Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott, co-authors of the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind, discuss the inception and inspiration of this new book which seeks to assess cancel culture as it s harshly affecting American universities and other institutions. They break down the difference between feminine and masculine tendencies in regards to free speech, the entirely real and yet rarely discussed phenomenon of toxic femininity, and why we must prioritize a cultural shift away from the ease of self-described victimhood. They also discuss why they are writing a sequel to their previous book, Coddling, even though it s a follow-up to it, and how they came up with the idea for a book that focuses on three things: 1. What is cancel culture? 2. Why is it a problem? 3. How can we get rid of it? And how can we stop it? And why is it happening in the first place? Sponsors! Betonline - BetOnline gives you the option to bet on real-world sports betting, and you can increase your wagering amount by up to $25,000 by contacting the player services desk by phone or emailing betonline@betonline.ag. BetOnline.ag using promo code DAILYWIRE.ag to place a friendly wager at BetOnline and get a 50% discount of up to 50% off your total wager on your first month of $250. BetOnline is betting on sports betting. and the options are endless. Use promo code Dailywirere to place your bets on your favorite team or the latest in sports betting at Betonline. That s betting up to win a $250, and the chance to win $250 in the next episode of the latest episode of Dailywirerer. You can t miss out on that sizzling new episode of Sports BetOnline! on the newest episode of ESPN s Sports Betting! Subscribe to Dailywire Rewind! and get 5% off the next week's episode of Sports Bettery? on Drafto. and more! Get all the latest sports betting going live on DraftOuts and more by becoming a supporter of the newest DraftOwl. Subscribe & more than $5,000 in your favorite sports betting app, including VIP access to the latest DraftOversave, betting on NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NHL and NHL?
00:03:49.580And immediately realizing just how brilliant she was from her writing, she became a FIRE fellow.
00:03:54.600And we talked about the idea of working together on something that would be a follow-up to talk about it from a Gen Z young woman's perspective.
00:04:04.600But as we were getting ready for that, I started realizing that there are still people out there who are trying to claim that cancel culture isn't real.
00:04:29.720We don't see the kind of numbers of professors fired in the last, you know, since we mark cancel culture as beginning around 2014.
00:04:37.740We don't see the kind of numbers of professors fired during cancel culture since the 1950s in the United States.
00:04:44.500There's nothing even close, about twice as many professors fired than the standard estimates of McCarthyism, for example.
00:04:50.820So people saying it doesn't exist is just crazy.
00:04:53.920Then we try to situate it as part of a way of winning arguments without winning arguments.
00:05:00.800That essentially, it succeeds so well because people realize, well, I could try to refute you an argument and I might fail.
00:05:08.780But I could also scare you into thinking that you don't have a livelihood going forward to just make the cost so high of dissenting that you win arguments without persuading anybody.
00:05:20.020And then the last part of it is really trying to point to different potential solutions.
00:05:24.340Yeah, and I would also add that the difference of our perspective together is really rich because I'm Generation Z.
00:05:33.420We have very different political beliefs.
00:05:35.200But everything in this book in terms of classical liberalism and free speech and pluralism and reinvigorating our democracy and our civic conversation is just like we hold that so near and dear into our hearts.
00:05:47.180And I think that that cross-generational kind of melding really worked very well to our advantage in the book.
00:06:10.160So, now, you guys said a bunch of interesting things there and we'll go through them.
00:06:13.960But I want to ask you first, Ricky, you pointed out that you two have different political beliefs.
00:06:19.240Like you share some core presumptions, but you have different political beliefs.
00:06:22.560So, how would you characterize both the similarities and the differences in your beliefs?
00:06:27.740Yeah, I'm a right-leaning libertarian.
00:06:29.940I don't want to speak for you in terms of how you define your politics, but.
00:06:33.420I'm left of center, homeless democrat, but definitely, and when it comes to, and that may sound like highly inconsistent to a lot of people these days, but there was nothing inconsistent for someone my age to be really pro-free speech and also think of themselves as a left of center.
00:06:51.000Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer of us.
00:06:54.180When I look at what was going on in the 90s, you know, I always thought kind of like the more working class element of the left would win over.
00:07:01.800And I thought the people who believed in speech codes and, you know, some of the identity politics stuff were just our crazies who would eventually self-marginalize.
00:07:09.500Because I'm really disappointed to see that they seem to have all the juice on the left at the moment.
00:07:13.840Yeah, and it seems like, at least in my lifetime, the word liberal was associated with very illiberal actions and things in a way that, you know, true classical liberalism is not a partisan divide in my mind.
00:07:25.840And I think that that's really where we share our common values.
00:07:29.580And certainly in terms of free speech and cancel culture, that's like the heart and center of our book.
00:07:35.600And we pull no punches, you know, when we think the right or left has been wrong, just like we do with fire, we call them out.
00:07:40.940But when it comes to the phenomenon of cancel culture, the place where it's the most dominant, of course, is in higher ed.
00:07:47.800And that is a very, you know, disproportionately lefty space.
00:07:51.560And it's gone really off the rails, as you well know, in higher ed.
00:07:57.140Ricky, how in the world did you become a right-leaning libertarian?
00:08:02.920I mean, as, well, Jonathan Haidt's data in particular, although Greg worked on this too, I mean, the data is indicating quite clearly that there's a growing divide among young men and young women in relationship to their political affiliation.
00:08:15.460With young men increasingly tilting towards where you stand, I would say, right-leaning libertarian.
00:08:20.880And young women increasingly not only becoming much more miserable on the mental health front, but also becoming much more leftist.
00:08:28.440So, how is it that you aren't part of that cohort?
00:08:34.240Since you're not, why do you think it's reasonable in some sense for you to speak for younger women, younger people, younger women?
00:08:42.080And why did you drop out of university?
00:08:46.140So, I'm actually 23, but my father is 86.
