00:00:35.600It's a great pleasure to have you on the show. I've given you the full introduction there,
00:00:39.620but tell us a little bit about the story behind that. Who are you? How are you where you are?
00:00:44.440What has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
00:00:48.740Oh, wow. Okay. So we were talking a little bit before the camera started rolling about my family
00:00:53.820history. I'm a first generation American. My father is Russian by way of Yugoslavia and my
00:00:59.700mother is Irish by way of England. And because of the peculiarities of each culture, my ethnically
00:01:06.000Irish mother thinks of herself as British and my ethnically Russian father thinks of himself as
00:01:10.700Russian because you don't just wake up one morning and decide you're Serbian. Like that's just not
00:01:14.800the way identity works in that part of the world. So I grew up, you know, we were pretty broke slash
00:01:22.740poor when I when I was a kid. I grew up in a neighborhood with lots of other kids from, you
00:01:28.440know, Peru, from Vietnam, from Korea, from the Dominican Republic, from Puerto Rico. And the
00:01:34.660white kids in my neighborhood were actually from the American South, which is a first generation
00:01:38.460American seemed even stranger and more exotic to me. And so I had the sort of first generation
00:01:45.100American slash immigrant kind of appreciation for American freedom of speech, because we know how
00:01:51.640how rare that is historically and how unusual America's commitment to that is both historically
00:01:59.220and in the world, particularly at the moment. So I went to undergrad, which was kind of a
00:02:06.040surprise. I wasn't really totally sure I was going to go to college at all. I studied journalism and
00:02:12.140international relations, thinking I would, you know, do something, follow my father's footsteps
00:02:15.760who speak seven languages um but as a journalism um a double major i got to see you you know with
00:02:22.440my own eyes how people will come into your office all the time it will come into the newspaper the
00:02:28.120student newspaper office and demand that the you the editor fire somebody because of what they
00:02:34.140published or would withdraw that article and it really started to become clear to me that like
00:02:40.160people are natural born censors like they want to figure out a way to punish you for saying that
00:02:45.020article and they're still rationalizing that they completely believe in freedom of speech
00:02:48.540but the wheels start turning um and they're like i think you should punish this person for what's
00:02:53.400the magic word at the moment i felt threatened i felt intimidated i felt harassed um and and
00:02:58.740finally the final link of the chain for free speech was the communications decency act was
00:03:04.000passed um in 1995 um and this was the old version of it that actually tried to ban
00:03:09.040indecency, that's the word of it, on the internet back in 1995. And that's laughably unconstitutional
00:03:16.820under the American First Amendment. And that's what made me decide to go to law school. I went
00:03:22.040to Stanford for law school. I took every class that they offered on First Amendment. When I ran
00:03:28.360out, I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty, because this was like my lifelong
00:03:34.020passion. And everybody thought a little nuts for hyper focusing on this thing that there weren't
00:03:39.680many jobs in. But my superpower is when FIRE found me out in San Francisco, you know, paying,
00:03:46.720offering me $50,000 a year, you know, given my life history, it was kind of like, wow,
00:03:51.040this is amazing. A huge amount of money for a graduate. And so I worked there, you know,
00:03:58.180I was the legal director from 2001 to 2005.
00:04:01.580I became the president in 2005 and originally interned and then became president in 2006.
00:04:06.820And then I was lucky enough to have a complete mental breakdown because the culture war was
00:04:11.000so incredibly depressing and so alienating and so difficult to fight all the time.
00:04:15.580The good news is about that suicidal depression is it led me to start doing cognitive behavioral
00:04:21.520therapy, which created the basis for my work with Jonathan Haidt, my good friend.
