The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 257: Greg Lukianoff—Where the Chili Meets the Cheese

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression a.k.a. FIRE, Greg Lukianoff discusses free speech vs hate speech, Safetyism vs Safety Third, and the Coddling of the American Mind.

The ocean moves us. Surfing a wave or savoring the view. The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kelp forests. The ocean connects us. Visit Monterey Bay Aquarium.org slash connects. Hey guys, it's episode number 257 of the way I heard it. This one is called where the chili meets the cheese, mostly because it's an expression I like and when I used it in the conversation you're about to hear.

my guest admitted to immediately becoming a bit peckish. And that made me laugh, Chuck, because when he said it, I knew that you were probably thinking the same thing. Am I right? I wake up hungry. I go to bed hungry. I'm hungry all the time. I think you know that. Yeah. This episode of the way I heard it is not about food or hunger. It's about speech. And my guest is a guy named Greg Lukianov, who I met a few months ago in Colorado at a gathering called Stand Together.

Stand Together is an organization that was formed not too long ago by Charles Koch, who's a big supporter of Microworks. And Charles wanted to focus on helping foundations and organizations that provided what he calls bottom-up solutions. And that's what Greg is all about. He has an organization called Fire. It stands for foundation of individual rights in expression. Four, yeah.

You said something else. What did I say? Of and four. I don't really think that's germane. You could call me pedantic. You know, it's their name. And their website is thefire.org. Thefire.org.

Okay. Well, not, what do you want people to do with that information now, honestly? They haven't heard the interview. You want to send people to a site that they don't even understand what it's about, much less what it's called. I'm not sure we're really doing him a service here. They're all about free speech. Let's not get bogged down in the details. Let's focus on the fact that we had a really great conversation.

One of the things fire has done back since I think 2001 when Gray got involved was, in my estimation, my words, not his, but pick up some of the slack that was created when the ACL years. became a different organization. The ACLU, you know, Greg was a part of and is still very supportive of. But I think most people today would agree that they've become a bit more diverse, not focused merely on protecting speech, but involved in a lot of political things. And that involvement has turned a lot of people off. And fire is much, much more targeted, much, much more focused.

focused traditionally on what's gone wrong on college campuses and why council culture emerged so prevalently in college and how safe spaces evolve. So we have a conversation about all those things, but of course it's also pretty wide-ranging. And we talk about his movie, Chuck, which you recommended to me, which I thought was great. Yeah, it's terrific. It's called Mighty Ira. Thank you. And it's about Ira Glasser, who was instrumental, was part of the ACLU and brought them to a next level in the, I believe, the 70s. Yeah. And he was around, you know, when the ACLU took on the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois. Yeah.

Which was amazing. Just amazing. I think it's a really super important conversation to have. I think speech is absolutely on the ropes. You know, by the time this podcast drops, I mean, you and I haven't even talked about this, but the Supreme Court's been pretty busy this week. Yes, they have. I mean, this ruling on guns.

Save that for next week. Yeah, we'll save it for next week. But by the time you guys listen to this, I'm sure that the headlines will have been drenched with all sorts of other topics. But underneath all of it, underneath it all is always the ability to speak freely, to be heard, a culture of free speech is something that Greg is terribly interested in preserving and uplifting. You'll hear all about that, where the chili meets the cheese, episode number 257. Here we go.

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You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Greg Lukianoff, I can't help but notice you're wearing the moniker of your You're a recently re-identified organization on your shirt. That can't be a coincidence. Well, we used to be the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, and we are now, a completely different name, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. So we've got to keep the cool image.

Well, I think I understand the distinction, but I just want to compliment you on the fact. Most people who change the name of their organization need to completely rebrand. They need an entirely new logo. they need new swag, they need new hats, they need new shirts. This was, it had to occur to you that you were doing just a diabolically ingenious end run around traditional marketing. Well, it's funny because like for First Amendment nerds, we all know that there was a group before the ACLU in the early 20th century called the Free Speech League that doesn't get enough attention.

So all of us like constitutional law nerds are kind of like, oh, wow, we should revive the Free Speech League. And every time we have this conversation, like, that's what we should do. and we're like, wait a second, if I find just a better name, it's a cooler image that allows for better puns. Well, I have to say, I was delighted to meet you in person four or five months ago or whenever that was. I knew of your organization. I had heard of your book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Full disclosure, I have yet to read it, but I've skimmed through it. And I don't know how much you can love a thing as a result from skimming, but it's the next thing I'm going to dig into.

Two nights ago, I watched a terrific documentary called Mighty Ira, which you executive produced. I want to talk to you about all that stuff, but if we could, I want to kind of maybe start with something you call safetyism. I call it safety third. It's been an ongoing aspect of my foundation from the jump. So if you could just talk a little bit about what in the world has happened in our colleges and how the role of safety, which you've written about for a very long time really ascended both with the whole safe space thing and of course with the lockdowns and how safety in all of its forms really seems to be informing and dictating our policy like, I don't know, I don't want to overstate it, but maybe like never before.

Yeah, I think you're right. I call this a problem of progress that essentially, you know, you should be so lucky that people can take, can be increasingly worried about smaller and smaller threats to their safety. That's actually a pretty good development. You just should fight that urge to do it so much it's paralyzing. So I always like to give a shout out to Pamela Pretzky, who was our chief researcher during coddling, who coined the phrase safetyism. We were all trying to come up with a cool word for it, and she nailed it. And the idea is essentially that not just physical safety, but an idea of emotional safety, and I have to put that in quotes because it's a relatively recent idea, have to be protected at all costs. And we talk about making it sacred. And this means

as far as my co-author Jonathan Haidt is concerned, that essentially there's no trade-offs, like basically that you should fight for that incrementally more tiny little bit of safety, even if it means the most ridiculous of precautions, that there are never any trade-offs. And particularly when you add that to the idea of emotional safety, it's hard to figure out how you can have things like democracy, you know, pluralism, or education, and perfectly respect people's desire to feel emotionally safe, which we used to oftentimes just call not be offended. Right.

So how did you come to the point, first of all, where freedom for individual rights and expression morphed from education? Because so much of everything that you did seem to be limited to the college campuses. And I was delighted by that because that's a lot of what I do. but this expansion is significant, it seems like. You're raising tens of millions of dollars from what I've read anyhow. I mean, how's it going?

Great question. We were founded in 1999 at fire, and just true to our nonpartisan reality, we were founded by a right-leaning libertarian, Island Charles Coors and a left-leaning libertarian Harvey Silverglay. And we've always tried to actually have people who vote for different people on staff is actually a priority. And almost since day one, I was originally legal director and I became president in 2006. And almost since, you know, day one, people have been asking us to go off campus to take on the mantle of the nation's premier free speech defender.

And my answer had always been, I think we all feel called to that. I feel like we all feel to a degree like that might be our ultimate destiny. But we have to make sure we are really well covered on campus first. And sometime around 2019, when we got the ability to start asking students, directly on campus, pull them directly to ask about the environment for free speech. That's what created the possibility to do in a really rigorous way, a ranking of schools according to how good or bad they are for free speech in which you can say, you know, without a doubt that Purdue is better than Yale.

Right. And say it empirically. And once we had that, I felt like we had enough coverage on campus to start talking about, well, you know, like maybe it is time we start talking about extending beyond that. And so we were thinking maybe our 25th anniversary in 2024, but 2020 was the worst year for freedom of speech, at least in the United States, that I have seen in my career. We're like, we have to do this now. And the thing is when it comes to, you know, us actually walking the walk as being nonpartisan, I think that, you know, the country really needs that nonpartisan defender of freedom of speech that they can always count on to be on the right side of free speech cases. So we decided about a year ago that we were going to do this.

