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

00:00:00.000 The same habits that make students illiberal, that make them oppose freedom of speech,

00:00:04.220 are the same mental habits that make people anxious and depressed.

00:00:13.100 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:17.400 I'm Constantine Kissinger.

00:00:18.460 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:24.120 Our brilliant guest today is the president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education,

00:00:29.080 and the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukanoff. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:34.260 Yeah, thanks for having me.

00:00:35.600 It's a great pleasure to have you on the show. I've given you the full introduction there,

00:00:39.620 but tell us a little bit about the story behind that. Who are you? How are you where you are?

00:00:44.440 What has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:00:48.740 Oh, wow. Okay. So we were talking a little bit before the camera started rolling about my family

00:00:53.820 history. I'm a first generation American. My father is Russian by way of Yugoslavia and my

00:00:59.700 mother is Irish by way of England. And because of the peculiarities of each culture, my ethnically

00:01:06.000 Irish mother thinks of herself as British and my ethnically Russian father thinks of himself as

00:01:10.700 Russian because you don't just wake up one morning and decide you're Serbian. Like that's just not 0.92

00:01:14.800 the way identity works in that part of the world. So I grew up, you know, we were pretty broke slash

00:01:22.740 poor when I when I was a kid. I grew up in a neighborhood with lots of other kids from, you

00:01:28.440 know, Peru, from Vietnam, from Korea, from the Dominican Republic, from Puerto Rico. And the

00:01:34.660 white kids in my neighborhood were actually from the American South, which is a first generation

00:01:38.460 American seemed even stranger and more exotic to me. And so I had the sort of first generation 1.00

00:01:45.100 American slash immigrant kind of appreciation for American freedom of speech, because we know how

00:01:51.640 how rare that is historically and how unusual America's commitment to that is both historically

00:01:59.220 and in the world, particularly at the moment. So I went to undergrad, which was kind of a

00:02:06.040 surprise. I wasn't really totally sure I was going to go to college at all. I studied journalism and

00:02:12.140 international relations, thinking I would, you know, do something, follow my father's footsteps

00:02:15.760 who speak seven languages um but as a journalism um a double major i got to see you you know with

00:02:22.440 my own eyes how people will come into your office all the time it will come into the newspaper the

00:02:28.120 student newspaper office and demand that the you the editor fire somebody because of what they

00:02:34.140 published or would withdraw that article and it really started to become clear to me that like

00:02:40.160 people are natural born censors like they want to figure out a way to punish you for saying that

00:02:45.020 article and they're still rationalizing that they completely believe in freedom of speech

00:02:48.540 but the wheels start turning um and they're like i think you should punish this person for what's

00:02:53.400 the magic word at the moment i felt threatened i felt intimidated i felt harassed um and and

00:02:58.740 finally the final link of the chain for free speech was the communications decency act was

00:03:04.000 passed um in 1995 um and this was the old version of it that actually tried to ban

00:03:09.040 indecency, that's the word of it, on the internet back in 1995. And that's laughably unconstitutional

00:03:16.820 under the American First Amendment. And that's what made me decide to go to law school. I went

00:03:22.040 to Stanford for law school. I took every class that they offered on First Amendment. When I ran

00:03:28.360 out, I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty, because this was like my lifelong

00:03:34.020 passion. And everybody thought a little nuts for hyper focusing on this thing that there weren't

00:03:39.680 many jobs in. But my superpower is when FIRE found me out in San Francisco, you know, paying,

00:03:46.720 offering me $50,000 a year, you know, given my life history, it was kind of like, wow,

00:03:51.040 this is amazing. A huge amount of money for a graduate. And so I worked there, you know,

00:03:58.180 I was the legal director from 2001 to 2005.

00:04:01.580 I became the president in 2005 and originally interned and then became president in 2006.

00:04:06.820 And then I was lucky enough to have a complete mental breakdown because the culture war was

00:04:11.000 so incredibly depressing and so alienating and so difficult to fight all the time.

00:04:15.580 The good news is about that suicidal depression is it led me to start doing cognitive behavioral

00:04:21.520 therapy, which created the basis for my work with Jonathan Haidt, my good friend.

00:04:27.420 I'm a lovely person, by the way. I wrote an article with him in 2015 called Coddling the

00:04:34.040 American Mind. By the way, a title I have never liked and have fought pretty much at every stage

00:04:39.760 because I think it alienates the very people who need to read it. So we did the article in 2015

00:04:45.300 about like how the same habits that make students illiberal, that make them oppose freedom of speech

00:04:50.620 are the same mental habits that make people anxious and depressed. And so we wrote this

00:04:55.100 into the summer of 2015 and we fixed the whole thing. Well, quite. I mean, it's a very funny

00:05:03.500 joke, but that was actually the question that I was going to go to because I said to you before

00:05:08.480 we started, myself, Francis, our whole team, we were all incredibly impressed and persuaded

00:05:17.280 and informed and interested in what you and Jonathan wrote in The Coddling of the American

00:05:24.040 mind uh how do you see some of those dynamics that you've mentioned playing out in recent years

00:05:31.400 particularly in the last few years where are we with that culture war that that gave you the

00:05:35.660 breakdown in the first place yeah is it time for another one is what i'm asking oh yeah believe me

00:05:40.980 don't don't encourage me i've been feeling a little bit that way lately um the just you know

00:05:45.140 for your listeners i i one of the reasons why i'm such a proponent of cognitive behavioral therapy

00:05:49.420 is I used to struggle with depression pretty severely as I got older pretty much every year.

00:05:54.740 And, you know, with the help of I'm lightly medicated, but so no, nothing against medicine.