00:08:49.520And having that breadth of historical knowledge in my household and so near, I think, made me a little bit more resistant to generational trends.
00:08:56.500And, you know, the tides and just kind of shifting away from what I think common sense right and left was, which happened.
00:09:04.940And I think a lot of my parents or my friend's parents were a little bit more lenient towards the nonsense of what my generation would bring home.
00:09:13.320Whereas, you know, I'd come home to my dad sometimes at dinner and come home with whatever the next politically correct-ism is and say, oh, no, dad, we don't say African-American anymore.
00:10:56.720But I found something that I was passionate about, and I realized that I'd been kind of hoodwinked by a system that was telling me that I needed to fork over enormous amounts of money and spend time fulfilling requirements that weren't important to me and writing essays that, you know, defied my own personal opinions because of the obvious slants of my professors.
00:11:15.240And so, at a certain point, I realized there are more than one pathway to success, and I'm going to tread my own.
00:11:21.960And fortunately, people like Greg were there to kind of pick me up and make sure that I ended up on the right track.
00:11:28.240And so, this is a way cooler place to be at 23 than to have just graduated.
00:11:31.600So, Greg, I wanted to commend you for something first.
00:11:38.880You're not a psychologist, but you are the most outspoken psychologist that I know of, pointing out the fact that if we had set up a cognitive behavioral therapy program nationwide to demoralize young people,
00:11:55.320we couldn't possibly have done it more effectively, speaking strictly from a clinical perspective than we have done.
00:12:49.940And despite that, there is an absolute dearth of psychologists speaking out against, say, cancel culture, trigger warnings, all of this infantilizing idiocy that characterizes the campuses.
00:13:02.840Now, that's partly because, as I found out in Canada, that if you do speak out, and this obviously speaks to cancel culture,
00:13:10.100the probability that the mid-level, miserable, resentful bureaucrats who are in charge of doing things like handing out professional licenses will come after you.
00:13:20.340And if you can't afford to have your career threatened, well, then you're in trouble.
00:13:24.300Now, I don't think that excuses people precisely because I think there's a time and a place to speak in some ways, regardless of personal cost.
00:13:31.900But, and the thing is, you've spoke, so obviously it can be done.
00:13:36.800Now, I want to talk to you, both you guys, about some psychological ideas that I've been working on.
00:13:43.060And some of them are quite contentious, and I'd really like to know what you think.
00:13:47.100So, first of all, there's a very large literature on female antisocial behavior.
00:13:53.820Now, it's not as extensive as male antisocial behavior literature, because males who are antisocial tend to be violent physically, and that gets more attention.
00:14:05.140But there are antisocial females, and they have a very set way of going about destroying their opponents to their own advantage.
00:14:14.280And the way they do that is by innuendo, reputation savaging, and gossiping.
00:14:20.640And this literature all arose before the dawn of social media, and it was very well-established for multiple decades.
00:14:28.800Now, my observation is that that scales brilliantly on social media, right?
00:14:35.500Because you can savage reputations, you can use innuendo, you can gossip, you can destroy, with zero cost to yourself.
00:14:43.760Now, women tend to turn to that because they don't engage in physical fighting, not between each other, very, very rarely, and they certainly can't fight physically with men.
00:14:53.300So, if they're going to be antisocial and instrumental, narcissistic, psychopathic, and all of that, they're going to do it in this more subtle manner.
00:15:01.460Now, I see absolutely no limits to the expression of that sort of behavior whatsoever on social media.
00:15:07.400In fact, quite the contrary, that leads to an even more dismal possibility.
00:15:13.580This terrifies me, to tell you the truth.
00:15:16.380So, you know, the problem of parasitical criminality, parasitism in particular, is so deep that sex itself evolved as a solution to the problem.
00:15:31.020So, the problem of parasitism is very, very old.
00:15:37.980And this proclivity of the psychopathic and narcissistic types to denigrate and to elevate their reputation falsely is a form of parasitism.
00:15:51.000And it has no constraints whatsoever on social media.
00:15:54.600We know that the troll types and the online criminal types are much more likely to have dark tetrad personality characteristics,
00:16:01.640Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic because the other three weren't enough.
00:16:07.260My sense is that we've enabled the psychopaths.
00:16:12.280They have free reign to express themselves in this more feminine, antisocial manner.
00:16:17.100And we risk bringing down the whole house of cards because of it.
00:16:20.180So, the first thing I'd like to know is, like, what do you guys think about that hypothesis?
00:16:25.560This disparity in the virtual versus the real world.
00:16:30.380Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:16:35.820Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.
00:16:37.960But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:16:43.660In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:16:48.640Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
00:16:53.100you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.
00:16:58.120And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:17:01.320With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:17:08.700Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:50:23.460I mean, you've thought about this a lot, both of you.
00:50:25.600What do you see that might actually be done concretely to regulate this proclivity towards cancel culture without also, you know, I see what Christopher Rufo and people like him are doing in Florida, you know, and I have some real sympathy for their attempts.
00:50:40.320But I can easily see that going astray, too.
00:50:43.000You know, once the politicians enter the fray of ideas, I mean, how could that go wrong?
00:50:49.200I mean, it's going to go wrong real fast, right?
00:51:08.720Real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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00:52:03.220And what's funny is, you know, I end up, you know, arguing with Rufo about reforms.
00:52:09.060And step number one, and I believe profoundly in higher education reform, but step number one of reform is you have to pass something that actually is legal, is actually not going to be immediately laughed out of court.
00:52:20.660And so this is what we warned about some of the regulations that they were trying in Florida.
00:52:50.760And so far, that's exactly what happened.
00:52:54.120Meanwhile, some of the other reforms that DeSantis was talking about were great ideas.
00:52:58.420When it came to, you know, for example, having, you know, as part of orientation, debate series where you actually have people argue about the most radioactive topics in the country, that could be amazing.
00:53:10.100Talking about free speech and orientation could be amazing.