We started raising money for it in December. We're doing this giant $75 million expansion that's in addition to our about $19 million budget annually. And a big part of the focus is public education about freedom of speech. We're already at about $30 million of that. I feel like we've gotten a good start. But of course, as a fundraiser myself, I'm always like, eh, but there's also almost $50 million to add. I'm confident we can do it. And one thing I really do want to stress to your listeners,

The health of a civil liberties organization is best determined by how many small dollar donors they have, particularly if they're across the political spectrum. That's when you can't be, you know, canceled for lack of a better word, if you have a broad basis of war. So, so far, so good, but, you know, we only announced the rebrand a couple of weeks ago. So when I saw you in Colorado, you were right on the verge of that, right? Right on the verge of the expansion? Yeah. We were. We actually originally were thinking we weren't going to actually announce this until next year. And so many bad cases came up. So many people, it seemed to be silly to wait too long to tell people about becoming the foundation for individual rights and expression. We also have these like incredibly inspiring commercials that really try to focus people on the idea that free speech is an American value, that black, white, liberal conservative, with the exception of a pretty, you know, tiny elite up at the top, Americans love freedom. of speech, they care about it. And I think they've all been kind of doing this for a couple of years,

kind of like, you know, afraid to say that they actually care about free speech because, you know, on places like Twitter and Facebook, or for that matter, in the workplace, they feel like they can have their career ruined at any moment. And what we're trying to do, and it's a good idea to do it sooner rather than later, is break the spell, say the emperor has no clothes, break the collective illusion and say, actually Americans love freedom of speech. It's this really kind of weird, powerful elite that doesn't. So what happened? I mean, is it the frog in the boiling water?

Is it social media? You know, I mean, it seems like for the first time in the history of the world, billions of people are able to talk to each other in a weirdly unfettered way. I don't know that that's ever happened before. And maybe that's just putting everything on steroids, you know, with regard to safe spaces, with regard to feeling like we're going to be canceled at any moment. I don't understand when the ACLU, did they change? I know you're friendly with them,

but has fire evolved in a way to somehow pick up a kind of slack, for lack of a better word, that maybe has been created by a different environment? Because, you know, when I grew up, they were it. They were the people who defended the Nazi. in Skokie. They defended unpopular speech, which I think is the only kind of speech that needs defending. Yeah, exactly. Popular speech does just fine. You know, as one of these things where, you know, I worked closely with Nadine Strausson, the former president of the ACLU. We've

worked with ACLU, state chapters, and national since we were founded at fire, you know, on some cases. So I don't want to badmouth the ACLU. I want this to be about, you know, fire's expansion. But I also have no problem saying that one of the. the things that I think they either did wrong or should just kind of own is that they have 19 practice areas. And we're not going to do that. We're trying to figure out what we think can actually be long-term trouble for nonprofits. And one is make sure you have an actually politically diverse staff. And that's something that is very important to me. Like, I mean, like, we had someone speak at Princeton, and she was an alum. And someone was, like, reading the bios of some of

people on fire staff and pointing out that, you know, the executive director of fire is a evangelical Republican. And it's like, you're trying to get me to be ashamed of something that I'm deeply proud of? I mean, like, what other cause-based organization actually has people who vote for different people on staff? And as we expand off campus, one thing that we really want to stick to is we're going to have one cause and that's freedom of speech. I don't know how you feel about the expression of, you know, stay in your lane. But that's kind of what it sounds. like, right? If the ACLU is doing 19 different things and if they're weighing in on, you know, Stacey Abrams is a candidate they like, or if they're weighing in on the upside of forgiving

$50,000 in student loans, I think a lot of people who are watching are saying, wait, what's that have to do with these core things? On the other hand, things are so fractured, Greg, and some of what I heard at Stand Together really spoke to this as well. How do you stay in your lane when the roads are everywhere. Oh my God, yeah. What is my lane today? Like, historically, I've had permission to talk about workforce development and education and not take too much grief from the, what they call it, the chattering class, right? But if I start talking about my thoughts on fill in the blank, you know, OSHA, vaccines,

anything in the headlines right now, you don't have permission to do that. So I guess maybe if you could talk about where the line is, both. as a guy who runs a foundation that I admire a lot, but also as an individual who has ideas and feelings and passions and would like to communicate in a respectful, civilized way. Yeah, it's a challenge. And so one of the things that really characterized fire from day one was message discipline, that essentially we weren't going to get dragged into opining on how much we hate President A or President B. Like, that's not good. And we were so committed to message discipline. I think that we were having a hard time getting people to pay attention to us.

And so in 2012, I went to the board. Actually, no, 2010, because I asked permission before I started working on this. I'm like, listen, I'm going to write a book called Unlearning Liberty. It's not going to be all canon fire positions, even though I've been like the most adamant about maintaining message discipline. People are just going to think it's too boring if we just say, you know, recite whatever our positions are and all this stuff. So I wrote a book called Unlearning Liberty that came out in 2012. It was my first book. And I got a little bit more into psychology. I talked a little bit about Buddhism. Actually, I think I like this, Mike. The Buddhism link was essentially just this idea of creating this expectation of a pain-free life. And, you know, one of the central truths of Buddhism

is that life is going to be painful. And the wonderful thing is, as soon as you hear that, it immediately becomes somewhat less painful because you're realizing there's nothing wrong with reality when you experience emotional pain. But to tell a generation that life should not be pain is cruel on multiple levels. It creates an expectation that can never be lived up to. It leads them to a situation which they're always going to think they're in the wrong. So anyway, Unlearning Liberty did well. I have an intense interest in social psychology. I got a little bit into that Unlearning Liberty. I ended up writing with my friend Jonathan Haidt and have tried to write at the intersection of ancient wisdom, constitutional law, and psychology.

And, you know, so far, so good, I guess. Well, yeah, I would say so, because, again, you're in your lane, but you're taking a bit of a detour when you start to talk about the idea that comfort is the enemy, or at least a thing you ought to be suspicious of. So in our attempts to create the safe space and not, offend, I would imagine that leads to the titular coddling to which you refer. And then anything that doesn't line up with the expectations that come with coddling, well, that now borders on an assault. And with regard to how that impacts the things you say and the speech that you try and share,

well, that's where the chili meets the cheese, right? There's a pretty clear line between that, which can be said and that which can. Our friend Brett Weinstein obviously stepped over it once upon a time over there at Evergreen and so many others. Go back to what you said before. What happened in 2020 that made speech so breathtakingly tenuous on campuses? Before I say that, I should say, where the chili meets the cheese just got me incredibly hungry.

It's a great image. We'll have some burgers delivered. No problems. So I would say that my career went in several different, you know, formative moments. One was starting at fire back in 2001, and things were already much worse on campus than I expected. It was much easier to get in trouble for what you said way back in 2001 than I actually fully expected or knew, even though I just came from fairly PC Stanford Law School still was worse than I thought. Up until about 2011, the Department of Education was actually doing stuff that was kind of on our side,

And then in 2011, that all changed. You started having a redefinition of harassment as basically anything that offends. But then the real change, the most profound change, was 2014 when suddenly, like lightning struck, the students. And this might surprise some of your listeners. From 2001 to about late 2013, the students had been the best constituency for freedom of speech on campus without question. Administrators are the worst. Professors, not bad, depending on the professor. Students, great.

They understood that you don't have a right not to be offended. They understood offensive lyrics. They got edgy comedy. And then suddenly that all ended in 2014 like lightning struck. And so all of calling in the American mind is trying to figure out why was that so different. Then you have 2017 where you start seeing the first explosions of violence on campus at a large scale in response to the election Donald Trump. And so things were already like not so great. But 2020, it was all coming to the head.

And I think that COVID drove everyone a little nod. I think the lockdown drove everyone a little nuts, but worst of all, I think when people become their Twitter avatar 24 hours a day, it prevents this kind of like what I call benign hypocrisy that essentially like you could be very political and very strident pre-social media and still go out for drinks with your Republican or Democrat friend that you disagree with. And meanwhile, you know, if you're just your Twitter avatar 24 hours a day, it's this very uncompromising, very polarized, very nasty, you know, the term for it is, is cancel culture. You got to own the cons and you got to own the libs. Everybody's getting owned. Do do do do do do do do do do do dumb. I love stories like this.

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Good ranchers.com. American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch, get good ranchers now. I want to ask you something about free speech. You said that in general, we as Americans, we say, We love free speech, but I know anecdotally I've asked some of our interns, are you for free speech? Yes, yes, yes, yes.

How do you feel about hate speech? Oh, no, no, very much against that. And isn't it sort of the introduction of the term hate speech that kind of said, oh, I'm all for speech as long as it's not hate speech? The single best marketing job in the history of censorship is hate speech. And it is something that grew up on campus. So it's amazing because in 1964, you have the campus free speech movement. And in 1965, you have Herbert Marcuse, a American, actually German-born socialist, Marxist, who started to realize that maybe Marxism wasn't going to be that attractive in the U.S.

And was one of the people responsible for refocusing on race because class wasn't somehow working out, partially because, you know, working people just didn't, they're actually kind of happy in the U.S. We wrote a short book called Repressive Tolerance. And even though I don't think a lot of people today have read Marcos, they don't really. realize that there are unconscious Markusians to use it an obnoxious term. And already by 1980, you had advocates, and these are some of the founders of critical race theory, which is much in the news, because it is a real thing, and it was actually started by people, including Richard Delgado.

Later, Mary Matsuda joined and Charles Lawrence. Charles Lawrence was there from the beginning. And they started popularizing the idea that was very much, you know, barring from Marcos, that in order to have a really tolerant society, we have to go one step further, and we have to clamp down on intolerant speech. And Marcuse would put it much more directly as going after conservatives to fight back against them. So you had this launch of this anti-free speech movement

just 20 years after the launch of the free speech movement, but just 10 years after they started having serious wins for student free speech on campus in the Supreme Court. So it lasted about, sometimes joke that like the same year that Star Wars came out, 1977 was the one truly free year for freedom of speech because the new. censorship hadn't begun yet. Right.

And they passed speech codes. This was a very popular movement on campus, but it got laughed at by liberals and conservatives off campus. Not on campus, you know, different story. It got shot down in court. President H.W. Bush made fun of it. And from 1989 to 1995, you have this moment where all these codes are getting shot down. And by 1994, you've got Jeremy Piven making PCU, you know, which kind of felt like the fever

had broken, that the kind of crazy PC of the late 80s had gone. gone away and everybody kind of did this thing like, who, thinking that, you know, maybe the fever has passed. And instead, and I wrote about this for Reason magazine, or, you know, as per usual, I wrote like a 5,000 word piece, what it was called the second grade age of political correctness. That 20-year period from 1995 to about 2014, things got way worse, but the media wasn't paying as much attention. And that's when those sort of seeds that have been planted to raise kids thinking of hate speech

as being the exception to free speech, really took root. I realized I forgot to define this for some of your listeners. The thing that's really important to understand is people will tell you that there's never been hate speech laws in the United States because of that darn First Amendment, the people who are supportive of the idea of hate speech laws. That's not true. There have been hate speech codes on campuses since the 80s. They have been trying to clamp down on hate speech on campuses since the 80s.

And guess what it actually looks like. When you give power the ability to go after people, for opinions they don't like. They go after opinions that people in power don't like. They go after students that they don't like. They go after professors they don't like. It ends up being incredibly unprincipled. It doesn't do anything to stop actual bigotry. And it ends up being used by people in power to punish people with wrong think. And unfortunately, partially because education schools really kind of bought into this idea that you have this kind of slow process of people being raised in an environment where they take for granted hate speech is not protected

without realizing that as soon as you start trying to clamp down on hate speech, you've given up the whole free speech ballgame. Isn't it weird, though, that the worst year in your estimation, in the history of censorship and anti-speech on college was 2020, a year that I would assume a lot of students didn't even show up in school? So, is there something to what you said before about this business of assuming the identity of your avatar, your own? online self, which gives you, admittedly, a whole lot of permissions that you typically wouldn't have in real life. So you're home, you're locked down, you're stressed out, the anxiety levels are off the charts. You're gaining weight. Right.

You're swelling up like a tick. Nothing is going right. You're still paying your full room and bored and you're not allowed to go to school. Your parents are up your butt. Everything's wrong. But you can go online and you can say, you want. And more than the point, you can look for people who are saying things you don't want to hear and you can shut them down. And then all of a sudden, we're back in the real world.

And so are you suggesting that to some degree people morphed into a virtual version of themselves that allowed them, for lack of a better word, to become larger douchebags in real life? Not necessarily the words I would use, but I would say that 2020 was definitely a year where people got much more moralistic. It was the worst year for cancel culture that I'd ever seen. We started doing this Scholars Under Fire database, which we started in 2015 because 2015, 2014 was when we really saw an uptick in professors getting fired. Because prior to that, I saw professors get punished a lot, but I never saw or I rarely saw them get fired, let alone tenured professors get fired for anything less. than like serious wrongdoing that wasn't related to speech. We've been keeping track of this since 2015, and we thought 2015 was a bad year.

And that was when, I think, a handful of professors were fired. We're now up to 700 examples of attempts to get professors fired. You're kidding. 700? Yeah. And we're talking about, in terms of actually getting them fired, we're talking about maybe 170, somewhere around there. The number of ones sanctioned.

If you count any professor punished for speech on campus or teaching or research expressive related things, You're talking about the overwhelming majority of them have been punished in some way. And three dozen tenured professors fired for speech, teaching, research. When I started at this job, as bad as it was in 2001, I thought it was rock solid protection to be tenured from getting fired for exactly the reason why you have tenure, which is to protect research, etc. So it's been crazy. And I still have to deal with people saying that cancel culture isn't real. I'm like, no, I mean, when I went back and looked at the literature of how many professors got fired during like the second red scare, you know, the best they can come up with is between 100 and 150.

And I'm like, so this isn't just something happened. This is historic. People are going to be looking back at this going, what exactly happened in the United States? When did we lose our minds? And you still have people who are gaslighting the American mind saying that this isn't happening at all. And that's my next question. I don't want to make this political and I don't want to generalize, but let me do both for a moment. It seems like a lot of my friends on the right sort of default to a kind of, well, there it is again.

You can see the persecution. It's self-evident. Chuck knows. I just had a dirty jobs shoot canceled by the government, the GSA. And I was told the reason for it is because somebody way up the food chain read something I wrote somewhere and didn't like it. And so just canceled the shoot. Pulled our permits at the last minute, right? And so I was hesitant to. complain about it because I didn't want to sound like another right-wing nut job who was complaining

about some vast conspiracy to treat me unfairly. Same thing happened at Facebook. They canceled a huge hit show called Returning the Favor. Not long after it won an Emmy. And everybody was like, oh, you know, I guess you were canceled. And I'm like, I don't think so. I think I was just fired, but I've been fired before. Anyhow, my buddy's on the left, to your point, look at the same kinds of situations and say, Mike, you've always talked about consequences. You've always talked about not being able to say whatever you want to say and not have it come back over the net with some topspin on it. Well, that's what your cancel culture is. It's just the result of you opening your big mouth in uncertain times. And it's kind of like the marketplace of speech ideas. So quit your

whining. And stay in your lane. Stay in your lane, dummy. Stop it. Stop making trouble. So as a a guy who worked with and for the ACLU, as a guy who I've heard identify somewhat to the left of center, did I just hear you right? Did you just say that cancel culture was a real thing? Oh, absolutely. And I think at this point, when the New York Times did an article, an editorial, I think back in February, where they had to admit that what they were seeing in their polling was really happening. And it was this pretty modest explanation of cancel culture being real. Americans, like 80% of Americans report being afraid of losing their jobs, which of course, when you say this on Twitter, it's like, well, they're just afraid that they come up with some kind of excuse. So that's not really what they mean. Paranoid. Yeah, well, yeah, some kind of excuse.

So basically every way you could actually prove that cancel culture exists, you have some argument for why that's not really happening, but whatever. So the New York Times comes out with a pretty modest article editorial saying that cancel culture is real. They actually try to focus on some of the stuff coming out of Republican legislatures, which, you know, when they censored speech, particularly on campus, we absolutely oppose. We are a very nonpartisan organization. We take that extremely seriously. But when the New York Times came out with this, Twitter erupted with people saying,

Give me one example of this. And it's kind of like, would you like 700? So like I wrote a piece, you know, like for the Daily Beast. It's just the denialism to admit that something weird has happened and that some of the problem is on your own political side. The left used to be able to do that. Or, well, actually, the funny thing is I always made the distinction between liberals and the left. And I thought of the left is kind of like the segment that largely exists on campus and the liberals is kind of the rest of us who have sort of a centrist kind of, you know, they find some sort of. things in common with people on the center right. But it was absolutely, people will not accept

that this thing is happening at all. People always talk about being on the right side of history. It's like, I mean, I think you currently do look very foolish if you're claiming that cancel culture doesn't exist. But please explain that to all these people who have been fired and in some cases are winning lawsuits for being fired. Yeah. Amazing. It is funny how things shift. Bill Marr, three years ago, I looked at very differently than I look at him today. What you just said struck me. You write for reason. You write for the Daily Beast. You occupy some pretty weird real estate. I used to write for the often post for 10 years. Right. Well, that's my point. It's a very skinny peninsula that you're on, an isthmus that gets narrower every year. That's a hard word to say.

Ifthmith. That is a hard word to say. You should think Isthmus carols. Sounds like you're lisping. If the Venn diagrams overlap and if that overlap is the middle and if that's the place where sanity lives, it's getting smaller and smaller. So I guess my question is, how do you stay in it? Yeah, it's tough.

I mean, like, I'm lucky enough to have had my culture war-related mental breakdown way back in 2007. I was living in Philadelphia. I was working for a group that very passionately defended lefties and righties. Some of my biggest cases that year were actually defending people on the left. And still, you know, when I tried to date, you know, for example, in Philly, I actually dated this girl and I was so into her. And at one point, when I said she didn't seem to approve of what I did, I remember saying, so I'm like a true believer in this stuff. Like, I believe that free speech should protect Nazis. I'm certainly willing to protect Republicans. And she actually said, I think Republicans might be worse. And it was this kind of like weird, incredibly lonely kind of first two

years as being President of Fire. It's one of the reasons why, like, the President of Fire doesn't live in Philadelphia anymore. I got suicidally depressed. I was hospitalized for it. And a big part of, you know, the stress of being, you know, in a place that I didn't have a lot of family or friends, the stress, but also the culture was a huge part of it. And so I was hospitalized and as I was studying how to get better, I was studying cognitive behavioral therapy. And I started looking at this and being like, okay, so if I'm not supposed to catastrophize, if I'm trying to teach myself not to overgeneralize, if I'm trying to teach myself not to do all these things called cognitive distortions, because if you do them, you're going to make yourself

anxious and depressed. Why are we seem to be teaching this to kids? But nonetheless, you know, thank goodness back in 2008 that we weren't yet. 2014, it seemed like, wow. So you seem to claim that you care about kids. but we're teaching them the habits of anxious and depressed people. This was the point of my article with Jonathan Haidling in the American Mind as well back in 2015. And at the time, we thought we might see some little modest, you know, decrease in mental health.

And it was, of course, it was a cliff. Wow. Yeah, so how do I stay in the middle? A big part of it is that I've already gone through the, I hope I've survived, you know, the worst sort of process you have to go through. I watch other people, Mike, and I can't even name some names here, But I've watched other people who are relatively new to the kind of culture war that I got used to being in the middle of. It is depressing. It'll wear you down.

And I'm just glad that I got mine out early. Thank you for sharing that because there's not a lot of people I can talk to either about the weirdness of running an aggressively apolitical, nonpartisan foundation. We really, really try at MicroWorks to be as, you know, egalitarian as we can. there is no benchmark for measuring anything other than work ethic. But what do you do when work ethic itself has become a dog whistle and politicized in its own way? The language has shifted beneath us. And so when I hear about you literally checking into a hospital, I guess what I want to know is, without getting too personal, you probably had to do a lot of work to understand what exactly was happening.

But beyond the article that you guys wrote, in your book, you talk about three fundamental things that are being affirmatively taught in schools, in colleges, that are leading to these kinds of existential breakdowns that you yourself experienced. And if you could, you know, a lot of parents listen to this and a lot of kids too who are in college. What should they be most mindful of in that regard? Well, coddling in the American Mind, the book that came out in 2018, out the original article, ended up being a lot more of a parenting book than we expected going in. And we started doing the research and we realized that a lot of this, you know, is coming down from parents. And, you know, always with the best of intentions. Actually, I'm that kind of dad.

I can't stop myself. How old is he and what's his name? Who is that? Maxwell, the one in front is four now, but he's like one in that picture. and Benjamin is six, and today is his last day of kindergarten. Let's see him again. I missed it. If you're going to give him a shameless plug, get it up there to the lens.

Let's see him. Yeah, yeah. They're pretty cute. Not bad. Anyway, so it became, hey, it became much more of a parenting book, and that partially came from the research that we were doing. And, of course, we talk about how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.

It's like the immediate sense of I have to protect my kids from harm, and I have to do everything I can to make sure. that they're not psychologically harmed. If nobody's pushing back, that can kind of take on a life of its own. But the way we tried to get this across was it was as if, and this is the opening of coddling the American mind, I actually won't spoil the opening. We say it's as if we had been given the worst possible advice to a generation of young people and to a generation of parents that doesn't match with ancient wisdom, that doesn't match with modern psychology, and that will make your life worse if you believe them. We present these three things.

What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings. And that's the one that people are kind of like, well, that sounds nice. So, like, actually, it's not a good idea. Like, most of becoming an adult is, like, try to figure out what your feelings are saying, but don't punish that guy or don't quit on the scene when you're sad. Anyway, anyway. And the third one is life is a battle between good people and evil people.

And the thing is, we kind of, like, try to look at the audience and say, like, if we all think this is so obviously bad advice to give to anyone, then why are we implicitly giving this advice to an entire generation of young people? Well, shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Rowe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel, and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped

thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades. In fact, we'd love to help you. You can apply for a work ethic scholarship right now at microwworks.org. We've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants, thanks to a number of very effective fundraisers, including the one with my grandfather's name on the label. I refer, of course, to Noble, Tennessee whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, which is now available in a variety of delicious mash bills, all of which you can peruse at noblespirates.com. In fact, if you spend 100 bucks and use code Carl, C-A-R-L, you'll get one tube of orange bitter-infused sugar cubes for free. That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered

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What's the answer? Why are we doing that? I think it's because it sounds initially, if you don't think it through very well, and nobody actually points out that this is foolishness, it's tempting. Because, and I think this is partially polarization, I think this is partially a very wealthy, comfortable upper class that we gained so much. So like for the first point, safetyism, there was so much progress made against child mortality by doing sensible things, like putting warnings, figure out,

greater commitment to safety. Like fewer kids die from a lot of these smaller accidents than did when we were kids, you know, by a lot. And so it seemed like this great success. So why not do it infinitely and go off forever and protect them from all harm? And nobody was willing to say, particularly for more left-leaning parents, it's like, actually your grandmother was right about something that essentially everything's tradeoffs and that essentially you can't be permanently sealed off from the pain of the world.

So it's got this kind of attractiveness. and if nobody's willing to make the contrary argument, it can just kind of take off. When it comes to always trust your feelings, that one I think is a little bit like, I think that's something that you'll see even in popular movies. It sounds nice to always trust your feelings. It sounds romantic to always trust your feelings.

Follow your passion. Go with your gut. Exactly. And it's terrible advice. Susan David, I always try to give her credit for this because I love her quote on this, which is that you should think of your feelings

as information, not directions, which I just thought was just, perfect. And there's also in a recent song, sometimes your feelings can give wrong directions. And then the last one, you know, that's one that you have to fight all throughout human history, that people who don't disagree with me are either stupid or evil is pretty deeply in the human brain. I felt like growing up a lot of what we were taught and fed was we all know that we're deeply tribalistic as people. So really try to remember that people who disagree with you, they still generally think they're doing the right thing. They still generally think they're

acting with the best of motivations. And that was really kind of absorbed. Like, the fact that our fiction earlier in this century involved Don Draper and Walter White and Tony Soprano, to me it meant that we were reaching a stage where it kind of like, oh, yeah, like it's more morally ambiguous and therefore, a lot of times, honestly, more interesting drama. But it's like somewhere in the last decade. And I do think to a large degree, partially because of social media, which I'm happy to talk

more about, we got much more, we went backwards to a much more more. moralistic frame that essentially, yeah, you know, actually I think it's true. I think people who disagree with me are either stupid or evil, which is the opposite of being sophisticated, but when enough people believe it, it's bad for pluralism and democracy? Yeah, not just moralistic, but binary, right? Let's make a deal. There was the door, there was the curtain, there was the box. Three choices. Now it's always and only two. And so our heroes, need to have the white hat and the gleaming smile and sit astride, the white steed,

and our bad guys need to twirl their mustache and laugh maniacally. Yeah, very difficult to see, you know, anything in between. I hadn't thought about it the way you said. You know, Don Draper's a great example, all of these characters who are really flawed, but interesting, nevertheless. To make Tony Suprano a hero is a pretty neat trick

after you see him kill some people. Yeah. And I do think that, did a great idea. Putting people, it went from relatively easy, you know, solutions. Like Star Trek Voyager, I'm a nerd, no shock there. A lot of times, like, Voyager would have these kind of, they set up a moral quandary. There was this monster that was like Super Hitler that also was covered in this deeply infectious thing. And when you could hear her thoughts, all he thought was kill. And she risks the lives of 120 people to save Super Hitler. And I'm like, that's not a good trolley

experiment. I actually think you're just being moralistic, not actually moral. Explain the trolley experiment for people who don't know. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah. So the trolley experiment is, would you, there are five people tied to the train tracks, and there's a turn on the train tracks, and you have a switch, and there's one person in front of the turn. So basically, the idea is, and it's a great for moral philosophy to go through this experiment, to figure out, would you be willing to be the person who pulls the thing to kill just one person instead of five people. And generally the moral argument is essentially considered, well, you know, you'd probably actually have a moral duty to pull the lever. But there's a whole sort of industry of trolley experiments

that try to tweak it and change it, including one interesting finding that if it required you to, for some reason they make them fat, if to like push a fat person in the way and that would actually save the five people. And when it actually involves human contact, people get a lot less comfortable with it. It's like, I'd actually be killing them with my own hands, which points out something really human, but under no circumstances does a trolley experiment involve. It's kind of like, okay, 120 completely decent people who die, and you can save one super-infectious super-Hitler. And it's like, no, that's not even hard.

And so, like, we had all this moralistic fiction for a while with bad moral tales. And then suddenly you had situations where you were like, wow, like the Ozark was amazing, because certainly these were morally compromised people. But once you're in the situation that your kids are going to get killed unless you do make some tough choices, you're like, wow. Fiction got better about it, but we as Americans got worse at being morally sophisticated and realizing that not everyone, again, who disagrees this is stupid or evil. Is it back to the avatar thing, the social thing? I mean, because you can get away with it there.

You don't have to apologize. You don't need the social lubricant that is so necessary when you're on the airplane, in the airport, on the train, jammed into subway, cheek to jowl with your fellow man. And if you don't go into those situations with an attitude of patience and forgiveness and some understanding of grace, well, then you're going to see exactly what we're seeing right now. So you said you wouldn't mind circling back to the social online thing. And it just seems to me that that might be one of the great unintended consequences of being able to chat with a billion people contemporaneously. All of that lubricant, it's not necessary.

And so it's gone. And we forgot to slather ourselves up with it when we walk back out into the real world. So many jokes that I'm not going to make. These are softballs, Greg. I'm talking to you softball, brother. Lead in a one. It's a family show. So to be even nerdier, I talk about like our relationship to social media as being like Henry

the 8th and 1521. He wrote his first ban on. unlicensed printing presses in Britain because even though the printing press was invented in the 1450s, this was the first time you saw a real clampdown on them because they were responsible for religious wars, they were responsible for an uptick in the witch trials. From the perspective of 1521, it's like, why did we even build this thing in the first place? So I think we're in a moment where we can't see that there might be, and I'm confident of this, so I'm still a little bit of a techno-optimist, that adding billions of people to the

conversation will at some point be shown to have real advantages. However, in the meantime, it's, I've been trying to actually not use $50 words, but then I found myself at a podcast I did yesterday, so I'm like, no, that's not the way to put that. But there's no way that we're not going through like a seriously kind of crazy period, because it was a big deal when thousands of people could suddenly talk to millions of people, thanks to the printing press. When you're adding billions of people to the conversation for the first time in human history, it's going to be disruptive. And we saw this everything from the Arab Spring to occupy Wall Street to protest in Israel. In Spain, they actually, do you know what they call, like, forgive the expression, but woke people in Spain? No. The indignados.

The indignant ones, which I thought was kind of funny. The indignant ones. That's perfect. It's kind of funny. And now, gosh, we went from indignant to deplorable. What are the odds? Yeah. So, yeah, I think that there's nothing we can.

can do right now that's going to make this go away. So a lot of these top-down solutions of like, why don't we just get into Section 230? It's like, no, there's no easy fix to the fact that we just experienced a massive phase switch. But hopefully we can learn how to be smarter about living with social media in our lives, about remembering some of the old ancient wisdom about not being so pompous, not being so moralistic, not being so judgmental. So certain. Oh, yes, absolutely. certainty. There's a wonderful quote that sounds like a Zen cone when I say it to students on campus today. And it's from Judge Lernad Hand in a speech called the Spirit of Liberty in 1944. Everybody go out and listen to this. We actually did a recording of it read aloud at the fire website thefire.org where it says this true spirit of liberty is that which is not that sure that it is right. Good God. That's great. I know. And people go, what? This podcast is called The Way I heard it. simply because I was desperate to try and say something that had some measure of modesty baked into it.

Chuck's heard this rant a thousand times, but it just seemed like in 2020, when things really crapped the bed at the universities, something else was happening in both social and broadcast. And it was a new level of certainty. We heard it in our elected officials. We heard it in our journalists. we heard it in our scientists. That was the most alarming thing. When did scientists get so certain?

I mean, I narrate a show called How the Universe Works that over the course of a month... Great show. Thanks. I loved it. And one day I went into the booth and certainly announced, with all of the earnestness I could muster that there were two trillion galaxies

in the known universe based on recent, based on the best science we could glean. And then two weeks later, I had to revise it because the best science we could glean revealed that, in fact, there were more like 200 million. So I was off by roughly two trillion, right? But I sounded equally certain. I sound just as sure when I'm wrong as I do when I'm right, as a narrator.

But guess what? The same is true as people, too. So that's my theory. When things went off the rails in 2020 with speech, at the same time, we were falling deeply in love with a level of certainty. that was unlike anything the world had ever seen before. At the same time, we were crafting our well-owned avatars. Yeah, Unlearning Liberty, well, like my 2012 book,

one of the major themes is kind of like the war against certainty. I think a lot of human evil takes place when you believe that you're so sure that you can start sacrificing people. I think that certainty, in a lot of cases, is the enemy. And I try to explain this sometimes. It's like, I know we First Amendment people can sound obnoxious and self-certain ourselves, but the principle we're defending is that I know I'm wrong about any number of things. I know I'm not all knowing, and I suspect you aren't either.

And this is a great small D democratic idea. This is a great way to live to be kind of okay with like, I don't know everything, no matter how much you may want to think you do when you're 17. And yeah, we developed a great deal of moral certainty over the last decade. And I think it's at least in part because people believe, and this is actually. This is hit journalism, I think, particularly hard, that people are such savages that essentially we have to tell them, we have to tailor the news to make sure, because if they knew something bad happened, that's going to lead those savages to doing some evil something. So we have to adjust it to make sure that they don't get the wrong ideas.

And it's like, no, you know what's going to happen then? They're just not going to trust you anymore. And that was something that, like, I remember when the people started getting in trouble for the Lab leak hypothesis. And the thing that didn't occur to people was that, no, Americans aren't dumb. So when you say in February of 2020 that maybe it was a lap leak and someone immediately comes back and say it definitely wasn't, I'm like, it definitely wasn't? Like, we all know that there's no way you could actually know that. What, China let you in to look for yourself?