00:04:27.420I'm a lovely person, by the way. I wrote an article with him in 2015 called Coddling the
00:04:34.040American Mind. By the way, a title I have never liked and have fought pretty much at every stage
00:04:39.760because I think it alienates the very people who need to read it. So we did the article in 2015
00:04:45.300about like how the same habits that make students illiberal, that make them oppose freedom of speech
00:04:50.620are the same mental habits that make people anxious and depressed. And so we wrote this
00:04:55.100into the summer of 2015 and we fixed the whole thing. Well, quite. I mean, it's a very funny
00:05:03.500joke, but that was actually the question that I was going to go to because I said to you before
00:05:08.480we started, myself, Francis, our whole team, we were all incredibly impressed and persuaded
00:05:17.280and informed and interested in what you and Jonathan wrote in The Coddling of the American
00:05:24.040mind uh how do you see some of those dynamics that you've mentioned playing out in recent years
00:05:31.400particularly in the last few years where are we with that culture war that that gave you the
00:05:35.660breakdown in the first place yeah is it time for another one is what i'm asking oh yeah believe me
00:05:40.980don't don't encourage me i've been feeling a little bit that way lately um the just you know
00:05:45.140for your listeners i i one of the reasons why i'm such a proponent of cognitive behavioral therapy
00:05:49.420is I used to struggle with depression pretty severely as I got older pretty much every year.
00:05:54.740And, you know, with the help of I'm lightly medicated, but so no, nothing against medicine.
00:06:01.140But the big difference was CBT. And eventually, you know, the depressive voices in your head just
00:06:06.040don't sound as convincing anymore, which it takes a long time. It takes a lot of work,
00:06:09.720but it really does happen. Anyway, so 2015 happened. There was a summer in 2015. Little
00:06:15.360did we know that the fall of 2015 would be a terrible uh a terrible year that's when i um i
00:06:20.760was the one who videotaped the students surrounding my friend nicholas kristakis at yale you know
00:06:25.740telling him that it was horrible because his wife wrote something saying that should we really be
00:06:29.700policing the halloween costume choices of the students and this happened all there were there
00:06:34.700were about a hundred of these kind of incidents where it was something relatively minor and the
00:06:38.120next thing you knew activists were demanding that for example at umass amherst um that the student
00:06:43.620newspaper stop being funded, you know, that Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna get fired,
00:06:48.320for example. So 2015 was pretty bad. And 2017, even scarier. That's when you had the Berkeley
00:06:55.700riots. That's when you had you had the assault on Alison Stanger protecting Charles Murray at
00:07:00.840Middlebury. So 2017 was really bad. And that's one of the reasons why we decided to write the book
00:07:06.220Coddling the American Mind, which came out in 2018. And we were hoping that it was as bad as
00:07:11.260it was going to get, but we had a feeling it was going to get worse. We didn't know how much worse
00:07:15.900and how soon, because 2020 was, without exception, the worst year for freedom of speech and academic
00:07:23.860freedom I have seen in my entire career. The second worst year, 2021. And so it's been a very
00:07:31.040disheartening couple of years. It's kind of funny because there are still people who will talk about
00:07:36.220like cancel culture isn't real and it's like and and literally like after the new york times
00:07:40.900finally you know wrote an editorial saying well actually everything indicates it's real including
00:07:45.200our own polling and you know people on twitter it blew their minds they they completely freaked
00:07:51.440out and including people saying give me one example of someone's and it's like i have a
00:07:57.240database and this is just professors of now we're getting close to 600 professors who were targeted
00:08:04.200for being canceled since 2015, about two thirds of them happened just since 2020. About one fifth
00:08:10.680of them were fired about also about, you know, about three fifths of them were punished in some
00:08:16.340way, whether that's, you know, loss of position or whatever. This includes 30 tenured professors
00:08:22.820who were fired for their for their expression or for their pedagogy or for their research.