00:53:12.860I think that reducing the bureaucracy is something I've been saying for decades.
00:53:18.620A lot of the worst things that are happening for freedom of speech at first, for the first part of my career, they were overwhelmingly coming from the ranks of administrators.
00:53:26.420And then in 2014, they started coming from the students as well.
00:53:31.960Now, people sometimes think what I'm saying is it used to be administrators and now it's students.
00:53:37.480Now it's administrators and students and usually and students they like.
00:53:41.980So like what happened at Stanford, my alma mater, when they, you know, shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan, you know, that very much seemed to be a collaboration between some administrators in the DEI programs and students themselves to do a shout down there.
00:53:56.420So I think a deep bureaucratized university will have more, will have more free speech.
00:54:02.480It will have more due process and it will have fewer of these, fewer of these incidents.
00:54:07.060But I also think we desperately need the kind of experimentation that you're doing and University of Texas at Austin is doing, Minerva University out in San Francisco.
00:54:15.880Like ways that actually can perform better at much lower costs that can actually tell you who the best and brightest and most hardworking are out there.
00:54:25.160And your point about the laws going horribly wrong, that essentially if you think you can just get rid of bad ideas on campus through legislation, well, I've got bad news for you.
00:54:36.020They're already trying to do that all across the country.
00:54:38.620They're just coming at it from the left rather than the right.
00:54:41.320And I'm very proud that we were able to find, because we've been looking, Dr. Peterson, we've been looking for this for a long time.
00:54:47.260We wanted to find a really good, terrible DEI policy to shoot down in court to make it clear that this is compelled speech.
00:54:58.620This is utterly inappropriate for a place that's supposed to be the marketplace of ideas.
00:55:02.120And we found that, unsurprisingly, in California.
00:55:06.240And the California community college system had a system that actually requires you, and this includes whether you're a chemistry professor or an English professor, to incorporate, what is it called, intersectionality, anti-racism, which is Kendi's idea.
00:55:25.080To incorporate all of these ideological things that a lot of people don't even believe are true to begin with, but that you have to actually incorporate in your classroom, regardless of what you teach, and regardless of whether or not you disagree with them or not.
00:55:38.260So we brought this in court, and it's been very funny to me, watching people who were totally with us when we litigated against the StopWoke Act, freaking out.
00:55:48.100They were litigating against the DEI in tyranny, and making the point that, and I just argue back to them, like, no, this is a gross violation.
00:55:58.320And I always make the point that telling people what they can't say is really bad, and we will always fight it.
00:56:03.140Telling people what they must say is a thousand times worse, and we will definitely fight that right away.
00:56:09.220You know, that's what I objected to in Canada, and that's also why my license is on the line now, is because I am being told what I have to say, which is way different than what I can't say.
00:56:21.000You know, it's a little bit of both, but yeah, it's stunning.
00:56:26.020The other thing we found, by the way, in that research I referred to, was that if people had taken even one course that had a politically correct orientation, they were also much more likely to be politically correct authoritarian.
00:56:37.720So this tactic that the radicals on the left have of gaining control of the education system, that's unbelievably effective.
00:56:46.000Ricky, you mentioned earlier, this is something that's been an absolute bloody mystery to me.
00:56:50.660I can't believe, you know, I'm not a fan of the Democrats in the U.S. for what that's worth, given that I'm Canadian, but the Republicans and the conservatives have their problems, and one of those problems is kind of short-sightedness.
00:57:03.840It's like, I cannot believe, and I haven't had anyone explain this to me except Chris.
00:57:08.720I talked to Chris Christie about this because he went to battle with the teachers' unions in New Jersey.
00:57:14.100So, you know, the faculties of education have a monopolistic hammerlock on teacher certification, right?
00:57:20.420And there's, like, absolutely no reason for that.
00:57:22.920The faculties of education, to call their research dismal and misleading is to barely scrape the surface.
00:57:29.520They got to stupid several decades before the rest of the universities.
00:57:33.880They generally have the students who perform the worst academically, and so, and everything they teach is ideological and unfounded.
00:57:43.040There's no evidence whatsoever that the faculties of education know anything whatsoever about making better students.
00:57:49.160And yet, they have a hammerlock on teacher certification, and that essentially gives the progressive radicals access to 50% of the state budgets in the U.S.
00:58:01.160So, it's no bloody wonder that the liberals, the real liberals, and the conservatives are losing the culture war.
00:58:07.380I mean, they handed the children, and we've handed all the children to the faculties of education.
00:58:14.220And for the life of me, I can't understand how conservatives can't see that.
00:58:17.900And I just want to add one thing that we didn't know when Coddling of the American Mind came out, and we should have, is that we've been calling out education schools, you know, since we were founded at FIRE.
00:58:29.480And one thing that we thought successfully, by the way, was the accreditation body for most education schools tried to have a social justice requirement, saying that you could not graduate with a degree in education unless you proved your commitment to social justice.
00:58:43.600Which is, we're like, guys, if you don't see this as an obvious political litmus test, then I don't know what to say.
00:58:51.380But of course, when you have a situation where only FIRE and some other groups are objecting to an obvious political litmus test, and it's considered just fine among other people in the field, then the problem's already gone way too far.
00:59:03.260One thing we didn't know, though, is how much of the administration at universities come from education schools, and that we were way ahead of the curve fighting at University of Delaware back in 2007.
00:59:16.200They had this absolutely crazy brainwashing program that involved, you know, people having mandatory meetings with their RAs where they had to confess to, they had to talk about, like, when they discovered their sexual identity.
00:59:29.040And this was, in this case, like, one of the examples we had was a young woman, you know, being in a session with a man's room being asked this, and her answer was, none of your damn business.
00:59:39.080And she actually got written up for that, and we're like, that's exactly the right call on that.
00:59:44.000So, we've been fighting this for a long time, but we didn't actually fully understand how much of the distortions we see in higher ed as it currently exists actually come from the fact that the administrators who are enforcing these rules and enforcing the speech codes and enforcing the bias-related incident program policies are actually education school graduates themselves.
01:00:02.520Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, they're responsible also for the worst excesses of so-called psychological research in the last 60 years.
01:00:13.180It's like the self-esteem movement, that was a complete bloody catastrophe.
01:00:17.300That was the first time that the universe, or that the schools, set out to actually produce neurotic narcissists, and they did that quite successfully.
01:00:25.380They pushed whole word learning, which plummeted California from top of the national standings in literacy to bottom within about 10 years, right, predicated on the idea that just because expert readers could read a word at a glance, that we should teach children to do the same, even though we have a phonetic alphabet, which might have been a hint, right?
01:00:46.600The education schools produced multiple intelligences, which was a complete bloody fraud.
01:00:51.600They produced practical intelligence, social, emotional learning, like it's just one destructive, counterproductive, anti-scientific fad after another.
01:01:02.080And that's in addition to the fact that, while they're woke beyond comprehension, incompetent and generally have the worst students and the lowest academic standards.
01:01:10.820So, the conservatives couldn't possibly have done a worse job of defending their own territory if they would have come up with a plan to do so.
01:01:20.240So, Ricky, with what you're doing, like my daughter is pretty active on social media, and she has a background similar to yours.
01:01:29.840I'd say her political leanings are probably approximately the same as yours, somewhat right-leaning libertarian.
01:01:35.260And what sort of cancellation, et cetera, do you face online?
01:01:44.640Like, I mean, I've read the comments directed towards my daughter, and I mean, the ones directed to me are pretty brutal, but women do face a level of brutality, especially personal attacks, often appearance-related, that men just don't face.
01:01:59.560And so, what's that been like for you, and how, has it been a problem, and how do you defend yourself against that?
01:02:08.420Yeah, I think, you know, I'm benefited by the fact that I grew up with social media, and I was on, this is one of the few upsides of that fact, that I've been on Instagram since I was 11, unfortunately.
01:02:18.880But I do know how to deal with negative comments and negative feedback just from day one, essentially, of being an adolescent.
01:02:27.920But I would say, yeah, when I did my first real foray into mass exposure and seeing what, you know, I tend to be, like, I kind of roll my eyes at the, like, misogyny.
01:02:41.340And, like, a lot of my feminist friends who are seeing it in every corner, but, my God, when I did Bill Maher, did I see just, like, the wrath of God come for me in a way that was not coming for my co-panelists?
01:02:51.960So, that definitely was a humbling experience.
01:02:55.640I made the mistake of reading the Reddit threads and told myself, never again.
01:03:02.400But I would say, yeah, there was that, that definitely, weirdly, all people on the left I've found so far, at least when I am on conservative forums, maybe because they're more friendly to my ideology, I'd get less of that.
01:03:15.580But certainly, a lot of the more left-leaning Bill Maher fans were less, less fans of mine than, than most of my audience.
01:03:22.840Jordan, I tweeted out, you know, about, like how, like I said at the beginning, how lucky I felt to work with Rick Inge.
01:03:28.740And we're, we're a great team, because I'm a, I'm a crazy overrider.
01:03:32.000Hype was good at helping me with that, too.
01:03:33.780I'll write 5,000 words that has to be boiled down to 500, you know, like that's, it's a problem.
01:03:38.580And, and, and Ricky was constantly showing me that the thing that I took three pages to write that could actually be a perfect paragraph that actually was better than my three pages.
01:03:47.900So, she's absolutely brilliant to work with.
01:04:16.580So, this is a pandemic, a pandemic meeting of mine.
01:04:19.280Although, it was kind of funny, like, because I was so impressed with her and my interactions with her was, was just like email and phone calls.
01:04:26.340When I first saw her, I'm like, oh, my God, you really are a kid.
01:04:31.660And, Dr. Peterson, if I may go back to your question about what we can do to actually solve cancel culture, I do have, you know, my, my expertise is certainly less professional, but more on the ground as a young person growing up in the age of cancel culture for as long as I can effectively remember.
01:04:49.080And I have to tell you, one thing that I think is just so underappreciated is the fact that just courage is contagious.
01:04:56.880And when I was at NYU, I learned, I learned the hard way that cancel culture thrives off of making everyone feel alone and as though they're the only person around them that thinks the way that they do.
01:05:07.900It incentivizes you to close in on yourself, to not, to not share your beliefs.
01:05:12.160And, you know, you could be sitting next to a roommate who feels the same way or someone across the hall.
01:05:17.300And I was, when I first decided, my first article that was published was actually in the Daily Wire.
01:05:23.920And when I first decided to put my name to an article, I was ready for everyone I knew to instantaneously hate me and disown me.
01:05:30.320And some people, not huge fans of what I was writing, and that's fine.
01:05:34.360But I found out that there were so many people that I was so close to in so many ways that actually shared a lot of my political beliefs or at least the core principles of classical liberalism or they respected me in a way that I didn't expect.
01:05:47.540And even at a place like NYU, and I actually say this in our book, but when I was a freshman, I was hiding books under my bed, including your book, 12 Rules for Life, and Thomas Sowell's books.
01:05:58.760So I had my, like, secret library underneath my bed, which I'm ashamed to admit, looking back.
01:06:03.760But when you're an 18-year-old in a new place, yeah, exactly.
01:06:07.040But when you're an 18-year-old in a new place, like, the incentives are to close in on yourself.
01:06:11.960And as soon as I spoke out, I had administrators, professors, people that lived on my floor in my dorm, people that I was friends with for years.
01:06:19.200And, like, if we can just prove that this is a tyranny of the minority, which it absolutely is statistically, even with Gen Z, even though our Gen Z politics are so out of control, if you look at what generations have a positive view of cancel culture, the most positive view is millennials.
01:06:38.560But the least positive view by far is Gen Z, because we grew up in it.
01:06:42.340We know how awful it is to be a teenager with tripwires all around you.
01:06:46.620And if we could just get more young people to say, you know what, here I am being open and honest and humble and criticize my beliefs, but they're out here and this is who I am, then the courage will be contagious.
01:06:58.900Well, there's something I want to zero in on that, too.
01:07:01.540So you tell me what your experience was.
01:07:04.020So you said, you know, you were hesitant when you first started to write.
01:07:09.540But so one of the things I've realized more clearly in the last five or six years is that the meaning that sustains you in life is certainly not a hedonic meaning.
01:07:25.900And the reason for that, at least in part, is that, well, hedonism can make you impulsive and make you sacrifice the future for the present.
01:07:34.020And it can alienate you from other people, because if you're hedonistically inclined, you'll use other people.
01:07:38.980But there's a deeper reason why it's not reliable as a means of orientation.
01:07:44.300And that is that if something terrible happens to you, hedonism isn't going to protect you because you're not happy when you're suffering.
01:07:51.520And so if you're relying on a hedonistic viewpoint, then as soon as you're miserable, you're doomed.
01:07:58.380So then you might say, well, what do you turn to to sustain you?
01:08:01.740And you can think, well, you have your relationships, your loves and your interests and all of that.
01:12:00.400I'm not an environment where I'll be canceled.
01:12:01.960And time and time again, of course, I hear this from professors and within like a year, they're writing fire to ask for our help.
01:12:08.400But even off campus, one of the ways in which cancel culture is devastating,
01:12:12.400and we see this in the case of like Carol Hooven, a professor at Harvard who stepped down from her position and then left Harvard for a while,
01:12:21.940after she just went on Fox News and argued that biological sex exists and got targeted by administrators there.
01:12:38.940But of course, what I feel like these people don't get is like, you know that you've completely destroyed any credibility that anybody will have ever debating these topics ever again when it comes from academia.
01:12:49.800If people know that one Galileo can be sacrificed for arguing that the Earth goes around the sun,
01:12:56.500they're not going to trust anybody else who says that the sun goes around the Earth again, you know, like that's just the way it works.
01:13:04.000And from that kind of effect of having the billion extra eyes on the problem, what I feel like is it showed us how shallow our expert class is,
01:13:13.020how shallow our pundit class is, how, you know, it let more people know about the replication crisis and how much shoddy research comes out of higher ed.
01:13:21.080And that led to sort of like an epistemic anarchy kind of situation like we currently have.
01:13:27.240And what happens over time, and I think is happening, is people are looking primarily to individuals who they're like, okay, who has always been honest to me?
01:13:36.680Who has actually always said what they think is actually true?
01:13:40.280And I think that one of the reasons why I'm, like I said, I'm not necessarily optimistic, but I am hopeful is that, and particularly on places like Substack, for example,
01:13:47.840you see some of these experts who have always shown integrity, you know, having, creating audiences around themselves to be the people who raise their hand and say,
01:13:56.340by the way, one thing I can say is you'll always get the truth from me.
01:13:59.500Yeah, yeah, like Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, for example.
01:14:02.900Yeah, there's lots of examples like that now, and there's more academics like that coming out of the woodwork all the time.
01:14:11.260I used to work at Harvard, and I loved it there.
01:14:13.300It was a great institution when I was there in the 90s.
01:14:15.760You, in a fit of comic accuracy, your organization, FIRE, has just awarded Harvard your coveted, you score below zero on campus freedom score,
01:14:30.440and which I don't know how you can score below zero on a scale, so I'd like to hear about that.
01:14:34.900I think you gave them, you actually invented a new category, which was abysmal, and abysmal is not good.
01:14:40.820Can you explain why is this not just a joke, let's say, and can you justify what you did and let people know what it means?
01:14:52.020Yeah, I've been kind of amused by some people that I know at Harvard claiming that our survey was arbitrary
01:14:58.560because it couldn't possibly be true that Harvard scored actually less than zero by our rating.
01:15:05.680Now, to be clear, we have done, every year we've been doing it, FIRE has conducted, and progressively,
01:15:12.740the largest study of student opinion about the atmosphere for freedom of speech on their campus ever.
01:15:18.160Like, from the very, from our very first one, I believe, was the largest one that was ever of student opinion,
01:15:22.820and now we're up to 55,000 students that we talk to.
01:15:25.760We create, we work with a group called College Pulse, we create representative panels at each school,
01:15:31.360we survey them on everything from how acceptable violence is in response to freedom of speech,
01:15:35.580to whether or not they feel like they can disagree with each other,
01:15:38.420or whether or not they're afraid to disagree with their professors.
01:15:40.400We also have the largest database of speech codes ever put together.
01:15:45.400We evaluate universities according to their written policies.
01:15:48.640We evaluate them in terms of cancellation of professors and attempts to cancel professors.
01:15:52.900We certainly think that if you have a huge number of professors who have been targeted,
01:15:57.080that certainly speaks badly of the environment to begin with,
01:15:59.660but certainly if you're firing them too or punishing them too, that's even worse, and that's a bigger thing.
01:16:04.320We have the biggest database of students being targeted,
01:16:07.120and we combine all of this research together in definitely the most ambitious attempt to rank schools,
01:16:13.800according to freedom of speech, ever done.
01:16:16.160And I don't put a thumb on the scale on any of this.
01:16:19.500And Harvard, when we never did well on our survey, it was always in the bottom fifth.
01:17:19.360It's just one of the things that's going on.
01:17:21.040Like, a tenured professor that they're trying to get rid of.
01:17:23.160But the students themselves are saying, this is an environment where it's really hard to have a discussion about anything important.
01:17:29.680And, of course, you know, a lot of these schools, you end up, at the same time, having, you know, being kind of soft on violence in response to speech, which might be part of the problem.
01:17:37.700But University of Pennsylvania, which was 247 out of the 248 schools that we ranked, got a score of, like, 11.63, which is really bad.
01:17:53.980We rounded them up to zero because we thought that was a responsible thing to do.
01:18:00.440But they actually scored below zero according to all the different environments that we rank, including, again, most importantly, what students are actually saying about the environment at Harvard.
01:18:18.500We give schools scores for whether or not they support students when they're in situations, when they have their free speech challenged, and when they have a speaker disinvited.
01:18:30.460And you get negatives for things like if you have a disinvitation and the school didn't do anything to stop it, you get negative points.
01:18:38.320And most schools—actually, sorry, all 247 other schools were able to—we didn't think there was any risk that a school could get an actual negative score because we do these little adjustments here and there very rigorously to try to accommodate for the fact that, one, students sometimes go to schools that they think are actually pretty good for free speech.
01:19:02.820But actually, if you look at their record, they're firing tenured professors for freedom of speech.
01:19:06.820So, like, Princeton actually scores surprisingly well, even though they fired tenured—or they forced out Professor Joshua Katz.
01:19:14.640Now, of course, they said that was for sexual misconduct, but it's really clear the reason why he was targeted was because of his calling, I think, BLM, like a hate group or something like that.
01:19:25.120That's when the scrutiny started, and that's what they actually got him out for.
01:19:28.300So they get a ding for forcing out a tenured professor.
01:19:31.020But the students there themselves—and this comports somewhat with my own experience—actually, I think the environment's not that bad for free speech.
01:19:37.380Princeton doesn't do great, of course.
01:19:39.800But in—so we include all of these factors together.
01:19:43.440And Harvard, you know, Harvard's been on our ten worst schools for freedom of speech list, I think, four times already, and we've only been doing that since 2011.
01:19:51.020So it shouldn't have come as such a shock to Harvard that they need to fix things.
01:19:57.120And meanwhile, you know, good friends like our advisory council member, Stephen Pinker, who's been a friend of FIRE forever, he created a group that was to defend academic freedom and freedom of speech at Harvard.
01:20:07.660I think he got a hundred scholars to join it.
01:20:10.540And this is something that actually creates an opportunity for them to be taken more seriously.
01:20:15.400And meanwhile, kind of like we—as far as schools that we interact with, FIRE has a really good track record of convincing schools to do the right thing.
01:20:23.360Sometimes we have to take them to court.
01:20:24.880Sometimes it's just public pressure that actually leads them to do the right thing.
01:20:28.160Harvard won't ever budge on any of this stuff.
01:20:30.940And the question is, like, will the fact that their own students and that their own behavior has gotten them this ranking, will this make them take the issue of academic freedom and free speech more seriously?
01:20:40.340And actually, honestly, Jordan, you probably know better than we would.
01:20:43.580Yeah, well, the question is, is Harvard a university or a hedge fund?
01:21:24.660Tongue-in-cheek in a way, but brilliant.
01:21:28.000And he has a lot of maxims and axioms.
01:21:30.920It's a list of axioms about how you analyze how a system works.
01:21:34.120And one of his axioms, which I've never forgotten and has been unbelievably useful to me as an analytic researcher, was the system does not do what its name says it does.
01:21:48.040And so that when you approach a system, you have to look at, so if you want to, for example, figure out what a system does, you look at where it spends its money.
01:21:55.320So I learned this when I was working for the Alberta government 30 years ago, 40 years ago, as a junior analyst.
01:22:04.100I had to gather statistics on how much the social services branch of the government spent on the actual people to whom they were delivering services, right?
01:22:13.720So that would be people receiving welfare and who are being subsidized for kindergarten and so on.
01:22:19.460Everything that comes under the rubric of social services.
01:22:21.720And I found out that there were no stats.
01:22:27.420The system wasn't set up to actually monitor its own behavior.
01:22:30.880And that the consulting company that had been hired to produce the report detailing those numbers the year before had just basically made them up.
01:22:54.360But it's no different than most charities.
01:22:56.360You know, most charities spend 90% of their money running the charity.
01:23:01.120Now, you know, I'm not completely cynical about that because most corporations have about a 5% profit margin.
01:23:07.520So that means they spend 95% of their money running themselves.
01:23:11.360You know, it's not that easy to get an enterprise up and running that actually does something other than take care of itself.
01:23:16.680But when you look at an organization like Harvard and it has that immense storehouse of money, you think, well, why do they care about being a university?
01:23:26.500What the hell difference does it make?
01:23:29.740That's got to be the fundamental preoccupation.
01:23:31.960Now, that doesn't account for why it's become so insanely politically correct.
01:23:36.420You know, and I've talked to Harvard professors, one from the Kennedy School, which was particularly worrisome given its primary role, let's say, in determining American domestic and foreign policy.
01:23:49.040And then one from a different department who both told me that one from the business school told me or the Kennedy School told me flat out that the professors there are terrified to say anything they think because the students will skin them alive.
01:25:00.780And the reason they said yes was because they were smart.
01:25:03.760And they thought, well, if we have professors and students who want to stay in their damn lab so long that they don't go home,
01:25:09.660they sleep there and they need a shower.
01:25:11.380It's like, okay, if you want to work 17 hours a day, hey, man, we'll build you a shower.
01:25:18.060Now, you know, at my last institution, the University of Toronto, that would have never happened because they would have just thought of that as a luxury because they weren't, you know, frankly, that bright.
01:25:26.580But Harvard was the sort of place, I'm dead serious about that.
01:25:30.120They talked a lot about excellence but had no idea whatsoever how to facilitate it, although they were very good at talking about it.
01:25:36.760And so they put obstacles in the way rather than clearing them out of the way.
01:25:41.620And I have no idea what the hell has happened to it in the interim, although, you know, the fact that Pinker felt compelled,
01:25:47.420and he's a very reasonable person and a liberal by any stretch of the imagination.
01:25:52.800He's hardly a right-wing, you know, some sort of right-wing conspiracy theorist, not Steven Pinker.
01:25:58.380And the fact that he felt compelled to set up a whole organization to facilitate free speech at Harvard is another indication of just exactly how dreadful that place has become.
01:26:52.580I mean, this is what I'm seeing in Canada is that Canadians in my situation, I'm being pursued by my accrediting board at the moment who want to take my license or subject me to re-education, which is, you know, just, I just can't even believe that this is the case.
01:27:07.660And, or how they think that's going to work possibly, because I'm definitely not corrigible by standard re-education techniques.
01:27:14.980So, but I think Canadians, when they look at my situation, they have a very hard choice to make.
01:27:21.040And it's the same choice that you're requiring people who are analyzing higher education to make.
01:27:25.480You had, in the United States, you guys had stellar institutions, man.
01:27:28.820Those, your Ivy League schools, they were knocking it out of the park for a long time.
01:27:33.520And the state school system in California was deadly good for a long, long time.
01:27:39.160And so, it's a complete bloody catastrophe that those institutions have inverted and are now actually peddling hard in the opposite direction.
01:27:46.900And it's not the least bit surprising that people can't believe it.
01:27:50.740Like, I'll tell you a funny story about this.
01:28:24.080And they said, well, they told us that we would lose our library privileges, we would lose our cafeteria privileges, and we wouldn't be able to park if we didn't take the course.
01:28:53.260They had no idea whatsoever that there is an entire ideological enterprise underneath this, pushing everything in this insane progressive direction.
01:29:03.100They had no concept of that whatsoever.
01:29:05.460And so I think a lot of people who are looking at the universities and the political institutions, you know, they can either think that me and people like me, and that might include you two, unfortunately for you, are, you know, just noisy conspiracy theorists screeching in the wilderness.
01:29:24.100Or our major institutions, many of which were world-class and which took hundreds of years to instantiate, have now become virtually irreparably corrupt.
01:29:35.420Well, it's obviously a lot easier to write off the bearers of bad news.
01:29:42.760And unsurprisingly, and in Canada, you really see that, because most of our institutions here, they worked until, well, you say 2014, that's probably about right.
01:29:54.620No, it is funny watching the various ways you get dismissed talking about this.
01:29:58.700And one of the funniest ones is when people point out that in my book, Unlearning Liberty, I talked about 2007 as being the worst year I had seen.
01:30:05.560And that was one way of the University of Delaware, you know, brainwashing program that I mentioned before, a crazy case involving someone getting, you know, expelled for a flyer, another case in which someone said the epithet wet back in class and then criticized, in order to criticize it and was immediately suspended.
01:30:23.140All things that are day-to-day occurrences now, and people are kind of like, oh, but you're saying that things have been, you've never seen it as bad, but you said that back in 2007.
01:30:30.660I'm like, because they kept on getting worse every several years.
01:30:34.420And you always have the danger, of course, of being dismissed as a kook or unpleasable, but it's particularly difficult when you're saying, like, I've been doing this for 22 years.
01:30:43.160It was already worse than I thought it would be for free speech on campus.
01:30:46.400In 2001, and it's definitely had peaks and valleys here and there, but the trend line has overwhelmingly been, it just gets worse.
01:30:56.2602017, giant acceleration in terms to get professors canceled.
01:30:59.880And then that's put in the dust by 2020 and 2021.
01:31:04.380And to get to the DEI stuff, the idea that in the midst of a situation in which there are departments that have literally no conservatives, particularly in elite higher education, where they have record low, all-time low viewpoint diversity among professors.
01:31:19.220When they have cancel culture, when they have BRTs, when they have a tenure process that screens out for loud people, when they have all of these, what we call the conformity gauntlet in the book, they have all these mechanisms to shut you up from high school for actually from K through 12 on up, including nature, human behavior, saying that they won't actually publish things that are found to be harmful to groups, which is just like, wow, you can survive all that.
01:31:41.340And still not, and they decided in addition to this, that they would add DEI statements being required for professors, that they needed an additional political litmus test.
01:31:53.080It's like, I can't believe any, like only an administrator would look at the world of higher education and see, you know what, there is too much freedom of thought.
01:32:02.120There's too much heterogeneity among these professors.
01:32:05.160We need a mechanism to make it even more rigid.
01:32:07.560You know, I might also add in terms of being dismissed as a conspiracy theorist for pointing out these realities, I think that the people who I've seen to be most amenable to these arguments that higher education is just completely turned on its head are young people who don't remember the model that you both remember of it actually being better at some point in time.
01:32:29.160When you look at the statistics of faith in higher education with Gen Z, two-thirds of current high school students say that they think that they can tread their own educational path.
01:32:37.840Less than half of current high schoolers say that a college degree is necessary for financial success, 100%.
01:32:45.580And I mean, just the statistics are staggering and who can, I mean, like who can blame young people for looking at the situation in which people feel like they can't speak their minds.
01:32:57.500The millennials are just saddled in debt.
01:33:00.320We have a system in which a third of American colleges produce graduating classes in which the median graduate makes less than the average high school graduate.
01:33:08.660Like the system has absolutely been filled with federally backed money and student loans.
01:33:18.220And no wonder young people who then were told, oh, not only are you going to shell over an arm and a leg to join this university, but now we're going to do the pandemic.
01:33:26.440And what NYU did was still charge us full tuition for Zoom school.
01:33:33.600And that was when my family was like, you have our blessing, you get right out of there.
01:35:24.760I thought the university ran like a charm.
01:35:26.520So it's not just, you know, old guys looking back thinking things were better when we were young.
01:35:31.880It's that things have become so corrupt and so expensive that it's actually, it borders on what's being done to young people on the higher education front borders on criminal.
01:35:43.920The bloody administrators figured out how to pick the future pockets of the students.
01:36:10.660Not to mention, like, half the kids in my classes were in completely different time zones.
01:36:14.980So they're up at like 3 a.m. and they all have their cameras off as well.