00:06:01.140 But the big difference was CBT. And eventually, you know, the depressive voices in your head just

00:06:06.040 don't sound as convincing anymore, which it takes a long time. It takes a lot of work,

00:06:09.720 but it really does happen. Anyway, so 2015 happened. There was a summer in 2015. Little

00:06:15.360 did we know that the fall of 2015 would be a terrible uh a terrible year that's when i um i

00:06:20.760 was the one who videotaped the students surrounding my friend nicholas kristakis at yale you know

00:06:25.740 telling him that it was horrible because his wife wrote something saying that should we really be

00:06:29.700 policing the halloween costume choices of the students and this happened all there were there

00:06:34.700 were about a hundred of these kind of incidents where it was something relatively minor and the

00:06:38.120 next thing you knew activists were demanding that for example at umass amherst um that the student

00:06:43.620 newspaper stop being funded, you know, that Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna get fired, 1.00

00:06:48.320 for example. So 2015 was pretty bad. And 2017, even scarier. That's when you had the Berkeley

00:06:55.700 riots. That's when you had you had the assault on Alison Stanger protecting Charles Murray at

00:07:00.840 Middlebury. So 2017 was really bad. And that's one of the reasons why we decided to write the book

00:07:06.220 Coddling the American Mind, which came out in 2018. And we were hoping that it was as bad as

00:07:11.260 it was going to get, but we had a feeling it was going to get worse. We didn't know how much worse

00:07:15.900 and how soon, because 2020 was, without exception, the worst year for freedom of speech and academic

00:07:23.860 freedom I have seen in my entire career. The second worst year, 2021. And so it's been a very

00:07:31.040 disheartening couple of years. It's kind of funny because there are still people who will talk about

00:07:36.220 like cancel culture isn't real and it's like and and literally like after the new york times

00:07:40.900 finally you know wrote an editorial saying well actually everything indicates it's real including

00:07:45.200 our own polling and you know people on twitter it blew their minds they they completely freaked

00:07:51.440 out and including people saying give me one example of someone's and it's like i have a

00:07:57.240 database and this is just professors of now we're getting close to 600 professors who were targeted

00:08:04.200 for being canceled since 2015, about two thirds of them happened just since 2020. About one fifth

00:08:10.680 of them were fired about also about, you know, about three fifths of them were punished in some

00:08:16.340 way, whether that's, you know, loss of position or whatever. This includes 30 tenured professors

00:08:22.820 who were fired for their for their expression or for their pedagogy or for their research.

00:08:27.580 That's the only reason why tenure exists. And generally, like tenured professors could have

00:08:31.640 been fired in the past when I first started my career. But that was for like murdering somebody

00:08:36.500 or like or not showing up to class or just like genuinely like leaving the country, doing something

00:08:41.680 illegal or just failing to do your job entirely. Them being fired for for their point of view,

00:08:50.620 for their expression. That's the whole reason why tenure exists in the first place. So and that's

00:08:55.140 just professors. The number of students who get in trouble is many times that. And that's harder

00:09:01.280 to dig up because when a student gets expelled, that doesn't make the student newspaper, for

00:09:06.080 example. So it has been the worst couple of years of my career. And my big fear is that just the

00:09:13.740 same way you had sort of like the political correctness thing of the late 80s and early 90s,

00:09:19.480 that kind of passed after a while, after the speech codes were defeated in court, after

00:09:24.240 comedians started making fun of it, it kind of fell out of fashion. And people kind of went,

00:09:28.540 thank god that's over but then from 1995 to 2015 things just got worse with just more quietly with

00:09:35.400 less attention and i what and i can feel that there's a little bit of a sense that people are

00:09:39.740 returning to their sanity on some of this stuff but if we don't but if we just go oh thank goodness

00:09:44.440 that's over again the next time the pendulum swings which will be sooner it's going to be

00:09:48.980 even worse still so greg thank you for making me depressed now i'm here to get you some cbt

00:09:56.640 yeah but greg in your book there were lots of you pointed out lots of reasons why this was the case

00:10:05.600 yep which do you think are the most important ones why we find ourselves in this position now

00:10:11.940 you know my two are the two we started with um in in the we talk about seven causal threads

00:10:18.880 in coddling the dark and mine because of course we do you know have to make it as complicated

00:10:22.240 as possible. Actually, sorry, we talk about six, but we added a seventh later. But the two most

00:10:26.440 important ones to me are social media is what sped these trends up. A lot of these things

00:10:33.960 existed already, you know, like the sort of, what's the best word for it, like revivocation

00:10:41.500 of ad hominem arguments, that essentially the idea that you would focus on the person,

00:10:48.420 not the argument they're making was something that at minimum college was supposed to be teaching

00:10:53.740 people to, you know, that actually that's kind of disfavored, but just because someone's horrible

00:10:58.180 doesn't mean they're wrong. And just because someone's a saint doesn't mean they're right.

00:11:01.920 This is just logical. This is just also true. So I think when social media came along, it came at

00:11:08.280 a confluence of higher ed, you know, adopting these one kind of giving up to a surprising

00:11:15.980 degree on the rules of argumentation, but also on the even more pernicious side, K-12 and college

00:11:23.940 teaching that ad hominem arguments are essentially good, that essentially, yes, you know, like this

00:11:30.340 is a, life is a battle between good people and evil people is what we call our third great untruth

00:11:35.420 in the book. Basically, the untruths are the idea of it's as if we're giving the world's

00:11:40.660 worst possible advice to a generation of students. And we call that the great untruth of polarization.

00:11:45.980 So I do think that the confluence of social media, a bunch of bad things are happening in K through 12, a bunch of bad things are happening in higher ed added to polarization.

00:11:56.020 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.

00:12:13.160 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 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.

00:12:31.520 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.

00:12:40.500 The dynamics around your appreciation for free speech shifts because free speech is the argument of.

00:12:47.520 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.

00:12:58.880 But in a democracy, if you have 50 percent or more, you you get to make the rules.

00:13:04.840 And it really the only people who benefit from a separate idea of the free speech or for that matter, the First Amendment under the under those circumstances are people who are in minority point of view or who have unpopular beliefs with with with elites.

00:13:19.000 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 with a overwhelming majority when it comes to administrators, more like 95, 95 percent.

00:13:38.700 It's predictable that you start seeing free speech is not something that's your ally.

00:13:43.420 You start seeing something of more of an inconvenience.

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00:14:16.480 i i still can't get my head around why people would think that free speech is more of an

00:14:24.900 inconvenience how have we got to this point where we take something so fundamental to our society

00:14:31.260 and treat it so frivolously i i think it's it to a degree it's regression to the mean

00:14:37.240 um that uh that essentially most of human history is about um censorship you know that essentially

00:14:44.500 the censors generally won. There's a reason why I call my blog the eternally radical idea,

00:14:51.200 because the idea that everyone's entitled their opinion and that the fact of that opinion,

00:14:57.100 their right to hold that opinion is absolutely their right, even if you think they might be

00:15:01.980 wrong, is a very radical idea. And you know this because in every generation, people stand up

00:15:08.600 to oppose it. We like to always point out these freedom fighters in history, and it's like, well,

00:15:14.060 who were they fighting against um and it's most of human history that the other side the forces

00:15:19.800 of conformity the forces of authority the forces of groupthink the forces of religion all of these

00:15:25.320 things um they all conspire against freedom of speech and so freedom of speech has to be taught

00:15:32.020 it has to be valued and one of the ways you see what a culture values is in their idioms um like

00:15:37.940 the little sayings that they have that pepper their speech and so growing up in in the u.s you

00:15:43.500 always heard, it's a free country, everyone's entitled to their own opinion, to each his own

00:15:48.420 or her own, walk a mile in a man's shoes, and for that matter, even none of your business.

00:15:53.700 You know, these are all kind of ideas that undergird a democratic society. But those

00:16:01.260 have increasingly fallen away. And I think in no small part, because we disproportionately,

00:16:07.320 And I think to a degree that is unhealthy. We we rely in the United States on a ruling class that sound very Marxist about it that comes overwhelmingly from a hand through a handful of colleges.

00:16:17.880 I know partially because I went to one of them. And it and when you actually start having, you know, a democracy, you know, choosing its leaders only from a relatively narrow batch of schools that already see free speech as an impediment to their agenda.

00:16:35.340 You shouldn't be surprised that this starts coming down, starting to seem like what most Americans think. Now, on polling, this is absolutely not what most Americans think. But if your impression of what the country looks like is Twitter, which, you know, 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.

00:17:01.880 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.

00:17:12.360 And the thing that really blew my mind was from a couple of months ago where the U.S. government were advocating censorship of podcasts, in particular Joe Rogan.

00:17:22.380 and i and i was watching that going is this really america is this really the land of the free

00:17:28.540 is this really what i i would associate with america no well the whole disinformation thing

00:17:36.980 is um i get it i i understand how it that disinformation can be used by your enemies

00:17:44.040 it can be used by malicious people it can be used by snake oil salesmen um to profit or to disrupt

00:17:50.640 or or or whatever but it is the reason why it's so hard to fight is because the other option is

00:17:58.800 omniscience you know like like that essentially we that's one of the reasons why free speech

00:18:04.680 works so well is because in the grand scheme of things we're all incredibly self-deluded animals

00:18:09.440 like we we don't we we are very bad at guessing what the truth is we're very bad at knowing um

00:18:15.400 if the person talking talking to us is a liar we're overconfident in our current beliefs we're

00:18:20.140 overconfident that our age has all of the moral questions settled. And free speech is this

00:18:27.120 constant recognition of epistemic humility that in the grand scheme of things, we don't know all

00:18:32.040 that much stuff. So it's amazing to me when people point out, yeah, disinformation is a problem and

00:18:37.040 it's one that has to be combated. But the way you combat it is by having experts that people

00:18:41.840 generally trust talking about these things and treating people like adults. When you start having

00:18:47.680 a situation where people think that higher education, journalism, experts in general are

00:18:53.800 biased in some way and that that trust starts to be undermined. That's a very dangerous thing

00:19:00.060 for a democratic society. I also think, by the way, social media makes that process inevitable

00:19:04.500 and we have to figure out how to live with that disruption. But you can censor by going after

00:19:09.560 disinformation, you can by claiming to go after disinformation, you can censor practically

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00:20:20.200 And Greg, I'm really glad you bring up the point about social media from that perspective,

00:20:24.980 because God knows I'm on your side, and I agree with you, and free speech is great.

00:20:29.660 And one of the points that we've explored extensively here on Trigonometry from the

00:20:34.380 beginning is how important it is. And with, you know, both of our backgrounds, we understand its

00:20:39.860 value. But in the context of Elon Musk's attempted purchase of Twitter recently, there was a thread,

00:20:47.800 I don't know if you saw it from a guy called Yishang Wong, I think is his name. He used to run

00:20:53.840 Reddit. And one of the points that he made is he was like, look, guys, I was there in the early

00:20:58.180 days of the internet. I'm all for free speech. But the internet we have now, which is dominated by

00:21:04.200 social media, any large network of communication will not be able to provide the free speech

00:21:11.020 quote unquote that we all want because in the end, large numbers of people arguing about

00:21:17.340 stuff, whether that's baking cookies or whether that's politics, results in tribalism, results

00:21:22.720 in confrontation, results in bias, results in people trying to censor each other and

00:21:27.940 all of that.

00:21:28.480 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 that is being exhibited in the real world as a result of that speech is harmful.

00:21:43.280 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.

00:21:54.460 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?

00:22:10.080 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, you know, about 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.

00:22:35.040 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?

00:22:52.040 um and and one of the things that i you know so i i think um what was it what was the name of the

00:22:58.960 one that got shut down parlor uh parlor parlor and parlor when it got shut down i didn't know

00:23:04.480 enough about the site to have a strong opinion on it but the accusation was that people were

00:23:08.960 conspiring to commit actual crimes and of course that's not protected um threats of bodily harm or

00:23:14.400 death are not protected um i mean one of the things that immediately um required some amount

00:23:20.140 of moderation on the internet, you know, going back to its earliest days is spam. You know,

00:23:25.000 people just, they'd be spammed to death if there wasn't some amount of moderation. But I do think

00:23:30.080 that there are sensible principles that you can draw from it, which are like that nobody should

00:23:34.800 be punished simply for expressing their opinion, that essentially you can't have viewpoint

00:23:38.960 discrimination on a topic. When you have a social media platform, you can have general parameters,

00:23:46.040 You can even it's even acceptable within within First Amendment norms, which is, of course, very strong, that you could have what would be called a limited public forum.

00:23:55.260 Like on this one, we're just talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you know, for example.

00:24:00.680 I think that it's not as hard as people think to do some of this.

00:24:05.920 You know, not punishing people on the basis of viewpoint is a good start.

00:24:09.540 You can have viewpoint neutral rules in place anyway.

00:24:13.220 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 coddling came out at Martin Gurry.

00:24:31.880 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.

00:24:45.500 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.