00:08:27.580That's the only reason why tenure exists. And generally, like tenured professors could have
00:08:31.640been fired in the past when I first started my career. But that was for like murdering somebody
00:08:36.500or like or not showing up to class or just like genuinely like leaving the country, doing something
00:08:41.680illegal or just failing to do your job entirely. Them being fired for for their point of view,
00:08:50.620for their expression. That's the whole reason why tenure exists in the first place. So and that's
00:08:55.140just professors. The number of students who get in trouble is many times that. And that's harder
00:09:01.280to dig up because when a student gets expelled, that doesn't make the student newspaper, for
00:09:06.080example. So it has been the worst couple of years of my career. And my big fear is that just the
00:09:13.740same way you had sort of like the political correctness thing of the late 80s and early 90s,
00:09:19.480that kind of passed after a while, after the speech codes were defeated in court, after
00:09:24.240comedians started making fun of it, it kind of fell out of fashion. And people kind of went,
00:09:28.540thank god that's over but then from 1995 to 2015 things just got worse with just more quietly with
00:09:35.400less attention and i what and i can feel that there's a little bit of a sense that people are
00:09:39.740returning to their sanity on some of this stuff but if we don't but if we just go oh thank goodness
00:09:44.440that's over again the next time the pendulum swings which will be sooner it's going to be
00:09:48.980even worse still so greg thank you for making me depressed now i'm here to get you some cbt
00:09:56.640yeah but greg in your book there were lots of you pointed out lots of reasons why this was the case
00:10:05.600yep which do you think are the most important ones why we find ourselves in this position now
00:10:11.940you know my two are the two we started with um in in the we talk about seven causal threads
00:10:18.880in coddling the dark and mine because of course we do you know have to make it as complicated
00:10:22.240as possible. Actually, sorry, we talk about six, but we added a seventh later. But the two most
00:10:26.440important ones to me are social media is what sped these trends up. A lot of these things
00:10:33.960existed already, you know, like the sort of, what's the best word for it, like revivocation
00:10:41.500of ad hominem arguments, that essentially the idea that you would focus on the person,
00:10:48.420not the argument they're making was something that at minimum college was supposed to be teaching
00:10:53.740people to, you know, that actually that's kind of disfavored, but just because someone's horrible
00:10:58.180doesn't mean they're wrong. And just because someone's a saint doesn't mean they're right.
00:11:01.920This is just logical. This is just also true. So I think when social media came along, it came at
00:11:08.280a confluence of higher ed, you know, adopting these one kind of giving up to a surprising
00:11:15.980degree on the rules of argumentation, but also on the even more pernicious side, K-12 and college
00:11:23.940teaching that ad hominem arguments are essentially good, that essentially, yes, you know, like this
00:11:30.340is a, life is a battle between good people and evil people is what we call our third great untruth
00:11:35.420in the book. Basically, the untruths are the idea of it's as if we're giving the world's
00:11:40.660worst possible advice to a generation of students. And we call that the great untruth of polarization.
00:11:45.980So 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.
00:11:56.020And 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.
00:12:13.160So 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.
00:12:31.520Because 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.
00:12:40.500The dynamics around your appreciation for free speech shifts because free speech is the argument of.
00:12:47.520So 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.
00:12:58.880But in a democracy, if you have 50 percent or more, you you get to make the rules.
00:13:04.840And 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.
00:13:19.000When 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.
00:13:38.700It's predictable that you start seeing free speech is not something that's your ally.
00:13:43.420You start seeing something of more of an inconvenience.
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00:14:16.480i i still can't get my head around why people would think that free speech is more of an
00:14:24.900inconvenience how have we got to this point where we take something so fundamental to our society
00:14:31.260and treat it so frivolously i i think it's it to a degree it's regression to the mean
00:14:37.240um that uh that essentially most of human history is about um censorship you know that essentially
00:14:44.500the censors generally won. There's a reason why I call my blog the eternally radical idea,
00:14:51.200because the idea that everyone's entitled their opinion and that the fact of that opinion,
00:14:57.100their right to hold that opinion is absolutely their right, even if you think they might be
00:15:01.980wrong, is a very radical idea. And you know this because in every generation, people stand up
00:15:08.600to oppose it. We like to always point out these freedom fighters in history, and it's like, well,
00:15:14.060who were they fighting against um and it's most of human history that the other side the forces
00:15:19.800of conformity the forces of authority the forces of groupthink the forces of religion all of these
00:15:25.320things um they all conspire against freedom of speech and so freedom of speech has to be taught
00:15:32.020it has to be valued and one of the ways you see what a culture values is in their idioms um like
00:15:37.940the little sayings that they have that pepper their speech and so growing up in in the u.s you
00:15:43.500always heard, it's a free country, everyone's entitled to their own opinion, to each his own
00:15:48.420or her own, walk a mile in a man's shoes, and for that matter, even none of your business.