01:36:18.360It was just, it was an abdication of all of the school's responsibility on just a fundamental level.
01:36:23.280At the same time, all of our lives are being torn apart with these wild cancel culture mobs, which we talked earlier about whether social media made cancel culture go awry.
01:36:32.200I mean, certainly when you not only have social media as the predominant tool of communication going into a pandemic, but then you require that it only be the primary sole communication between people, where you no longer have to look at your classmate in the eye and stuff.
01:36:46.980Like, the conversations that I saw on social media, even in Zoom chats during lectures, like, it's just absolutely rampant, out-of-control, antisocial behavior.
01:36:59.160And I think before the pandemic, we were all kind of complacent for a while and thinking that, you know, cancel culture slowed down after 2016.
01:37:05.080And people often are very early to champion that it's over and ended.
01:37:09.700But then we have one little cultural, we have a cultural hiccup, and then we're right back to square zero, and we're burning the whole house down and tearing people down with it.
01:37:17.620So I think, you know, 2020 in terms of just the experience of being a young person was really life-changing for all of us.
01:38:01.340Yeah, you mentioned in your, you know, the first discussion that you had when you went off to university that all the girls that you were sitting around had a history of self-harm, you know.
01:38:12.460And Jonathan has done a very good job.
01:38:14.680Jonathan Haidt has done a very good job of documenting this cataclysmic rise in self-destructive neuroticism.
01:38:21.980Hey, here's something that's useful to know.
01:38:24.180So, you know, in the Neo-PIR personality questionnaire, it's the gold standard for assessing the five dimensions of personality.
01:38:33.700So, you know, one of the subfacets, one of the subfacets of neuroticism, so that's the proclivity to experience negative emotion, literally one of the subfacets is self-consciousness.
01:38:47.180There's also a very large body of work now that documents the propensity of people who are either depressed or psychotic, so seriously mentally disordered, in the miserable direction, are much more likely to use pronouns and terms that are self-referential.
01:39:06.560And so it's literally the truth that the more you concentrate on yourself, the more miserable you are.
01:39:14.140And, of course, your generation has been taught to identify, to put their own subjective self-identification paramount, to do little else but concentrate on their own feeling, and to do little else but to concentrate on their own feelings.
01:39:28.700Now, in your personal experience, you mentioned what happened to you in that first group at university.
01:39:35.560What do you feel has been the consequence of this?
01:39:44.200In terms of the ongoing consequences of growing up in social media and this depressive sort of environment?
01:39:49.760Yeah, well, in particular, well, let's say for women in particular, also for the relationship between young women and young men.
01:39:55.080I mean, I have to say that it feels as though a lot of my cohort is experiencing kind of like a prolonged adolescence.
01:40:04.380I don't know if that's in part because of the pandemic and our adulthood's launch in just such a bizarre way.
01:40:12.320But, I mean, I would say it's just, even still now, when I was a teenager, I thought, you know, when we get older, we're not going to be mired in the same sort of, like, depressive malaise.
01:40:23.340It's the only word I can really use to describe how I feel like my generation is just, like, there's this cloud over us.
01:40:29.660And it's often very negative to be in groups, particularly of young women together.
01:40:34.900I mean, it's—I remember that night still.
01:40:38.840It was unbelievable to me that, like, it was almost like, why was I the one person who in this group was not able to share in that experience?
01:40:50.120And even as we've gotten older, I've not seen it subside.
01:40:53.740I mean, I don't have friends that are still cutting themselves like they did when they were teenagers, but there's still this depressive, like, downward pull of my generation.
01:41:26.440I mean, I feel like we're growing up in an age where, you know, the relationship between male and female is quite recently changed very dramatically, and we're still trying to get our footing on that.
01:41:38.960The way that we communicate with each other is completely upended because we're now completely digitized.
01:41:44.200The political environment around us is so dysfunctional, and it's just, like, I don't really know what to say about the state of my generation besides it's just bleak, and I'm concerned that it doesn't seem to be getting much better.
01:41:57.420And somehow, we just all seem to be folding in on ourselves.
01:42:00.720You know, one of the things I've observed traveling all over the world now for five years is that, you know, if you try to demoralize young people for 60 years by telling them that their ambitions are pathological and world-destroying and that everything's predicated on power and oppression, you actually do demoralize them.
01:42:17.720Especially when you add to that the vision of a necessarily apocalyptic future brought on by that ambition that can only be rectified by having everyone, especially the poor, give up pretty much everything they own.
01:42:32.160It's like, well, we're pretty much done with that.
01:42:35.840Also massive amounts of disfizing yourself.
01:42:39.420Justified self-hatred as a parasite on the surface of the planet.
01:42:44.580Yeah, I think we've pretty much had enough of that.
01:42:46.400And we do, to end on a positive note, you know, I mean, your situation is instructive.
01:42:52.900You know, you took these technological tools that are at your disposal and you're doing that right now and you decided to say what you had to say.
01:43:00.340And, you know, your future, as far as I can tell from the limited time we've spent together, your future seems to be pretty damn bright.
01:43:07.140And there's no reason that can't be the case for everyone.
01:43:09.380And so it is a very sad situation that we've managed to demoralize young people so badly and to split them apart at the level of sexual relationship.
01:43:19.980But by the same token, and you'd mentioned this earlier, there is an increasing space for people who are willing to stand up and to make their case known.
01:43:29.840And to do that with extraordinarily effectiveness using the tools that are at hand.
01:43:35.000And so maybe that, and, you know, I think FIRE is one of the organizations that's actually pushing for that outcome to be the one that is going to prevail.
01:43:43.680I hope your book also tilts things in that direction as your previous book did quite successfully.
01:43:49.320I mean, it's had a good run and people still talk about it, still sells.
01:43:53.860And so, and it did draw a lot of attention to what was going on in universities.
01:43:57.820I know that Jonathan Haidt has got a new book coming out.