TRIGGERnometry - Elon Musk, Twitter & Free Speech with Greg Lukianoff

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

Gregory Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind with Jonathan Haidt. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The same habits that make students illiberal, that make them oppose freedom of speech are the same mental habits that make people anxious and depressed. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you,

if you want honest conversations, with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is the president of Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the co-author of the coddling of the American mind. Greg Lukenev, welcome to Trigonofy. Yeah, thanks for having me.

It's a great pleasure to have you on the show. you the full introduction there, but tell us a little bit about the story behind that. How are you? Who are you? How are you where you are? What has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Oh, wow. Okay. So we were talking a little bit before the camera started rolling about my family history. I'm a first generation American. My father is Russian by way of Yugoslavia and my mother is Irish by way of England. And because of the peculiarities of each culture, my ethically Irish mother thinks of herself as British and my ethnically Russian father thinks of himself as Russian because you don't just wake up

one morning and decide your Serbian. Like that's just not the way identity works in that part of the world. So I grew up, you know, we were pretty broke slash poor when I was a kid. I grew up in a neighborhood with lots of other kids from, you know, Peru, from Vietnam, from Korea, from the Dominican Republic, from Puerto Rico. And the white kids in my neighborhood were actually from the American South, which is a first-generation American seemed even stranger and more exotic to me. And so I had the sort of first-generation American-slash-immigrant kind of appreciation for American freedom of speech, because we know how rare that is historically and how unusual America's commitment to that is, both historically and in the world, particularly at the moment.

So I went to undergrad, which was kind of a surprise. I wasn't really totally sure I was going to go to college at all. I studied journalism and international relations, thinking I would follow my father's footsteps who speak seven languages. But as a journalism, a double major, I got to see, you know, with my own eyes, how people will come into your office all the time. It will come into the newspaper, the student newspaper office, and demand that the, you, you, the editor, fire somebody because of what they published or withdraw that article. And it really started to become clear to me that, like, people are in natural-born censors. Like, they want to figure out a way to punish you for saying that article.

And they're still rationalizing that they completely believe in freedom of speech. But the wheels start turning. And they're like, I think you should punish this person for what's the magic word at the moment. I felt threatened. I felt intimidated. I felt harassed. And finally, the final link of the chain for free speech. was the Communications Decency Act was passed in 1995.

And this was the old version of it that actually tried to ban indecency. That's the word of it, on the internet back in 1995. And that's laughably unconstitutional under the American First Amendment. And that's what made me decide to go to law school. I went to Stanford for law school. I took every class that they offered on First Amendment when I ran out. I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty, because this was like my lifelong passion.

And everybody thought all nuts for hyper focusing on this thing that there weren't many jobs in. But my superpower is when Fire found me out in San Francisco, you know, offering me $50,000 a year, you know, given my life history, it was kind of like, wow, this is amazing. A huge amount of money for graduate. And so I worked there, you know,

I was the legal director from 2001 to 2005. I became the president in 2005 and originally intern and then became president in 2006. And then I was lucky enough to have a complete mental breakdown because the culture war was so incredibly depressing and so alienating and so difficult to fight all the time. The good news is about that suicidal depression is it led me to start doing cognitive behavioral therapy, which created the basis for my work with Jonathan Haidt, my good friend, I'm a lovely person, by the way. I wrote an article with him in 2015 called Codling the American Mind.

By the way, a title I have never liked and have fought pretty much at every stage because I think it alienates the very people who need to read it. So we did the article in 2015 about like how the same habits that make students illiberal that make them oppose freedom of speech are the same mental habits that make people anxious and depressed. And so we wrote this in the summer 2015 and we fixed the whole thing. Well, quite. I mean, it's a very funny joke, but that was actually the question that I was going to go to because I said to you before we started, myself, Francis, our whole team, we were all incredibly impressed and persuaded and informed and interested in what you and Jonathan wrote in the coddling of the American mind. how do you see some of those dynamics that you've mentioned playing out in recent years,

particularly in the last few years? Where are we with that culture war that gave you the breakdown in the first place? Is it time for another one is what I'm asking? Oh, yeah, believe me, don't encourage me. I've been feeling a little bit that way lately. Just for your listeners, one of the reasons why I'm such a proponent of cognitive behavioral therapy is I used to struggle with depression pretty severely as I got older pretty much every year. And, you know, with the help of, I'm lightly medicated, but so no, nothing against medicine.

But the big difference was CBT. And eventually, you know, the depressive voices in your head just don't sound as convincing anymore, which it takes a long time. It takes a lot of work, but it really does happen. Anyway, so 2015 happened. There was a summer in 2015. A little did we know that the fall of 2015 would be a terrible, a terrible year. That's when I was the one of videotaped the student surrounding my friend Nicholas Christakis. at Yale, you know, telling him that it was horrible because his wife wrote something saying

that should we really be policing the Halloween costume choices of the students. And this happened, there were about 100 of these kind of incidents where it was something relatively minor and then next thing you knew, activists were demanding that, for example, at UMass Amherst, that the student newspaper stopped being funded, you know, that Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna get fired, for example. So 2015 was pretty bad. And 2017, even scarier. That's when you had the Berkeley riots.