00:15:53.700You know, these are all kind of ideas that undergird a democratic society. But those
00:16:01.260have increasingly fallen away. And I think in no small part, because we disproportionately,
00:16:07.320And 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.
00:16:17.880I 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.
00:16:35.340You 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.
00:17:01.880And 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.
00:17:12.360And 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.
00:17:22.380and i and i was watching that going is this really america is this really the land of the free
00:17:28.540is this really what i i would associate with america no well the whole disinformation thing
00:17:36.980is um i get it i i understand how it that disinformation can be used by your enemies
00:17:44.040it can be used by malicious people it can be used by snake oil salesmen um to profit or to disrupt
00:17:50.640or or or whatever but it is the reason why it's so hard to fight is because the other option is
00:17:58.800omniscience you know like like that essentially we that's one of the reasons why free speech
00:18:04.680works so well is because in the grand scheme of things we're all incredibly self-deluded animals
00:18:09.440like we we don't we we are very bad at guessing what the truth is we're very bad at knowing um
00:18:15.400if the person talking talking to us is a liar we're overconfident in our current beliefs we're
00:18:20.140overconfident that our age has all of the moral questions settled. And free speech is this
00:18:27.120constant recognition of epistemic humility that in the grand scheme of things, we don't know all
00:18:32.040that much stuff. So it's amazing to me when people point out, yeah, disinformation is a problem and
00:18:37.040it's one that has to be combated. But the way you combat it is by having experts that people
00:18:41.840generally trust talking about these things and treating people like adults. When you start having
00:18:47.680a situation where people think that higher education, journalism, experts in general are
00:18:53.800biased in some way and that that trust starts to be undermined. That's a very dangerous thing
00:19:00.060for a democratic society. I also think, by the way, social media makes that process inevitable
00:19:04.500and we have to figure out how to live with that disruption. But you can censor by going after
00:19:09.560disinformation, you can by claiming to go after disinformation, you can censor practically
00:19:14.740everybody. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Because if you do,
00:19:21.480then EasyDNS is a company for you. EasyDNS is the perfect domain name registrar provider and
00:19:28.100web host for you. They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be
00:19:32.500cancel culture, de-platform attacks, or overzealous government agencies. He knows about that.
00:21:28.480And 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.
00:21:43.280Now, 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.
00:21:54.460But 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?
00:22:10.080Yeah, 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.
00:22:35.040And 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?
00:22:52.040um and and one of the things that i you know so i i think um what was it what was the name of the
00:22:58.960one that got shut down parlor uh parlor parlor and parlor when it got shut down i didn't know
00:23:04.480enough about the site to have a strong opinion on it but the accusation was that people were
00:23:08.960conspiring to commit actual crimes and of course that's not protected um threats of bodily harm or
00:23:14.400death are not protected um i mean one of the things that immediately um required some amount
00:23:20.140of moderation on the internet, you know, going back to its earliest days is spam. You know,
00:23:25.000people just, they'd be spammed to death if there wasn't some amount of moderation. But I do think
00:23:30.080that there are sensible principles that you can draw from it, which are like that nobody should
00:23:34.800be punished simply for expressing their opinion, that essentially you can't have viewpoint
00:23:38.960discrimination on a topic. When you have a social media platform, you can have general parameters,
00:23:46.040You 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.
00:23:55.260Like on this one, we're just talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you know, for example.
00:24:00.680I think that it's not as hard as people think to do some of this.
00:24:05.920You know, not punishing people on the basis of viewpoint is a good start.
00:24:09.540You can have viewpoint neutral rules in place anyway.
00:24:13.220But 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.
00:24:31.880He 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.
00:24:45.500And this is actually not the worst thing in some cases. I mean, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, it's good that he got torn down.
00:24:52.840There 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.
