous societies didn't fully, you know, fully accept. And part of knowing the world as it is is knowing what people really think and why. And you don't have any hope at all of knowing what the world really looks like without some sense of what people really thinking why. And this points out to me why censorship is such a foolish endeavor, because it's depriving you of the knowledge of, oh, yes, you know, lizard people who live under the Denver report don't control the world. That's a fact. But if there's also the fact that people believe that, that's a very important thing to know about your society. Absolutely. It's important that the world is, it is, it's that the world that you know is just part of the whole world.

And it's that part of free speech. By restricting free speech, you don't get any idea what other people are thinking. We're not having any idea of what the other people are thinking. You really don't know the world in which you're living, I guess. And I will say, by the way, that my last book, I say the first sentence is the most important three words and science, but it's really everything. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think when I think about the, you're saying the Enlightenment of Discovery,

ignorance. It's really important because that's what we've forgotten. It seems to me at the heart, I made notes and I kept jumping. I don't doubt. I don't know. I don't know. If we just seem to me when we when we'll get to talk about your solutions that that one of things I didn't see explicitly there so much about what to teach kids is to recognize is to be what is for teachers and parents to say, I don't know a hell of a lot more. And to realize that, you know, it's that sense of religious certainty, the secular religious certainty that is so pervasive now that gets people to close their ears. And you talk about the perfect, we'll talk about the various rhetorical fortresses that you've talked about being built up. But that fortress is built on the

fact that you're certain, you know what the answer is, just like religious fundamentalists. But I'm going to be wary of trying to talk too much here and not you. So anything else about free speech? So free speech is this discovery of ignorance in some sense. Is that? Yeah, absolutely. And that's, and that's just my idiosyncratic theory is the pure informational theory, that you're not safer. You're not safer from the world for knowing less about it, is one of those arguments

that I make a lot. But then there's also the most basic, you know, ideas like the, you know, the marketplace of ideas, which, which I am actually critical of as being, you know, about this much of the story of why we talk and the value of freedom of speech. But the place where the people are most suspicious of the marketplace of ideas, metaphor tends to be higher education, the one place where it's the most apt, well, the one place where it's actually supposed to make the most sense that it's supposed to be, you know, a battle about ideas, you know, discard, you know, striving towards truth by chipping away at

falsity. And now higher ed, depending on like what department you're talking about and what school and what professor you talk to, tends to be much more skeptical of this fundamental idea than at any time in my career. Yeah, I was surprised to read later on people even redefining that idea Yeah. But I think that's why perhaps both you and I are particularly attuned to the academic disappointment because it's not that it's worse there. It may be worse there than everyone else, but it's the place where you expect it should happen the least.

Oh, yeah. It's antithetical to the whole notion of scholarship. And so when it happens, it's so much more disappointing there than you might imagine somewhere else where you might expect people that have to buy into something in order to, you know, make money or whatever it is they're doing. Yeah, I mean, I think that awe and doubt. are, you know, unlike a lot of other people, our formulas for good lives,

but it's not central necessarily to the identity of a business. I think it's hard for a business to be, you know, to realize in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't know everything. But it's absolutely devastating. And actually renders, you know, some entire disciplines, at least parts of them,

kind of dysfunctional. If essentially, you know, we think of a, and I'm going to be somewhat critical of the studies department, at the moment. There's so much dogma, you know, in those studies. It's kind of like, listen, here's the thing that you do with things that can't be questioned. You put them in books and have people read those books, but there's no point to teaching courses about them. There's no point to actually having dialogue about them if it's a dogma. Read the book, see what you think.

But that's not, you know, unfortunately for some of the more politicized and originally politicized ones, it is supposed to function more like dogma. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, Well, okay, good. But you just brought up something else. Before, I want to actually begin with some examples as you do in the book, because one of the illusions that some people have is that this idea of canceling of the American mind, that cancel culture doesn't exist, which is one of these amazing fallacies that we need to overcome. But you just mentioned something else, and I don't remember reading it anywhere in the book,

and I want to ask you about it. Because you said your first experience was of this, when you've gotten trouble talking about you're really happy the ACLU defended the right of Skokie people to the Nazi party to march and someone says we don't defend harassment and one of the things that I I'm particularly aware of maybe because of writing and other things but I don't see here is this illusion of harassment this legal notion of harassment that somehow saying something I don't like is harassment.

And there's no sense in which the original meaning of harassment has been preserved. And so what that guy said that time is that somehow Nazis marching and saying whatever they want to say is somehow harassing people

who have the choice to not listen, which is therefore, you know, to not go watch the march. It's like, you know, I mentioned that Ricky Jervais was on this program,

but one of his jokes that he gave there, which is one of my favorite jokes, when he said, it's like saying that you're being harassed by that is like going to the public square and seeing a sign someone saying guitar lessons and you phone up the person say, I don't need any damn guitar lessons. And in any case, talk to me a little about harassment and the abuse of that. Yeah.

So this is something that is incredibly clear from my daily work and over the past couple decades, but most people won't know, is that harassment was, Because sometimes if people know a lot about this topic, most people know nothing about it, they might be familiar with the speech code movement of the 80s and 90s. And they remember that there are these speech codes that were passed and they were terrible and everyone laughed at them and they were defeated in court. But what they often don't know is that every single one of those were harassment codes. They just redefined harassment as speech that offends me or offends one. And it's like, okay, you're mad.

magically changing the term. We wrote a early paper maybe back in like 2002 just saying that doesn't magically inoculate you from constitutional scrutiny dubbing it harassment. But from a psychological standpoint, particularly for those of us on the left, it really did. Because immediately, because I started Stanford two years, just two years after the Stanford speech code had been defeated in court. And the Stanford speech code was harassment extended to the idea if anything that might victim, victimize or stigmatize somebody subjectively, that essentially, if you feel victimized or stigmatized by that, you've been harassed. But meanwhile, when this would come up, when people would talk about the harassment codes, I was a good liberal and be like, no, no, I don't think people should be harassed.

I don't think people should be racially harassed or women should be sexually harassed. But it was this kind of control of language, you know, idea that essentially if you dub this, if this isn't a speech code, but a harassed. code that just happens to actually implicate speech. It's much easier from a political and psychological standpoint to get away with it. Courts never fell for this, by the way. Averin Cohn seemed to want to in 1989, Dovey, Michigan case, but still. But this was an idea that was developed in the 1970s of using harassment codes as ways to become speech codes. One of the first big articles on this was Richard Delgado and others. I think the original article was 1980 words that wound of proposing a new way to go after speech that might be racially offensive or sexually offensive by reimagining it as harassment.

And this is amazing when you land this stuff up in time. The free speech movement, 1964 in Berkeley. By 1974, the free speech movement had been wildly successful already with the final two parts of the sort of Supreme Court equation of four dominant cases, that being Swayze v. New Hampshire, which establishes academic freedom. Kishian, which says no loyalty oath for professors. The Healy v. James, which said you can't refuse to recognize a student group, by the way, even if it won't promise to not engage in violence, but because of, the bad behavior of previous groups and papish, which is a case that involved a cartoon with police officers raping the Statue of Liberty. And in that case, they actually said, like, listen, we can't ban something just because it's offensive on a college campus. So after those

four, you know, cases were established, the productions of free speech and economic freedom were very strong in the United States. By 1984 and 1985 campuses across the country were passing speech speech codes, which is a remarkable success for the sort of Richard Delgado wing of higher ed. And they were all conceptualized as harassment codes, sometimes a little bit of the fighting words doctrine thrown in. Like I said, courts did not fall for this. They were defeated in decision after decision. Sort of like the fever for enlightened censorship kind of started to dissipate as you got closer to the mid-90s. And everybody thought, oh, thank goodness, that's all done for.

But unfortunately, it just, the students and the faculty became less enamored with enlightened censorship. But the administrators kept on shugging. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, you've done, you anticipate, of course, you know, in the book, you go through the history of this, the different periods of 64, 74, 84, 2004, 2004, 2004, 2004, 2004, 2004, 2004, 2007, you know, 2007 to 2022. And I want, because it's interesting to see that evolution. And where we get to today, and I think it's important that your book. and we discuss the sad situation today, just to point out that this is an illusion.

But I can't resist based on what you said, asking one more question, because this seems to me to be at the heart that somehow the notion that saying, even saying something offensive wants to someone is harassment, that's also a different, my understanding is that harassment in the real legal sense is a pervasive continual.