That's when you had the assault on Allison Stanger, protecting Charles Murray at Middlebury. So 2017 was really bad. And that's one of the reasons why we decided to write the book, Coddling the American Mind, which came out in 2018. And we were hoping that it was as bad as it was going to get. But we had a feeling it was going to get worse. We didn't know how much worse and how soon. because 2020 was without exception the worst year for freedom of speech and academic freedom I have seen in my entire career.

The second worst year, 2021. And so it's been a very disheartening couple of years. It's kind of funny because there are still people who will talk about like cancel culture isn't real. And it's like, and literally, like after the New York Times finally wrote an editorial saying, well, actually everything indicates it's real, including our own polling. and, you know, people on Twitter, it blew their minds. They completely freaked out,

including people saying, give me one example of someone seeing canceled. And it's like, I have a database, and this is just professors of, we're getting close to 600 professors who were targeted for being canceled since 2015. About two-thirds of them happened just since 2020. About one-fifth of them were fired, also about, you know, about three-fifths of them, were punished in some way, whether that's, you know, loss of position or whatever. This includes 30 10-year professors who were fired for their expression or for their pedagogy or for their research.

That's the only reason why tenure exists. Generally, like, tenured professors could have been fired in the past when I first started my career. But that was for, like, murdering somebody or, like, or not showing up the class or just, like, genuinely, like, leaving the country, doing something illegal or just failing to do your job entirely, them being fired for their point of view, for their expression. That's the whole reason why tenure exists in the first place. And that's just professors.

The number of students who get in trouble is many times that, and that's harder to dig up, because when a student gets expelled, that doesn't make the student newspaper, for example. So it has been the worst couple of years of my career. And my big fear is that just the same way you had sort of like the political correctness thing of the late 80s and early 90s. That kind of passed after a while after the speech codes were defeated in court, after comedians started making fun of it. It kind of fell out of fashion. And people kind of went, ooh, thank God that's over. But then from 1995 to 2015, things just got worse, just more quietly with less attention.

And I can feel that there's a little bit of a sense that people are returning to their sanity. on some of this stuff. But if we don't, but if we just go, oh, thank goodness that's over again, the next time the pendulum swings,

which will be sooner, it's going to be even worse still. So, Greg, thank you for making me depressed now. We can get some CBT, mate, don't worry about it.

But, Greg, in your book, there were lots, you pointed out lots of reasons why this was the case. Yep. Which do you think

are the most important ones, why we find ourselves in this position now? You know, my two are the two we started with. We talk about seven causal threads in Calding the American mind because, of course, we do. You know, they have to make it as complicated as possible. Actually, sorry, we talk about six, but we added a seventh later.

But the two most important ones to me are social media is what sped these trends up. A lot of these things existed already, you know, like the sort of, what's the best word for it? revivocation of ad hominem arguments, that essentially the idea that you would focus on the person, not the argument they're making, was something that at minimum, college was supposed to be teaching people to, you know, that actually that's kind of disfavored. But just because someone's horrible doesn't mean they're wrong. And just because someone's a saint doesn't mean they're right. This is just logical.

This is just also true. So I think when social media came along, it came at a confluence of, higher ed, you know, adopting these, one kind of giving up to a surprising degree on, on the rules of argumentation, but also on the even more pernicious side, K through 12 and college teaching that ad hominem arguments are essentially good, that essentially, yes, you know, like, this is a, this is a, life is a battle between good people and evil people is what we called our third great untruth in the book. Basically, the untruths are the idea of, it's as if we're giving the world's worst possible advice to a generation of students.

And we call that the great untruth of polarization. So I do think that the confluence of social media, a bunch of bad things that are happening in K through 12, a bunch of bad things that are happening in higher ed, added to polarization. And by that I also mean the big sort theory, which is, you know, also plays out that literally Americans of different who vote for different candidates and who come from different economic classes don't even interact with that with each other all that much anymore. So I think that this, it's very easy to start seeing people who disagree with you as evil. If you don't know any of those people to think that they're stupid or evil, which is one of the reasons why lack of viewpoint

diversity on campus was a much more serious problem than people understood going back to the 80s. Because it's when you have this kind of situation where, you know, basically you have a coherent moral community of overwhelmingly people who are who are more left-leaning, the dynamics around your appreciation for free speech shifts because free speech is the argument of, so I always have to, forgive me if I'm going on too long, but talking about the rich and the powerful have always been fine historically with a couple exceptions, of course. But in a democracy, if you have 50% or more, you get to make the rules. And it really, the only people who benefit from a separate idea of free speech or for that matter of the First Amendment under those circumstances are people who are in minority point of view or who have unpopular beliefs with elites.

When you go from being, you know, roughly two to one conservative to liberal to conservative on campus to five to one or 30 to one in some departments with with a overwhelming majority when it comes to administrators, more like 95%, you know, 95%, it's predictable that you start seeing free speech is not something that's your ally. You start seeing it's something of more of an inconvenience. I still can't get my head around why people would think that free speech is more of an inconvenience. How have we got to this point where we take something so fundamental to our society and treat it so frivolously? I think it's, to a degree, it's regression to the mean. that essentially most of human history is about censorship. You know, that essentially the censor is generally one.

There's a reason why I call my blog the eternally radical idea because the idea that everyone's entitled their opinion and that the fact of that opinion, their right to hold that opinion is absolutely their right, even if you think they might be wrong, is a very radical idea. And you know this because in every generation, people stand up to oppose it. We like to always point out these freedom fighters in history,

and it's like, well, who were they fighting against? And it's most of human history that the other side, the forces of conformity, the forces of authority, the forces of group think, the forces of religion, all of these things. They all conspire against freedom of speech. And so freedom of speech has to be taught. It has to be valued. And one of the ways you see what a culture values is in their idioms. like the little sayings that they have that pepper their speech. And so growing up in the U.S., you always heard, it's a free country, everyone's entitled to their own opinion, to each his own or her own, walk a mile in a man's shoes, and for that matter, even none of your business.

You know, these are all kind of ideas that undergird a democratic society. But those have increasingly fallen away. And I think in no small part, because we disproportionate, And I think to a degree that is unhealthy, we rely in the United States on a ruling class that sounds very Marxist about it that comes overwhelmingly from a handful of colleges. I know partially because I went to one of them. And when you actually start having, you know, a democracy, you know, choosing its leaders only from a relatively narrow, you know, batch of schools that already see free speech as an impediment

to their agenda, you shouldn't be surprised at this start. coming down, starting to seem like what most Americans think. Now, on polling, this is absolutely not most Americans think, but if your impression of what the country looks like is Twitter, which the 2% of the 2% dominate, then yeah, I mean, it can really start to feel that free speech is this Neanderthal idea and we're finally coming around to enlightened censorship. And I always have to be the person reminding them that enlightened censorship or people who think they're engaging lightning is the rule of human history, not the exception.

And the thing that really blew my mind was from a couple of months ago, where the US government were advocating censorship of podcasts, in particular Joe Rogan. And I was watching that going, is this really America? Is this really the land of the free? Is this really what I would associate with America? No. Well, the whole disinformation thing, thing is, I get it. I understand how that disinformation can be used by your enemies. It can be used by malicious people. It can be used by snake oil salesman to profit or to disrupt or whatever. But the reason why it's so hard to fight is because the other option is omniscience.

You know, like that essentially we, that's one of the reasons why free speech works so well is because in the grand scheme of things, we're all incredibly self-deluded animals. Like, we are very bad at guessing what the truth is. We're very bad at knowing if the person talking to us is a liar. We're overconfident in our current beliefs. We're overconfident that our age has all of the moral questions settled. And free speech is this constant recognition of epistemic humility that in the grand scheme of things, we don't know all that much stuff. So when it's amazing to me, when people point out, yeah, disinformation is a problem and it's one that has to be combated. But the way you combat it is by having experts that

people generally trust talking about these things and treating people like adults. When you start having a situation where people think that higher education, journalism, experts in general, are biased in some way. And that trust starts to be undermined. That's a very dangerous thing for a democratic society. I also think, by the way, social media makes that process inevitable. and we have to figure out how to live with that disruption. But you can censor, by going after disinformation, you can, by claiming to go after disinformation, you can censor practically everybody.

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Sign up for their newsletter, Access of Easy, which tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. And Greg, I'm really glad you bring up the point about social media from that perspective because God knows I'm on your side and I agree with you. And free speech is great. And, you know, one of the points that we've explored extensively here on. trigonometry from the beginning is how important it is and with you know both of our backgrounds we understand its value but in the context of Elon Musk's attempted purchase of Twitter recently there was a thread I don't know if you saw it from a guy called yeshang Wong I think is his name he used to run Reddit and one of the points that he made is he was like look guys I was there

in the early days of the internet I'm all for free speech but the internet we have now which is dominated by social media, any large network of communication will not be able to provide the free speech, quote, unquote, that we all want, because in the end, large numbers of people arguing about stuff, whether that's baking cookies or whether that's politics, results in tribalism, results in confrontation, results in bias, results in people trying to censor each other, and all of that. And eventually, the network has to step in, not because they are trying to lock down our ability to speak, but because some of the behavior is being exhibited in the real world as a result of that speech is harmful.

Now, I am very much, just to finish this, someone who leans even into the point, like, look, some speech is harmful, but it's still better for people to be able to speak. But what do you say broadly to this idea that we live in a social media world in which censorship is inevitable and actual free speech in the way that you'd think about it 200 years ago at the founding of the United States is just not possible anymore. Yeah, I would think that the person making that argument doesn't understand how sophisticated, for example, First Amendment jurisprudence is. I describe American First Amendment jurisprudence as about 100 years of the best and brightest

people in the United States figuring out how you have freedom of speech in the real world. you know, warts and all, and how you try to minimize some of the consequences, how you actually draw it. And that's one of the reasons why when Elon Musk was talking about this, I took it as an opportunity to write an open letter, you know, to Elon Musk saying, hey, you know, actually, why don't you try to peg your norms towards an existing body of thought that actually is very practical? And one of the things that I, you know, so I think, what was it? What was the name of the one that got shut down, parlor. Parlor.

Parlor, when it got shut down, I didn't know enough about the site to have a strong opinion on it, but the accusation was that people were conspiring to commit actual crimes. And of course, that's not protected. Threats of bodily harm or death are not protected.