00:24:59.480but it's utterly incapable of building at this point that essentially if you want to tear something
00:25:04.280down social media is great if you want to actually build something constructive it will not help you
00:25:09.080it'll probably actually uh completely sabotage that but we shouldn't give up on the idea that
00:25:14.420we can get something much more productive um for the produce and this is where i'm going to sound
00:25:19.180very pie in the sky production of human knowledge from social media why because the great institution
00:25:25.680of disconfirmation, you know, which is either the Republic of Letters or what higher education is
00:25:30.700supposed to be, um, is all about disconfirmation. Um, just disconfirmation within some rules that
00:25:36.280ad hominems don't count. Like, again, like I said, you can be, you can be right and be a horrible
00:25:40.460person. Um, and so I do think that if you could think of a way to use social media that rather
00:25:46.620than, um, completely banking on the, uh, on the outrage machine, um, tried to actually use it to,
00:25:53.320you know more thoughtful um uh more well-structured arguments actually get more uh more discussion
00:26:00.180there i i believe that there's a way to do it that we could have it go from something that is just
00:26:05.060snarky gossip to something that might actually have a positive benefit on the species well you're
00:26:12.100right that does sound pie in the sky um but but but look as i say i'm playing devil's advocate
00:26:19.500and i'm fully on on your side of the argument but at the same time you know the argument for
00:26:26.020example like look take the hunter biden story that was suppressed by the the by social media
00:26:31.500and take the banning of donald trump from twitter my take on that is that to me those two events
00:26:38.260are essentially they are i don't want to sound extreme but to me that was the end of democracy
00:26:46.140in a way, if you can't get accurate information and if you can ban the sitting president of the
00:26:50.360United States from speaking on the biggest public platform that there is, you know, you've ended
00:26:55.400our ability to make decisions independently based on the information that we want to seek out.
00:27:00.360However, the argument would be from the people who are involved in that censorship is,
00:27:04.340well, that is a point where free speech causes real world harm and it becomes equivalent of
00:27:10.020screaming fire in a theater now given now i don't agree with that point even with january the 6th
00:27:16.420and all of that but that that could have been the interpretation certainly from the social media
00:27:22.100companies that that is what was happening their platforms were being used to organize i mean they
00:27:28.420call it an insurrection call it whatever you want a large-scale riot in the heart of the world's
00:27:33.420greatest democracy right i live on capitol hill by the way so like right there so we were in the
00:27:39.380isn't isn't that inevitably where we're always going to end up it's always going to be at that
00:27:46.620extreme where yeah you can have your free speech and use the network responsibly but then the day
00:27:51.460when push comes to shove when it's crunch time someone is going to get on twitter and go
00:27:56.020this election was bs let's all get to x place and start y action yeah i mean i i think that these
00:28:03.720are there are going to be you know misfires and mistakes inevitably in any system um you impose
00:28:09.880but there's there's a difference between trying to maximize freedom of speech and freedom of opinion
00:28:13.840um and giving up on the whole thing because the system fails sometimes and when it comes to the
00:28:18.480hunter biden thing um you know i am somewhat with my my friend john roush like like the idea of
00:28:25.460being a little bit spooked about the idea of there being you know russian disinformation about this
00:28:30.000sounding because it sounded fishy, frankly, like the idea of like they found a laptop at a company
00:28:34.680like suddenly right around the time of the election. Still, I think Twitter made absolutely
00:28:39.780the wrong call. But I'm not saying it's as crazy as it sounds under the under the circumstances.
00:28:45.960And when it comes to, you know, January 6th, that the standard in the law is the incitement
00:28:51.960standard under Brandenburg. There are First Amendment lawyers, you know, saying this may
00:28:56.660not be exactly Brandenburg, but it's damn close. And there are other people like David French who
00:29:00.060actually thought it crossed the line, for example, into even a violation of First Amendment
00:29:05.120standards. So I think that some of these issues are not necessarily as hard as they sound,
00:29:10.180and they don't devalue the entire system. Well, Greg, what you're saying to me sounds
00:29:16.280even harder than what I thought it was, because you can have your lawyers adjudicating on it for
00:29:20.940years to come. But that decision has to be made in the moment by Twitter. So what was the right
00:29:27.140decision in that situation, in your opinion? I try to be nonpartisan in my take on it. But I am
00:29:37.640a Democrat, which I explained to the genuine horror of Trump people. They're so nasty. I mean,
00:29:46.000honestly, I think under the circumstances, saying that it was close enough to incitement,
00:30:19.560The 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?
00:30:42.040Absolutely not. And that's and that's the reason why. And to be clear, for Hunter Biden, that was a mistake, in my opinion.
00:30:48.840I'm just making the point that it's not that that was a bad call and it was wrong.
00:30:53.260And 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.
00:31:03.720Because, like I said, it sounded it sounded kind of fishy.
00:31:05.600i would hope that any journalist hearing an implausible sounding backstory would be kind of
00:31:10.800like is that really true but nonetheless what they did the laptop thing was a mistake that
00:31:16.860they should be embarrassed and ashamed of greg isn't the problem that what we've got is of these
00:31:23.660companies which are huge conglomerates they're privately owned and as a result they're going
00:31:30.400to do like all corporations do and act in their own self-interest and that being the case they
00:31:36.360cannot be trusted with these hugely powerful tools and be the ones in charge of disseminating
00:31:43.240information to the public yeah let's give it to the government yeah exactly you know that that's
00:31:49.820my answer to that it is that essentially people think that and this is one of the funny things
00:31:55.400like as far as like a i'm not like a full libertarian but i'm definitely a civil libertarian
00:31:59.860But 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.
00:32:13.060And I'd really rather have something, you know, driven by the profit motive than by driven by pure political calculation.
00:32:21.660Unfortunately, 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.
00:32:39.080um so i do think that that the existing silicon valley um has a major problem in that it has
00:32:45.960doesn't have sufficient viewpoint diversity among itself still i when it comes to a lot of the
00:32:50.960solutions i find the solutions worth worth worse than the disease i think people would be scared
00:32:55.860like so i always found it really kind of like jaw-dropping that republicans were always talking
00:33:00.600about how you know uh and trump in particular was talking about dropping uh the existing version of
00:33:06.440Section 230, which protects social media giants from liability in a number of cases. Because if
00:33:15.060they weren't protected from that, the very first people they would drop would be overwhelmingly
00:33:19.620conservative. Now, to be clear, I don't think there is a perfect solution to any of this. I
00:33:24.800do occasionally think that sometimes the companies, as much as maligned as they are,
00:33:30.080made some actually pretty good calls. I was originally very skeptical of the Facebook
00:33:35.480like a overseer board thing, because I assumed what would happen is they would since they were
00:33:41.760trying to make it international, that it would turn into the convoy system and the least
00:33:45.560speech protective person in the board would actually be the one who decides. But setting up
00:33:52.060an outside body was was was actually a pretty good call. So I think that there are ways to
00:33:58.680navigate it. And what I'm more scared of is that people are going to think that, well, you know,
00:34:02.560The whole problem is social media is corrupt.
00:34:05.720So therefore, we're going to come up with a solution
00:34:07.260that actually ends up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
00:34:10.680But let's talk about power, Greg, because power is at the root of all this
00:34:15.940and that these companies are so powerful,
00:34:18.700they can effectively do what they want,
00:34:21.260even if it means silencing the president of the United States,
00:34:25.360even if it means influencing elections,
00:46:35.180When we were talking at the very start of the interview, we were talking about education.
00:46:40.160We were talking about college education.
00:46:42.500And it seems to me the victim in all of this, there are many victims, but possibly the biggest
00:46:48.620victims are kids and college kids themselves, because they're not being taught how to think.
00:46:54.540They're not being taught how to debate. They're not being taught to listen. They're not being
00:46:59.060taught how to develop as people. What is that doing, not only to that generation, but to the
00:47:05.400individual themselves? Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, my first book was called Unlearning Liberty.
00:47:11.060And the idea was that I felt like people were going into higher education in particular and
00:47:15.940coming out hostile to a lot of democratic, small d democratic norms. When it comes to the mental
00:47:21.860health aspect of it, I think it's even worse because, and this is where, like, I usually try
00:47:26.600to keep my cool. But as far as something that actually just makes me flat out angry is, you
00:47:32.720know, when, when coddling came out, we still had people saying the evidence just isn't there,
00:47:39.120that there's a mental health crisis on, on, on campus. And that, and in 2015, when we wrote the
00:47:45.380initial article that, you know, the, the, the research wasn't out yet literally, but we were
00:47:50.380saying we were hearing of this on campus. And then when the numbers finally came out, it was
00:47:54.640way, way worse than we thought. So we wrote the book basically saying it's as if we are giving
00:48:01.280a generation of students the kind of advice that will make them anxious and depressed.
00:48:05.900We know this for a fact now, that kids are hitting higher education with way higher rates of
00:48:13.000depression, anxiety, mood disorders, self-harm, and suicide, even among like 10 to 14 year olds,
00:48:20.240which is like pains me to like talk about like the fact that you're talking about a big spike
00:48:25.600in suicide rates for people that young. So to know that for a fact and still teach students
00:48:31.780to basically effectively whisper in their ears, by the way, you can't really handle hearing things
00:48:37.000that are offensive to you. You will be permanently damaged by it. You won't recover. And by the way,
00:48:44.000most of you the overwhelming majority of you are both oppressors and oppressed there's not very
00:48:50.780much you can do about it other than feel bad and apologetic about yourself and you know again and
00:48:56.340you're not very resilient and life is essentially you know everybody out you know your parents are
00:49:01.840essentially evil and your other americans are out to get you and everyone's secretly against you if
00:49:07.020they're not nominally against you it's like that is a messed up thing to tell anyone but when you
00:49:12.560know that they're coming in with high rates of suicide anxiety and depression um that's just not
00:49:17.620acceptable by any stretch of the imagination so so i've definitely i i think a lot about ways to
00:49:24.080get out of the educational system we have in the u.s in in in radical steps like because k through
00:49:30.48012 um it's kind of weird because like the public education system in in in america has its problems
00:49:37.240but some of the worst ideologies coming out of the most elite, you know, prep schools.
00:49:42.320And meanwhile, higher education, I mean, even just on cost and bureaucratization alone, it's insane.
00:49:48.520Like the idea that someone at Sarah Lawrence can say with a straight face that it's $70,000 a year
00:49:53.660and that covers only half the cost of educating a single student for a single year.
00:49:59.200And they really will say this. And it's like, that's nuts. That's a failure of the system.
00:50:03.780If 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.
00:50:11.980So 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.
00:50:22.460And I don't think we should be massively subsidizing over bureaucratized, incredibly expensive country clubs.
00:50:29.880Yeah, 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?
00:50:53.740I 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.
00:51:09.980Because 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.
00:51:20.280A 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.
00:51:31.500You 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.
00:51:37.160There 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.
00:51:53.200That 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.
00:52:06.520And what's funny is that if I can imagine so many different competing systems that could
00:52:11.360actually tell, because I'm an employer as well, that could tell employers that this
00:52:16.640is an incredibly bright, incredibly hardworking person.
00:53:02.440That's a really interesting point, Greg.
00:53:03.960And 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.
00:53:23.560And the idea was, you know, every action causes a reaction, the pendulum swings and this new generation coming through.
00:53:30.400Oh, 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.
00:53:43.240My understanding is there is there is evidence in the polling that there is a backlash effect going on.
00:53:50.300I'll believe it when I see it, you know, essentially.
00:53:52.980um i do think my and my big fear i wrote this 6 000 word article for reason um magazine uh talk
00:53:59.800and i call it the the the second great age of political correctness and my whole point there
00:54:04.320is like i was saying earlier that that um uh that this is exactly what happened last time
00:54:10.060in the late 90s is it can't we can't continue to have this kind of you know for lack of a better
00:54:15.820term cancel culture go on at its current rate forever because eventually literally run out of
00:54:21.860people or at least people brave enough to dissent. So there will absolutely have to be a turning back
00:54:28.220of the pendulum to some degree. And arguably, that's already happening to at least some modest
00:54:32.540degree. But if we think that, oh, thank goodness that's over because we lost our minds for a couple
00:54:38.020of years there, that doesn't fix the problem. It still means that you have institutions that have
00:54:43.200no viewpoint diversity, that they are wildly over bureaucratized. All of these problems haven't
00:54:48.940actually been fixed. So I think that relying on the pendulum to swing back is not sufficient,
00:54:54.100even if it does swing back. And we shouldn't assume, just like you're skeptically pointing
00:54:58.360out, that it necessarily will. And Greg, why is it, and I've got my own theories on this,
00:55:05.480that the institutions most prone to this always tend to be the wealthiest, always tend to be the
00:55:13.400most prestigious, always tend to be the most privileged. I find it fascinating. Why do you
00:55:20.720think that is? Rob Henderson coined the term, I believe it was him. He's an amazing thinker
00:55:27.400and way younger than me. He's coming on the show very soon. So we'll ask him if it's a quote of
00:55:31.540his. Go ahead. Oh, terrific. Luxury beliefs that essentially there's a class of belief that you
00:55:38.400can have that improves you in esteem among people from your class, um, that has no harm to you,
00:55:46.420but makes you seem more pure, more moral, more upstanding, but actually harms, uh, other people
00:55:53.100in this, in the society. And definitely I saw a lot of luxury beliefs in my sort of journey up
00:55:59.280the class ladder, uh, in the United States. It was, it could be, um, I remember in my human
00:56:05.580rights classes when I was at Stanford, I realized that the theme seemed to be, and I was always
00:56:13.820pointing this out, so they hated me for it, but it seemed to be that the professor's idea of what
00:56:18.500the good should look like was more important than helping actual people survive, in many cases in
00:56:25.420the real world. And I was constantly like, hey, that sounds like you're just being puritanical
00:56:28.660about it has to be your way or the highway, and you're literally willing to kill people over that.
00:56:33.040So 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.
00:56:49.240But 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.
00:57:00.440a re-romantization of the old Soviet Union, for example, which I thought was the fact that the
00:57:06.400New York Times did in 2018, did an entire year-long thing talking about the Bolshevik
00:57:14.720revolution, including articles that talked about how sex was better during the Soviets. I'm like,
00:57:20.540this is unbelievable to me. This is a monstrous lie. So basically what I'm saying here is we
00:57:29.020never fixed the old problems that the ruling elite in the United States had. And we're doing very
00:57:35.080little to fix the new ones. But it is pretty normal, unfortunately, for upper class people to
00:57:41.680just think of themselves as to rationalize their belief that they're better than everybody else.
00:57:46.040They just do it now in a way that seems very self-flagellating, but it's really about
00:57:50.120those other rubes over there. Well, Greg, it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation.
00:57:55.900Thank 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?
00:58:14.300um i think it's about major reform to american higher education um i mean i i said it it's one
00:58:21.680of the things i i really hit all throughout i think when um some of the bills you know that
00:58:27.320are being passed in the united states particularly as they apply to higher education they're going
00:58:31.080after viewpoints which is not okay like you you can't in the u.s under the first amendment nor
00:58:36.400should you be able to go after professors because of their viewpoint or books because of their
00:58:40.620viewpoint. But I do think that the insane hyper-bureaucratization of universities is a
00:58:46.520scandal. I do think that in a lot of these cases, like the situation where the Yale Law School
00:58:52.560students shouted down what was supposed to be sort of a kumbaya session between conservative
00:58:57.440Supreme Court lawyers and liberal Supreme Court lawyers, the scandal there in particular is not
00:59:03.340just that 100 students in a class of 180 showed up to shout it down, it's that it was encouraged
00:59:08.220by administrators, and those administrators are still employed by Yale. So I think that figuring
00:59:13.300out who the bad, like the fact we're not even firing the administrators who are causing this
00:59:17.280problem in the first place is something that everybody should be thinking about. This doesn't
00:59:20.640even seem to be on the radar. Greg, it's been an absolute pleasure. The time has flown by.
00:59:28.260If people want to find you online, Greg, where is the best place to do that? Where is the best
00:59:32.300place to look for your books? Where is the best place to find out about FIRE? Thefire.org.
00:59:37.720We have a lot of great content coming out. We have we actually have a surprisingly good TikTok game.
00:59:43.400You know, if you can spell my last name, you can find my books, you know, pretty easily.
00:59:48.920But 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.
00:59:59.800Greg, thank you so much for coming on. We'll do the last couple of questions for our locals in the second.
01:00:04.460but in the meantime, thank you for being on the show
01:00:06.520and thank you all for watching and listening.
01:00:08.960We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode