The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 310: The Eternally Radical Idea with Greg Lukianoff

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Greg explains why we should be suspicious of certainty and invites us to join the million-strong free speech army to combat cancel-culture.

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guest. It's great to have him back. I'll tell you what, man, he can burn an hour like nobody's business. He's a fast talker, and his head is ginormous, and he's got a lot of ideas in it. And he's really fun to listen to. He is fun to listen to, but he's also, I think, importantly here, because the mission he's on matters a lot. The ACLU, we all know what that is, fire. It was founded, I what, 20 years or so ago, and it stands for, what's the stand for, Chuck? The foundation for individual rights and expression. That's correct. Used to be rights in education, but they changed their name somewhat.

Although their mission is still really pretty singular. It's all about free speech. Greg has a ton to say about council culture. He has a ton to say about the way colleges have basically transformed from being a bastion of free speech to being, unfortunately, kind of the opposite of it. and he always is relevant because the headlines are always relevant in this area. So we cover a lot of ground in this conversation. And that's really what it is.

There's no agenda. It's a free-flowing conversation aided a little bit by some dayquil on my end, some caffeine. And I took something else, Chuck. I'm not sure what it was. It looked like a Motrin. But now I can't be entirely sure because I'm experiencing a whole new level of, I can't breathe, which is good news. But obviously, I'm starting a lot of sentences with no clear idea of how they're going to end. Isn't Motrin sort of a lady thing? Well, it depends where you put it, I suppose.

I don't, I didn't, no, no, no, no, no, I don't believe that's the thing. You can't say that. What do you mean? No, you can't? Motrin, now a lady thing? Isn't it for menstrual cramps? Good God, no, no, it's, I mean, I think it works for. What am I thinking of? Maybe you're thinking about that time you used to have a job on the way I heard it. Come on. You know what? That's pretty good. It's been like two weeks since you threatened to fire me.

It's true. I'm doing all right. You know what? I still actually have a little PTSD from Motrin. I took some when I threw my back out about six years ago. And I had a couple set aside on my bedside table because I knew I was going to wake up and I knew I was going to want to take them. well, Freddie, my dog, ate them. And I called the vet.

And the vet was like, your dog ate Motrin? Please tell me it's a big dog. I'm like, now he's like 15 pounds. And the vet literally said, he has an hour to live. Get him in here now. Oh, my God. Yeah. So, you know, don't give your dog Motrin.

He's fine. He took him. They pumped his stomach and did some other stuff. But anyway, look, this conversation has nothing to do with dogs or, or, I, ibuprofen or analgesics or any of that stuff. No, no, I got to say something. Motrin is actually acetamidifin. What I was thinking of was my doll, which I believe is for, you know.

Menstrual cramps? Yeah. You know, cramps. Are you sure Motrin is acetaminephine? I don't think so. All right. You know what? I think Tylenol is acetamine.

I think motrin is a cedomipotin. Motrin is probably ibuprofen. Yep, you're right. It's hydropin. Damn it. Maybe you remember once upon a time when I was the spokesman for a little company called Tylenol. Take comfort in our strength. Remember that?

Yeah. And then I remember that they had this event where they got tampered. They had to come up with the tamper-proof things because some asshole did something. That was before me. Was it? No coincidence there? You didn't? You sure?

Tylenol literally changed the whole game. That was one of the great stories in PR. that tampering and that poisoning, they got all kinds of advice from all kinds of crisis management people. One firm said, you got to get all that product off the shelves in the community where you sold it, not just the store. Another one said, no, no, you got to get all the product off the shelves in that state. And another one said, you should really think about getting all the product off the shelves on the whole East Coast or whatever coast it was. Thailand and all said, we're taking all the product off every shelf everywhere in the world.

And then we're going to introduce the childproof cap. And that is when their share went over 50% and stayed there for a very long time. Anyhow, I think defending free speech is best expressed by the right to have the conversation we just did. It's neither here nor there. But it did happen. Chuck said menstrual cramps in a way that might come back to haunt him. I don't know.

But I promise you this. Greg Lukianoff is a guy worth listening to. His foundation is doing really, really, really important work. And this conversation was a lot of fun to have, even in my somewhat drug-addled state. Without any further ado, it's episode 310, the eternally radical idea. Coming at you right after this. Do do do do do do do do dumb Well are you sick of it yet

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If we come out of the gate, Greg, and solve dark energy, that would be completely unexpected. Nobody's expecting that. Amazing. And I say this to you as a guy who's entering the 10th year of narrating how the universe works, which is hysterical, right? Because never before in the history of television. and my estimation has a title so colossally failed to live up to its promise. It's almost the opposite, isn't it?

It happens all the time in scientific history, though. We're kind of like, we figured everything out, except these two kind of weird things, but everything else makes sense. And it's like, oh, actually it turns out those two things are pretty big. There was a time, like, tell me if I'm wrong, but I think going back into the early days of the Royal Academy, when people would present their findings, right? Back in those days, the headlines were not only honest, but they were so completely specific, right? Like, on the effects of introducing acid onto the feathers of a southbound sparrow,

right? I mean, like, they were so specific, and then they would talk for hours about it. It was a simpler time. More acid on sparrows. So speaking of headlines, minds. I mean, I hesitate to say what's new because every time I ask you that question, we just have to decide which one to focus on. You are in a space, this business of wokeness and cancel culture and just free speech in general. I mean, has there ever been a more interesting time to be Greg

Lukianoff than right now? Unfortunately, I don't think so. The situation since 2014 on campus has gotten so much worse over the past couple of years, particularly since 2020. The number of professors being fired, we can't see a parallel, you know, since McCarthyism in terms of the number of professors getting canned. And what's funny is, back in McCarthyism, the law wasn't even clear that you couldn't fire professors for being communist. It wasn't until 1957 that became the law. And the solidification of like First Amendment protections for academic freedom and for campus free speech. That wasn't done until 1973. And there is literally no meaningful comparison to what cancel culture has like wrought on campus. And at the same time, you still

have people claiming that this thing isn't even happening. So I'm coming out with a book called Canceling of the American Mind with a 22 year old genius named Ricky Schlaught, she's amazing. And really like, it's partially out of frustration to be kind of like, no, no, this isn't some little scholarly uptick. This is something they're going to be studying in 100 years trying to figure out how the country lost its mind. Because when things happened this quickly, it's impossible to assess, right? Yeah, absolutely. We're moving at light speed, and it's easy and kind of fun to look back at the headlines 150 years ago

because we have a century and a half to kind of form an opinion and try and figure things out. But I wasn't kidding when I said, I never know where to begin with you, because, I mean, part of me wants to ask you about Stanford. and the actual hell is going on. That's dear to my heart, because that's my alma mater. Right. And the first thing that readers need to understand, readers, people reading this show right now. Our listeners can't read, Greg, so really just slow it down, walk us through.

What in the world happened to that poor judge, Duncan, right? Yeah, it's completely nuts, and it's profoundly disappointing. The good thing to come out of it, I'm going to preview beforehand, is that the dean's handling of it, is some of the best behavior I've seen, period, at an elite school. So there is some good news at the end of this. But I'm still arguing with people on Twitter who are trying to tell me, First Amendment specialist, you know, who learned all my stuff at Stanford, that, oh, no, shout downs are just part of free speech. That's totally fine.

And I'm like, okay, here's my thing. First of all, you're law students. You've been taught that that's nonsense. And you're also being hypocrites because they're like, if this happened to, like, a speaker you like, you'd immediately be like, oh, wow. So for your audience, Judge Kyle Duncan, he's a Trump appointee, he's conservative, and he doesn't shy away from controversy. He's also a circuit court judge.

He is one level below the Supreme Court. These are the kind of people that lawyers are intimidated to talk in front of and usually are highly deferential to because, you know, like we are trained that when you're talking to someone who's that eminent, that usually you kind of try to behave yourself and be like a serious thinker. And partially because he... Manners? Yeah.

And because he had some conservative rulings, like including one in which he, one of the ones they were really focused on was whether or not there was a motion to address a, someone who was in jail for child pornography possession to be addressed by a different gender pronoun. And he wrote something that I think actually was probably consistent with the law that, no, they couldn't and wouldn't do that. You know, controversial. I get it.

That's a major taboo on campus. these days. And there were other decisions related to voting rights, you know, where I don't agree with them on some of the stuff. But again, conservative judge, no shock here. Who was invited? Who was invited to speak? It was invited by the Federal Society. Now, I went to Stanford in 1997. The Federal Society was already not, which is a conservative law students group. It was already not a popular group. This was a tiny, unpopular minority at Stanford. There is literally, as best we can tell, one conservative professor at Stanford Law School on the faculty.

There used to be three, and now it's just basically former Judge Michael McConnell there. So you're already talking about like a minority of students who are not very well liked on campus with a lot of students who are going to one of the most prestigious law schools in the country acting like they're the underdogs, shouting down a circuit court judge, and really putting up the pictures of members of the federal society, on posters all over campus. And the thing that people really need to understand is Stanford is a tiny school. There's only 180 students there.

It's a very intimate setting. And that means, you know, if you have a bad breakup, if, like, it ends up feeling claustrophobically small. And the extent to which they personally targeted the Federal Society members who invited, you know, a circuit court judge, it was unlike anything I'd seen. So it begins with a shout down that they don't let them talk for 10 minutes. again, you know, Judge Kyle Duncan. Then an administrator, a DEI administrator, gets up with a pre-prepared speech that she gives for seven minutes. So we're 20 minutes into an event here.

And it's clear, and this is one thing that's hard to prove, but it happens in every single case that there are DEI administrators who are like in the room and doing nothing. This is Steinbach. Is that her name? Yeah, Dean Steinbach. Yeah. The same thing happened in Nicholas Christakis' incident back at Yale, back in 2015. when he was surrounded by all the angry students. One of the things that I didn't know

was there were DEI administrators in that crowd who also did nothing to calm the situation down. And that's partially because in our experience, they help encourage these situations. And the speech she gave in the immortal words of Dean Turing Steinbach, she asked, is the juice worth the squeeze over and over again?

Which is just such an irritating kind of like... Borderline dirty, too. I mean, I would have to inject that into this. It's like the lemon song. Yes. So she asked this, And what she's talking about is when she says it different times, what she's talking about free speech itself,

like are our free speech policies worth it at Stanford? And we're lucky that we're going to a school where students will get such good training that they will be able to oppose our free speech policies at Stanford. Another part of the juice is worth to squeeze is she blamed him for the divisiveness that was being created by his presence on campus. And that is there anything possibly that you could deliver

that would be worth the pain that you're causing this community. It's kind of like, he's a circuit court judge. He came with a speech about how the Fifth Circuit deals with the Supreme Court. It was very much like, it's something that any constitutional law nerd should have been like dying to get into. And it's like, well, of course, the juice is worse to squeeze. This is what you're here to study. And again, just to point out and reinforce the screamingly obvious, the audience is law students. these are our future litigators, our future judges.

Our future Supreme Court justices. Quite possibly, right? I mean, you can draw a pretty straight line to a number of justices right from Stanford Law. And so that's part of the reason I wanted to have you back, because last time we spoke, I think we acknowledged that in many cases, things have to go splat. Things have to get a little worse before they get better. And when you embrace that idea, you live. look at a travesty like this thing at Stanford, this temper tantrum that was then sort of validated

by this DEI's dean's comments. But then there's good news, right? Because she's been somewhat repudiated by the big cheese. So where are we now in the back and forth? So in the back and forth, overwhelmingly the public gets that shouting down this judge was wrong and the students behaved abysmally. And they also, since you're able to watch the video yourself, that most people understand that the administrator basically made herself the star of the show in a way, in an anti-free speech speech that claimed to be defending freedom of speech. But after that, Dean Jenny Martinez, who I like and respect a great deal, who's the dean of the law school, she came out and she apologized to the judge appropriately. He wasn't allowed to do his speech, but apologized to the students who hosted him because basically the whole thing got yelled over and disrupted in a way that they never would. have tolerated if it was a different speaker. So she apologized. And then the students revolted again saying that counter speech is free speech. True, but counter speech is also not

shouting someone down. So basically, these aren't advanced concepts, you know. So they really went at Dean Martinez. And when we talk about there being like 100 students at the initial protest that dozens of students went in to shout down at Judge Duncan, remember, this is a school of 180 people. You're talking about, sorry, the classes are 180 people. This is a huge portion of the entire population of the school coming out. They dressed up all in like black, black outfits to more or less like shame Jenny Martinez for apologizing to the dean. So there was lots of pressure on Dean Martinez. And in a lot of these other cases, like at Yale, over and over again, actually at Yale, administrators come out with sort of a tepid, sort of like, well, this was not ideal. You know, we hope to get to the bottom and everybody was well-intentioned.

They were really trying to get something like that out of Dean Martinez, and she had had it. She wrote a 10-page memo talking about how schools, she even goes so far as to adopt something that I've come around to, something called the Calvin Report that came out of University of Chicago, that says, listen, we're not supposed to be the speakers ourselves. The university is not supposed to be taking political positions. The free speech actors, the academic freedom actors on campus are the professors themselves and the students themselves. She came out with this great statement on free speech at a law school, how it's important to understand freedom of speech, how you don't have a right to shout down. She also gets into the fact that in California the law is a little different, that they're actually supposed to be bound by First Amendment norms when it comes to freedom of speech due to a state law called the Leonard law. So the response that Dean Martinez came out with gives me great hope. So basically nothing made me feel more despondent than the initial behavior.

here at my alma mater. I felt like these are students who have been miseducated about free speech since they were little. They don't understand the idea that they don't get to shout down whoever they like.

They don't understand the double standards that they were applying. But also, nothing's made me feel more hopeful about the possibility that we could start to turn a corner

that Mende Martinez's response, which was the best response I've seen out of an elite school possibly in my career. It was, I mean, I read the whole thing and I don't really have it. It's 10 pages.

It's a lot. And the fact that it was greeted by so many with, they put their hands over the ears and just what, la, la, la, la, la, la. Still don't want to hear it. It's, Greg, it's petulant. Yeah. Oh, as far as a class issue, by the way, Mike, that really bugged me because they were shouting a lot of really rude stuff at him, which was just childish. But the one that irked me probably the most was they start making fun of a guy who went to Louisiana State University and was top of his class that you wouldn't even gotten into Stanford law school. Right.

And it made me so mad because I'm kind of like, guess what, guys, a lot of you would not have gotten into Stanford Law School if you were not a legacy or your parents were donors. Exactly. That's called your slip is showing, dude, in a big, big way. You elitist jerks. Yeah. Well, my first thought, though, when I saw the tape and got into the story, was of you. And it was purely on a very personal level because I know you now. And I know that you probably sat in that classroom once upon a time.

Yeah. So talk a little bit, if you would, about fire. And whether or not these kinds of things just reinvigorate in you the sense of purpose that drove you to do this in the first place, or does it fill you with the level of despair and despondency that no words can fully articulate? Honestly, it depends on the day. There are some days where I'm like, I was put on this earth to do this fight. And the other days where I'm like, I won a nap because I've been doing this fight a lot. But really, I did follow the trajectory.

When it first happened, I'm like, I don't even know. This is so far gone. I don't know if this can even be repaired. But then seeing something hopeful come out of it with the Dean Martinez thing, you know, it definitely made me feel like, okay, maybe there's an opportunity here. And meanwhile, so fire decided to, as you know, we changed ourselves. from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression back on June 6.

And this is partially because we saw in 2020 things had gotten so bad for free speech nationally. And some of this was COVID-related, a lot of it, wasn't. Just a really weird sort of acceleration of cancel culture, this mass intolerance movement, that we decided to do, to look into the demographics of the United States to find out who we could win to be part of the 21st century free speech movement that we want to, you know, we want to lead, frankly. And on the right, you know, there's still a good libertarian element in there. So we found that there were definitely lots of people we could recruit there. But even on the left, people on the left, 45 or older, they're good on free speech.

And people on the left who are 30 and younger, they just haven't been taught very much about it. 30 to 45, we're not really sure we can win them over. But what we're trying to do right now is we're trying to create a million person strong free speech Army. We wanted to do it over the course of three years. And in our first year, we got to about half a million, you know, new emails, new Twitter followers, all this kind of stuff. Because what we know we need is there are cases where you're not going to win in court. You're not going to win a First Amendment battle. I always give the example of, do we talk about the PayPal thing last time I was here? No. I don't think we did. I think we did, yeah, about them fining people or they were going to find

people $2,500 or something. Oh, yes. Just real quick. They said they'll fine you $2,500. for misinformation. And they actually even say in their sole discretion if you engage in misinformation. Lovely protections there. We weren't going to win if we sued them.

Because can they do that? Probably they can. Should they do that? Absolutely not. And that's when you need the Twitter mob. This is going to sound even weird to people's ears. You need a Twitter mob

for free speech. You need a Facebook group saying, hey, actually, you know what? Don't fire the pizza guy who has an opinion you don't like. don't get rid of someone from their regular job because they cracked a joke that went viral and was a little bit obnoxious. We need a like a million person free speech army to fight back. And we've done so well that we now actually have almost as many people on the left as we have on the right as part of our group.

And having gotten to almost half a million in the first year, we're now thinking that really like this movement's got legs because people are tired of living like this. The danger is people can get used to the idea that, yeah, okay, I'm. I have political opinions, but I can't really share them or also lose my job. But Americans don't want to live like that. And we want everybody who cares about free speech to come, join in the new free speech movement because we need. People don't think it matters. But like that single email that goes in some cases to a boss, to a CEO, considering if they're going to fire somebody, just one person saying, by the way, stand your ground. Don't fire that kid.

That's just lame. Like, that makes a difference. Well, then let's dedicate the rest of our conversation to putting whatever topic comes up through that lens and make a really reasonable case as to why people should sign up for one more freaking thing, right? Because people are tired of signing up for stuff, but... But we can win, though. Like, this will feel cooler because you can actually see the results. This is what happened, by the way. When they were censoring Roll Dahl, when that stuff came out, it was awesome, like how fast our free speech supporters came into, like, how quickly they signed

the letter, got it out. Because that's the stuff that'll move the needle, Greg. That's personal. Charlie and you mess with Charlie and a Chocolate Factory? You mess with James Bond. You mess with Agatha Christie. Now you're starting to mess with people's... Oh, with goosebumps too, Aral Stein. Right. They edited Aral Stein with him even knowing.

He found out later that they'd rewritten his stuff to be less offensive. And meanwhile, particularly for something like Charlie and Chocolate Factory, it's like, we love it and we remember it because it was kind of warped. Of course. Do do do do do do do do do. Dumb. Well, people are still... Raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial.

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by John D. McDonald, who created this character called Travis McGee. And he's my favorite continuing character. He occurs in 22 mysteries, all with color in the title, right? Deadly shade of gold, bright orange for the shroud and so forth. They're written in the early 60s. Many of them are morality plays, but they take place at a time when obviously our social mores were different. Our views on everything were different. Yeah. But the charm of the books is that in part anyway, aside from just writing a great yarn, McDonald puts us in a space and time. And he creates a time capsule of sorts

in much the same way Mark Twain did, and much the same way any great writer would do. And this... Abacob. Yes, oh, my God. But the desire to go back and bend the language to comport with whatever it is we now high-five ourselves for seeing,

You know, I mean, how did that happen? Was it frog in the boiling water? Or can you find one moment when we just abandoned the principle of preservation in favor of signaling our virtue? I can't quite find one moment. But I think that it's been, I call it the anti-free speech movement. And it started on campus was one year after the free speech movement. people like Herbert Marcuse. America has a problem that we refer to people who are, you know, Marxist, utopianists who believe in authority should have more power.

We call them liberals too. And the same breath as we say people like Mario Savio, who actually believed in free speech on campus. So left versus liberal. Left versus liberal is a different deal. Yeah, exactly. Totally. And meanwhile, this movement on campus, this movement to actually become free speech skeptical, even though like a lot of people don't want to, make it sound like it was a conspiracy theory that essentially like the, it started as people argued

for free speech when they needed it when they weren't very powerful, but then closed the door behind them when they didn't need it anymore. That is true that that's not what most people wanted or most people were thinking. But if you look at what Marcos was actually right, that's exactly what he was saying. He was saying, like, use this, you know, what it's useful for us. But in 65, he was flat out saying that conservatives and right-wingers, like, basically, like, they should have less free speech rights because they're regressive. We're the good authoritarians who should be trusted.

So this has been a slow process. But one by one, you start going after the things that can make people imagine a different way of being. That essentially, if you read, if you love history, if you love reading snapshots of previous times, there's a great danger in that to utopians. The kind of people think they're part of Plato's guardian class. You know, they're afraid of this stuff because it makes you realize, wait a second, if things were that different, back then and they seem arbitrary and silly to us now, what if maybe now there's some stuff that's arbitrary and silly? And when you have a strong ideological movement, you can't allow for that kind of disquieting

idea that not everyone has known the Big T truth the entire time in history. Even though, like, sometimes people are like, oh, you just got to update it so it's nicer for children's sensibilities today, I do see something really quite nefarious in it because kids get the idea. They get it really quickly that, I forget who said this originally, but the past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. Like, kids understand that. If you basically instead really want to indoctrinate somebody going like, oh, no, we've always known the truth. It's always been like this.

And by the way, this has been known throughout history. And there's good and evil people and we're the good ones and those are the bad ones. Yeah. Because we got the white hats and they got the black hats. I don't know if you said this. I don't think you did. I think somebody that was describing your book on Amazon said that the council culture thing is both real and new. And I certainly believe it's real, but I'm not so sure about

the new thing. And when you start talking about Plato and not the children's toy, but the philosopher and Socrates and so forth, you know, there was a thing back in the day, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but I think it was Damnachio Memore. And it was the idea, basically today, it's the erasure of memory. So when you do something so awful back in the day, an emperor might etch your face out of a painting. They would leave the painting up. But the most famous one was a Servius, I think,

who basically impersonated Marcus Cyrillius, and he had a family, and things went off the rails, and one of his kids turned out to be a horrible actor. But rather than erase them from memory, they left all the portraits up and just crossed out his face. Right. They did that in the Soviet Union, too.

Of course. The pictures of Stalin. I got to take it out of the pictures. Yeah. So this idea of cancel culture, it doesn't seem new to me. It just feels that way, I guess, because there's no such thing as an old joke if you're hearing it for the first time. Yeah. Well, I am making the argument.

So canceling of the American mind comes out. October 17th, got to pitch the book. But we have lots of new data. We're going to hit it hard, man. We're going to hit it hard. Really excited about how it's come out. I can't believe it's actually that far in the future that it's coming out. We are, you know, mostly done with it.

And I am trying to make the argument that cancel culture. Now, of course, it was controversial that we called it cancel culture at all. Because definitely, you know, in the circles that I live, that's a taboo term. And it's like, oh, you don't want to use that. But when we looked at the numbers, we're like, okay, we can try to make some people on the interwebs who already believe that cancel culture is a myth or a hoax. we could try to change the name to make them happy. Guess what?

You're never going to make them happy. But what you do in the process is you lose the term that most Americans understand. So we're like, no, people think of this as cancel culture. We're going to call. And we call out cancel culture on the right and the left, of course, because we are actually consistent people. But I'm trying to make the argument that essentially cancel culture, even though exactly like you say, ostracism, gossip used to enforce conformity, all of these kind of identity-based

things that we use to dismiss each other. all of these have been around in different ways all throughout human history. But I do think that something particularly weird and special happened after the introduction of social media, after it reached a certain level of adoption. And I've been thinking about, like, we have this kind of state of nature that was first inhabited by junior high schoolers, that social media was like a colony basically settled by junior high school people. And of course, it continues to act like some of the rules of junior high school. And my point with the social media, and the reason why I think it's so significant, and people like to downplay it as well, but when you introduce an additional billion eyes or a billion mouths, for that matter, into a discussion, there's literally no way you're going to escape from that without it being incredibly disruptive. It's like wishing that the printing press didn't completely transform the world back in the 16th century. It's like, oh, no, we can just make this go away.

No, you can't. Things are going to be insane. Well, tell Henry the 8th, right, because wasn't he the guy? He was like, nope, nope, nope, nope, not going to do that. 1521, man, and boy, did he fail. I could talk about the Henry the 8th stuff all the time. He was a hoot. But right now, like, essentially, we've been through this incredibly anarchical period,

this incredibly crazy period. And I think we should call it cancel culture in the same way that even though, for example, the Red Skares were about, you know, everything from xenophobia to legitimate concerns about spying, all this kind of stuff, that we call that the Red Scare. I think that we should call the period from 2014 to whenever this thing ends, man. This should be called The Age of Cancel Culture is my pitch. I want to go back to something you said before about the kids at Stanford. You said, you know, they're standing there and they've been taught this their whole lives.

And isn't that really the problem? I mean, I know for Mike and I, if we've talked about this before, we know at a very early age that freedom of speech was something that you stood up for and it was okay to disagree. And nowadays, it's a foreign idea. And is this just sort of the death of manners to a degree? No, I think it's something that's actually more dangerous than that. It's one of the reasons why John Haidt and I became friends is we found ourselves violently agreeing on stuff like when we first hung out.

There was someone talking about like how all the evil in the world comes from greed. And we were both kind of like, honestly, a lot of the evil in the world comes from people who think they're going to save you. Basically, like the Guardian class people, like we're talking about, the people who think only they can see truth and only they can bring the stupid rabble to some better place. Those are the scary people in history. So I think that there has been for a long time this anti-free speech movement. And I feel like they've been learning from a young age that free speech is the argument of the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron. Three bees.

This is nonsense. But this is propaganda, essentially, that comes out of education schools in higher ed, that doesn't like to grapple with the fact that locally, more or less, kind of like people who are ideologically identical to each other are very similar, are in charge. They are the powerful in higher ed. They are the powerful in K through 12. They like to gloss over that. So the argument that essentially part of the problem is free speech, because since we are already the majority, we could actually, if it wasn't for this free speechy thing, we could punish. all of these people.

And since we're the guardian class, we can actually, we'll be good with it. So I do think that it's actually, unfortunately, using some things that are very real problems, like bully. I actually think one of the reasons why it hit campuses so intensely in 2013 was because in 2010, there were a lot of cyberbullying scares. Most of them actually ended up being not so simple as were presented in the media. They were much more complicated. But there was a sense that we have to do something about cyberbullying, which also was something

of course it came out of social media because suddenly we could see how mean people were being to each other. And to be clear, people did not, should not be as cruel, particularly as physically cruel as they were to each other when I was a kid to occasionally to weirdos like me, but also, you know, like there was a nastiness that I, you know, I'm definitely for good riddance for that, particularly the mistreatment of LGBT kids. It's like, no, by all means, stand up against that. But I think they replaced it with something that was much more simplistic where it's basically. We're basically just, we call this in coddling the American mind the third grade on truth. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. We also talk about what doesn't kill you makes you weaker as being a terrible piece of advice and always trust your feelings. So I think that some of this oversimplified way of looking at the world comes from a very good place.

But when law students are still thinking that essentially the most noble thing I can do is shout this person down without realizing that historically the mobs that shout people down are. of the bad guys is a bad sign. I look at it, like, what do all the bad guys have in common? A black hat. Secret layer. Yeah, but some good guys have a secret layer too. Some do. True, true.

But every bad guy I've met has this one quality. They're certain. There's certain. Yes. Right? Certainty is the enemy. It's the enemy of a lot of things. To my way of thinking,

enemy of another one of my favorite C words, which is curiosity, right? So if you're a third, fourth year law student at Stanford and you're in that room, in that moment, you have convictions, beliefs, ideas, and you are either certain of them or you are curious as to how they might be reshaped. And you're curious, or at least open to the possibility, that you might have somehow gotten your head up your ass. You're open to those possibilities. every bad guy I've ever met is simply not open to those possibilities. I completely agree. And when we talk about free speech culture in canceling of the American mind,

one of the main things is taking seriously the possibility, well, we sometimes phrase as weakly as the possibility you might be wrong. Knowing full well that you're wrong about a million things is a much healthier way to go through life, taking seriously the possibility you might be wrong, being curious where other people are coming from. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, I'm a First Amendment lawyer, But there are times when I think that protest can get things wrong because you have to be really certain you're right to protest. Whereas I consistently, I'm kind of like, you know, in the grand scheme of things, I don't know all that much.

So I'm going to sit down, I'm going to hear you out. You may not persuade me at all. But otherwise, it's just the regular old arrogance of power, the instinct towards conformity and comfort, all of these like negative aspects of human nature that we used to be a little bit more aware of as being. I think about like the old idioms that really express free speech culture, things like to each their own, everyone's entitled to their opinion. It's a free country, walk a mile on a man's shoes, like all of these things that actually we set a lot as kids, but they're good democratic habits that are that a lot of times are pointing the finger directly at you and saying, you know, you don't know everything. And if you do think that you know everything, you're possibly a dangerous person. But also, these aren't good democratic, small D democratic habits. Well, it's also, it's the problem with platitudes and bromides and tropes and stereotypes too, right?

There's a lot of truth and a lot of stereotypes. But when you just keep throwing accelerant on it and then start applying it to the masses, well, then you're in politics. I mean, that's why so many politicians talk in platitudes, I think. And unfortunately, it's why a lot of professors have started to do it. and why a lot of students have started to think it. Like, they're probably, in fact, I would bet big, that there are a lot of kids out there

who would benefit from being told, look, have the courage of your convictions. Be a little more certain than you are right now. So you can make an accounting of who you are because you're just an amalgamation of your own ideas. But sitting right next to that kid is another kid who needs to be talked off the certainty limb, right? and get a little pick line of curiosity jammed in there

because you can't be certain and humble at the same time and you can't be arrogant and curious at the same time. So that's my pitch for getting more people to sign up for your Million Man Army, because if the country just becomes in a really, really, really fundamental way, a bit more curious and a bit less certain, might we not also become a bit more skeptical of people who look into the lens and nod

and talk in a crisp well-minded? modulated baritone, about the certainty of two trillion universes out there when in fact, they're only two billion. Yeah. My fancy term for it is epistemic humility. And I don't call it intellectual humility, because intellectual humility is just about things relating to the intellect. I mean, it's about the fundamental unknowability of all things.

And this is something that I really try to instill into my children. I remember being challenged, and I'm not a religious person myself, but I spend part of my career defending people of faith. And I take it very seriously. But I was questioned once by a Mormon friend of mine about, do you actually, this must be very disconcerting. Like you preach the value of doubt and awe and all these kind of stuff. And it must be unsettling. And I'm like, oh, no.

Like looking up in a night sky and knowing how little I matter in the whole thing and how amazing, how I will work for the rest of my life to read as many books as I can and learn as much about as I can. And I will still know the tiniest drop of the ocean of things. You know, and that's awesome. That's not a sad fact of life. That's a wonderful fact of life. Have you ever heard Descartes, right? Ergo Kajitam, Ergo Sam, Ergo Sam. I think therefore I am.

I read an article once. I don't know if it's true or not, but the author was arguing that that's not exactly what he said, right? He's in jail and he's being asked to prove his existence and the popular explanation says, because I can think I know I am me. But the author was saying, no, he actually said something like, ergo doubtitum, ergo sum. I doubt, therefore I am. And right, if you kind of go back and forth

between the idea of thinking versus doubting, right, those are different words. And while I'm no fan of cynicism, I do think it is incumbent on the listener to wrap himself in a new layer of skepticism nowadays. Good-natured skepticism, but skepticism nevertheless. Yeah. Well, we have a recording on the fire website. It's one that we taped ourselves, but it's the learned at hand 1944 spirit of liberty speech. Oh, the judge. Yeah. He talks about liberty and not not knowing, right? Like the humility of liberty is that which is not sure that it is right. And I say this sometimes in front of students, and it sounds, and they're like, I don't understand even what that meant. Like, it sounds like a zen cone to them. And I'm like, that's the problem. The spirit of liberty speech by learned at hand

is one of the wisest, most beautiful. It talks about how if liberty dies in the heart, then no constitution can revive it. You've got it exactly right. And it was one of those things. It was wisdom that was hard won. Because in 1944, the intellectuals were all betting on,

or for that matter, 10 years before that, the intellectuals were all in the U.S. were betting on this democratic experiment's going to end, and it's going to be replaced either by fascism, which more intellectuals liked than your, usually willing to admit or communism, some kind of authoritarian top-down kind of system. Some is. And you even see this cynicism in Supreme Court decisions, you know, after the war.

But it's a beautiful moment to see learned at hand really capturing what is weird and unique about free societies that work. And it is this is a humility. It is this idea that we all have a value to society. if we hold these beliefs in our hearts, we can actually keep this experiment going. And I think history, you know, that's proven him right. Yeah, that's beautiful. I had forgotten about that speech, but it's terrific. And I realize now I probably plagiarized it with this podcast, which is called The Way I

Heard It, which is the Poor Man's Version of really saying the same thing. You know, it's what I think, could be wrong, probably am, you know. Yeah. But I heard it. I'm struck too. So, okay, so Hand lays out this speech in 1944. Yep. You changed the name of your foundation.

It goes from what to what? We used to be the foundation for individual rights in education, and now it's expression. So you go from education to expression. Hand says this in 1944. If I remember right, you told me you changed the name on June 6th. Is it some weird coincidence that you changed the name of your foundation on D-Day? It is actually a weird coincidence, but I was pretty excited about it. I'm an old history nerd who misses the old...

I mean, dude, think about it. You have basically offered an alternative to the ACLU. Not an opposite, but another way to think. They've got, what, a couple dozen, 20, 19 different programs. They have 19 programs. They have 19 programs. You have speech. Speech all day long, day and night, 365 days a year.

And, you know, when I think about D-Day, when I think about what was really at stake and what that conflict was really about, I mean, the greatest thing, arguably, that was saved is the freedom to express. And here you are, changing your name on the longest day and up to your neck in the longest fight, man. It's pretty great. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem.

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I was pretty excited that it just ended up being on D-Day. Partially because one thing we couldn't control is when Politico would do its big release, we had an embargo to announce it. And yeah, it was, we definitely felt a little bit like we were doing something kind of crazy because we knew we were taking on a much, much bigger world. But it has led to really cool stuff, like the fact that we get the whole team together every morning to talk about like the goofy free speech incidents that happen every day. And like sometimes the stuff is just plain ridiculous or funny. Sometimes you're looking at other parts of the world where it's just really tragic.

Because even though we don't, we limit our advocacy to the United States, we're always pointing to other countries to be kind of like, you know that limitation on speech that you think would be great? this is what it looks like in the real world. It's not so great. I mean, reminding people, when they talk about limitations, there is definitely in the sort of like anti-free speech movement, there's this sort of like European exceptionalism in there, which I always take real issue with because my mother, you know, I grew up over there partially.

My mother is British. My dad is Russian. I spent a lot of time over there. And the more familiarity, the more you're kind of like, oh, they got all sorts of crazy things wrong. But apparently, like on campus in particular, You're not supposed to be a jerk like me who goes over to Europe and I say, oh, by the way, we're actually right on the free speech thing. And you guys have idiotic ideas about this.

And when you're having debates about which cartoonists should go to jail and which one shouldn't, then you've already gone down the wrong approach. But people seem to have this impression that all these laws are working out just fine. I'm like, 3,000 people were arrested in Britain in 2016 alone. Actually, sorry, about 3,500 were arrested in Britain for posting offensive. offensive jokes or offensive words on social media. It's kind of like, that's thousand. There was something like 100,000 people who were brought in or arrested for non-hate crime speech.

Like basically, no, this isn't working out great, even in countries that we used to think of as being just as free as we are. So like, pump the brakes here, people. Yeah, man. Tap the brakes. Let's go back to the post-war real quick, too. Not the 40s, but I guess the 50s, because you mentioned it at the top. And I think maybe we glossed over it a little bit.

you compare and juxtapose McCarthyism. Yeah. To what's happening to professors in college today. I mean, tell me if I got the numbers right, but it seemed like it's not a fair comparison. I mean, back in those days, you're talking about 150, 200 professors who were basically outed, shut down, muzzled, and blacklisted. We're coming up on a thousand right now. Well, that's a thousand targeted. And the ones who are actually either fired or forced to resign, that's closer to 200.

So when we went to deep dive into the McCarthyism numbers, it's about 100 professors fired was the one, the number that we hit over and over again, with some claiming that it was more like 150. So we think the number is probably somewhere in between. But a couple things. I'm a serious history guy. So it's kind of like when I read some of the scholarship on this, there's a tendency. not to take seriously the idea that there wasn't national security crisis. And it's like, yeah, there were actually American citizens selling and British citizens selling or giving, you know, secrets to someone who had a murder rate as high as Hitler, Stalin. So I think that people would be freaked out too.

One of the reason why it's not all that comparable is because three of the years, you know, were the Korean War, which was an undeclared war with China, where MacArthur wanted to use nuclear weapons. And again, the law was not clear until 1957 that you couldn't do that in the first place. So it isn't comparable in the sense that there are all sorts of factors at play in the 1950s that aren't applicable today. And the law is really strong. And nonetheless, we're talking about 150 to 200 professors losing their jobs. But again, like you said, around 900 of them targeted with about two thirds of those 900 being punished in some way. Also most important to keep in mind. and we try to lay this out in canceling the American mind,

you're already talking about a situation where, for example, at Harvard, only 3% of professors are conservative in the first place. So there's already, like, tremendous homogeneity. There are secret hearings, which sounds completely, like, crazy. If you know enough about this, though, this is something that Laura Kipnis writes about, and Applebaum at the Atlantic writes about it. This is a known quantity.

You have biased-related incident programs where you can call in, if your professor says, offensive things, anonymously, and obviously this gets a beautiful. used. So the fact that you can even find this money, which is to burn under the current circumstance, is all the more remarkable. And then I have to deal with people who are saying this isn't even happening. Oh, but here's something that Mike drives me nuts. When I start explaining this stuff, and when it comes to cancel culture, when it comes to student-on-student cancel culture, that is overwhelmingly from the left. And when it comes in businesses, that

is largely cancel culture coming from the left. When it comes to professors, about 35, to 40% of those professors who are targeted. They're targeted from the right. A lot of those professors have lost their jobs due to campaigns to get them fired on social media. But when I watch people suddenly take the issue seriously when they hear that fact. When they hear it's kind of like, oh, you know, like, for example, fire defended Nicole Hannah-Jones. When she had a position that should have given her tenure and they said they weren't going to give it to her, we're like, well, if the position is supposed to give it to her, that seems pretty clear cut. But as soon as someone like suddenly cares about it, when they were like, oh,

Oh, liberals are getting in trouble. It's like, I know you just got more respect for me. I have lost all respect for you. Like, if that's what it took, then suddenly it's like, oh, magically you care now. It's an amazing litmus test. Have you heard of the College of the Ozarks? I have, but don't know too much about it. I just spoke there.

I did love to show Ozark. These two things are polar opposites, Greg. The show Ozark. Physically beautiful, though. I was really impressed by the natural beauty that they highlighted in Ozark. It is staggering. I flew into a little private airport, actually, and drove through these giant limestone ravines and came to this sprawling campus that's been there since 1906.

Now, it's a Christian university, and it's known colloquially as hard work you. This is a liberal arts school, four-year programs, 50 to 60 different fields of study from a county. to zoology. No one has ever graduated with any debt. Love it. Everything's paid for because every student there works a minimum of 15 hours a week on the campus, whether it's in the dairy or the printing press or the fruitcake kitchen or, I mean, it's just, it's, they have a hundred and twenty separate workstations. They make fruitcake. They do make fruitcake, yes. Last year they sold 30,000 Fruitcakes. Oh, fruit cake I should try then.

They have a machine shop. I wish I was leading towards some sort of super insightful question, but I just feel like after talking about Stanford. Oh, no, I hear what you're getting at. It's the other models I get excited about, like, because elite higher education matters too much to America right now. And I know that a lot of your listeners might be kind of like, well, that sounds a little exaggerated.

I'm like, no. Way too many people who are leaders on the left and the right. They went to the fancies. I know I say this is someone who went to a fancy too. And I think that's really harmful in a lot of ways. There's a great book by Evan Mandry called Poison Ivy. Because I started working when I was 11. I really weirded people out in law school because I was sending money home to my family while I was there.

Because I remember someone being kind of like, why can't you borrow money from your parents? And I'm like, because I'm sending money home to my parents. Like, what are you talking about? And I definitely had like a little bit of a class chip on my shoulder. I still have a lot of them. You're all better now, Greg. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah, that totally went away.

But I was talking about, like, how weird it was to end up in this weird place and discover the conspiracies I didn't know existed. So I'd never heard of the school called Andover. And to discover that a disproportionate number of my classmates went to the school Andover, and they still thought it was a really important thing to mention. I was like, what is this creepiness? It's like Chote, Andover, all the big, big Boston. Yeah, Exeter's a big one. Up schools. Totally creepy. But he wrote this book about like how bad elite higher education is actually promoting social mobility. For every kid like me or my best friend John Brady, who was a carpenter for 10 years before Stanford, you know, 100 other rich kids get to stay in the upper classes. And I think the number is something like there are as many kids from the 1% at most of these elite schools are from the bottom 60 or 70% of the entire American distribution. And that is an indictment. That cannot stand. We need other ways that get just as much resources and use for, you know, smart auto-didacts to be able to sort of like raise their hand and say, actually, I am a harder working person.

And meanwhile, I really want people to understand, like, if they hire from Harvard, for example, sure, a lot of smart people go to Harvard, a lot of us hardworking people go to Harvard. But 50%, for example, almost 50% of the white students who go to Harvard, they are either kids of alums or they are kids of employees. or they are in sports, which I think is adorable because Harvard doesn't really have sports. Sorry, a little study on that way. Rowing. Yeah, exactly. So basically, guess what the average GPA,

the average GPA at Harvard is right now? Oh, it's going to be higher than it should be, isn't it? A little bit. 3-9, 38. Nice. You actually beat it. It's 3.8. So basically kind of like, if you're hiring from Harvard, yeah, you might have one of these, like,

super bright kids, or you might have the dumbest son of someone who's a professor there, who since they all get 3.8s, it's kind of like you can't even tell if they learned anything. There's got to be better ways. And one of the reasons why you have to focus a little bit on elite schools is they get way too much juice and there's got to be better, more efficient ways for people to raise their hands. And when I got to a Blessing Stanford, I went to American University as a scholarship student. And if you have a class chip on your shoulder, that's the worst place possibly you can go. Because I was friends with all the

other scholarship students and it leads to this kind of oversimplification where poor people are hardworking and decent and hard work and rich people are like rich people are lazy and stupid and then I get to Stanford and I'm like look at all these decent hardworking rich folk and so it was a kind of like a reverse after school special but at the same time kind of like we rely way too much on this system there's got to be better ways to do it and I really like I would love everybody to buy a canceling of the American mind. I'd love everybody to sign up for fires emails to battle for free speech. But also, I keep on telling everybody to read Poison Ivy by Evan Mandry because it's outrageous.

Well, I mean, I think that in a vacuum, most people would agree, sure, we ought to come at it from different angles, simply because we know deep down that not every kid is going to respond the same way to every educational approach. Yeah. And yet, I'll come back to certainty and curiosity. Oh, yeah. We're not curious enough to really give a place like College of the Ozarks an honest look, because once you see it's a Christian school, and look, in no way what I say, that this school is for everybody. I posted about it yesterday when I got back.

It got all kinds of traction on social, not all of it positive, because they don't make any bones about it, right? They're not trying to be all things for all people. You walk in and it says, okay, so we're going to try and churn out some Christ-like graduate who love their country and who are a lot smarter than they were when they came to us. Ideally, we want to work with worthy individuals who don't have the means to procure the aforementioned on their own. It's crystal clear, you know, and if you don't like it, well, then this little slice of heaven might not be for you, as opposed to so many schools working so hard to trumpet

some kind of egalitarian thing and cast a really, really wide. net. And of course, with a wide net, you catch a lot of stuff. You just bring a lot of stuff to the surface that you really didn't want. Yeah, as a screwed up metaphor. Yeah, I think about as far as things that I would love to see. And this is a place where Republicans and Democrats, at least as long as Biden in the office, can actually agree on. Like the fact that Biden talked about, bragged about there being more jobs created that don't require a bachelor's. I was like, yes. More of that. We need a lot more of that. I would like to see, you know, know, gap year be something that is, I would love to see it basically be like, we don't want you to apply to colleges until you've actually had a year of living on your own.

I think that would be transformative. And by the way, also I think I'd be transformative to mental health because I think one of the reasons why in coddling in the American mind is I showed up for college. There was no novelty to personal freedom. I knew how to handle a household. I knew how to handle my life. I knew how to handle a couple drinks. Like, I knew how to, you know, and I was blown away by how watching all of these kids kind of like fizzle down because they couldn't handle like the novelty of any amount of personal independence or freedom. But yeah, I keep on thinking about different ways.

Like, I come back a lot to the different ways autodidax could really show their work. Explain what that means exactly. Autodidax. So autodidics, readers, people who like to study on their own. I was someone who actually hid this, by the way. I was on the football team and nobody knew that I was going to the library on weekends, you know, like for my own fun because, you know, I want to admit to that kind of stuff. So there are some ideas, you know, like there was this edgoblox idea, for example, that essentially every book you read, you take a little exam at the end of it and you get a little thing that verifies that you actually, you know, have mastery in this. Because when I'm interviewing for people at fire, if I know you went to a fancy, all I know is that you probably were pretty smart and pretty hardworking in.

high school. That's about it. I don't know if you've learned anything. And a lot of times what I'm really trying to get at is, are you one of us? Do you live, eat and breathe, freedom of speech? Have you read all of these books on your own even if nobody's stopping you? And that would be a much better predictor of their success in the organization is just knowing the books that they, you know, the ones that they wanted to tell us that they read. That's a much better predictor. And meanwhile, there are people who are being really ambitious about this. Like Sal Khan, like has some great ideas for mastery level education where basically people can really prove that they learned actual things and attain mastery for next to no cost.

Because right now, elite higher education tries to defend itself by saying, yes, it costs $70,000 a year. But if someone comes from the bottom quartile or bottom half, they get a free ride. Forgetting the fact, by the way, also you lose a huge opportunity cost. If you're a poorer kid and you're going to school, you're going to be losing the income you would have been making by working. So that's part of the problem. And also just, I also am living proof of like what the poorer kids are scared of. Because I went to American because they gave me a free ride. I visited one school.

And on the tour, they offered me admission. And I was, okay. You know, I'm, I know I'm vaguely supposed to go to college. So, okay, great. And they chipped away at my scholarships for the next two years. I then wrote about it in the student newspaper saying, was I baited and switched by American University. And then they gave all my money back. But that means I know personally that kind of.

of like, yeah, the poorer kids, they're scared of the $70,000 a year because, yeah, sometimes you'll get the package and then they'll take it away for no good reason. So we need better ways to get at this. And also, as far as, of course, like what you're talking about, vocational training, we just need so much more of that because I think about the difference between my two sons. My seven-year-old, he's all theoretical physics. My five-year-old is all applied. Like, he just wants his hands-on stuff. He wants to fiddle with stuff. He's really good at it. But we need different things that take advantages of different people's strengths. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap.

They have an important role to play for sure. But if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965. And today, they are relevant like never before. with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA.

And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it.

You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself. And see, too, how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to this. 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 mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S. Skills USA. You know, Todd Rose, I know you know, he, uh, collective illusion is a great book. collective illusions is a remarkable read, but the end of average is pretty good, too.

And when he talks about, oh, man, yeah, it's an earlier one. It's an earlier one, but he basically takes the position that, look, average is this thing upon which all our metrics are based, but if you really look closely at it, it doesn't exist. It's just an amalgam. Like the Air Force discovered this when none of their pilots fit into the cockpit because they had constructed a cockpit for a pilot with average dimensions, but nothing was perfect. So that really heralded the onset of the adjustable seat and lots of other adjustable things. The idea that your two kids are going to respond equally to the same kind of education is no less

preposterous. So, yeah, you know, I think it's just a question of resetting the table. And if you think about schools and their relationship to factories, Todd writes about this a lot, too. The bell goes off. Class begins. The bell goes off, shift change. It's kind of like a prize fight. The bell goes off. Come out and start swinging. There's got to be a better way to learn. The bell goes off. Start salivating. That's right. We're a click away from Pavlov and his pooch. But look, as we start to land the plane and as I start to think again about what can we say that we'll persuade people to go? to your site and become a part of this million man army. And by the way, I know you have a lot to say about copyright and whatnot.

Maybe you can take it under parody, or maybe you can get Jack Black's permission, but Seven Nation Army as a theme song for Million Person Army for this whole speech thing. Love it. Would be amazing. That's one of the greatest songs of the 20th century. Does Jack Black, or Jack White, you said Jack Blatt. You know what?

Jack Black's pretty good too. Yeah, Jack Black. Kung Fu Panda, man. I don't see color, right? You see the black and white of Kung Fu Panda? Sorry, Jack White, of course, the white stripes, wrote Seven-A-Shartner. Amazing. It'd be a great...

Anyhow. Great song. So in terms of joining what we're doing, it can be, you know, as simple as just visiting the fire website and looking at some of the material we've already come out with. I have this thing that I do with the former head of the ACLU, Nadine Strausson, who is now a fellow at fire, where we just... She's nicer than... than I am. So, like, I used to call it, like, answers to bad free speech questions,

basically trying to knock out the easiest arguments. And we do this regularly. We talk about, like, is speech violence? And we feel like we have to do kind of a remedial class kind of for the whole country. But in terms of, like, the stuff that we have on Instagram, the stuff that we're reaching controversial platform, but, like, our material on it's great, reaching people through TikTok, we want to teach people about this in new and different ways. So, for example, Like we did a documentary on free speech and comedy. We just did a video with Melissa Etheridge talking about how about censorship and about how she had to self-censor being a gay woman back in the 90s. We did something with a guy from Rage Against the Machine.

We have lots of ways to what we're trying to do is we are lucky enough as a civilization to reach a point where we could take freedom of speech for granted for long enough that we forgot why we had it in the first place. And we have to remind people that there are aspects of your everyday life that you only have thanks to freedom of speech. One thing I'd love to do. I want to do a big documentary series. We did comedy. I don't want to update. Can we take a joke? Because that came out way back in 2015.

There's so much more to write about now. But another thing I want people to know about is the history of American music is the history of freedom of speech. That if you love what America was able to achieve, there were people, there are Americans, generation after generation. who tried to stop it, who demanded that this, you know, the devil music has to be stopped in various different incarnations. But so much of what makes America America are these things that uphold free speech values that actually allow the weirdo that we all later loved to beat themselves and we all benefit? Have we seen it yet the same level of statue toppling in the music business? Are we seeing the damnatio memore in the music?

business? Is there a parallel to Charlie and a Chocolate Factory or songs being re-thunk, re-sung, rewritten? Can you think of any? That definitely is happening. I think it's happening somewhat less. I mean, Chris Rock did his special selective outrage,

which I think was exactly right. And he talks about one of his points in selective outrage is kind of like, you can't play R. Kelly, but you can play Michael Jackson all day long. Right. So it's partially, like, it's done with tremendous numbers of double standards. We're seeing some of the worst cancel culture, though, is young adult fiction, like some of the nastiest, meanest fights you will ever see. And, of course, like everything that happened with J.K. Rowling, you know, like the extent to which what she actually said on trans issues, people will respond with disbelief sometimes when they see actually what she's written on the topic because it's not the way it's presented.

Barry Weiss, who's someone I've known since she was 17, started up this new institution called the Free Press, you know, trying to collect a lot of the high integrity journalists out there. They're hosting a series called The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling that's really trying to explore cancel culture. It's compelling stuff. They've come for everyone to a degree. How important do you think Barry Weiss and Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibi and the whole substack phenomenon is to this whole larger conversation, at least vis-a-vis independent journalism? I am glad you asked. Because you know how I talk about that whole unnarcical thing, you know, that happens when you have a billion additional voices in a conversation. Sure.

That's unavoidable. There's nothing that we could do to put the genie back in the bottle. Unfortunately, let the movement be led by junior high schoolers, so, you know, we pay for that. But what cancel culture is part of is when you have that many eyes on a problem, you can tear down any institution, any idea, or any person. And that third one is cancel culture itself. Now, to be clear, there are people in institutions and ideas that needed to be torn down. It's not all, there's some positivity in tearing down a Wubarak or a Gaddafi, for example. But that led to a period where we realized that we were relying too much on pundits to sort of like be oracular thinkers when honestly, pundits are, you know, Philip Tetlock points out are wrong more often than a monkey throwing darts at a board.

But that is not a sustainable state, though, where everybody just distrust each other. people will raise their hand and over and over again show that they are high integrity and that they will tell you the truth even if it doesn't serve them. And Barry, I've known her since she was 17 again, and she is the kind of person who will. I think Schellenberger is the same way. Taibi does not care if you hate his guts, which I really appreciate. I think he likes it if you do, actually. I think he prefers it.

It's one of those things where, like, the getting used to people hating your guts, you know, for me, at least it took some practice. and some depression that led to coddling the American mind. But I did an event with Chris Best out in Palo Alto, who's the president of Substack. And I am so excited about Substack. I'm thinking about starting my own Substack. I used to do this, the eternally radical idea,

which is my way of referring to freedom of speech, because it's radical in every generation. And I used to do this on the fire website. And now I'm like, listen, I can go from like people who are self-styled communists who I completely agree with. like Freddie DeBoer, who is like one of like the best thinkers out there, even though you might not always agree with him on a variety of issues, a very serious guy.

You've got the free press out there. You've got Michael Shermer. And of course, my co-author, John Haidt, has been more productive than I've seen of in years in terms of like the sheer amount of awesome stuff he's coming out with. So I think that Substack is a revolution. And I think that that's the most likely location for the journalists who were not willing to compromise themselves where you're going to find them. So I asked this question as a guy who's about to go on Fox and then CNN and then CNBC in the next 12 hours or so.

But what do you think that that level of independent journalism is going to do both to the mainstream press and to back to the certainty? Because man, if there's one thing that define every anchor on there, it's certainty. And it just hit me earlier when you said, you know, the pundits are, is right about as often as a monkey with the dart hits his target. But man, whether they're right or whether they're wrong. Never and out. They always sound certain. They're never in doubt. What does all this mean for our typical mainstream institutions?

I hope that there's a lot more tearing stuff down and rebuilding. But there are attempts, like semaphore, for example, is like one of these media companies that's trying to actually, they have a lot. a very clever structure where essentially they tell you what the facts are in sort of like a smart brevity way like Axios. And then if they have an opinion on it, they put the opinion on it deeper down that you don't have to read. And it's like, that's awesome. And so I think there's a lot of thinking and innovating in this space. I think that CNN, between CNN, I don't know MSNBC and Fox News, there are high integrity people in those institutions. Sure.

I think about people like, you know, I don't always agree with them. But Fried Zakaria is someone that I always think is thinking heart and asking heart. questions. I feel the same way about Smirkaners, for example. I think that there is an opportunity for media to recreate itself as something that we will not lie to you. We are not going to spend things for you. And I think that there's a real hunger for that. The fact that hasn't happened already shows you how entrenched some of these existing media institutions have been. I mean, I have a confession. I still listen to MPR. And I used to, like five years ago, I would talk to, to my conservative friends and be like, listen, it's better journalism than a lot of my friends

on the right say. And man, has it gotten more captured? And it can be really disappointing. But there's a hunger for the people who will not make things simpler, who will actually talk about problems as they exist. So I'm hopeful that maybe the fever is breaking to a degree, but here's my fear. The kind of craziness with cancel culture that we had in 2020, 2021 and 2022 is not sustainable because eventually you run out of which is to burn and everybody shuts up. Everybody's like, okay, we will shut up for the next 10 years. You've proved your point. I will never say my opinion again.

So it can't actually keep up at that level forever. And I feel like there's a little bit of a break in the fever to some degree that the New York Times, for example, is trying to bring on more dissident voices, bringing in my friend David French, for example. National Review, right? He's been all over the place. He was previously at the Atlantic. He's a nerds nerd.

He'd like him. Have you had him on the show? I haven't had him on the show, but I've read his stuff. And that weird trajectory from the Atlantic to Nat Review to the Times reminds me a lot of Kevin Williamson. These guys are in the mainstream, but they're on the edge of the mainstream. And then there's the sub-sac stuff. I'm just curious to see how it all turns out. Go ahead.

I'm sorry. So I think there's a little bit of signs that things are not quite as crazy as they were maybe two years ago. And here's my fear. I wrote something for Reason magazine talking about the first great age of political correctness. which is roughly 85 to 95. I love Nick. And the, hi, Nick. But in 95, there was a sense that PC is now a joke.

You know, we made that terrible movie with Jeremy Piven called PCU. And the last speech code, by the way, to be defeated, Stanford Law School in 1995, two years before I got there and nobody even talked about it. So there was a sense that the fever had passed and professors weren't really into speech codes anymore and everything was fine. No, it wasn't. Things quietly got much, much worse. And if basically we'd say it's like, oh, well, the fever is past. Cancel culture is not as bad as it once was.

Let's go back to our lives. It's only going to come back more intense and worse and in shorter order as well. What did you call it the eternally radical idea? The eternally radical idea. Yeah. Well, there's our title probably. Cancel culture, it's like whack-a-mole, you know? I mean, if there's anything to sum up from the last hour and a half,

It's whether it's Damnasio Memore or what just happened at Stanford, they pop up. You know, they pop up and somebody's got to be standing by with a big hammer to knock him back down. And obviously, that's what you guys are all about. We need a million people on board. A good-natured mob, I think, is the way you put it, which is really funny. Because just because you got the pitchforks and the torches doesn't mean, you know, you want to drag the guy out of the jail and string them up. It could mean you're there to stop. that very thing from happening.

We can't see without the torches. Don't be scared. It's dark out. And we're farmers. Just don't be freaked out. Last question. In the long history of censorship, has there been a more effective notion?

And I don't mean to open a new topic just as I'm saying goodbye, but hate speech. And the idea of hate speech. of hate speech. Don't get me sorry about hate speech. Well, I mean, I just ask because I know I'm not supposed to, frankly, but that is the point, you know?

This drives us insane at fire because it was hate speech was a theory so transparently derived in the 1970s as being part of this anti-free speech movement. Some of these people were literally like Marcuse's students who were pro the hate speech movement. Others of them were big fans. This includes people like Richard Delgado, who was one of the founders of critical racism. theory. There was a very self-conscious, you know, like we need to rein speech in. And, you know, of course, you start with how it sounds the nicest, which is essentially we're going to go after hateful speech. But what do they mean by hateful speech? They mean one of the things that got

labeled hate speech automatically was criticism of affirmative action. This happened on campus after campus where it's kind of like this is a controversial policy. Even when you look at the polling on campuses, it's more unpopular than people are generally aware. It's a major sort of legal issue. But there was, from the very beginning, there was a sense that this can be used to ban political opinions. And it's had this tremendous success from a PR standpoint, even though there's no such thing as a hate speech exception to freedom of speech. And what's amazing is watching people on the left think they want a hate speech code. And they cite a case called Schuplinsky from the 1940s. That is about the Supreme Court created this thing called the Fighting Words Doctrine that created an exception to freedom of speech.

that since is basically on life support. Like it practically doesn't exist anymore. Chiplinsky should be formally overruled, and I think the current Supreme Court would. And guess what Chplinsky was about? Whether or not you can call a cop a fascist. Calling him a fascist and a racketeer was considered to be too offensive to a police officer, and those are fighting words. And so I think 43, they decided that that could also be.

And it's never been upheld since. There have been cases that have been much worse where they're like, no cops should be able to be insulted. And it's kind of like, so let me see if I'm, understanding this. I have a bunch of lefty activist students who want the decision that said you can't call police officers fascists to be the law of the land. Are you thinking of this stuff through? And the idea is they are only being taught in a scenario that they assume they're going to be the guardian class. And I feel like you should still, even if you think you're going to be part of the ruling

elite, you should still think in terms of human freedom. I think there are generations of American leaders who are still nonetheless, even if I'm, you know, to the purple born that I still should be giving people, you know, their basic rights. But it all comes from like this idea that kind of like, if they're going to be in charge and they're enlightened, that essentially we're going to have these new justifications for how we can get rid of the speech we dislike. And hate speech is one of the greatest PR sort of like successes for the anti-free speech movement, certainly in my career. And it's so transparently political. And it's, you know, it won't survive constitutional scrutiny. And every time they've tried, it's been shot down easily. Even my judges who were sympathetic to the idea of hate speech bans, it's been shot down.

And appropriately so. It's just amazing to watch a really bad idea that you know isn't rooted in anything solid go through these weird twists and turns. And before we can finally walk it out behind the barn and shoot it in the head, I hope the next time you're on, we'll be celebrating. In the meantime, to sum up, we need a million people. And the best way to do that is register over at, is it fire.org or come? Thefire.org. The fire.org. And we got fun material.

You know, you've got skeptical friends. We got lots of ways to try to get them on our stand freedom of speech. We try everything from humor to deep philosophy. Our podcast kills it. But we need your help. And like I said, that one tweet that you're forward in some cases, that one thing you say on LinkedIn, the one time you actually say, you know what? I know you're all coming after my old friend over here,

I haven't talked to in a long time. I don't agree with my old friend on a lot of stuff, but he's a good person. Leave him alone. Like, that's a good thing to say. That's a good small D-democratic habit to have. And I think that a lot of these small moves can make such a difference.

Final shout out to our mutual friends at Stand Together. They're doing great work. They've been a huge help to Microworks. I know they're helping you as well, and a lot of other names we dropped. Am I going to see you at the next gathering? I believe you will, yeah. Fantastic.

Until then, keep the fire burning. Keep the home fire burning, as it were. And final, final thought, everyone should not only sign up for the newsletter, which you can do that on thefire.org. Scroll down. Hot sauce is amazing. Nice, well, okay. And then also go to Amazon and pre-order the canceling of the American mind.

Cancel culture undermines trust, destroys institutions, and threatens us all, but there is a solution. I like how you made it hopeful at the end. That was good. Petitioning for getting rid of that last clause, just because it makes it too long. But making the point that how much it destroys trust is something that I don't think people fully appreciate.

For sure, man. Drip, drip, drip. It erodes it. Yep, absolutely. So you can pre-order it now, but when does the book drop? October 17th. Boom. There it is.

Great. Our work is done here. We've once again saved the Republic. Couldn't do it without you, Greg. It's all free speech. How hard could it be. Thanks for listening to folks. We'll see you next week.

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