So just saying something offensive once, even if you want to define harassment as offense, It's not harassing because it's just a one-time thing. And yet somehow, I think if you went around and asked most people, whether it's harassing to say to someone, you know, you're short or something like that, I mean, most people would say yes. Yeah. And that's been, you know, a shift.

I think, you know, 20, 30 years ago, people would be like, no, harassment. They wouldn't necessarily have the right vocabulary for it, but they'd be like, no, it's a pattern of behavior. You know, it's a bugging so much. a lot is more or less what harassment means. But there's been a shift on that term that's been very intentional. We call it the anti-free speech movement. And it starts with people like Herbert Marcos, you know, on campus, but then is really picked up by, interestingly, a lot of the founders of critical race theory.

Now, what's funny about this, of course, is that fire, you know, went to court to defend the right to teach critical race theory. and we defeated the Stop Woke Act in court because it was unconstitutional and that's what we do. But I do want any time someone mentions critical race theory who's supportive of it to also add the caveat. And by the way, which is the very first thing that the founders of critical race theory did when they got together was proposed speech codes, which were then passed at schools across the country because it's not a free speech friendly philosophy. It's not a liberalism friendly philosophy by its own explanation. Yeah, to the extent that it is anything, yeah, it is neither liberal nor free speech.

Yeah. Or sensible, nor historically appropriate, nor scientific, nor anything. But a great way to win arguments without winning arguments. Yeah, exactly. And I want to, yeah, we're dancing around. I want to get to, because, you know, you give specifics for a lot of this, and I want to try and get to it. But let me just at least less people not think we're in a current situation, 84% of Americans believe it's a problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations due to fear of retaliation.

In 2020, Paul found 62% of American adults, of all political persuasions, did not feel comfortable expressing their origins of public. 32% worried they'd miss out on job opportunities to get fired if their political views became known. From 2014 to 2023, fire knows of more than, 1,000 attempts to get professors fired, punished, or otherwise silenced. About two-thirds these attempts are successful, resulting in consequences from investigation to termination, and even unsuccessful attempts matter because they're more than sufficient

at chilling speech. 16% of professors said that either been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech. 29% said they've been pressured by administrators to avoid controversial research, and it's especially alarming that this is concentrated in the most influential. influential universities of country. These are wildly disproportionately by the way. To give some statistics early on in the book to give a sense

of the problem. Now, let's, before we get to the history, and I will say before I forgot, I was telling you that I was also, you know, the second time we met, you won't remember because

you wouldn't have remembered so much because you were on stage, but I came up to see afterwards, was and you and Jonathan was when you and Jonathan were on stage in New York City at the Y, talking about coddling of the American mind. And I was shocked. And I don't know if Jonathan still admits to this. But he said in that lecture that he has changed the way he taught at least one whole part of his syllabus for fear of getting fired.

Oh, yeah. I would have thought he'd say, I'm going to stand up from, but he's actually changed his. So, you know, this, even people who speak out against it. Yeah. Are terrified. Absolutely. And I think. And I appreciate him doing that.

Like he's actually saying, listen, I, I, I know what the rational response is here. And I'm and, you know, and the environment has become, the extent to which, you know, professors admit to being afraid of their own students is scary. Now, here's the dirty little secret, though. They're not just afraid of their own students. They are afraid of their students in collaboration with some administrators. Because like sometimes people misunderstand kind of like one of the points of my previous book,

coddling in the American mind, which is that, you know, in my first book on Learning Liberty, I talk about how the primary threat to freedom of speech on campus are the bureaucrats, are the giant speech policing, you know, an absolutely, yeah, bureaucracy. But then in coddling and in my short book, Freedom from Speech, we talked about a new sort of cohort of students showing up who are much less, we're much more hostile to freedom of speech. I was lucky enough for the first part of my career to be dealing mostly with the kids of boomers who are actually really good on free speech.

Yeah. And then that changed dramatically. in 2013, 2014. But sometimes people think, oh, the problem used to be administrators, and now the problem of students. I'm like, no, no, no, no. That's not worth saying at all. The problem, like the reason why it got so bad is it's, is that administrators were pretty, you know, at least some of them were pretty eager to clamp down on free speech they didn't like. And suddenly they got a much more willing cohort of students. And together, man. Yeah. And then, and then, and then, and then, and then,

and then, I mean, one who was been in the, was in universities for 40 years. something I'm not sure again that one can appreciate so much from here because you're seeing from the outside is that it's not just administrators what happened is it's this cancer it's this self-fulfilling thing because a few administrators start and then the administration gets bloated so that the so that all of the subsequent hires and that ultimately the people that are in control are not necessarily necessarily the people who originally may have been well-intentioned in creating this police they're not they're not in control anymore there's this massive infrastructure that's been created and self-perpetuating because bureaucracies are.

And it's in the interest of bureaucracies to point out the problems, otherwise they wouldn't do it. I mean, Heather McDonald's talked a lot about that in her book, too. It's important that if universities didn't claim that, you know, that every student was being sexually harassed by every other student, they wouldn't be able to keep in business the bureaucracies. But let's, yeah, so that is a problem. And we'll talk about when you talk about your solutions.

I hope we'll get there. But let's start with your definite, I mean, for people who, again, are coming at this from outside, well intentioned, but maybe not aware of it, one of the first things you talk about is the definition of cancel culture. So, and I guess you say that Jonathan Rauch's definition is the best, but why don't you talk about what you're, you know, how you view cancel culture? Yeah, Rauch's, you know, Rauch's definition, I think is the most precise. I actually tend to think ours is the best because it's simplest, actually. But it's also true to my interest, it's a historical definition. That essentially it's the uptick in campaigns to get people. And we say uptick.

I took some flag for it. It's like, well, no, that's to recognize the obvious argument that, well, people have been canceled in the past. It's like, well, if you mean they've been shunned or punished for speech, then of course they have been. But there was an uptick in campaigns. And that's an important part of it. to get people, you know, punish, fired, de-platformed, expelled for speech that would be protected under the First Amendment, by which we explain we mean as an analogy to public employee law, which introduces a tremendous amount of common sense and rationality to the definition that began in 2014 and accelerated 2017 and after and the culture of fear that results from it. It's kind of a lawyerly definition, but that's our definition of cancel culture, because we're trying to get people. people to think about it the same way as people think about other mass censorship incidents in American history,

whether that's the 1798 Sedition Act or the Victorian era, much longer, obviously, or the first red scare, which was surprisingly short. A lot of people don't know that. It's supposedly short, and you think of it, it's so, it's amazing. And as you point out, in terms of its impact, it's impacted far fewer people, in spite of the fact it's huge and movies have been made about it, far fewer people than the current, whatever scary you want to call it. The second Red Scare, you know, that's McCarthyism, and that's about 11 years. And but still, you know, like when we go through those numbers, we're talking about, you know, to our knowledge. And we're very clear that there are secret hearings, which we hear about all the time at fire.

There's been books written about this, you know, this. Oh, I know. Every professor has this massive sort of like title and apparatus, which, by the way, police is speech. It doesn't just police, you know, inappropriate interactions with sexual interactions with, with coworkers and staff and coeds. It polices speech. And at fire, we're on the receiving end of calls about what do I do in the circumstance. You know, they won't let me have a lawyer. They won't let me know what I'm charged with. And, you know, we do our best to help.

So the fact that we know of, you know, 200 firings with, you know, 40 plus of those being tenured professors since 20. 14. I mean, to put it in perspective, like that's twice as many professors who were fired under McCarthyism, at least by the best study conducted at the time. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you make a point that in a variety of different estimators, it's two, three, four times a significant in terms of impacting directly on people's lives than McCarthyism. And nothing even vaguely close to it since the law was established, by the way. And that's one thing I always have to point out. I was like, who people would be like, oh, the higher education industry was smaller in the 1950s. Absolutely true.

No doubt. However, it wasn't clear that you couldn't fire somebody for being a communist back in the 50s. And by the way, a lot of university presidents said, these guys are crazy ideologues. They're completely doctrinaire. Of course, we're going to fire them. What was basically the defense on a lot of these things. And it was only 57 that it became clear that you couldn't do that. Yeah, that's remarkable.

And the, I would say you just, I just forgot when I was going to ask you there about that, because it really is, oh yeah, you point out it's more insidious in a way because the McCarthy, McCarthyism was externally imposed, whereas the current country culture is internally imposed. And, you know, so it was imposed upon academia by whoever you want, whether it's McCarthy and a bunch of rabid congresspeople. But this one is not coming from the outside. I mean, in certain cases, certain parts of cancel culture is in Florida, you know, the right

legislative part is as you talk about. But the left part is internal. It's coming from within and therefore more worrisome. So we break it down on like the political, like the political leanings of like where they different attacks come from. And of that of the punishments handed out for for speech among these professors, about one third of those initially start on the right. And that's important. And we take a lot of flag from the right on this. And I'm like, no, I'm sorry.

Like we're going to say, we're going to follow what the facts say. Now, and what do we mean by on the right? That almost always is off campus because there just aren't that many people on the right on most campuses. Sometimes it stops starts as Fox News, Turning Point USA, for example, you know, Todd Starns at Fox, sometimes like the Carlin Newman Society or something like that. But, you know, I have also, I also do allow that the person actually doing the firing still is usually someone on the left when it comes to, you know, the people on the right because the left are utterly dominant among administrators and professors in higher head today. But we do, we are very clear there is a threat from the right and it tends to come from, you know, comes from off campus. But when it

comes to threat from the left, and this was very interesting, we did an interview with Nicole Hannah Jones about her case at UNC Chapel Hill and which fire defended, you know, proudly when they were saying that she, you know, couldn't get tenure because a donor didn't like her politics. We're like, you know, we will absolutely fight this case. You know, in these cases, you and I know, why don't you just mention that case? You know, I don't want to go into too much about there's, you know, when we could spend eight hours giving every, every case example, but why do you, why do you mention her example, just so people get an idea? And this is the case that, you know, on severity, you know, I'd probably place it like maybe a six because it was this kind of unusual

circumstance where UNC Chapel Hill had this like, oh, honorary professorship thing that basically was like an award, but then you become a tenured professor at UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism, which is kind of unheard of, to be honest. And she won it, but they didn't want to give her the tenured professor part because a donor was like, nope, no, we can give the award, but we're not giving the tenured professorship. And from a, you know, a First Amendment perspective, we're like, no, actually, sorry, like, you can't treat someone differently on the basis of viewpoint. So we defended her, you know, in that case.

and we did an interview with her afterwards. And it was, I think people should watch the interview because it's kind of funny in one way in that she's very aware of the attacks from legislatures. And by the way, there's been one law in the entire country that went after curricular decisions in higher ed. The only one that was clearly unconstitutional was the Stop Woke Act, which fire so far is defeated.

It's on appeal. We'll defeat it again. But I emphasize this because you might be surprised here. There's only been one. that hit higher higher education. That's interesting. But when it came to the students demanding that professors be fired, well, that was okay. You know, like that was kind of no big deal.

Like they're there and it's like, yes, because you agree with them. And by the way, I feel like a lot of times people hide behind the students when really, like I said, it's not actually just the students. It's administrators being like, hey, you know, this happened. at Sarah Lawrence College. Sam Abrams, just to give this one example,

because I think it's very revealing. Sam Abrams, who was a statistician, he's a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. He wrote an article in the New York Times, making a very grounded, basic argument that from his additional research showed that administrators were even further to the left

than professors, and more monolithically so, something like 12 times as many, you know, administrators from the left and from the right. And should that, it was in the New York Times. Should this have been controversial? No, everyone knew this.

It just, you know, it's just a question of severity. Suddenly, students, for some reason, start protesting Sam Abrams, even though students aren't really mentioned in the article. Just coincidentally, and they vandalize his door, they do all sorts of things that he's going to be writing more about

that are pretty terrible. They take over the president's office, which by the way, I think it was another case where it was catered. So it was really an unfriendly takeover of the president's office. And they demand that he be fired. And as far as like something be a tell that it's like, no, administrators clearly put them up to this. It's because it wasn't even about students. It was about administrators feeling like, oh, this is an attack on us. We got to get rid of this squeaky wheel. Fiery got involved. We helped with the case. He's still at Sarah. Lawrence, but talk about it. Just something that's like, okay, yeah, I see what's going on here. Administrators are defending their turf in this case and putting students up to doing their dirty work.

Yeah, well, or, yeah, well, in fact, boy, every time you say something, it prompts like six things in my mind. Well, it'll be interesting to see how much we get through. I will say that we need to, it is interesting to point out you say, yes, there are things in the right, roughly 30% come from the right. And I don't know if you were attuned to this much before me. You know, I come from the left, political left. I'm now, I'm now called a right wing pundit all the time because I defend things like free speech. But, but, but, uh, aren't we all? But it's amazing, but I remember I used to write during the, when Bush was president. I mean, I, I wrote as a scientist about science policy and the efforts to shackle scientists. And, you know, I all, at the time, it seemed to me that

the real villains for from the right. And it's been a, it's been an epiphany to see, you know, over the years that, that in fact, that that's a small fraction of what's going on, that the left is, unfortunately, and, you know, at fault. And one of the things you talk about, we talk about the perfect Torco fortress or even the efficient one is that people like you and I are now claimed to be conservatives because we happen to criticize certain things that the left are doing. and therefore we're concerned with us and therefore doesn't matter what we say it's not worth listening to.

Yeah, and that's something we talk about. So in terms of things we're trying to do in the book, one is prove cancel culture is real, which seems asinine to have to do, but there are still people out there claiming it doesn't exist who basically, as far as I'm concerned, no one should ever listen to again, show with data that it's real. Yeah. But then part two is to get people to reimagine kind of what the function of cancel culture is and how it works in like knowledge producing industries. And cancel culture is just the meanest, nastiest way to win arguments without winning arguments. That essentially I could try to persuade you. I could disprove your argument or I could make you too scared to make it or get you fired from

your job so you don't have a perch anymore to make it. And that's cancel culture. But we try to get people to think about it as part of a giant panoply of options to defeat your opponent without addressing their argument. And so in the book, we talk about what we call the obstacle course, which is basically standard logical fallacies that everybody uses. We then talk about the minefield, which is the ad hominem approaches that everybody right and left use and make the point that, you know, we all argue like we're on social media 24 hours a day using these techniques that we know are never going to get you towards truth, that they're considered

a legitimate and actual debate, but nonetheless are very useful to win, to score cheap wins. But then we talk about the efficient rhetorical fortress on the right, which is, you know, four steps that you don't have to listen to someone that you can dub a liberal or wokester journalists, experts, or, you know, if you're very hard right, anyone who disagrees with Trump. But on the left, it's the perfect rhetorical fortress, which partially because it grew up on academia, it's layer after layer after layer after layer of ways to rationalize not having to listen to you. And step one of... Good. Well, actually, you know, it's amazing to me.

It's going through each time I do it, you come to the... My next note is perfect rhetorical fortress. But I want to... And I want to go there in some details. Sure. You don't have to rush through this because that and the official rhetorical fortress I think are really worthwhile, just, you know, elusive. And I'm glad you have to tip your tongue.

I have the notes on which pages in your book to go to read it. But when you say, but I want to come back to administrator issue. I don't want to lose track of that because it's not just administrators agreeing with students. And that's interesting that you point out to me. What worries me more, and we're jumping to things I thought you get to at the end, but since we may not get there, might as well do it now. What worries me more, and I've seen this happen at universities and some of your examples in other industries the same, is not that people, the administrators necessarily agree with any of it.

They just look and say, what side is my bread buttered on? And I'm going to virtue signal, if necessary, or just simply capitulate because it's easier. If you're an academic, I mean, I view when you, you pointed out the two first parts of your book is, one, showing a cancel culture exists, then talking about what it is and how we got there. And the last part, which is really worth pointing out, is how, what can we do about it? And I want to try and get there. But one of the, in my mind, the real, the real, one of the deep problems, which will make this so difficult is that at the heart of this are leaders, be the academic leaders, business leaders, or government leaders, who simply do not have a spine or else

make a calculated decision that this person's free speech rights or academic freedom aren't important. If I look about, well, throwing that someone under the bus is not as important as, the as the good press I'll get for doing it or whatever it is, whatever calculated decision-making. And so I think that no matter what one does from the ground up, that academic leaders and business leaders are really the central part of this problem. It's not necessarily that they even agree. I'm not sure they know what they agree with anymore because they, in order to raise a million

a day or $10 million a day or whatever a president has to do now, you have to be a salesman, which means you stop knowing what you believe in and you and you decide what is going to, you know, what's going to work. And if throwing, if agreeing with someone one day is fine in private, but you'll throw them under the bus the next day if it looks good for your campus. So I want to get a comment on that because I think it's a deep, deep problem because I've sent known so many university presidents, almost none of whom have a spine, the same with scientific leaders from the National Institutes of Health to the head of the Department of Energy. And I mean, you know, I've been involved with all this and I just watched them,

either having drunk the Kool-Aid and saying, what Francis Collins says, the National Institutes of Health has been systemically racist for years. And yet, I'm the director of it, and I'm not going to resign. Yeah. So do you really believe this? Yeah, do you really believe it or you're just saying it to seeing university presidents? And you give so many examples. And I know people individually who the men.

minute the mob turns on, the university president says, okay, you're out of here because I don't want to deal with the mob. So before we get to the perfect tutorial fortress, I want you to comment on that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, there's just example after example of it, because sometimes you do have the university president who just believes it all. Yeah. But more often, they have a somewhat more nuanced view of it that they will not defend in public when it's easier just to get rid of somebody. Yeah, it's just easier. And that was something that you saw. I mean, getting out of academia, James Bennett has a very long piece in the economy, maybe a little bit too long, but an amazing piece about his time at the New York Times and about, you know, Solzberger, you know, being very much on his side until he wasn't. Until he wasn't.

Yeah. The Bennett's story, which you go into in detail here is a really interesting one. Sir, go on. It's a powerful one. And there was a, there's an email that Roush, you know, shared from Yale, you know, about Dean Salave, you know, during the era. Erica and Nicholas Christakis of a fiasco back in 2015, you know, that is now public that he's saying, like, listen, these students are just too fragile. They seem completely, you know, like, I don't think he uses the word crazy, but kind of like he doesn't know how to cope with them. He's afraid that they're too easily damaged.

But it's very much like showing sympathy with the idea that the Gristakas is or the victim of a mob that's just angry in every direction. and not really taking it seriously. But then, of course, how did Dean Salivay actually ask in the real world? As if all of it was incredibly serious, had to be taken seriously, and it took a while and a great deal of hesitance to really say anything, even outwardly focused defending the Christacchus. And that's another trick that happens a lot, is that they'll say something to the alumni.

Yeah. That actually seems to make some amount of sense. But then what they're actually saying on campus doesn't really reflect that. You used to think that the people that should be in control of the people who were running the place, and to simply look at the students and say, grow up, just grow up and just grow up and stopping children would be simple, but it's just somehow unimaginable in this modern world where one could imagine the students going on social media and again, the calculations that go on in administrators' minds about what the alternatives are, to just saying what anyone should say in the last chapter of your book is something like the

adulting of the American mind. It's all a matter just growing up and stopping children at some level, but administrators are not even able to say that to the students where in the old days you used to say that because they seem to be in control and for some reason they're not anymore. Yeah, no, I think that, you know, I think we're in a process of adjusting to social media that's really ugly. And I think that maybe some of the spell is breaking that essentially that appearance of a thousand person mob who's demanding that you know they'll burn down your school or you'll never get funding again unless you fire this one professor one that's usually a fraction of that actual size it just looks like it's a ton of

yeah it's usually there's a very small it always amazes me it's a small noisy group and it you feel like the whole world is but it's just a small noisy group and if you just it's a small noisy group just let them go on for a little while and they're gone anyway and and it will pass that essentially like those groups they one of the best ways to sort of frustrate a council mob is to say oh so you're saying that there's a serious problem with this employee okay well our policy is to actually have a three week cooling cooling off period before we investigate this and we'll launch investigation three weeks it'll die off because they'll move on something else but here's but here's the thing on you know on campus is that add add to that though the administrator who might

actually literally be in the room that is very much you know talking up the idea of like oh this a disaster for the university and the students will be so angry and all of this kind of stuff. So I think that the, you know, some of the, and it was most on display after October 7th, because after the October 7 attacks, you know, from what I know of a lot of these university professors presidents and what I've heard, I know a lot of them are actually very pro-Israel and they were absolutely disgusted and horrified by the attacks. And they came out with nuanced sort of squishy opinions on this stuff initially, not because it's what they really thought. because they were afraid of their own students, administrators, and faculty.

And if that doesn't speak volumes about the environment for cancel culture on campus, the weirdly oppressive, when you have some of the most powerful people in the country, university presidents, afraid to say what they really think because they're afraid of the chilling, you know, effect of their own people, it really shows you like how dysfunctional this whole thing has become. And it's the norm that they were afraid to say what they think. But again, we talked about beforehand, but we might have. we'll get to it, October 7th, and it demonstrated the, you know, it came after your book appeared, but it's very timely. And I know it's one of the reasons that we were talking about earlier.

There's been so much interest in the book lately. It exposes this utter hypocrisy of the university presidents who in this particular case argue on behalf of free speech for repulsive ideas, which is an appropriate thing I'm in favor of, who on every other case, have done exactly the opposite. In particular, you know, I mean, this president and this very unimpressive president of Harvard, and she is unimpressive, I'm sorry. Everything I've learned about her

and impressed by her less as I read, you know, took an active role, as you probably know, in suppressing free speech rights of people with whom she might have disagreed. What's that economist's name? at Harvard who who Roland Friar. Yeah, Roland Pryor who was who was and Ronald Sullivan. And Ron Sullivan exactly who were both Claudine Gaye played a huge role in basically canceling them and and and because she disagreed with them or they disagreed with her.

But I mean it's just but it's but at the same time it's not just playing gay. It's the fact it's and so many cartoonists have made examples of this that somehow it's okay to I saw a spoof I forget somewhere. someone was going to have to leave the seminar on misgendering as violence to go to the kill the Jews rally. The double standards are spectacular in a neutral way. And that was the thing that the testimony, you know, the anti-Semitism hearing testimony, it was a little bit of a boy who cried wolf moment, is that so much of it relied, depended on. those witnesses, and that was, of course, Penn, MIT, and Harvard, to be taken seriously on being serious and consistent on freedom of speech. And nobody could because they're not. And so McGill's stepping that, it was an interesting thing for a First Amendment defender, because the concern about the hearings was that the message sent by the hearings would be that you did not clamp down on free

speech enough on your campus. So I think people were kind of surprised that when McGill stepped down, you know, when I wrote about it, I was like, this actually could be a great opportunity for free speech at Penn. Yeah. And what people didn't understand why we said that missed several things. One, Penn was second to last on our campus free speech ranking right above Harvard, which is a very rigorous, you know, study that we do of 13 different factors, including the largest survey of student opinion ever done, the four biggest databases on professor cancellation, student cancellations, deplatforming and speech codes. And Harvard really did earn its dead last place. And Harvard, and Penn was right behind them in terms of that. So they couldn't, so our ranking actually came

up in the hearings a couple of times. Like, you can't actually be taken seriously on this stuff because you weren't singing this kind of pro free speech tune when it was, you know, professors and students. You didn't like better. The other thing that people missed was the fact that, that the donors who are who were pushing to get rid of McGill actually had said some really great stuff about free speech academic freedom being the path out of this ideology, the path out of this kind of mechanical way of thinking, the path out of cancel culture. And we knew that that was actually the proposal for fixing pen. And worst of all, McGill actually came out and said after the hearings, and this is why her going was absolutely a good thing. oh, I was wrong. We're going to delink our policies now from, or we're going to consider delinking our policies now from constitutional standards. And it's like, so your administrators

have always had way too much power over free speech on campus. You're now arguing that you're going to give them even more unlimited power over free speech on campus. This is going to be like a genuine disaster. And the good news is the alumni group's proposal, their vision statement for going forward. I have it up on my substack, the eternally radical idea. It's great. It's talking about we need better viewpoint diversity. We need freedom of speech. We need actual discussion. We need less ideology. All of these kind of things that hire a desperately needs. So we saw McGill stepping down as actually a positive development and even more so because of the vision statement. When it came to when it came to

Claudine Gay, you know, I think there's lots of concerns about Claudine Gay, like you said. And the plagiarism one is really, really striking to me. The idea that she has 11 papers and five of them have. 11 papers, I've graduate students have more than that. But anyway, I'm in physics, which is a different feel, but still. Yeah. And five of them with serious plagiarism in them is a pretty bad fact. We actually, if she stepped down directly after the hearings, you know, like our concern was that,

then that would have sent the message. Yeah, I agree. what what she did wrong was not clamping down in free speech enough but let's see how she does next year i think yeah exactly i kind of think the credibility is gone and we'll see it we'll see it in a year or two you know and and that will indicate um that it's important to i mean i you know well we'll get in trouble for this but um uh that when it comes to appointments at universities factors like intellectual depth and scholarship are at least as important as identity when it comes to appointing to someone like the president of a major university. And I think that maybe that will be

the lesson. In fact, that's what I was going to ask you when we talked about before. As horrible, and it is what happened on October 7th, and there's nothing intrinsically good about what happened. But if something's going to come out of it, one whole whole, that besides hopefully the people will be released, et cetera, and eventually there may be pieces, all of those things one might hope for. But when bad things happen, one can hope at least there's some lesson that makes the future better.

And it may be, could this be the Sputnik moment that, when you see the ridiculousness of what's going on on campuses and the student groups and shouting people down, and at the same time as we have the congressional testimony issue, it does, I think for many people who weren't aware of how utterly problematic it is on higher education right now and this hypocrisy of claiming free speech for speech you like and not free speech you don't like, it's really come to the fore. Could this be a defining moment in terms of changing the direction of where things are going higher? I really hope so. I mean, I got very frankly depressed

writing, canceling of the American mind. Yeah. One, I didn't realize I was sticking my neck. I actually, sorry. It started really done on me that I was sticking my neck out once again on a position that will be hated by the kind of people who like to cancel people. Yeah, yeah, it's scary. And the sheer nastiness.

Every time I write about it, I worry about, yeah. Yeah, and the sheer nastiness and drive. And the thing about council culture is they're, you know, they, you know, might hate us on these opinions, but they'll find something else, you know, like dig something up from decades ago, misrepresented. Like, you know, like, so you're making yourself, you know, very vulnerable. The other thing that got, that got me depressed was, and it particularly comes through in the conformity gauntlet chapter, which is where I just kind of like layer the pressures on top

of each other. Yeah. And then, like, looking at it, I'm like, man, like, how does anybody get, you know, and I actually have the specific idea of someone who wants to be a scientist going to MIT and all the different conformity inducing pressures they would have and then still not be able to get public. if they're, even if they're incredibly rigorous research, you know, is found to be harmful in some way. Yeah, if you happen to be trying to publish a nature of human behavior if it might harm someone. Yeah, exactly.

Let me make, I don't know if you've heard or read anything by me recently, but in the Royal Society of Chemistry Journal, it's even worse. The editors are instructed, oh, I'll send you the example. It was in this talk. They were instructed to look at anything. And if anything, was offensive on the basis of gender, political, you couldn't think of any height, physical attributes, anything, anything anyone could be offended by. Editors were advised to consider whether to publish that, whether that should be published.

If it offended on the basis of anything, you could think of anything ever, anyone being offended by. This is the Royal Society of Chemistry. I mean, so it's an example that's even worse, I think, than the nature behavior one, I think. But anyway, sorry, go on. And just the, it got me really like, wow, this, like, higher ed is an even worse shape than I thought, which is saying quite a thing, given I've been watching the worst of higher ed for 22 years now.

But one thing that, you know, we said the same, I said the same thing when we were on Bill Maher, and he said the same, as we're all saying here, is that maybe this is a moment where people go, this is not okay. this is not sustainable. We have a, you know, clearly, extremely unreflective ideological environment that is utterly dysfunctional, like something needs to be done. I hope that this moment makes us realize that situation normal in higher ed is not sustainable. I even make the point, I would go back to the point like, yeah, part one. They're now arguing that it costs $170,000 to educate a single student for a single year at many of these schools, which is insane. And if that's admitting,

you've done something wrong, but by itself. Or admitting, as you point out, that many of these schools have more, more, like Yale has more administrators than they have students, right? Well, they have more employees. You have more employees, yeah. Because they have almost as many administrators that they have students, but they, but when you add in professors and administrators, yeah, they have, they have more, administrators, they have more employees than they have students. That's where the bulk, I mean, I know when I've been writing by DEI, if you look at universities, the bulk of the increase. Yeah. You know, the huge increase in that infrastructure, vast increase is hiring a faculty, student scholarships,

any of the other expenses of universities are dwarfed by the increase in this massive, useless and counterproductive bureaucracy. Yeah. To mention Colhanes Jones again, she called us out on not being, not jumping to the defense of schools in Oklahoma, who have been told that. I have to reduce their DEI departments, their administrative DEI departments. It's like, you did catch that what we've been saying is that DEI administrators time and time again are the ones who are repressing academic freedom and freedom of speech.

So I can't really be like, oh, don't shut down the censors department. It's like, no, of course, like we're for that. To be clear, I think there are people who are incredibly sweet and kind people who do DEI work. Probably some of them. like many things. Yeah, probably some of them even have like an ideology that's very different than the ideology that's the most problematic. But if you're going to fix higher education and you can't, you have to reduce the administrative

class. And the first thing you have to start with are the people who are enforcing political orthodoxy. Speech codes and everything else. Yeah. Exactly. That's the only, I mean, that's the only way, as I say, my opinion, doing something about leaders who somehow have spying. The other thing, and that

we said that touch me, people have asked you in advance, how will this change? And I thought, well, maybe the other way is when most faculty members, having been a faculty member a long time, most faculty members just try and stay below the radar. They just try and get through their stuff. They don't, they think what's going on is nonsense, but they don't

want to speak out because they know there's a problem. They just want to get their money, do the research, and go on with it. when when the bulk of those faculty realized that there but for the grace of God go they there that it's become so insidious that that they could be next I wonder if that's the it's if that's another if that's another sort of bit of pressure that might change things you think no well here here's here's here's the case for pessimism though about about the future of higher education that my uh that sometimes people caution me against talking about because we're trying to actually fix things. But I do think that this is more the argument that we have to be considering other institutions, smaller,

cheaper ways of doing this because higher education is in trouble long term. Is that by all the polling that we've seen and some that we've done ourselves at fire, we have a great research department of fire, the younger cohort of professors is more politically homogenous and more hostile to academic freedom and free speech. And so the idea that kind of like, if we don't take this moment, it's definitely going to keep getting worse. Even if we take this moment, it might keep getting worse in a way that makes it. Well, I mean, again, you would, I think you allude to it, but it's a, look, if the whole

infrastructure is designed to hire people, if these people have to do a divert D-I statement in order to get the job. Yeah. I mean, a lot of them are just doing it to get the job and they don't believe it. but you're going to naturally self-select for the next generation that's going to be then having bought into this. I mean, having bought into the secular religious notion, and of course they're going to be more homogenous and they're also going to be less, they got their job by being within a structure that didn't promote free speech but did quite the opposite,

restricted it. And so therefore it's less likely they're going to be receptive, the idea of it, right? Yeah. Well, and then we spend some time in that conformity gauntlet chapter talking about, I mean, I think most intelligent people understand that there's no way to evaluate someone's quote unquote commitment to DEI that isn't a political litmus test. But we even, Nate Honeycutt actually even did an experiment, you know, about would you get past the reviewers if you had anything other than the most, forgive the expression, woke version of the, of a DEI statement. And unsurprisingly, he found out that that was the only one that would actually get you through, was the one that sounded the

like the ideology that's, you know. Just being sympathetic is not good enough. It won't get you through. You quote the Berkeley study, it's 76% of the people for that biology position didn't even make it through to have their research credentials looked at because they didn't do the DIA statement. I assume you're aware of the recent study

that came out of the National Associated Scholars, I guess, of the DEI statements at Ohio State. You know, where I think it was in the computer science department, 30% of the score of a candidate was their DIC statement. I think it was in astrophysics. 50% of the score when you assessed people was not, was their diversity statement. So if you didn't, if you just were sympathetic and got zero, there's no way you could ever get a position. It may not have been physics, but it was one of the science departments.

And it's just, it's remarkable. Yeah. And I think about the kind of personalities that would never even fill one of these things out to begin with. I think about like what, you know, give Feynman. Like, fill out this DEI thing. You tell you to go to hell. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. You tell you go to hell.

And it was, well, that's a long, yeah, exactly. And I've had so many colleagues who overtly tell you that the people graduating, they're more worried about their DEI statement than their research statement, even if they don't buy into it. But they're much, I spend much more time on it. They're much more worried about it. It's the universal. It's not the, it's the norm, not the exception.

Oh, yeah. Look, we have about a half an hour left before I know you have to go. There's two things. I mean, you know, I only have 37 different points here, which got to before. But it's okay. I mean, there's people can read the book. And, and, but what I would like to do probably is spend a little time on your notions of the left's perfect. I interrupted you before because I knew I wanted to get to it.

The perfect rhetorical for Chris, which is really the way that, I mean, as you point out, cancel culture is really. It's bad for many reasons, but it's bad because it stops the process of intellectual discussion, debate that's so central for a functioning democracy in principle and a functioning academia. So the perfect rhetorical fortress and the efficient rhetorical fortress, which takes us to the right and left. And then the rest of the time I want to talk about the last part of your book, which is what to do, which I think is what to get to. Sound okay?

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So the perfect rhetorical fortress is something I've been talking about since 2015. when I started to notice that people on on, well, actually noticed it going quite a ways back, particularly in San Francisco and places like Stanford, that there were all these different easy dodges that people on the left could use to actually not have to address someone's argument. Yeah. And I remember, you know, I think it wasn't until 2016 that the first time, you know, I was told

to check my privilege was told to me by a non-white person because I got very used to, oh, check your privilege. That's something that's a tradition among rich white people to tell each other to do. you know it was um and so step one of the perforterical fortress is just dubbing someone on the right and and i say dubbing someone because i don't mean the 36 percent of people who are self-describes conservative although surely they count actually they'd probably be you know you're far right fascist or something like that it's all the rest of us if it's tactically convenient to not have to want to listen not to want to listen to us um that you just go boom you're right wing and like the

best example of this, you know, most recently is this amazing article by Marianne Franks in the in the free speech journal. She'd previously written an article saying cancel culture isn't real. She just asserts this, that it just, you know, it doesn't actually look at data, just says it's not real. And the previous one cited no actual case law, by the way, and had citations to alternate. And it said this is a right-wing Fox News plot. I guess that she didn't think that was, you know, intense enough because that people still still tend to believe this thing believes. So she has to insult us even more. So in this article that came out, we're now referred to as we're not just right wing. We're not just far right. We're not just fascists. We're neo-Confederates, if we believe cancel culture is real. And it's a mind-blowing

article to read. I really actually recommend it to everybody. And guess who are among the ranks of neo-Confederates and their dupes? The New York Times and the ACLU, because they both recognize that, you know, cancel culture is real and sometimes the left is part of the problem. Yeah, they've been part of the problem. Both of them. Certainly, yeah. But why is this, you know, why are they actually extending this attack to the, to the New York Times and the ACLU? Because it's always worked before. So step one of the perfect rhetorical fortress is incredibly effective. People hate me. I don't like being called conservative. I'm not. But at the same time, it doesn't stop me anymore. It doesn't make me want to apologize to anybody. And it's just a

I used to it myself. Yeah. It's like, it was like, whatever, you know. And that's just step one. Then we go through the demographic funnel, you know, like, are you white? Are you cis? Are you gay?

Or any of the, are you men or woman? Yeah, yeah. Et cetera. And we give examples at each step of people being dismissed, usually for things that aren't related to anything that really should matter to that category. Yeah. But then after you get through the demographic funnel,

you're down to about 0.9% of the population that is, transgender and non-white. But guess what? If you're even in that 0.9% and you have the wrong opinion, you can be accused of internalized misogyny and internalized racism or internalized transphobia,

which makes it perfect because that's 100% of the entire population. And by the way, you could also call them right-wingers to boot. So already by like step six in the perfect historical fortress, you've got 100% of the population ways to not actually address their argument and ways to dodge out. And we're just getting started. You know, like we get to the if people get angry in public, we get to the darkly hinting that someone might, that something else is afoot. Yeah, you know, you're at point six, you got point seven.

Guilt by association, which is always amazing, amazing thing. You know, I get accused of many things because the people I know. And I just think, well, you know, I know some Republicans and I'm not Republican. I know some, you know, I mean, it's amazing to think about it. We all know people who are not us. Yeah. Well, there was a moral, there was a moral Bible article that was critical of coddling in the American mind that we just thought was amazing because all it was doing, it was just, it made one substantive argument that we didn't talk enough about student debt. And I'm like, okay, you know, one of the reason why we didn't is because much to my surprise, that was much lower on the list of concerns in student polling. the rest of it was, oh, Light and Lukianoff are soft right, which means, of course, that we don't have to be listened to because we're

at wingers, etc. And the way this was proven was by the fact that, for example, we quote Soljan Nietzsen in coddling the American mind, but guess who wrote the foreword to the new version of the Gulag Archipelago? Jordan Peterson. And therefore, we don't count. And meanwhile, kind of like, like my job is to get the word out. Jordan Peterson asked me to be on the show for this.

For my book, we go on the show for this. Actually, I've done Jordan Peterson. He's in mine. Yeah, which is like, yeah, I'm trying to reach people. Even though I disagree with him, but a lot. Absolutely. But at the same time, like the tactic, though, of just being like, you know this person or you're on this person's podcast or whatever, that also gets you once again to 100%

of the population of the planet that's ever lived. And then this innuendo, you point out that number 11 is that you were just getting to, hinting darkly that something else is really going on. Yes. And that's, I find that perhaps the most, well, I don't know, there's so many worries and things, but I see it's so effective because especially in this modern neo-puritan moral panic, all you used to do is allude that maybe there's something going on sexual. You know, what I'm thinking of it, you didn't in your book, but I'm aware of it because

I know him is there was a great story by Michael Powell of New York Times about the James Webb's Space Telescope, how there was a group trying to, tying to have the name changed because they felt he was homophobic and racist. And a black physicist who was head of the National Association of Black Physicist, who else was at NASA at the time, looked at it and discovered that there was no basis for any of that. And he was, not only was he excoriated by these people who didn't know what history that had decided, but they said, well, we think there may be, maybe he was involved in this physicist, might have been involved. some harassment at his old university because he moved university. All you do is say that. And that, that I see as, you don't mention in your book, but I say that, that the same thing with, with Roland Fire, or, you know, the notion that somehow there's a scientist David Sabatini who was, who lost. Oh yeah, yeah. And remember he went, he was offered a job at NYU. And all the people

walked out. This is the guy who had a relationship with another woman and and for reasons that may have been inappropriate. He was he was let go. I happen to think they were inappropriate. But we went to NYU and all these people walked out because they said, oh, it's an unsafe environment if he's here. And they and they, they caved in. All you have to do is say that is cast sexual aspersions in the modern times and they're not even questioned. They're just automatically. And I think that's, That's an additional factor that's sort of being used here as a real weapon, the weaponization of accusation. Yeah.

No, we had more about sexual harassment in there. It became such a rabbit hole. We ended up taking it up because it was going to end up being, well, it's going to end up being its own chapter, you know, and we're like, okay, we want, we don't want to buy this down to other people. You know, I like Heather and other people. Yeah. So, okay.

Yeah. So those are the tools that are used primarily by the left to basically, Basically, disqualify anyone who doesn't agree with you, not just disqualify you, but just stop the conversation, not allow the conversation effectively to cancel. The discussion, even if it's not dis-canceling the individual. The right has been doing this in different ways for a while. And as you point out, and it always amazes me, I like the fact that you use the word efficient because it always amazes me that in many ways the right is much more efficient than the left.

Yeah. And maybe because they're more homogeneous. I don't know. But why don't you talk about what the efficient rhetorical fortress is that the Wright uses to disqualify people? Yeah. So we have three chapters on cancel culture from the right, including book bannings and some of the legislative stuff in addition to that. But we also talk, we have a chapter talking about the efficient rhetorical fortress, particularly, you know, and in that chapter, which I think is very interesting, we talk a lot about, you know, Trump trying to cancel people in the new. news media, for example, and some of this kind of scary anti-liberal movements on the academic

right, which worries as well. And the efficient rhetorical fortress is efficient. It's three things. Can I woke? Are you a journalist or an expert? Or are you anti-Trump? And in just four steps, it's efficient because you get rid of an awful lot of people you should probably listening to. And we and it's and one thing that might surprise, you know, some of your listeners is that height and I get orders of magnitude, orders of magnitude, more hate mail from the right for coddling the American mind than we do from the left. Why? Because we're hard on Trump for Charlottesville. Oh. Which I will never apologize for because that's appropriate. Yeah. And we wrote a, you know, wrote something in persuasion sort of explaining this, you know,

we were right about this again, but we, you know, that still is where we get the most, get the most hate mail from. And we have had some people, you know, like pan the book for the fact that it, it's engaged in, you know, both ciderism, like mindless, both siderism, because we all take on the right. And it's kind of like, well, no, we're pretty clear that, you know, when it comes to corporations, when it comes to universities, particularly when it comes to students, that's, you know, that's wildly disproportionately cancel culture from the left. That doesn't mean that we're not going to. to take on council culture from the right what it happens as well, but we're not saying this

happens at the equal amount. We are concerned about the legislative stuff. Yeah, but like I said, that's where you, that's what you're not seeing, well, not yet. Actually, it's not quite true. I, you don't mention it, but I do think there's legislative stuff on the left that's worrisome. But the more explicit legislative, legislative, legislative, the more explicit legislative, especially where I live in Canada now, but anyway, the most explicit worrisome aspect from the right is the legislative, the imposition of rules on what you can and cannot say in Acamia. And again, one of the things that you raised here when you talk about the right and you talk about the efficient fortress, that hadn't hit me.

And it's an interesting point I want to bring up for people to think about. I never thought about the decision between K to 12 and universities. I'm always hesitant in any case to restrict what kids are exposed to. but the argument that be made that kids are captive audiences when they're K to 12 because they're not they're required to go to school and therefore maybe maybe one should be therefore have one has more right to therefore have governments or parents say what they can what they can hear and not hear but there's no argument for sort of gone you'll say and and it's more than that you know I'm a parent Maxwell and Ben who I mentioned before they're at public school my middle name by the way I was embarrassed about it until I became a physicist. Well, but what? Because Maxwell Smart and Maxwell Silverhammer ruined one of the greatest things in a I know, but I still was, yeah, but it was James Clerk Maxwell that did it for me.

Anyway. Wonderful, fascinating man. And absolute genius. Einstein's favorite scientist. And dead when he was, by the time he was your age and my- 48. Yeah, I was reading his biography when I was 48. Like, I didn't know that.

Oh, my God. It's like Mozart, you know, by the time, yeah, it's just amazing. Anyway, go on. Yeah. So, oh, yeah, so public colleges, sorry, public education is taxpayer funded. It's mandatory. Like, so you have to send your kid to some school. You can get, you can get out of it now in a variety of ways.

But it's mandatory. It's publicly funded. And it's your kids. And on those three circumstances, you bet there should be some say from parents and the democracy itself. The democracy that's paying for it. That's paying for it to say, about like what should be taught.

So it's always been the case, always been the case, that politics has been part of what the curriculum is in the United States. And so like people pretending like, oh, my God, politics is now, it's like, no, it's just politics you don't like. And actually, to be clear, a lot of politics I don't like is now actually part of the curricular debate. But the idea that kind of like, oh, it's between this and free speech, it's like, no, it's just a question of whose politics actually dominate it.

And one thing I want to caution everybody about, if you think you're mildly sympathetic to the idea that K through 12 teachers should be the only ones deciding this kind of stuff, that's insane. Because the biggest problems that we've seen in higher education and K through 12 have come from education school graduates. To be clear, I know a lot of lovely, wonderful, thoughtful, caring, smart education school graduates. But as far as being incredibly ideological and narrow and sort of, you know, forgive the expression

captured, education schools are like the sine qua non of that. Oh, yeah, I have to say, when I was last taught at ASU, I started to work with the education school because I thought that would be a good thing to do. And boy, was it an awakening? I stopped out pretty quickly. Tell me more of what your experience. Well, I just, well, no, this is for you. Well, you and I'll chat for the. Oh, sure, sure.

You and I'll chat more. I hope we'll have a lot more time to chat because there's a bunch of things I want to talk to you about aside from what we're doing now. But yeah, but it is a problem. So go on. Yeah. So, yeah, so K through 12 curriculum are decided in a combination of parents, votes, etc. And honestly, I think they should be as long as it's still mandatory. Like, if basically public education became something that wasn't publicly funded or mandatory,

then that's an entirely different ballgame. Yeah. When it comes to libraries, though, that's a little more interesting because there's a case on point called Pico from 1982. Yeah. It was moved in 1983 or 83. And it was a decision that didn't have one clear opinion. But what we take from it is the idea

that you shouldn't be removing books from libraries just because you don't like the political point of view. Now, no, no, and we think that's a good policy. Now, people on the right also get mad at us because you're saying like, so you're saying that people should be, you know, and this is, I'm referring to a real book here. You think our kids should be reading, you know, a book where that teaches you with a very graphic graphic

about how to use a butt plug. It's like, no, actually, because you could actually actually, you could always, always, and you actually are required to consider age appropriateness. So age appropriateness is the normal part of the discussion about what should be in a K through 12 library. And that's most of the debate right now. But I do think it makes a lot of sense that if you're sending, you know, police officers to arrest people at public libraries for having, you know, books, which does happen, by the way, not very often, but it does happen. That's a problem for a free speech perspective, to say the least. Because you voluntarily go to the library.

Yeah. And this is kind of like the hierarchy of the greatest concern. When you're having limitations on bookstores, on private bookstores, that's the biggest First Amendment issue. When it comes to public libraries, that's a big issue too. K through 12 libraries, there's a lot more of sort of give and take on what's supposed to be allowed, but we still don't like the idea of removing books, you know, just on the basis of not, of disliking the political point of view. However, some of those cases are frustrating as well because there was one that got written up where it was a home for the inauguration. I think it was Amanda Gorman's poem from like

Obama's inauguration and it was available to third graders and a parent complained about it for being partisan. Now the and the school looked into it because they look into all the complaints and said, you know what? Third graders aren't even going to understand

this. This is more appropriate in the part of the library for the seventh and eighth graders. And this got treated like it was a book ban and it's like, well, no. they make decisions on the basis of whether or not something's appropriate for third graders and eighth graders all the time. Like you're really reaching on this one. But we do believe we do believe book bans are real. But as far as like when you actually factor in age appropriateness, like the actual, there are less of them than sometimes you might be led to believe. Okay. Let's move because we only have 15 minutes left about.

Yep. Let's talk about what to do because, I mean, I wish there was a magic bullet or a silver bullet. But basically there, as far, I went through and, you know, listed the different sort of, there's, you know, raising kids, somehow dealing with leadership and executives, reforming higher education and, and ultimately growing up. So let's let's let's go through them. You talk about raising kids. One of you give some of the examples of what one can do, and some of which are out of coddling. But yeah, a lot of that is out of coddling everything from like making sure that they have unstructured play, making sure that they actually have some, you know, modicum of independence, that they're not shielded constantly from anything that might be difficult for them because that's, you know, terrible policy. But for stuff that's specific about canceling, we focus a lot on trying to raise kids who are not cancelers.

And that's a little different because most people usually ask us, how do I keep my kid from being canceled? Yeah. And it's more important in our opinion to make sure that they're not cancellers. Yeah. To have the kind of kid who believes in the golden rule, you know, the idea. Or I think the platinum rule. That's one thing where I get away. I don't like the golden rule. I prefer the platinum one. Is that treat people as they would prefer to be treated? Yeah, instead of it. Yeah, because how do you know how they want to be treated? Yeah. People as they would prefer to be treated. Not as you think you think you like. Anyway. Yeah. I definitely do know that distinction. but we talk about the golden rule in the sense of like wouldn't you want someone to have your back as well.

Yeah, yeah, sure. The idea of something as simple to stand up for your friends, which kind of feels like it shouldn't have to be said. But that's the whole thing about council. Boy, do I wish when I've been on the wrong side to have friends stand up for me is such a means more to me than almost anything else. Yeah, raising your hand and simply saying so-and-so is a good person, you know, leave them alone. It puts a target on your back. But I think that target becomes less and less effective, the more people actually are willing to say, you know. And we're nowhere near there yet, unfortunately.

But yeah. No. You get a lot more in private. You get a lot more support in private than public. Yeah. So definitely, you know, we think that's part of it. One thing that we interviewed Pamela Peretzki for the book. And one thing that she likes to point out is, you know, stop thinking of your friends as allies.

Because even though that's treated as something that sounds very. cool and nice and something that people should strive towards. Allies aren't friends. Allies are temporary tactical relationships in order to achieve a political end that could be ended or began at any time. That's not a friend. A friend is someone who you trust and who can say hard things to you if you need to hear them and that you get forgiven or are forgiven or can be forgiven. You know, we need genuine friendships, not not ally ships. And they can disagree too. That's the point. They can also say you're wrong. It's a key part of having friends.

Like how often I rely on my friends to be like, am I wrong here? You know, and how often it's like, yeah, Greg, you got this one wrong. I'm like, oh, good. Well, you're right. Revive the Golden Rule, encourage free unstructured time, emphasize the importance of friendships, teach kids about differences, practice what you preach. And then I think to avoid the three grade on truths. Why don't you say what the three grade on truths are?

Yeah, the three grand and truth. That's from coddling of the American Monarch. And this is our idea of negative advice, like the idea of people won't listen to do this precise thing, but they are a little more open to the idea of, okay, whatever you do, I don't care what you do. Just don't do the following three really dumb things. And we call these a great untruths. These are terrible pieces of advice, and they are in order. Oh, wait. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings. And life is a battle between good people and evil people. And if you believe all, you know, any of these things, they're one, they're not backed up by ancient wisdom. They're not backed up by current thinking and psychology. And they will make you miserable. And in this book, we actually add a fourth, which is no bad person has any good opinion, which is essentially the idea of the way we behave when you think of cancel culture as an arguing tactic, that my goal is not necessarily to refute you. It's just to point out that you're a bad person.

And then somehow magically, that means that you don't have any valid opinions. And that's so much the way we argue right now, which, of course, you have to point out, and I always give the example of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. John Rousseau was an awful person. He was probably mentally ill, but he was also terrible to his friends. He was terrible to his mistress. He gave up something like six kids to orphanages, to die, which I didn't actually fully put together that that was the standard thing that actually happened to kids given away to orphanages. That doesn't mean he was wrong in his philosophy. Now, I think disagree with him a lot about aspects of his philosophy.

But the fact he was, you know, a horrible person is not an argument towards him being wrong. Yeah. And in fact, the reason I want to bring them up, they had come from coddling, but they really are the basis of a lot of the cancel culture argument. They are the untruth of fragility that somehow words are harmful and somehow, and people are never going to survive being called whatever word you want to call them. Somehow they're not going to be able to survive it. And then, you know, the untruth of emotional reasoning, you know, as you say, bad people are not, cannot have good ideas and the untruths of us versus them, which is power and oppression.

I mean, all of those are the basis of a lot of what's going on in cancer culture. And so, yeah, so to do that, to try and avoid those fallacies and kids. And I would, I would, once again, not just teach kids by differences, but I put that sixth one thing, teach kids to keep questioning. Oh, yeah. And know that it's based, that not knowing, that saying I don't know is not a bad thing, but a good thing. Absolutely. So for me as a teacher or as a, you know, with a history of teaching, that to me is one of the most important things I think I would add.

And one thing that where there's more detail outside of the book than in it is that we have a whole chapter on K through 12 reform. And that's largely sort of based on an article I came out with called Empowering of the American Mind, which are principles for higher education reform. sorry, for K through 12 reform. And basically, you know, virtue number one is epistemic humility and intellectual humility. And this is, you know, people will do this to me sometimes because I'm a First Amendment lawyer. It's like, oh, you know, First Amendment lawyer, but you're a parent. How do you, like, how much free speech do your kids have? And I'm like, well, I'm training them to understand that the first step in utilizing free speech

and really appreciating it is knowing how little you know. And it's nice that I can ask my kids. It's like, what kind of person thinks I know everything? they're hesitant to say stupid people because that's that's the S word now but they're like well nobody who claims that actually knows all that much like yes

I have to tell you this story that a friend of mine I won't say who was on who was on the apprentice with Donald Trump told me one of the things that amazed him the most that Donald Trump came up to him

and said you're one of the three people in the world I know who is smarter than me and as he pointed out anyone who is smart would never say anything like that Yeah, it's just anyway. Next, leadership, you know, I'm amused that in your quote at the top of this case study of publishing,

you quote Adam Bello, who is a warm spot in my heart because when, when at Tom, one of the times I was canceled from publishing, I was almost self-published after that, but Adam Bellow eventually agreed to publish my book. and the last two books actually have written. So, you know, he practices what he preaches in that regard. But the idea of this, and you talk about executive leaders and penguin and basically the awful experiences that are people have had from that woman, Gina Cummins, who wrote American Dirt. And somehow, because she was Mexican, her book was destroyed.

And then, you know, to Woody Allen, who wrote a book that was, you know, going to be in big demand. And then the publisher sort of kowtowed to this mob by saying somehow people shouldn't be allowed to hear what he has to say. But that publishing example, it was just a microcosm of what goes on in academia. The fact that, and I guess the lesson I have, you give a bunch of rules for executives, hire more broadly, define what you stand for, face problems at small groups, practice what you preach. But again, I would add be a leader and grow a spine.

I mean, these people are afraid to be leaders in many places, for whatever reasons, whether it's economics or their own fear of being canceled later on. Yeah. No, no, definitely. And leadership matters, you know, all throughout. That chapter on like how to keep your corporation out of the culture war, one thing that I want to sort of turn that into an article and emphasize the fact and also make sure that. you're not hiring cancellers because that that is something that um after coddling came out business leader after business leader contacted me and height you know saying uh that the new students that you're talking about the coddle do know and love that word are showing up at our corporations and it's it's disastrous like small interactions are shutting down the organization for days as they lead to hand-wrecking sessions and and and uh those those town hall meetings that are really just being shouted down kind of and browbeaten.

And one of the things I, you know, they kept on saying to me was like, and, you know, because of this, we're not hiring, we don't hire people from the Ivy League anymore. And every time someone said something like to me, I'm like, do me a favor. Say that out loud. Say that so everyone can hear it. Because if Harvard starts getting that they're producing a product that people don't want to work with, that actually might be the thing that gets them to take reform more seriously. And now I think the parents to then, I mean, the point is the Harvard's trying to get the

parents to send their kids. And if the parents don't think sending their kids to Harvard is an automatic road to whatever they want, they might not send them to Harvard. And you say something there too. And I know, I know we're really getting close to the end here. And I'm sorry because we could go on. But you talk about with employers, hire people who don't necessarily have university degrees. And one of the things you don't stress, and I wanted to add and get your press for this, there's another good reason to do that. Because as you know, it's coming close to two to one. It's now 50%. Young males are not going to college anymore. And we're going to have a society where young males are severely disadvantaged if people are only hiring people with university

degrees. It's 60 to 40, 60 percent, 40 percent, 40 percent. In most places, but it's even higher in a lot of a lot of places young males are for whatever reason i think there are good reasons leave not deciding that university is not the right place for them yeah you're closing yourself to an important segment of society if you start only hiring people who have university degrees and and point out that maybe there are alternatives you know when i lived i spent a year in switzerland when i was at cern and i was shocked because i thought everyone should go to college i mean it was i just bought the kool-lade and then i saw in switzerland they stream people now it's Now, of course, it's not, they don't force you, but they stream things.

So only 15% of the undergraduate population or the high school population is directed towards college because they also have apprentice schools. They also have, and for most people, you know, those are the right places to be. Yeah. But we have this notion somehow that college is the only way to be to learn what you need to to learn to be an adult, which is certainly not the case. Yeah. And the same time when you're paying this much,

you know, to go in the first place and everybody gets a 3.9, you know, which is the average GPA at Harvard, which I can't say loud. When I saw at Yale, I was going to add this, I once got called to the mat by a dean, a college dean for giving a student a C, saying, you know, he's a Yale student, you know.

Yeah. Well, look, and that's part of growing up. Look, I know it's the end, and I want to thank you for this and everything else. And I want to have a long conversation with you about a bunch of things. So maybe we'll have a chance to have a Zoom, But thank you for the work you do. Thanks for writing this. I hope we did a little bit of justice to it. There's so much more we could go through, but it's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Professor Krauss. That's a Catholic school in me. I'm going to like it.

And yeah, and hopefully your viewers will check out thefire.org. You know, we're doing amazing work. We're doing great research. And certainly if you do still want to send your kid to a college, our campus free speech ranking will show you which ones to avoid and which ones are still pretty good. my, and I've said this before, but as my late atheist friend, Steve Weinberg and the World Rising Phyllisicist said, you're doing God's work. I am an atheist who loves religious imagery, too. I often talk about being blessed. You take care. It's a real pleasure. I look forward to again.

You take care. Bye-bye. Take care. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization, whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing. access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit

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