Like, what do you mean? What they don't seem to get sometimes is that what they're doing is undermining the credibility of experts. I remember arguing at the time that the opposite of certainty isn't uncertainty. It's uncuriousness, right? Yes, very good. So if you're genuinely curious to get to the truth of a thing, then one of the things you ought to be most suspicious of is a narrator like me who can talk in a crisp, well-modulated baritone

and assure you that the correct number of galaxies is two trillion. wrong. You're just wrong. And so, boy, of all the institutions that crumbled, don't you think the one that really the real heartbreaker was science? It was the medical. It was this, I know it's well intended. But boy, that lab leak is a great example. Talking about that would have got you thrown off Facebook or Twitter. And then two weeks later, it didn't. And that's a hell of a thing. Yeah, it's something that in the epistemic anarchy that we're currently going through, the thing that

has to be sort of reestablished are, I use this word, in a neutral way. We have to have new elites. Elites just mean people who everyone trusts or people close to power who people trust. And I think that in some cases, yes, paranoid people, conspiracy theorists,

they're never going to go away, they're always going to be there. But the best way to keep otherwise sane people from believing in this stuff is to have people that like this person or this institution never lies to me. And that's one of the things that I'm really trying to make sure that fire, you know, becomes. It's a place that kind of like, no, we call them like we see them, we explain the facts as

clearly as we possibly can, and we defend free speech, even if I don't like what someone's opinion is. And that's one of the reason why I think we're in such a crazy period at the moment is because people don't trust what they read in the news. They don't trust, you know, the opinion of some experts. And the thing that's heartbreaking is that for all of those scientists who would say something, You know, the people who signed the letter saying that Black Lives Matter protests are fine, even though we advise people to not go outside and be around other people that somehow

doesn't apply to this one. It's like, no, that's a terrible idea. They're never going to be listening to you again. If you make that mistake, I'm hopeful that we are going to be able to start finding people who we always trust on certain matters. But with a billion people fact-checking you, though, that bar is going to be a lot higher than it used to be. Do do do do do do do do dumb The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap

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and see the impact for yourself and see too how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash Mike. That's skillsusa.org slash Mike. I'm talking skills, skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S. Skills USA. Oh, man. Isn't that the truth? I refer to him now, because we're talking to a billion people, right? There is an army of correctors out there. And going back 20, 25 years in TV, people would always write in to say, ah, you said it was a 56 Chevy.

It's actually a 57. And you can tell by the tail fin and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so forth. Okay, great. Now, you'll hear from a thousand people. An episode of Dirty Jobs goes up and the Army of Angry acronyms are watching. Pete is watching. H.S.U.S.U.S. is watching. The FBI is watching.

everybody is watching and everybody has the ability to fire off and correct a thing. So when you talk about fact checking, Jesus, Greg, where do you go to check the facts? Is it snoops or snopes or whatever it is? Is there a place? I mean, that whole Ministry of Truth thing didn't really seem to find a whole lot of traction. Oh, my God. Don't even get me started on that. Let's go for literally Orwellian.

What could go wrong? Literally. It did kind of break in my heart a lot that Mark Zucker. One of the most sensible things he ever said is you don't want Facebook to be the arbiter of truth. And people like savaged it. And it's kind of like, no, you really, you really don't. You really don't. Truth is a difficult process.

You can never be entirely sure. It's never really over. You're underestimating how not omniscient people that, you know, really are. When do we get back to having people we trust? I think there are all sorts of cultural adaptations that we have to take for this new media world. I think that some of them are just for health and raising kids. the simplest among them are like shut off your phones and internet at night for your kids, you know, maybe you have like just the emergency setting on it or something like that.

We're going to have to adapt. And if we don't adapt, no top-down solution is actually going to save us. But when it comes to institutions like higher ed, one of the things that I don't think they get or have thought through adequately is when people are being pressured to withdraw research because it comes to the wrong conclusion, they don't seem to get that that means It's like, then they're never going to believe you unless you actually come up with a statement that is unpopular on campus. If your research is completely right and it shows that everything that's popular on campus is actually true, they're still not going to believe you with good reason because they knew if you said the otherwise, you might get fired.

Right. And sometimes hypocrites agree with you. Yeah. Sometimes you agree with a hypocrite. It's really, people are just looking for a roadmap. Yeah. They're just looking for a playbook. There is no simple playbook to this, which is really why I wanted to talk to you, Greg.

It seems like the key to better speech is more speech, not less speech. But also to make it useful, you should do some listening, too. The idea that that's controversial at all is kind of like, yeah, actually, I mean, free speech is essential. It's a human right. Democracy can't work without it. And by the way, it's a lot more useful if you listen to people sometimes. Two ears, one mouth. It seems like that's kind of how we're.

equipped, but go back for a minute. I'm really interested in the scale of things. Like when you start with the press, with the printing press, and Henry the 8th and 15, 21, or whatever it was, looking around going, holy crap, we've got this new thing, and it's allowing lots of people to read lots of things that I'd prefer them not to read. This is a problem. So maybe it's the technology, although I'm sure that word didn't quite exist then. We got to tech problem for Henry the 8th. But as you go through the years and the centuries, especially this last one, I had a professor, I think he talked about something called the displacement theory, where in communications anyway, it was argued that, oh no, radio is here, newspapers are done.

Oh, no, film is here. Radio's done. Oh, no. Television is here. Film is done. Oh, no. The internet is here. TV is done. And likewise, oh no, the 8-track is here. The LP is done. The cassette's here. The 8-track is done. The CDs here. Sometimes they're right.

Sometimes the new tech completely destroys its predecessor. And yet, in this world of speech and communications, we still have newspapers. We still have radio. Now we have podcasts. We still have TV. We still have film. We still have books. We still have books.

And those three shows you. you mentioned right now, prove my point that I think, for all the crap that's out there, I think we might be in the golden age of television. So what is really going on with social? Are we really that far over our skis that it's a tech problem? Or is it just the same old thing with more gas thrown on more flames? I did an interview with Nick Gillespie. He gave a great example of this. When TV first came out, and I think he was talking like his parents would say that when they first got the TV, they left it on pretty much nonstop for weeks because they were just so kind of like, wow. Oh my God.

People are calling it sick. This is amazing. And then eventually they're like, this is not great. And they start getting a little bored with it. And they start adapting to it. And you bet I wasted a lot of time as a kid staring at the TV like we all did or, you know, maybe more virtuous people didn't. That eventually you adapt to the new technology. It does feel a little bit.

like people are a little bit less crazy than they were in 2020. What I'm scared is going to happen is that they're going to do just like they did in 95 and go, thank goodness that's over and not make any changes so that it's not even worse next time. One thing that you do learn from free speech history is that you should be more afraid a lot of times of the solution than the problem. The cure can be much worse than disease and some of the stuff. And I'm really scared that like in a panic about how to fix the very real problems generated by social media, we're going to do something especially dumb.

I watched Mighty Ira as well. And I remember, when I think of myself as a kid watching TV, I remember watching Donahue. I remember these great ideas being espoused. I remember, you know, you have Ira Glasser. Hiring one. Who was he talking to? Buckley. Buckley, right.

They became friends. And it's like listening to both sides of an argument is the only way to really understand the argument. I think. And when are we going to get to a point where we can get back? Can we go back to the future and have those kinds of discussions again? Will we ever? Yeah, I think we will, but I'm definitely not in a position where I'm going to be predicting when we're going to start getting better about that. Universities have me very worried. There was a book called It's Not About Free Speech that came out that is actually two professors who are involved with the American Association of University

professors, which is kind of like the ACLU for academic freedom. arguing that the real problem we're facing today after 700 attempts to get professors fired since 2015, you know, most of which have been successful, at least in getting them punished, that the problem on campus is actually too much academic freedom, partially because conservatives like Amy Wax and Bruce Gilly are still a thing. And so, like, I don't know if higher ed can sort of save itself at this point, if that's actually what they're thinking, that essentially there's too much, there's too much freedom of thought and diversity of thought among professors right now.

I'm like, okay. So I am hopeful that different technologies can actually provide some way, because I look a lot of this as an employer. Fire has about 85 people, but when I hire people from the Ivy League, when I hire people from the fancies, as they call them, I can be guaranteed generally that they're pretty smart and they're pretty hardworking. Or at least, sorry, that they were pretty hard working in high school. And that's it. I don't know if they understand stats. I don't know if they understand writing. I don't know if they know anything about what the world. actually looks like or history or law. And I think that if someone could come up with a way to tell employers that this person is not just smart and hardworking, but they actually know substantive stuff and they won't go to HR if they ever have a minorly negative interaction with another employee, when you start actually creating that separate pipeline, I think that those people

are going to flourish. I think they're going to get hired by some of the biggest and best companies. because the thing that a lot of corporations are afraid to say, just like there was an article in the Intercept talking about how the current crop of progressive college grads are hitting these organizations and kind of destroying them from within because everything becomes a drama about things going on within the organization, not the people on the outside, they're actually trying to help. And given this is unsustainable, it won't be sustained. So as far as people inventing something new, figuring out the way to tell employers that you can guarantee that this person is, hardworking, smart, and actually knows stuff, that could actually improve things for the better dramatically. How in the hell are you going to do that? We award work ethic scholarships through my foundation, and it's very, very, very imperfect,

but we try. Yeah. We try to challenge applicants to make a persuasive case for themselves. We try to do things that at least give us a rubric to measure personal responsibility or delayed gratification or work ethic in general. Easier said than done, but you're talking about doing the same kind of thing broadly or maybe even having some sort of credential that would reflect the presence of those qualities. That would be a consummation devoutly to be wished. How do you do it? You know, I'm going to practice the epistemic humility I preach so often and say, I don't know, but there are some, you know,

ideas that I think every American should be pulling for. So one of them is University of Austin, new liberal arts college that they're starting out in Texas, really trying not to be a conservative university. They want it actually to be like an old-fashioned liberal arts college, but without the sort of heavy-handed ideology and actually freedom of thought academic freedom. That's an experiment. Will it work? Don't know. Do I want it to work? Yes. And I think everyone else should too. There's projects like Minerva University out in San Francisco that's trying to do a hyper-difficult and rigorous program that is light on ideology. Actually, they try to, you know, there's no such thing It's not being none.

You know, the ideology is supposed to be about being better critical thinkers. There's Ralston College out in Georgia, you know, trying this. I sometimes think about the idea of like, what if every time you took an AP class, you could either get your five to get your extra credits and there was like a eight above it. And everybody who got the secret eight got invited back to some other to go to the next level and then got brought together and studied together where you could really say that these are, they're not from the usual backgrounds that you would think necessarily. They are the best and brightest.

They've proved it. So we have to be creative. But as far as things that we can't must not do is I have a lot of sympathy for people who are snookered into paying a lot, going to debt to go to higher education. But I think that the idea that we would consider forgiving any amount of student debt without also saying colleges are out of control in terms of bureaucracy, they're out of control in terms of cost, if you do nothing to rein that in, we are absolutely rewarding higher as it currently exists for exactly how it is in saying, you know, you're perfect, don't ever change,

which is just not a smart thing to be doing under the circumstances. So I think there's some terrible ideas that are very popular at the moment. And I think that some of the experimentation that's going on is actually good. There just needs to be even more of it. You went to Stanford? For law school, yeah. What's the endowment over there these days? Do you know? Let me think. It's $1.7.11 billion dollars. Honestly, the last I checked, it was creeping up on $40 billion. Wow. $40 billion.

Yeah, and a nonprofit, by the way. And a nonprofit. If anybody's going to forgive the student loan debt, shouldn't it be the universities themselves? Well, yeah. I mean, like, if you got someone to go to your school and they can't pay off their debt, then that's one of the things that's so messed up about getting bankruptcy out of the process with big mistake. Having the federal government take over all the student debt, can't really say it's a mistake because it allows them to be able to promise

that they're going to try to eliminate an awful lot of debt. But I do think that when it comes to higher ed, we've got to think of ways to cut down on the bureaucracy because that's responsible for an awful lot of the censorship, cut down on cost for long term, make sure that the rigor's there. I mean, there was a study called academically adrift that took place maybe 10 years ago,

and it showed that students, I think it was 14 different schools, thousands of students involved. And they tested them to see if they had any improvement in critical thinking skills, which included the idea of can you take an argument and can you make and break it? Can you say the opposite and argue for each side? And they found over the entire period of the study, which I believe was two years, they saw no improvement in critical thinking skills for about half of the students involved. Now, to be clear, if I still worked at

Burlington Coat factory between the ages of 18 and 20, I can say with pretty good confidence my critical thinking skills would have improved somewhat at least. The idea that you see absolutely none means that we also should be figuring out is this actually giving us any benefit? Are people becoming better thinkers like when they come out? Some way of testing this, some way of investigating if any of this massive public spending that we're doing on it, publicly backed loans, are actually producing some of the outcomes other than allowing a relatively, you know, affluent upper class to sort of perpetuate itself. I just find myself in violent agreement with everything you've said.

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at American-giant.com slash Mike. American Giant, American Made. American Giant, American Made. I want to be respectful of your time, but I got two other quick things. Back to the beginning, you said something that struck me

that I also really agree with, and that is the kind of support fire gets. It's very similar to the kind of support microworks gets. We have lots of people who write small checks who are really enthusiastically behind the mission. They are the majority, and they are super important. But we've got a couple of people too who have been really, really helpful who write large checks. And one of those guys is Charles. Koch and his foundation. And that's where we met at this thing called Stand Together. And so I guess my question is, how important is that organization to fire? And what have you found in terms of

generosity in the philanthropic world? How do the foundations break down politically versus the individuals, if at all, in terms of what you can look forward to vis-a-vis financial support. Yeah. When it comes to stand together, they've been incredible allies, but contrary to sort of like the conspiracy theories, I don't think there's ever been a year where we've gotten anything more than 10% of our total funding from any one source, I think, kind of ever. And as far as funding helping us with the expansion, a relatively modest contributor to that $75 million. So far, what we've been able to raise is individual donors. And our actual donor base, which is about 8,000 people active, about 14,000 historically,

is right to left. We have old-fashioned, the kind of liberals who still believe free speech is really important. They tend to be a little bit older. But they're big donors to us. Breaking the foundation market is harder. And this has been personally frustrating to me because you'll have people, like the same time that people were freaking out about the, oh my God, the New York Times just said, council culture. is real. When people were citing our statistics, you had some of these same people saying that

it's not real. And by the way, I bet Viar doesn't get funding from liberal foundations. And to be clear, we have occasionally. But as far as like a lot of the big ones and big checks, that's not for lack of trying. And if you think we're a great organization, then by all means, nudge these foundations to say it's like all those other groups I worked for, all those other nonprofits I work for, we didn't actually have people who voted Republican and Democrat. We had either Democrat or Green Party, and those could get foundation funding. But now that I work for the most best nonprofit that is actually walking the walk of being nonpartisan, I have a very hard time getting any funding from the left-leaning foundations.

And when people break this up, it's kind of like, well, that's not on us. They should fund us. Then, of course, you know, since it's usually said as a way to try to yet another way to try to dismiss people who have opinions you don't like, It's kind of like, okay, so if you like us and think we should be funded, by all means, they're going to write them and say that they should fund us. But if you hate our guts anyway, you're just looking for an excuse to dismiss us. So, yes, I'm going to bend over backwards to figure out how to help you. But I do think that the idea that currently, I call it the perfect rhetorical fortress,

we've figured out a million ways to not have to listen to each other that have nothing to do with the assertion someone's actually making. I guess the reason I'm asking is that it just seems so odd that colleges once the bastion of free speech are now this other thing. And so because you've spent so much time in that space, it feels like the right has sort of become the anti-cancel culture pro-speech movement.

And so you are de facto associated with that and therefore less interesting and appealing to foundations on the left, which is just perverse, but it kind of confirms what I was wondering. There will be a foundation that will remain nameless. When I started at fire, when I became president, you know, I came in kind of like, you know, I'm left-leaning myself, worked at the ACLU, worked at the Environmenters Project in Washington, D.C.,

worked for the Organization for Age of Refugees. I have a great liberal pedigree. And I'm like, I bet I can bring these guys in. And I was, you know, the conservatives in the organization laughed at me. And they were right, which is kind of heartbreaking in its own way. Isn't it due to a lack of nuance? Isn't it that you have to agree with a particular side 100% of the time? Otherwise, it's like you're either with me or again me.

Yeah. Oh, I forgot to say, to complete the thought, which I often forget to do. This foundation had a description that looked exactly like what fire actually did. And I'm like, well, we're definitely going to get this one. It was basically kind of like, we'd like to give lots of money to some kind of foundation for individual rights and education. And we were turned down for it. And I was like, okay, that's disappointing. When it comes to the idea that you're either with me or against me, I think this is at least in part because social media sped everything up.

And I do think a lot of what's going crazy, even globally, is due to suddenly having billions of people in the conversation as never before. But there are other trends that just got really sped up. And one of them is that we live in more politically homogenous places. That's the one that people are happy to point out. If they're less happy to point out generally, you know, when I was at Stanford, is we live in less economically diverse places than we used to. So running into a working class Republican is something that you don't have as much experience with if you grew up in some of these super Zikos and vice versa. And I think when you're in an environment that is very politically homogenous like higher ed, the administrators being much more even politically homogenous than the professors who are quite politically homogeneous to begin with, it becomes much easier to think that every sane person believes this thing. And therefore, I'm perfectly reasonable.

Like, I think of those people who think Lenin was right, you know, like, those are the crazies. I just think, I just think Marx was right. Because they have a smaller zone, they kind of think that they can still kind of tell themselves they're still being open-minded, even if they have never actually talked to a good faith Republican who comes from a different part of the U.S. Would the country be better off if everybody who could read picked up the coddling of the American mind in Reddit? or if everybody with the TV rented Mighty Ira on Amazon and really paid attention to it. Well, I can't say for sure, but I think the country would be healed forever if every American brought 10 copies of Coddley. Just kidding. I hope people would read it because I think sometimes when people just hear the title, I've never been a huge fan of the title.

I wanted to call it much more boringly disempowered, which was basically saying, no, we're taking bright kids and we're telling them, By the way, you're really fragile and you're guilty of everything and you'll be permanently damaged by words and there's nothing you can do about societal inequities except feel bad about them. Have a nice day. That essentially, it's something that we're doing to a generation. And when it comes to Mighty Ira, my former assistant is this guy named Nico Perino. And he is now the vice president of communications at fire. He's senior vice president actually just did that. He is not a filmmaker, but he runs our podcast.

And he interviewed Ira Glasser, the head of the ACLU, during its free speech golden age of, say, like, 1979 to 2000. And he was so impressed with the podcast that he went out using the two videographers that we have on staff and made a documentary film that has won awards all over the country. The idea that that was a first-time picture, I remember watching this being like, wow. And that's the thing that I love about fire is that we all care deeply about freedom of speech. And we also try to be creative in how we reach people. So I would love everyone to see Mighty Ira.

I'd love everyone to see our 2015 movie, Can We Take a Joke? Which was actually saying that outrage cultures, because there wasn't a name for it yet, was the threat to comedy. The only problem is we made it seven years ago. It was too far ahead of its time. It was ahead of its time. Yeah, I saw it. It's great. Thanks.

It's really good. Yeah. I thought Mighty Ira was great. I can't believe you guys did that on the shoestring you did. The whole baseball metaphor was so. so interesting. The fact that Ira Glasser took William Buckley on the subway to see his first baseball unbelievable. Unbelievable. And Chuck, it's such a great point. Something fundamental has shifted. I didn't agree with Phil Donahue half the time. But that show, Milton Friedman on that show,

to this day is some of the best TV I've ever seen. And firing line to this day. I mean, it just doesn't happen anymore. And my hope for this technology is that somehow it'll drag that sensibility back into the public square. And if fire does its job, well, then everybody's going to have a chance to open their big mouths and make a fool of themselves. It's better to know what people really think is my main argument about free to, of speech. You're not actually safer for knowing less about the world. Look, I said to Chuck, after that thing in Charlottesville, you know what I really enjoyed

about watching that whole crazy disaster? I could see everybody's face. Nobody was behind a hood. There were no pointy hats. Whatever it was, it was. And everybody could see everybody. And that, for better or worse, I think, is a good thing. And also because the research shows that People tend to think actually much worse things that they generally do if they think the only thing keeping them quiet is censorship. And people willing to recite, you know, Jews will not replace us carrying a teaky torch. It's like, well, I guess you're never getting a date again, huh? Right. You're on the record.

Yeah. You are on the record, dude. You have been weighed and measured and found a little, you know, teaky torchish. Last question. I want to get your thought on a quote I gave to the farmer's almanac, which has come back to bite me in the ass. They were doing something, this is probably eight years ago. They were just calling people and saying, fill in this sentence, America's greatest strength is blank and her greatest weakness is blank.

And I had had a couple drinks and I was in a hurry and I wanted to respond because it thought it'd be nice to be in the farmer's almanac. So I thought about it and I said our greatest strength is tolerance and our greatest weakness is acceptance. Well, I'm not sure how well that's holding up right now, but I stand by it. And I wonder if a lot of what we've talked about in the last hour and a half has to do with this changing metric whereby a thing that used to be tolerated now must be accepted. And all of the gray space around those things seems to have left people a bit confused.

The funny thing is, I think that a lot of the sort of cancel culture comes from people who actually deeply intolerant. They just want you to be intolerant in precisely the same way that they are intolerant. And this is something that really confused statisticians about the state of free speech on campus. So apparently, if you look at the global survey, tolerance on campus has improved. And I was like, really, that's kind of surprising. And then you look at it. And it turns out that this was based on the question of, like, do you tolerate or how do you feel about a gay speaker or a communist speaker? And it turns out they were not very popular. And it turns out they were not very popular in the 50s, but are completely accepted now. And people were trying to reconceptualize

that. I was like, no, see, students are more tolerant than ever. I was like, no, that's not tolerance. That's a change in affinity. That's an entirely different thing. How tolerant are they of people that they genuinely hate? As best I can tell from all the data, a lot less tolerant than they were even 10 years ago. Right. Because if Voltaire was right, or whoever said it, this business of not agreeing with you, but defending with my life your right to be disagreeable, that seems to be rooted in my ability to tolerate ideas that I find deplorable. But why then should I have to accept them? If acceptance becomes the benchmark, well, then the standard is so high that no one's ever going to be on the same page. And we are going to be stuck in this tautology of binary choice.

and pushing the fat guy on the trolley track or whatever. That image is going to haunt me, Greg. I got to tell you. Why does it always have to be a fat guy? One thing that I feel like a lot of people get wrong about American history, and this is a particular common on college campuses, is this idea that America wasn't very diverse back when it was colonial. By modern conceptions of diversity, where it's just overwhelmingly race,

then, yeah, you have an argument there. But what you have to remember is that, you know, the part of the country that I come from, New England, there were people who were literally fighting wars with each other, worse to the death over religion, who then came over and it was either them or their parents or their grandparents and then had to be fellow citizens with people who they believed were condemning themselves and anyone who listened to them to hell. Like the intensity of the disagreement was amazing, but nonetheless, we could still be citizens together. So like the idea that kind of like it was just way easier before. It's like, no, it wasn't way easier before. This is always going to be hard. But if you're starting from the point of view that that person is just, again, stupid or evil,

and therefore you can completely dismiss them, then I'm about to say that maybe you are, but that would be a mean way to say it. Then you're being the intolerant one. Then you're being the closed-minded one. Your brain is enormous. Your book is terrific. Your documentary is to be watched. And you've been super generous with your time.

I know you're taking your boys up to Maine, was it? Yep. Going up to Maine. Your listeners probably won't like this, but I love D.C. where I live, but it's too hot in the summertime, so we're going up there. Indeed it is. Will you be unplugging your devices and going all Walden on your kids, or you could strike some happy medium? They're four and six.

They've never played video games yet. I don't give them the tablet except to do Spanish lessons. I actually try to, if they're not asking for it, I'm not offering it. And when it comes to, you know, the rules of the house when they start hitting social media, It's going to be a strong encouragement. Don't. Really, thank you for your time. What can people do, aside from read your book and watch your movies, where do they go to participate in the mission? Go to the fire.org. That's their website, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression now.

And we need supporters. We need plaintiffs. And unfortunately, we already have an abundance of potential plaintiffs for lawsuits. But there are still horrifying cases out there that we know we don't know about. And we need talent. We need really committed free speech people. who don't just tolerate but like the idea of working with people that they disagree with on everything but freedom of speech. I'll keep my eyes peeled for the aforementioned. Are you going to be back in, where is it, Colorado next month? Is it Colorado? Yeah, I will be. Will you be there? I'm going to try and get there as well. Great. I'm going to try. It'll be great to see you. Yeah, Dirty Jobs is back in the works, so we're bouncing all over the place.

But it'd be great to see you again in person. Absolutely. Thanks for your time. Thanks for the time, Greg. We're great. Oh, and you know what else I loved you said before? Safetyism, in the long history of the world, has putting ism on the end of any word ever been a good thing? Pretty much now. All right, good. Well, I'll leave you with that then. Thanks, everybody. Talk to you next week. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long, but if it made you smile. then share your satisfaction in the way that people do take some time to go on life

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