I mean, one of the things that immediately required some amount of moderation on the internet, you know, going back to its earliest days, is spam. You know, people just, would they be spam to death if there wasn't some amount of moderation? But I do think that there are sensible principles that you can draw from it, which are like that nobody should be punished simply for expressing their opinion.

But essentially, you can't have viewpoint discrimination on a topic. When you have a social media platform, you can have general parameters. You can even, it's even acceptable within First Amendment norms, which is, of course, very strong, that you could have what would be called a limited public forum. Like on this one, we're just talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you know, for example. I think that it's not as hard as people think to do some of this. You know, not punishing people on the basis of viewpoint is a good start. You can have viewpoint neutral rules in place anyway. But the thing that I wanted to sort of raise the discussion a little bit in talking to Elon,

you know, with the idea of Elon Musk taking this over is, just to go back to someone who's influenced my thought a lot since codling came out, at Martin Gurry. He wrote a book called Revolt of the Public. And my way of interpreting what he's saying is that social media proved itself capable of tearing down any person, any institution, or any idea. And this is actually not the worst thing in some cases. I mean, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, it's good that he got torn down. There are lots of regimes. that needed to be torn down. There needed to be more light shined on abusive police practices in the U.S., for example.

But it's utterly incapable of building at this point. That essentially, if you want to tear something down, social media is great. If you want to actually build something constructive, it will not help you. It'll probably actually completely sabotage that. But we shouldn't give up on the idea that we can get something much more productive for the production. And this is where I'm going to sound very pine in the sky, production of human knowledge from social media. Why? Because the great institution of disconfirmation, you know, which is either the Republic of Letters or what higher education is supposed to be, is all about disconfirmation, just disconfirmation within some rules that ad hominems don't count. Again, like I said, you can be right and be a horrible person. So I do think that if you could think of a way to use social media that rather than completely banking on the outrage machine, tried to actually use.

it to, you know, more thoughtful, more well-structured arguments actually get more discussion. I believe that there's a way to do it that we could have it go from something that is just snarky gossip to something that might actually have a positive benefit on the species? Well, you're right. That does sound pie in the sky. But look, as I say, I'm playing devil's advocate and I'm fully on your side of the argument. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. But at the same time, you know, the argument, for example, like, look, take the Hunter Biden story that was suppressed by the, by social media, and take the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter. My take on that is that, to me, those two events are essentially, they are, I don't want to sound extreme, but to me, that was the end of democracy in a way.

If you can't get accurate information and if you can ban the sitting president of the United States from speaking on the biggest public platform, that there is. You know, you've ended our ability to make decisions independently based on the information that we want to seek out. However, the argument would be from the people who are involved in that censorship is, well, that is a point where free speech causes real world harm and it becomes equivalent of screaming fire in a theater. Now, I don't agree with that point, even with January the 6th and all of that.

But there could have been the interpretation, certainly from the social media companies, that That is what was happening. Their platforms were being used to organize. I mean, they call it an insurrection, call it whatever you want, a large-scale riot in the heart of the world's greatest democracy. I live on Capitol Hill, by the way. So like we were in the green zone. Isn't that inevitably where we're always going to end up?

It's always going to be at that extreme where, yeah, you can have your free speech and use the network responsibly. But at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, when it's crunch time, someone is going to get on Twitter and go, this election was BS. Let's all get to X place and start Y action. Yeah. I mean, I think that these are, there are going to be, you know, misfires and mistakes inevitably in any system you impose. But there's a difference between trying to maximize freedom of speech and freedom of opinion and giving up on the whole thing because the system fails sometimes. And when it comes to the Hunter Biden thing, I am somewhat with my friend John Rausch, like the idea of being a little bit spooked about the idea of there being, you know, Russian disinformation about this sounding, because it sounded fishy, frankly. Like the idea of like they found a laptop at a company, like suddenly right around the time of the election. Still, I think Twitter made absolutely the wrong call. But I'm not saying it's as crazy as it sounds under the circumstances.

And when it comes to, you know, January 6th, the standard in the law is the incitement standard under Brandenburg. There are First Amendment lawyers, you know, saying this may not be exactly Brandenburg, but it's damn close. And there are other people like David French who actually thought it crossed the line, for example, into even a violation of First Amendment standards. So I think that some of these issues are not necessarily as hard as they sound. And they don't devalue the entire system. Well, you know, Greg, what you're saying to me sounds even harder than what I thought it was, because you can have your lawyers adjudicating on it for years to come. But that decision has to be made in the moment by Twitter. So what was the right decision in that situation, in your opinion?

I try to be nonpartisan in my take on it. But I am a Democrat, you know, which I explained to the genuine horror of Trump people. they're so nasty. I mean, honestly, like I think under the circumstances, saying that it was close enough to incitement, not necessarily the legal standard, that they could say he shouldn't be included. And I know I'm going to get a lot of hate mail for that. So thanks. Probably so, but that's why we bring people on because we want to hear what they actually think. What about Hunter Biden?