00:24:52.840 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.

00:24:59.480 but it's utterly incapable of building at this point that essentially if you want to tear something

00:25:04.280 down social media is great if you want to actually build something constructive it will not help you

00:25:09.080 it'll probably actually uh completely sabotage that but we shouldn't give up on the idea that

00:25:14.420 we can get something much more productive um for the produce and this is where i'm going to sound

00:25:19.180 very pie in the sky production of human knowledge from social media why because the great institution

00:25:25.680 of disconfirmation, you know, which is either the Republic of Letters or what higher education is

00:25:30.700 supposed to be, um, is all about disconfirmation. Um, just disconfirmation within some rules that

00:25:36.280 ad hominems don't count. Like, again, like I said, you can be, you can be right and be a horrible 1.00

00:25:40.460 person. Um, and so I do think that if you could think of a way to use social media that rather

00:25:46.620 than, um, completely banking on the, uh, on the outrage machine, um, tried to actually use it to,

00:25:53.320 you know more thoughtful um uh more well-structured arguments actually get more uh more discussion

00:26:00.180 there i i believe that there's a way to do it that we could have it go from something that is just

00:26:05.060 snarky gossip to something that might actually have a positive benefit on the species well you're

00:26:12.100 right that does sound pie in the sky um but but but look as i say i'm playing devil's advocate

00:26:19.500 and i'm fully on on your side of the argument but at the same time you know the argument for

00:26:26.020 example like look take the hunter biden story that was suppressed by the the by social media

00:26:31.500 and take the banning of donald trump from twitter my take on that is that to me those two events

00:26:38.260 are essentially they are i don't want to sound extreme but to me that was the end of democracy

00:26:46.140 in a way, if you can't get accurate information and if you can ban the sitting president of the

00:26:50.360 United States from speaking on the biggest public platform that there is, you know, you've ended

00:26:55.400 our ability to make decisions independently based on the information that we want to seek out.

00:27:00.360 However, the argument would be from the people who are involved in that censorship is,

00:27:04.340 well, that is a point where free speech causes real world harm and it becomes equivalent of

00:27:10.020 screaming fire in a theater now given now i don't agree with that point even with january the 6th

00:27:16.420 and all of that but that that could have been the interpretation certainly from the social media

00:27:22.100 companies that that is what was happening their platforms were being used to organize i mean they

00:27:28.420 call it an insurrection call it whatever you want a large-scale riot in the heart of the world's

00:27:33.420 greatest democracy right i live on capitol hill by the way so like right there so we were in the

00:27:39.380 isn't isn't that inevitably where we're always going to end up it's always going to be at that

00:27:46.620 extreme where yeah you can have your free speech and use the network responsibly but then the day

00:27:51.460 when push comes to shove when it's crunch time someone is going to get on twitter and go

00:27:56.020 this election was bs let's all get to x place and start y action yeah i mean i i think that these

00:28:03.720 are there are going to be you know misfires and mistakes inevitably in any system um you impose

00:28:09.880 but there's there's a difference between trying to maximize freedom of speech and freedom of opinion

00:28:13.840 um and giving up on the whole thing because the system fails sometimes and when it comes to the

00:28:18.480 hunter biden thing um you know i am somewhat with my my friend john roush like like the idea of

00:28:25.460 being a little bit spooked about the idea of there being you know russian disinformation about this

00:28:30.000 sounding because it sounded fishy, frankly, like the idea of like they found a laptop at a company

00:28:34.680 like suddenly right around the time of the election. Still, I think Twitter made absolutely

00:28:39.780 the wrong call. But I'm not saying it's as crazy as it sounds under the under the circumstances.

00:28:45.960 And when it comes to, you know, January 6th, that the standard in the law is the incitement

00:28:51.960 standard under Brandenburg. There are First Amendment lawyers, you know, saying this may

00:28:56.660 not be exactly Brandenburg, but it's damn close. And there are other people like David French who

00:29:00.060 actually thought it crossed the line, for example, into even a violation of First Amendment

00:29:05.120 standards. So I think that some of these issues are not necessarily as hard as they sound,

00:29:10.180 and they don't devalue the entire system. Well, Greg, what you're saying to me sounds

00:29:16.280 even harder than what I thought it was, because you can have your lawyers adjudicating on it for

00:29:20.940 years to come. But that decision has to be made in the moment by Twitter. So what was the right

00:29:27.140 decision in that situation, in your opinion? I try to be nonpartisan in my take on it. But I am

00:29:37.640 a Democrat, which I explained to the genuine horror of Trump people. They're so nasty. I mean, 0.99

00:29:46.000 honestly, I think under the circumstances, saying that it was close enough to incitement,

00:29:50.140 not necessarily the legal standard,

00:29:51.560 that they could say he shouldn't be included.

00:29:54.020 And I know I'm going to get a lot of hate mail for that.

00:29:55.700 So thanks.

00:29:56.500 Well, probably so, but that's why we bring people on

00:29:58.760 because we want to hear what they actually think.

00:30:00.800 What about Hunter Biden?

00:30:02.480 I mean, this is where the problem is, Greg.

00:30:04.800 Let me just make this point quickly.

00:30:06.660 The problem I have with all of this is

00:30:08.460 you can have your brilliant standards

00:30:10.600 and you can go, look, a sitting president

00:30:12.340 shouldn't be able to incite people to go

00:30:14.460 and protest about something that is likely to spill over.

00:30:17.560 Okay, let's say I agree with you.

00:30:19.560 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?

00:30:42.040 Absolutely not. And that's and that's the reason why. And to be clear, for Hunter Biden, that was a mistake, in my opinion.

00:30:48.840 I'm just making the point that it's not that that was a bad call and it was wrong.

00:30:53.260 And I protested at the time and I still do the my only point with the John Roush point was that it might not be as arbitrary as it might have seen at the time.

00:31:03.720 Because, like I said, it sounded it sounded kind of fishy.

00:31:05.600 i would hope that any journalist hearing an implausible sounding backstory would be kind of

00:31:10.800 like is that really true but nonetheless what they did the laptop thing was a mistake that

00:31:16.860 they should be embarrassed and ashamed of greg isn't the problem that what we've got is of these 0.79

00:31:23.660 companies which are huge conglomerates they're privately owned and as a result they're going

00:31:30.400 to do like all corporations do and act in their own self-interest and that being the case they

00:31:36.360 cannot be trusted with these hugely powerful tools and be the ones in charge of disseminating

00:31:43.240 information to the public yeah let's give it to the government yeah exactly you know that that's

00:31:49.820 my answer to that it is that essentially people think that and this is one of the funny things

00:31:55.400 like as far as like a i'm not like a full libertarian but i'm definitely a civil libertarian

00:31:59.860 But the most useful contribution, like the term that I borrowed 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.

00:32:13.060 And I'd really rather have something, you know, driven by the profit motive than by driven by pure political calculation.

00:32:21.660 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, we're we're taking away the New York freaking posts, Twitter access for like a couple of days over a story that might be true.

00:32:39.080 um so i do think that that the existing silicon valley um has a major problem in that it has

00:32:45.960 doesn't have sufficient viewpoint diversity among itself still i when it comes to a lot of the

00:32:50.960 solutions i find the solutions worth worth worse than the disease i think people would be scared

00:32:55.860 like so i always found it really kind of like jaw-dropping that republicans were always talking

00:33:00.600 about how you know uh and trump in particular was talking about dropping uh the existing version of

00:33:06.440 Section 230, which protects social media giants from liability in a number of cases. Because if

00:33:15.060 they weren't protected from that, the very first people they would drop would be overwhelmingly 1.00

00:33:19.620 conservative. Now, to be clear, I don't think there is a perfect solution to any of this. I

00:33:24.800 do occasionally think that sometimes the companies, as much as maligned as they are,

00:33:30.080 made some actually pretty good calls. I was originally very skeptical of the Facebook

00:33:35.480 like a overseer board thing, because I assumed what would happen is they would since they were

00:33:41.760 trying to make it international, that it would turn into the convoy system and the least

00:33:45.560 speech protective person in the board would actually be the one who decides. But setting up

00:33:52.060 an outside body was was was actually a pretty good call. So I think that there are ways to

00:33:58.680 navigate it. And what I'm more scared of is that people are going to think that, well, you know,

00:34:02.560 The whole problem is social media is corrupt.

00:34:05.720 So therefore, we're going to come up with a solution

00:34:07.260 that actually ends up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

00:34:10.680 But let's talk about power, Greg, because power is at the root of all this

00:34:15.940 and that these companies are so powerful,

00:34:18.700 they can effectively do what they want,

00:34:21.260 even if it means silencing the president of the United States,

00:34:25.360 even if it means influencing elections,

00:34:28.300 and nothing happens to them.

00:34:30.140 you know like you said hunter biden was a bad call and i know we're coming off as massive

00:34:36.720 trumpers here which we're actually not we're just exploring the the edge of the argument right

00:34:41.140 it's like hunter biden was an awful decision in my opinion just

00:34:45.540 yep but where's where's the you know where's the pushback where's the punishment this is to me

00:34:53.500 that's a really serious crime because if i was running that company i'll be honest i'd be like

00:34:58.460 oh, hey, we may have changed

00:35:00.100 the course of an election.

00:35:01.640 Nothing happened.

00:35:04.080 You know, look at this magic ring

00:35:06.040 I'm wearing now.

00:35:07.500 So I and I understand this,

00:35:09.740 but my point is not that

00:35:11.340 they don't do things wrong

00:35:12.620 and that there are abuses

00:35:13.600 that can be better handled.

00:35:16.400 But like, what is the solution then?

00:35:18.320 Like, because most of what I'm saying,

00:35:19.920 what I've been saying about this

00:35:21.100 is that I'm more afraid

00:35:22.060 of the solution than the disease.

00:35:23.700 What do you think would actually fix it?

00:35:25.720 OK, so would you be in favor

00:35:28.160 for instance of again government entering and breaking it up like they would do with monopolies

00:35:34.000 because it can be argued that these companies are monopolies yeah I've heard about that one um I

00:35:40.900 possibly um when it comes to uh you know breaking up um monopolies I do actually think that trust

00:35:48.420 busting sometimes can sometimes can help but I know I know a lot of my libertarian friends would

00:35:52.580 say actually it didn't achieve anything I don't know like I remember when AT&T you know owned

00:35:57.460 everything and i definitely feel like there was a big telecom explosion after they were broken up

00:36:02.360 um so maybe yeah i think we're probably approaching this the wrong way greg

00:36:07.680 you don't think there is a solution do you no why um because nothing in life of that symbol

00:36:15.600 right well that that is something that resonates with me very strongly so

00:36:19.680 so what do we do then because at the end of the day we can you the three of us can sit here and

00:36:24.640 go there is no solution but we still have to do something right oh yeah i think we should experiment

00:36:30.100 i think we should try a variety of different experiments and this is the way the way i end

00:36:34.220 up putting it um is that a lot of times when people look at like my and heights take on social

00:36:40.420 media and how we point out all the downsides of it i actually always try to try to like chime in

00:36:44.820 when we were writing saying by the way i actually i have a lovely experience on most of social media

00:36:48.900 there are positive there are genuinely positive things about it but when people hear how critical

00:36:53.840 we are of some aspects of it and we absolutely are and i still very much am and particularly

00:36:58.200 the weight i think it drives our entire political class kind of insane um i think it's actually

00:37:03.320 very unhealthy that so many of the nation's journalists are are are on twitter but people

00:37:08.940 will point out it's like oh heighten lukianov they probably said this would say the same thing

00:37:12.560 about the printing press and i'm always like you mean the technology that led to a massive increase

00:37:17.880 in the witch trials that led to about 200 years of religious uh of religious wars in europe like

00:37:23.180 like that it was the defining disruptive technology um it had over overall was it worth it yes um was

00:37:30.880 it peaceful god no i mean it was incredibly powerful so what i feel like we're doing right

00:37:36.300 now is we're it's like i don't know 14 98 and we're looking at the at the printing press and

00:37:44.520 saying to ourselves um what's the easy fix that's going to get us out of this situation and the

00:37:50.140 answer is there isn't one um and because that was adding millions of people to the discussion it was

00:37:55.960 probably only adding thousands of people like of additional publishers or tens of thousands

00:38:01.200 additional publishers but making people you know making millions of recipients information now we

00:38:07.620 have a two-way conversation with billions of people that is that is unprecedented in human

00:38:14.040 history there is no way this isn't going to be highly disruptive um there's no way it isn't going

00:38:19.860 to come with all sorts of new problems. So what I would hope for would be that when we're doing

00:38:26.100 solutions, and this is one thing in terms of like a way to think about the way we come up with

00:38:30.520 solutions, is like they say with medication for all sorts of reasons, you know, go slow and start

00:38:39.700 low. That essentially try a variety of different fixes. Give them credit where they actually do

00:38:44.880 seem to be helping. I, for example, think Twitter was helped out a lot by the fact that they doubled

00:38:49.600 the character limit, you know, several years ago.

00:38:53.740 I think that actually improved the level of discourse.

00:38:56.200 I live in what I consider to be a kind of nice bubble

00:38:59.400 on Twitter where I follow a lot of my expert friends.

00:39:01.720 We have relatively civil conversations.

00:39:03.400 So I do think that my fear is that the absolute worst

00:39:07.980 of what goes on in social media could be used

00:39:11.700 and that could stifle the best

00:39:13.460 of what comes out of social media,

00:39:14.440 which I do think is a real thing.

00:39:16.500 I'm really glad you bring up the printing press

00:39:18.660 because I do think that's a really, really useful analogy here.

00:39:23.640 But I think underlying both the printing press and social media

00:39:27.120 is something that's very obvious out of all of this,

00:39:30.940 which is that ideas are very powerful things.

00:39:35.520 And so if we're talking about free speech

00:39:38.020 in a world where I can tweet something

00:39:42.340 and be part of a thing on social media

00:39:46.200 that starts a civil war somewhere,

00:39:47.880 which is probably where we are already if we're not heading there.

00:39:54.140 Isn't that, isn't it inevitable that that is, you know,

00:39:57.480 it's just too powerful not to be censored by somebody, isn't it?

00:40:01.520 Well, even within First Amendment law, it's kind of funny

00:40:05.600 because a lot of times people who don't know a lot about American First Amendment law

00:40:09.600 will talk about the great European sort of balancing of interests that they try to do,

00:40:15.320 that essentially free speech is just one among multiple different interests in other bodies of

00:40:20.760 law. I think personally, that's why it's a disaster in many of the countries in Europe

00:40:24.920 is that they do this ad hoc balancing and free speech is always on the losing side.

00:40:29.360 But believe it or not, American freedom of speech, even in terms of the law, is a balancing act.

00:40:34.640 It's just considered to be a balancing act with a very heavy thumb on the scale. And the balancing

00:40:40.080 is called strict scrutiny um i i sometimes and i remember actually kind of horrifying um a friend

00:40:46.460 of mine by not being like she actually did you guys watch the battle star galactica um like the

00:40:52.460 one that was on sci-fi the reboot yeah and i love that show um but uh it's about you know a planet

00:40:59.880 of 10 billion people uh 50 000 people are left um and there's this constant battle about whether

00:41:06.460 or not they're maintained democracy on the ship. And I'm kind of like, okay, I will say that. And

00:41:11.860 there's, there's spaceships following them trying to completely complete the genocide. And I'm like,

00:41:16.400 okay, even American law understands that the rules are a little different when you're like this close

00:41:21.360 to oblivion, when you're this close. So I do think that there's a, there's a level of sophistication

00:41:27.500 within the law that says, you know, like, for example, like the Pentagon papers, they talk

00:41:31.880 about the idea of printing the time and place of transport ships being sent out you know um and

00:41:38.920 that's and at least nominally within the law that's like yeah there are actually levels at which

00:41:43.280 you can censor even factual information however i i have a hard time thinking of a single situation

00:41:50.020 where simply someone's honest expression of opinion would actually end the world

00:41:55.000 expression of opinion yes but a the difficulty is that a continued expression of a certain

00:42:05.600 opinion over time is pretty much what led to trump being taken off twitter isn't it

00:42:11.340 i thought that was specifically what happened on january 6th though

00:42:16.200 but i mean i think the argument would be that what happened on january 6th

00:42:23.540 is a product of his communication on Twitter over time,

00:42:28.080 you know, calling the election into question and all of that.

00:42:32.000 Wouldn't that be the argument?

00:42:33.860 So I guess my point is, all I'm asking you is,

00:42:37.720 is it not inevitable that social media will be a place

00:42:40.940 where at the end of the day, someone goes,

00:42:42.960 well, we've reached Battlestar Galactica point now.

00:42:46.520 Like this is real now. 1.00

00:42:47.840 This is real world shit. 1.00

00:42:49.980 And if we don't shut this down, 1.00

00:42:51.700 someone's going to get hurt or a thousand people are going to get hurt or the country is going to

00:42:55.760 go to whatever. And so we're always going to end up in a position where we don't actually have

00:43:01.460 freedom of speech online in that way, because it's just too powerful now, because the multiplication

00:43:06.160 of, you know, me saying something at home to my wife or us chatting here is very different to me

00:43:12.320 saying that very same thing on Twitter. Yeah. I mean, I think about times where freedom of

00:43:19.420 speech in the u.s like uh took a turn for the worse and i think of like the um the red scare

00:43:25.620 like the the dennis uh the dennis case in 1951 and i always try to give like extra context it's like

00:43:31.540 so american spies and british spies gave super hitler stalin the the h-bomb um and so i always

00:43:39.220 i always try to put that in there to be kind of like people had a reason to be spooked but i still

00:43:44.060 think that the law went in the wrong direction uh briefly in the 1950s saying that people who

00:43:48.360 were just members of the communist party could be uh thrown in jail um was that the wrong call

00:43:53.820 yes did freedom of speech die that day in the united states no

00:43:57.560 that's an interesting point why didn't you think it died that day then

00:44:03.860 because it because history kept going um because later decisions they found that uh they they try

00:44:12.220 there was there was an attempt sort of like to pull to withdraw from the free speech purism that

00:44:18.560 was developing after 1925. So you have the Boharnese case, for example, that talked about

00:44:23.480 that you can't defame people on the basis of race. That was basically like and that was found to be

00:44:28.480 basically an early version of hate speech laws was found to be constitutional in the U.S. in the early

00:44:33.900 1950s. But that none of those cases have ever been replicated since and that the law kept on

00:44:39.060 progressing, we look back with some disappointment or some horror about what we did several years

00:44:44.740 ago, but free speech didn't die because we didn't give up on it. And yeah, mistakes are going to be

00:44:51.500 made. That is inevitable under literally every single system that you develop. But as soon as

00:44:57.440 we do the thing where it's like, well, I guess that didn't work in that case, so let's just give

00:45:00.860 up on free speech entirely. That's how you actually turn your sense of doom into a self-fulfilling

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00:46:33.200 Greg, let's move on now.

00:46:35.180 When we were talking at the very start of the interview, we were talking about education.

00:46:40.160 We were talking about college education.

00:46:42.500 And it seems to me the victim in all of this, there are many victims, but possibly the biggest

00:46:48.620 victims are kids and college kids themselves, because they're not being taught how to think.

00:46:54.540 They're not being taught how to debate. They're not being taught to listen. They're not being

00:46:59.060 taught how to develop as people. What is that doing, not only to that generation, but to the

00:47:05.400 individual themselves? Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, my first book was called Unlearning Liberty.

00:47:11.060 And the idea was that I felt like people were going into higher education in particular and

00:47:15.940 coming out hostile to a lot of democratic, small d democratic norms. When it comes to the mental

00:47:21.860 health aspect of it, I think it's even worse because, and this is where, like, I usually try

00:47:26.600 to keep my cool. But as far as something that actually just makes me flat out angry is, you

00:47:32.720 know, when, when coddling came out, we still had people saying the evidence just isn't there,

00:47:39.120 that there's a mental health crisis on, on, on campus. And that, and in 2015, when we wrote the

00:47:45.380 initial article that, you know, the, the, the research wasn't out yet literally, but we were

00:47:50.380 saying we were hearing of this on campus. And then when the numbers finally came out, it was

00:47:54.640 way, way worse than we thought. So we wrote the book basically saying it's as if we are giving

00:48:01.280 a generation of students the kind of advice that will make them anxious and depressed.

00:48:05.900 We know this for a fact now, that kids are hitting higher education with way higher rates of

00:48:13.000 depression, anxiety, mood disorders, self-harm, and suicide, even among like 10 to 14 year olds,

00:48:20.240 which is like pains me to like talk about like the fact that you're talking about a big spike

00:48:25.600 in suicide rates for people that young. So to know that for a fact and still teach students

00:48:31.780 to basically effectively whisper in their ears, by the way, you can't really handle hearing things

00:48:37.000 that are offensive to you. You will be permanently damaged by it. You won't recover. And by the way,

00:48:44.000 most of you the overwhelming majority of you are both oppressors and oppressed there's not very

00:48:50.780 much you can do about it other than feel bad and apologetic about yourself and you know again and

00:48:56.340 you're not very resilient and life is essentially you know everybody out you know your parents are

00:49:01.840 essentially evil and your other americans are out to get you and everyone's secretly against you if

00:49:07.020 they're not nominally against you it's like that is a messed up thing to tell anyone but when you

00:49:12.560 know that they're coming in with high rates of suicide anxiety and depression um that's just not

00:49:17.620 acceptable by any stretch of the imagination so so i've definitely i i think a lot about ways to

00:49:24.080 get out of the educational system we have in the u.s in in in radical steps like because k through 1.00

00:49:30.480 12 um it's kind of weird because like the public education system in in in america has its problems

00:49:37.240 but some of the worst ideologies coming out of the most elite, you know, prep schools.

00:49:42.320 And meanwhile, higher education, I mean, even just on cost and bureaucratization alone, it's insane.

00:49:48.520 Like the idea that someone at Sarah Lawrence can say with a straight face that it's $70,000 a year

00:49:53.660 and that covers only half the cost of educating a single student for a single year.

00:49:59.200 And they really will say this. And it's like, that's nuts. That's a failure of the system.

00:50:03.780 If you're saying that you can't educate a single student for less than one hundred and forty thousand dollars a year, that's just that's just completely crazy.

00:50:11.980 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.

00:50:22.460 And I don't think we should be massively subsidizing over bureaucratized, incredibly expensive country clubs.

00:50:29.880 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?

00:50:53.740 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.

00:51:09.980 Because if you look at the budget of Harvard, of any of these schools, you know, by different calculations, they have like 80, 85 percent overhead.

00:51:20.280 A mass debaracuritization of universities should at least be tried, in my opinion, partially because those very same professors, you know, who came on your on your on your show.

00:51:31.500 You know, I think of I think of, you know, our advisor, Steve Pinker. I think of my friend John Hite. I think of Paul Bloom.

00:51:37.160 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 some reforms could actually go a long way to fix it.

00:51:53.200 That being said, I don't think there's going to be meaningful reform in the Yales and Harvards and Princetons 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. 0.95

00:52:06.520 And what's funny is that if I can imagine so many different competing systems that could

00:52:11.360 actually tell, because I'm an employer as well, that could tell employers that this

00:52:16.640 is an incredibly bright, incredibly hardworking person.

00:52:19.720 And guess what?

00:52:20.220 Because generally, if someone went to an elite college in the US, it's a more or less safe

00:52:24.840 bet that they are pretty smart and were pretty hardworking, at least in high school.

00:52:30.120 But that's it.

00:52:31.300 You don't know if they understand statistics.

00:52:33.000 You don't know if they understand history.

00:52:34.360 You don't know if they understand law.

00:52:35.780 You don't know if they understand economics, any of these basic things.

00:52:39.880 So I think a lot about if you could start promising to some of these companies that

00:52:43.840 care about making a profit, that there's this alternative system that actually identifies

00:52:47.960 the best, brightest, hardest working, most creative people in the country.

00:52:52.020 That's when you start scaring the Yales and Princetons and Harvards. 1.00

00:52:56.780 And only then do I think that they will start taking any meaningful action to get their

00:53:01.380 acting gear.

00:53:02.440 That's a really interesting point, Greg.

00:53:03.960 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.

00:53:23.560 And the idea was, you know, every action causes a reaction, the pendulum swings and this new generation coming through.

00:53:30.400 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.

00:53:37.900 Is there any evidence for this?

00:53:40.680 I've heard this assertion as well.

00:53:43.240 My understanding is there is there is evidence in the polling that there is a backlash effect going on.

00:53:50.300 I'll believe it when I see it, you know, essentially.

00:53:52.980 um i do think my and my big fear i wrote this 6 000 word article for reason um magazine uh talk

00:53:59.800 and i call it the the the second great age of political correctness and my whole point there

00:54:04.320 is like i was saying earlier that that um uh that this is exactly what happened last time

00:54:10.060 in the late 90s is it can't we can't continue to have this kind of you know for lack of a better

00:54:15.820 term cancel culture go on at its current rate forever because eventually literally run out of

00:54:21.860 people or at least people brave enough to dissent. So there will absolutely have to be a turning back

00:54:28.220 of the pendulum to some degree. And arguably, that's already happening to at least some modest

00:54:32.540 degree. But if we think that, oh, thank goodness that's over because we lost our minds for a couple

00:54:38.020 of years there, that doesn't fix the problem. It still means that you have institutions that have

00:54:43.200 no viewpoint diversity, that they are wildly over bureaucratized. All of these problems haven't

00:54:48.940 actually been fixed. So I think that relying on the pendulum to swing back is not sufficient,

00:54:54.100 even if it does swing back. And we shouldn't assume, just like you're skeptically pointing

00:54:58.360 out, that it necessarily will. And Greg, why is it, and I've got my own theories on this,

00:55:05.480 that the institutions most prone to this always tend to be the wealthiest, always tend to be the

00:55:13.400 most prestigious, always tend to be the most privileged. I find it fascinating. Why do you

00:55:20.720 think that is? Rob Henderson coined the term, I believe it was him. He's an amazing thinker

00:55:27.400 and way younger than me. He's coming on the show very soon. So we'll ask him if it's a quote of

00:55:31.540 his. Go ahead. Oh, terrific. Luxury beliefs that essentially there's a class of belief that you

00:55:38.400 can have that improves you in esteem among people from your class, um, that has no harm to you,

00:55:46.420 but makes you seem more pure, more moral, more upstanding, but actually harms, uh, other people

00:55:53.100 in this, in the society. And definitely I saw a lot of luxury beliefs in my sort of journey up

00:55:59.280 the class ladder, uh, in the United States. It was, it could be, um, I remember in my human

00:56:05.580 rights classes when I was at Stanford, I realized that the theme seemed to be, and I was always

00:56:13.820 pointing this out, so they hated me for it, but it seemed to be that the professor's idea of what

00:56:18.500 the good should look like was more important than helping actual people survive, in many cases in

00:56:25.420 the real world. And I was constantly like, hey, that sounds like you're just being puritanical

00:56:28.660 about it has to be your way or the highway, and you're literally willing to kill people over that.

00:56:33.040 So I think that there is, unfortunately, in the United States, we still have an idea that 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.

00:56:49.240 But it is this idea of this uncompromising person of the people kind of thing. And I do think that never correcting that way of thinking about the world, you know, leads to even deeper problems.

00:57:00.440 a re-romantization of the old Soviet Union, for example, which I thought was the fact that the

00:57:06.400 New York Times did in 2018, did an entire year-long thing talking about the Bolshevik

00:57:14.720 revolution, including articles that talked about how sex was better during the Soviets. I'm like,

00:57:20.540 this is unbelievable to me. This is a monstrous lie. So basically what I'm saying here is we

00:57:29.020 never fixed the old problems that the ruling elite in the United States had. And we're doing very

00:57:35.080 little to fix the new ones. But it is pretty normal, unfortunately, for upper class people to

00:57:41.680 just think of themselves as to rationalize their belief that they're better than everybody else.

00:57:46.040 They just do it now in a way that seems very self-flagellating, but it's really about

00:57:50.120 those other rubes over there. Well, Greg, it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation.

00:57:55.900 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?

00:58:14.300 um i think it's about major reform to american higher education um i mean i i said it it's one

00:58:21.680 of the things i i really hit all throughout i think when um some of the bills you know that

00:58:27.320 are being passed in the united states particularly as they apply to higher education they're going

00:58:31.080 after viewpoints which is not okay like you you can't in the u.s under the first amendment nor

00:58:36.400 should you be able to go after professors because of their viewpoint or books because of their

00:58:40.620 viewpoint. But I do think that the insane hyper-bureaucratization of universities is a

00:58:46.520 scandal. I do think that in a lot of these cases, like the situation where the Yale Law School

00:58:52.560 students shouted down what was supposed to be sort of a kumbaya session between conservative

00:58:57.440 Supreme Court lawyers and liberal Supreme Court lawyers, the scandal there in particular is not

00:59:03.340 just that 100 students in a class of 180 showed up to shout it down, it's that it was encouraged

00:59:08.220 by administrators, and those administrators are still employed by Yale. So I think that figuring

00:59:13.300 out who the bad, like the fact we're not even firing the administrators who are causing this

00:59:17.280 problem in the first place is something that everybody should be thinking about. This doesn't

00:59:20.640 even seem to be on the radar. Greg, it's been an absolute pleasure. The time has flown by.

00:59:28.260 If people want to find you online, Greg, where is the best place to do that? Where is the best

00:59:32.300 place to look for your books? Where is the best place to find out about FIRE? Thefire.org.

00:59:37.720 We have a lot of great content coming out. We have we actually have a surprisingly good TikTok game.

00:59:43.400 You know, if you can spell my last name, you can find my books, you know, pretty easily.

00:59:48.920 But definitely check out thefire.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.

00:59:59.800 Greg, thank you so much for coming on. We'll do the last couple of questions for our locals in the second.

01:00:04.460 but in the meantime, thank you for being on the show

01:00:06.520 and thank you all for watching and listening.

01:00:08.960 We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode

01:00:11.160 like this one or all show.

01:00:13.200 All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.

01:00:15.340 And for those of you who like your trigonometry,

01:00:17.660 On The Go is also available as a podcast.

01:00:20.500 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:00:24.440 The best treatment for anxiety and depression

01:00:27.580 among young people is cognitive behavioral therapy

01:00:30.160 for their parents.

01:00:34.460 We'll be right back.

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TRIGGERnometry - May 16, 2022

Elon Musk, Twitter & Free Speech with Greg Lukianoff

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