Yeah. Well, that, this is where the problem is, Greg. Let me just make this point quickly. Sure. The problem I have with all of this is you can have your brilliant standards and you can go, look, a sitting president shouldn't be able to incite people to go and protest about something that is likely to spill over. Okay, let's say I agree with you. The problem is something like the Hunter Biden story, do you think if Donald Trump Jr. had handed his laptop into some repair shop and it turned out there was whatever, I don't want to get sued for libel, but some kind of porn, some kind of evidence of drug taking,

some kind of evidence of corruption, do you think Twitter would have suppressed that story? from being shared? Absolutely not. And that's the reason why... And to be clear, for Hunter Biden, that was a mistake, in my opinion. I'm just making the point that it's not... That was a bad call and it was wrong and I protested at the time and I still do.

My only point with the John Rouch point was that it might not be as arbitrary as it might have seen at the time, because like I said, it sounded kind of fishy. I would hope that any journalist hearing an implausible sounding backstory would be kind of like, is that really true? But nonetheless, what they did, the laptop thing was a mistake that they should be embarrassed

and ashamed of. Greg, isn't the problem that what we've got is of these companies, which are huge conglomerates, they're privately owned, and as a result, they're going to do like all corporations do, and act in their own self-interest. And that being the case, they cannot be trusted with these hugely powerful tools. and be the ones in charge of disseminating information to the public. Yeah, let's give it to the government. Yeah, exactly.

That's my answer to that. Is that essentially people think that, and this is one of the funny things. As far as like I'm not like a full libertarian, but I'm definitely a civil libertarian, but the most useful contribution, like the term that I borrow from libertarianism, and I just added naive to it, which is naive statism, that essentially the fixed everything is just handed over to the government and they will do it way, way better. And I'd really rather have something, you know, driven by the profit motive than by driven by pure political

calculation. Unfortunately, by having a lack of viewpoint diversity in Silicon Valley, you end up with situations where there wasn't someone, you know, at Twitter to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're taking away the New York freaking posts Twitter access for like a couple of days over a, story that might be true. So I do think that the existing Silicon Valley has a major problem and that it doesn't have sufficient viewpoint diversity among itself. Still, when it comes to a lot of the solutions, I find the solutions worse than the disease. I think people would be scared. So I always found it really kind of like jaw-dropping that Republicans were always talking about how,

you know, and Trump in particular was talking about dropping the existing version of Section 230, which which protects social media giants from liability in a number of cases. Because if they weren't protected from that, the very first people they would drop would be overwhelmingly conservative. Now, to be clear, I don't think there is a perfect solution to any of this. I do occasionally think that sometimes the companies, as much as maligned as they are, made some actually pretty good calls. I was originally very skeptical of the Facebook, like an overseer board thing, because I assumed what would happen is they would, since they were trying to make it international, that it would turn into the convoy system and the least speech protective person in the board would actually be the one who, you know, decides. But setting up an outside body was actually a pretty good call. So I think that there are ways to navigate it.

And what I'm more scared of is that people are going to think that, well, you know, the whole problem is social media is corrupt. So therefore, we're going to come up with a solution that actually ends up throwing out the baby with a bathwater. But let's talk about power, Greg, because power is at the root of all this. And that these companies are so powerful. They can effectively do what they want, even if it means silencing the president of the United States, even if it means influencing the president of the United States, even if it means influencing elections. and nothing happens to them. You know, like you said Hunter Biden was a bad call, and I know we're coming off as massive Trumpers here,

which we're actually not. We're just exploring the edge of the argument, right? It's like Hunter Biden was an awful decision, in my opinion, just atrocious this. Yep, I agree. But where's the, you know. Where's the pushback? Where's the punishment?

To me, that's a really serious crime. Because if I was running that company, I'll be honestly, I'll be like, oh, hey, we may have changed the course of an election. Nothing happened. You know, look at this magic ring I'm wearing now. So, and I understand this, but my point is not that they don't do things wrong and that there are abuses that can be better handled. But like, what is the solution then? Like, because most of what I'm saying, what I've been saying about this is that I'm more afraid of the solution than the disease.

What do you think would actually fix it? Okay. So would you be in favor, for instance, of, again, government entering and breaking it up like they would do with monopolies? Because it can be argued that these companies are monopolies. Yeah, I've heard about that one. Possibly. When it comes to breaking up monopolies, I do actually think that trust busting sometimes can help. But I know a lot of my libertarian friends would say actually it didn't achieve anything.

I don't know. I remember when AT&T owned everything, and I definitely feel like there was a big telecom explosion after they were broken up. So maybe, yeah. I think we're probably approaching this the wrong way, Greg. You don't think there is a solution, do you? No.

Why? Because nothing in life of that simple. Right. Well, that is something that resonates with me very strongly. So what do we do then? Because at the end of the day, the three of us can sit here and go, is no solution, but we still have to do something, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I think we should experiment. I think we should try a variety of different experiments. And this is the way I end up putting it, is that a lot of times when people look at like my in Heights take on social media and how we point out all the downsides of it. I actually always tried to like chime in when we were writing saying, by the way, I actually have a lovely experience almost with social media. There are positive, there are genuinely positive things about it.

But when people hear how critical we are of some aspects, And we absolutely are, and I still very much am, and particularly the weight, I think it drives our entire political class kind of insane. I think it's actually very unhealthy that so many of the nation's journalists are on Twitter. But people will point out, it's like, oh, Height and Lukanov, they probably said this, would say the same thing about the printing press. And I'm always like, you mean the technology that led to a massive increase in the witch trials that led to about 200 years of religious, of religious wars in Europe? Like it was the defining disruptive technology. It had overall, was it worth it? Yes.

Was it peaceful? God, no. I mean, it was incredibly powerful. So what I feel like what we're doing right now is it's like, I don't know, 1498. And we're looking at the printing press and saying to ourselves, what's the easy fix that's going to get us out of this situation? And the answer is, there isn't one. because that was adding millions of people to the discussion. It was probably only adding thousands of people of additional publishers or tens of thousands

additional publishers, but making millions of recipients information. Now we have a two-way conversation with billions of people. That is unprecedented in human history. There is no way that isn't going to be highly disruptive. There's no way it isn't going to come with all sorts of new. problems. So what I would hope for would be that when we're doing solution, and this is one thing in terms of like a way to think about the way we come up to solutions, is like they say with medication for all sorts of reasons, you know, go slow and start low that essentially try a variety

of different fixes, give them credit where they actually do seem to be helping. I, for example, think Twitter was helped out a lot by the fact that they doubled the character limit. you know, several years ago. I think that actually improved the level of discourse. I live in what I consider to be a kind of nice bubble on Twitter, where I follow a lot of my expert friends. We have relatively civil conversations. So I do think that my fear is that the absolute worst of what goes on in social media

could be used and that could stifle the best of what comes out of social media, which I do think is a real thing. I'm really glad you bring up the printing press, because I do think that's a really, really useful analysis. here. But I think underlying both the printing press and social media is something that's very obvious out of all of this, which is that ideas are very powerful things. And so if we're talking about free speech in a world where I can tweet something and be part of a thing on social media that starts a civil war somewhere, which is probably where we are already if we're not

heading there. Isn't it inevitable that that is, you know, it's just too powerful not to be censored by somebody, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Well, even within First Amendment law, it's kind of funny because a lot of times people who don't know a lot about American First Amendment law will talk about the great European sort of balancing of interests

that they try to do, that essentially free speech is just one among multiple different interests in otherwise law. I think personally that's why it's a disaster in many of the countries in Europe is that they do this ad hoc balancing and free speech is always on the losing side. But believe it or not, American freedom of speech, even in terms of the law, is a balancing act. It's just considered to be a balancing act with a very heavy thumb on the scale. And the balancing is called strict scrutiny. I sometimes, and I remember actually kind of horrifying a friend of mine by not being like she actually, Did you guys watch the Battlestar Galactica, like the one that was on sci-fi?

The reboot. Yeah. And I love that show. But it's about, you know, a planet of 10 billion people, 50,000 people are left. And there's this constant battle about whether or not they're maintained democracy on the ship. And I'm kind of like, okay, I will say that. And there's spaceships following them trying to completely complete the genocide. And I'm like, okay, even American law understands that the rules.

are a little different when you're like this close to oblivion when you're this close so i do think that there's a there's a level of sophistication within the law that says you know like for example like the pentagon papers um they talk about the idea of printing the time and place of transport ships being sent out you know um and that's and at least nominally within the law that's like yeah there are actually levels at which you can censor even factual information however i i have a hard time thinking of a of a a single situation where simply someone's honest expression of opinion would actually end the world. Expression of opinion, yes. But the difficulty is that a continued expression of a certain opinion over time is pretty much what led to Trump being taken off Twitter, isn't it?

I thought that was specifically what happened on January 6th, though. But, I mean, I think the argument would be that what happened on January 6th, is a product of his communication on Twitter over time, calling the election into question and all of that. Wouldn't that be the argument? So I guess my point is, all I'm asking you is, is it not inevitable that social media will be a place where at the end of the day someone goes,

well, we've reached Battlestar Galactica point now. Like, this is real now. This is real world shit. And if we don't shut this down, someone's going to get hurt or a thousand people are going to get hurt or the country is going to go to whatever. And so we're always going to end up in a position where we don't actually have freedom of speech online in that way because it's just too powerful now because the multiplication

of, you know, me saying something at home to my wife or us chatting here is very different to me saying that very same thing on Twitter. Yeah, I mean, I think about times where freedom of speech in the U.S., like a, to, took a turn for the worse. And think of like the red scare, like the Dennis case in 1951. And I always try to give like extra context. It's like so American spies and British spies gave super Hitler Stalin the H-bomb. And so I always I was trying to put that in there to be kind of like people had a reason to be spooked. But I still think that the law went in the wrong direction briefly in the 1950s saying that people who were just members of the Communist Party could be

thrown in jail. Was that the wrong call? Yes. Did freedom of speech die that day in the United States? No. That's an interesting point. Why don't you think it died that day then? Because history kept going. Because later decisions they found that they tried. There was there was an attempt sort of like to pull to withdraw from the free speech purism that was developing after 1925. So you have the Boharnay's case, for example, that talked about that you can't defame people on the basis of race. That was basically like a, and that was found to be, basically an early version of hate speech laws was found to be constitutional in the U.S. in the early 1950s. But that none of those cases have ever been replicated since. And that the law kept on

progressing, we look back with some disappointment or some horror about what we did several years ago, but free speech didn't die because we didn't give up on it. And yeah, there are going to be, mistakes are going to be made. That is inevitable under literally every single system that you develop. But as soon as we do the thing where it's like, well, I guess that didn't work in that case, so let's just give up on free speech entirely. That's how you actually turn your sense of doom into a self-fulfilling prophecy of actual doom. Hey, KKK, do you like podcasts?

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I've never listened to it because it is appropriately banned in Russia. Greg, let's move on now. When we were talking at the very start of the interview, we were talking about education. We were talking about college education. And it seems to me the victim in all of this, There are many victims, but possibly the biggest victims are kids and college kids themselves, because they're not being taught how to think.

They're not being taught how to debate. They're not being taught to listen. They're not being taught how to develop as people. What is that doing not only to that generation, but to the individual themselves? Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, my first book was called Unlearning Liberty. And the idea was that I felt like people were going into higher education,

particular in coming out hostile to a lot of democratic, small D democratic norms. When it comes to the mental health aspect of it, I think it's even worse. Because, and this is where, like, I usually try to keep my cool, but as far as something that actually just makes me flat out angry is, you know, when Kotling came out, we still had people saying the evidence just isn't there that there's a mental health crisis on campus. And in 2015, when we wrote the initial article, the research wasn't out yet, literally. But we were saying we were hearing of this on campus. And then when the numbers finally came out, it was way, way worse than we thought.

So we wrote the book basically saying it's as if we are giving a generation of students the kind of advice that will make them anxious and depressed. We know this for a fact now that kids are hitting higher education with way higher rates of depression, anxiety, mood disorders, self-harm and suicide, even among like 10 to 14-year-olds, which just like pains me to like talk about like the fact that you're talking about a big spike in suicide rates for people that young. So to know that for a fact and still teach students to basically effectively whisper in their ears, by the way, you can't really handle hearing things that are offensive to you. You will be permanently damaged by it. You won't recover.

And by the way, most of you, the overwhelming majority of you, are both oppressors and depressed. There's not very much you can do about it other than feel bad and apologetic about yourself. And, you know, again, and you're not very resilient. And life is essentially, you know, everybody out, you know, your parents are essentially evil and your other Americans are out to get you and everyone's secretly against you if they're not nominally against you. And it's like, that is a messed up thing to tell anyone. But when you know that they're coming in with high rates of suicide, anxiety, and depression, that's just not acceptable by any stretch of the imagination. So I've definitely, I think a lot about ways to get out of the educational system we have in the U.S. in radical steps. Like, because K through 12, it's kind of weird because like the public education system in America has its problems.

but some of the worst ideologies coming out of the most elite, you know, prep schools. And meanwhile, higher education, I mean, even just on cost and bureaucratization alone, it's insane. Like the idea that someone at Sarah Lawrence can say with the straight face that it's $70,000 a year, and that covers only half the cost of educating a single student for a single year, and they really will say this. And it's like, that's nuts. That's a failure of the system. If you're saying that you can't educate a single student for less than 100, $140,000 a year.

That's just completely crazy. So there are lots of, when I think about, you know, what we need to do with regards to higher education, I think every and all experiment should be acceptable. And I don't think we should be massively subsidizing over bureaucratized, incredibly expensive country clubs. Yeah. We've had many people on the show, you know, former professors or current professors. and there's a consensus among many of them that higher education is now beyond saving.

There's just no way you can save it. And the only alternative is to build other colleges. Do you agree with that or do you think we can still save this particular system? I think you need massive reforms. I think that so I run a nonprofit. And I would never get a donation if I had the kind of overhead that most of these schools have. and overhead defined as administrators and fundraisers. Because if you look at the budget of Harvard, of any of these schools,

you know, by different calculations, they have like 80, 85% overhead. A mass de-brockertization of universities should at least be tried, in my opinion, partially because those very same professors, you know, who came on your show, you know, I think of, you know, our advisor, Steve Pinker, I think of my friend John Haidt, I think of Paul. bloom. There are, there is great research and writing going on in higher education among some of the professors. And most of the havoc comes from the administrators that maybe there would, some reforms could actually go a long way to fix it. That being said, I don't think there's

going to be meaningful reform in the Yale's and Harbards and Princeton's, as long as they think that they are the only game in town to getting your children into the, going to sound like a Marxist again, ruling class. And what's funny is that if I can imagine so many different competing systems that could actually tell, because I'm an employer as well, that they could tell employers that this is an incredibly bright, incredibly hardworking person. And guess what? Because you generally, if someone went to an elite college in the U.S., you can, it's a more or less safe bet, that they are pretty smart and were pretty hardworking, at least in high school.

But that's it. You don't know if they understand statistics. You don't know if they understand history. you don't know if they understand law, you don't know if they understand economics, any of these basic things. So I think a lot about if you could start promising to some of these companies that care about making a profit, that there's this alternative system that actually identifies the best, brightest, hardest, hardest working, most creative people in the country, that's when you start scaring the Yale's and Princeton's and Harbards. And only then do I think that they will start taking any meaningful action to get their acting gear.

That's a really interesting point, Greg. And sticking with education, one of the things that people in this conversation often I've heard at least said is that the next generation, so Francis and I are like geriatric millennials, and then there is the next generation, whatever they're called, and then there's another generation coming below them. And the idea was, you know, every action causes a reaction, the pendulum swings, and this new generation coming through, oh, they love offensive. humor and they hate restrictions of speech and they're all about, you know, the stuff that we'd all agree on.

Is there any evidence for this? I've heard this assertion as well. My understanding is there is evidence in the polling that there is a backlash effect going on. I'll believe it when I see it, you know, essentially. I do think my, and my big fear, I wrote this 6,000 word article for Reason magazine. talk and I call it the the second great age of political correctness. And my whole point there is like I was saying earlier, that this is exactly what happened last time in the late 90s,

is we can't continue to have this kind of, you know, for lack of a better dream, cancel culture, go on at its current rate forever, because eventually literally run out of people, or at least people brave enough to dissent. So there will absolutely have to be a turning back of the penit. pendulum to some degree. And arguably, that's already happening to at least some modest degree. But if we think that, oh, thank goodness that's over because we lost our minds for a couple of years there, that doesn't fix the problem. It still means that you have institutions that have no

viewpoint diversity, that they are wildly over bureaucratized. All of these problems haven't actually been fixed. So I think that relying on the pendulum to swing back is not sufficient, even if it does swing back. And we shouldn't assume, just like you're skeptically pointing out that it necessarily will. And Greg, why is it? And I've got my own theories on this, that the institutions most prone to this always tend to be the wealthiest,

always tend to be the most prestigious, always tend to be the most privileged. I find it fascinating. Why do you think that is? Rob Henderson coined the term, I believe it was him. He's an amazing thinker, and way younger than me. He's coming on the show very soon, so we'll ask him if it's a quote of his. Go ahead.

Oh, terrific. Luxury beliefs. That essentially there's a class of belief that you can have that improves you in esteem among people from your class that has no harm to you, but makes you seem more pure, more moral, more upstanding, but actually harms other people in the society. And definitely, I saw a lot of luxury beliefs in my sort of journey up the class ladder in the United States. It could be, I remember in my human rights classes when I was at Stanford, it was, I realized that the theme seemed to be, and I was always pointing this out, so they hated me for it. But it seemed to be that the professor's idea of what the good should look like was more important than helping actual people survive in many cases in the the real world. And I was constantly like, hey, that sounds like you're just being puritanical about it has to be your way or the highway. And you're literally willing to kill people over that.

So I think that there is, unfortunately in the United States, we still have an idea that's sort of like, you know, Lenin and Mao and Che Guevara are people to be, people to be celebrated when that's utterly offensive to the rest of the United States. But it is this idea of this uncompromising person of the people kind of thing. And I do think that never correct. that way of thinking about the world, you know, leads to even deeper problems, a re-romatization of the old Soviet Union, for example, which I thought was the fact that the New York Times did, in 2018, did a entire, like, year-long thing talking about the Bolshek revolution, including articles that talked about how sex was better during the Soviets.

I'm like, this is unbelievable to me. Like, this is a monstrous, you know, like, I, like, a lot. So we never fixed, so basically what I'm saying here is we never fixed the old problems that the ruling of the United States had. And we're doing very little to fix the new ones. But it is pretty normal, unfortunately, for upper class people to just think of themselves to rationalize their belief that they're better than everybody else. They just do it now in a way that seems very self-flagellating, but it's really about those other rubs over there. Well, Greg, it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

We're about to ask you a couple of questions from our supporters that only they will get to see on our local community. But before we do that, we always have one final question, which is always the same. What is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I think it's about major reform to American higher education. I mean, I said it, it's one of the things I really hit all throughout. I think when some of the bills that are being passed in the United States, particularly as they apply to higher education, they're going after viewpoints, which is not okay.

You can't in the U.S. under the First Amendment, nor should you be able to go after professors because of their viewpoint or books because of their viewpoint. But I do think that the insane hyper-proachronization of universities is a scandal. I do think that in a lot of these cases, like the situation where the Yale law school students shouted down what was supposed to be sort of a kumbaya session between conservative Supreme Court lawyers and liberal Supreme Court lawyers, the scandal there in particular is not just that 100 students in a class of 180 showed up to shout it down. It's that it was encouraged by administrators and those administrators are still employed by Yale. So I think that figuring out who the bad, like the fact we're not even firing the administrators who are called. causing this problem in the first place is something that everybody should be thinking about.

This doesn't even seem to be on the radar. Greg, it's been an absolute pleasure. The time has flown by. If people want to find you online, Greg, where is the best place to do that? Where is the best place to look for your books? Where is the best place to find out about fire? Thefire.org. We have a lot of great content coming out.

We actually have a surprisingly good TikTok game. You know, if you can spell my last name, you can find my book. you know, pretty easily, but definitely check out the fire.org. We're doing a lot of public education at the moment on freedom of speech as a, not just a legal value, but as a moral and philosophical value as well. Greg, thank you so much for coming on. We'll do the last couple of questions for our locals in the second, but in the meantime, thank you for being on the show, and thank you all for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or all show. All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time. And for those of you who like your

trigonometry, on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. The best treatment for anxiety and depression among young people is cognitive behavioral therapy for their parents. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply.