Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Greg Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott: The Cancelling of the American Mind

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Greg Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott: The Cancelling of the American Mind · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans, welcome to the same space for dangerous ideas, art companies and universities
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  becoming less tolerant of ideas that are a bit out there, a bit out there, a bit controversial,
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  ideas that might be different from what the majority of people on campus or in the institution
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  think are the right ways of thinking. If you're on the wrong side of history,
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  you're getting excluded from not just polite society, but maybe even your job.
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  The coddling of the American mind was a book initially, a cover piece in the Atlantic magazine
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  that hit the world like a lightning bolt back in 2015 was the Atlantic cover story about how
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  we're all becoming essentially snowflakes and we're raising children to be dysfunctionally
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  sensitive and hyper-vulnerable. It was written by Jonathan Hate and Greg Lukyanov.
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  Greg is our guest today. He has a new book, a follow-up to the coddling of the American mind called
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  the cancelling of the American mind because what Greg works on in his day-to-day business
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  essentially as a lawyer is in defending people who are being persecuted for holding unpopular
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  opinions, often at universities, often in big organizations. Greg is a New York Times best-selling
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  author. He's the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression,
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  which is the acronym of which is Fire. He's written a bunch of books about freedom of speech
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  and his collaborator in the cancelling of the American mind is a Jen Zeder named Ricky Schlott,
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  a journalist, political commentator, just in case anyone thought that this was old Fuddy Dutties
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  shaking their fist at the heavens and saying, kids these days just can't take a joke.
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  Ricky is on hand to report from the front lines of the American university campus about what's
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  going on, what she's seen, and the aspirations that she holds for free speech in American academia
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  and American capitalism. She's also a research fellow at Fire, she has a podcast called Lost
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  Debate, as well as being a columnist at the New York Post. Please enjoy it. They want to early
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  Greg Lucchela and Ricky Schlott.
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  How are you feeling doing a book tour? How are you feeling doing a book tour about free speech
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  at a time when there is a crisis in the Middle East which touches exactly on a bunch of issues
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  that people find it most difficult to talk about. On both sides, this is one of the most
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  toxic issues in terms of feeling like you are given a path to be able to float ideas,
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  to be able to kick around ideas, to be able to consider who's at fault and who's not at fault.
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  It's like everyone has an extremely strong set of priors at this time.
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  One of the reasons why it doesn't bother me is the fact that one of the most important values
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  of freedom of speech is to know what people really think, not even if it's monstrous,
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  but especially if it is. Right now, a lot of the speech that you're seeing some professors and
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  certainly some students saying on campus looks incredibly callous at minimum. In some cases,
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  really outright supporting murderers, rapists and terrorist attack. That's pretty horrifying,
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  but you're not safer for knowing less about the world. I think that if people are looking at some
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  of the opinions at higher education and going, whoa, what the? And looking at some of the polling
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  for particularly on how supportive people under the age of 25 are of not just Palestinians,
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  but of Hamas, that's stuff worth knowing. So I think that when you're arguing about
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  the harder argument to make at the moment is the free speech culture argument. Telling people
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  that if you're making black lists of people who signed the Harvard letter or blaming Israel entirely,
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  you know, for the Hamas attacks and you're trying to remind people that, you know, if you're
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  making black lists and you're deciding not to hire people on the basis of their opinion,
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  we would still consider that cancel culture. I can understand that the answer is, you know,
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  what a lot of people actually try to argue, well, it's not really cancel culture. I'm like, well,
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  according to our definition, it is like cancel culture is the uptick of attempts to get people,
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  you know, de-platform, fired, not hired in the first place. And otherwise punished for their point
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  of view, the big uptick around 2014, accelerating 2017 and the culture fear that resulted from it.
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  And I hear people saying, oh, that's the, you know, that just disagree with your definition of
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  cancel culture. And I'm like, no, I think I think you can't make the definition too subjective or
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  also it becomes meaningless again. But if what you're saying is, do you think that these are people
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  who deserve to be canceled? Then I just want kind of people who are saying that to own that.
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  Now, and I always have a caveat on the decision not to hire, you know, from some of these elite
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  schools that I think almost nothing healthier could happen for the country is if America was far
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  less dependent on creating, you know, giving our fanciest positions and our ruling class positions
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  to graduates of these very strange places like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. I think we'd be
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  a healthier country for it. And I also think that if you hire from one of these places, one of the
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  things you have to make sure is that you're not hiring a counselor because like, yeah, like I'm
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  very sympathetic to the idea that you can have some radical beliefs on some stuff that really
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  matters to you and still be an amazing employee. But you do want to make sure that you can tolerate
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  other people's beliefs as well because what you don't want as an employer is someone who shows up
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  like a lot of elite college students did. And you know, around 2020 and 2021 saying it's, you know,
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  my politics the highway. And, you know, I think you should get rid of the following, you know,
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  five employees, you know, that IT guy who seems to be vaguely pro-champ. That guy's got to go.
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  You know, like, I think that one thing that that campuses have been exporting to corporations has
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  been an unhealthy council culture that's bad for business.
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  Ricky, there's something that's going on about safety, about the about violence, about my identity
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  being attacked. I'm a visiting fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, whose dean of
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  social sciences is one of the few people in Australia to be committed to fostering a culture of
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  free speech on campus and something that I see that I didn't see when I was studying there
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  is a framing of what I would regard as disagreement into one of almost human resources questions
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  about like, you know, if it's, if there's a huge gay pride parade and there's rainbow flags all
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  over the place, the dissident gay person who speaks up and says, well, hang on, how long is pride
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  actually going to be useful for? Does it maybe have collateral damage on young people who don't
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  quite feel like they fit into the cliche of gayness? And, you know, maybe there's a path towards
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  the sexual flourishing that doesn't go through the rigid identity of pride. That person can
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  be accused of credibly accused of undermining people's identity, attacking their lived experience
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  and making them feel unsafe in an area where they should feel safe. What's that shift about?
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  Yeah, I mean, I'm 23 and I read the Coddling of the American Mind Gregg's prior book when I was in
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  college and it very much diagnosed what I was seeing firsthand on campuses. I was read certainly
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  in a period of time where it was pretty unambiguous that speech was effectively equated to violence.
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  I think a lot of my friends who spent more time online and in Tumblr sort of previsors may have
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  been more prone to believing that and clinging on to their identities more forcefully, but I do
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  think that the Sikh Dism was rampant when I was at NYU. I only did two years of school at NYU
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  and ended up dropping out during the pandemic and it was institutionalized and reinforced as the
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  Sikh Dism that you're referring to in just like such profound ways. It's pretty hard for me to
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  believe and retrospect looking back when I first ended up at NYU's campus. I went to the
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  the security center to get my ID to get into every building and on the back of the ID it tells you
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  here's 911, here's the Student Health Services in case you have a medical emergency, the
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  campus safety in case you have a safety issue and the bias response hotline in case someone
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  agrees to you when you're on campus and so I think literally from day one the incineration to young
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  people that college campuses really put forth is that you could be assaulted for verbally for your
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  identity or for your politics or for whatever other protected category you may feel and there's
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  actually institutional hotlines and administrators on the other ends that are there to attack words
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  with sanction or with punishment and I think that that is something that really had a chilling
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  effect for me on my college campus and you see that same kind of mechanism being used by these
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  Gen Zers who learn these tactics on campus and then show up at a job a couple years later and they
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  use a jar like they would a bias response hotline so I think that it's impacting broader swaths
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  at society in a really profound way and certainly it's something that I was raised completely
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  mirrored in and it took like some serious thought myself and some serious reading on my own to
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  actually pull myself out of some of the distortions of my generation I would say.
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  What was it? What did it for you? What clicked?
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  For me it was being a college student during the pandemic and being told that I should still be
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  paying full tuition for Zoom school which occurred into my mom for saying absolutely not and
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  where and you can go and take a semester off and do your own thing and and she helped flip me
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  through that as long as they did something interesting and with my mind and so I did a ton of
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  reading of books that I had not been assigned in my I did a two-year condensed philosophy humanities
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  program at NYU so I did finish effectively what would have been a liberal arts degree in two
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  years and I pulled back and I said what actually haven't I been assigned in one of the things that
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  just I can never like unlearn what I learned in the book on Liberty by John Stuart Mill it's so
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  personally impacted me in a way where it was like riding a bike and you can never get back to
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  not knowing how to ride a bike or I mean it was it was the fundamental values of what underpin
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  the society that I inherited that really just shook me from my complacency and made me animated
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  to want a defense speech and to defend the classical liberal values that make my country free
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  and that I think we're becoming so complacent about. And is that not on the syllabus?
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  What were you studying? No we had utilitarianism and I actually ran into a professor
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  later on who I had had at NYU a philosophy professor who I mentioned that I had read on Liberty
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  too and I was like why didn't we read that and he goes oh I have to read it we go get out
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  okay yeah are you serious he's a philosophy professor and he hasn't read on Liberty
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  one of the classic underpinning texts of Western liberal philosophy yeah so I think that's the
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  state of academia at the moment I really want to find an old copy of on Liberty that I have
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  because I remember there being this absolutely patronizing like intro to a version of on Liberty
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  that came out I think in like the 80s or 90s that's kind of like you know not very taken very
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  seriously today like it was this really dismissive kind of like and it's a funny thing when people
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  were kind of like poo poo John Stuart Mill and I'm kind of like the man spoke Greek at three he's
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  smarter than any of us but also I mean you can poo poo and I still think it's interesting in a
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  philosophy class to read Karl Marx it's interesting to read Jeremy Ben Thurman it's interesting
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  to read utilitarians it's interesting to read communists and but the idea that he would not be a
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  foundational part of any tertiary education is extraordinary yeah well no poop poo it as being like
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  not like particularly good philosophy and I'm like no he was actually trying to fix things in the
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  real world like like the and you know I think some of the people are read in this
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  instead of mel or comparatively simplistic thinkers so the attack on a person's identity being
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  equated with the attack an attack on them can we just explore the boundary between ideas and
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  attacks or between because they you know they must they must bump into each other at some point
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  right if I if I say that Jews are worthless human beings who should be eradicated from the face
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  of the earth that is an opinion but it's obviously going to land as an extremely offensive attack
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  on an individual Jewish student or worker so we're drawing the boundary somewhere right about where
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  beliefs and opinions bump into attacks is that is the boundary just being drawn too tight
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  or is that is that a fallacious boundary well when we talk about you know the the free speech
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  culture versus free speech law one of the things that free speech law that we think actually
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  makes a lot of sense but my my mom's British my dad's Russian that's been a lot of time I know
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  the country's America's never had a sense that where there's like one modal American and I
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  think it's helpful to help us navigate being a genuinely multicultural you know country is there
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  is no sense that kind of like there's there's a there's a one like one type or idea of how Americans
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  you know should be and that's one of the reasons why in First Amendment law the bedrock principle
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  from a 1989 case cult text to be Johnson is he can't ban something simply because it's offensive
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  and because offensiveness is just too damn subjective basically people dis people disagree on it from
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  year to year from person to person from from group to group yeah even across agendas and class
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  differences now how does that translate into you know our argument for free speech culture you know
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  again it's the idea that we think it's valuable to know what people really think I think we do too
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  much of associating in higher education the idea that there are I you came up with a great example
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  of where ideas and identity do clash but I think we do an awful lot of sort of associating
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  identities too much with opinions and ideas that and that's one of the things we talk about in the
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  book is we try to get people to think of cancel culture as a way of winning arguments without winning
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  arguments that essentially cancel culture is a way to not refute someone or convince them but
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  to scare them out of disagreeing with you or to run out the clock so that they no longer you know
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  bother and we talk about on the left there being we talk about the right and the left's different
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  rhetorical fortresses which are ways of avoiding arguments we talk about the way identity gets
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  used in higher education but how it's bled out to the entire society and how you get taken down
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  this entire sort of demographic funnel of you know are you white are you male are you cisgendered
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  are you etc um and we actually do the numbers when we're like okay this gets down to about
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  0.9% of the population as so that so congratulations you will limit it 99.1% of the of the people you might
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  be arguing with also since you can claim kind of anyone's conservative or an idea is conservative
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  and then you can dismiss it there you know that gets you pretty close to almost zero if you really
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  want to use it liberally but here's the thing none of it mattered because by the time you get to
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  the next step the are you phobic if you are a transgender non white person and you have the wrong
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  opinion you still don't count you actually get it in many cases so for example we talk to pretty
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  much every black conservative author we knew and and black moderate author we knew have been told
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  that they're not really black for some of the opinions they have if they weren't conforming it's
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  like oh that's that's amazing that that that that's perfect because Thomas is not black he's
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  not equal to him but my favorite version of that was someone saying that that Peter that Peter
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  Teal isn't actually gay because of his political opinions yeah as a man who has sex with men but not
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  gay because because of his politically which is a which is a nuts you know a crazy perfect
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  track and of course you know trans people are told that they have internalized internalized
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  you know Ricky get told you as internalized the misogyny I'm the queen of internalized
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  massage you can join you can join you can join us you can join us self hating gays and self
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  hating Jews in the in the tribe of ever growing Uncle Tom's yeah it's it's interesting isn't it
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  something yeah do you want to just finish that thought I mean I feel like there's another
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  another beat there about how identity relates to the kinds of ideas that we're willing to tolerate
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  in other words my thinking about myself essentially as a cluster of different communities
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  rather than the John Stuart Mill on Liberty idea of each individual having a certain sanctity
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  you know so that the in the in the rambunctious roiling conversation about the the way that
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  identities intersect in culture though when those identities bump into each other they're not
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  just ideas of ideas of of of identities bumping into each other they're a personal attack on
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  individual human beings well yeah it is up falling too much into the idea of like this is your
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  identity and this is your approved opinion from that point of view of identity which is oftentimes
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  something imposed from without usually by elites themselves saying that that's well that's
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  that's the gay opinion that's like really like you really think that's appropriate and yeah
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  earlier in my career I would just say nobody actually thinks like something that's stupid but now
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  I actually feel like we have this very primitive way of arguing where we just assume that there are
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  you know what what was Anna Presley saying that we we don't want you know non-intersectional black
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  voices are like whatever yeah and two two observations on that friend um first one thing that I
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  noticed quite a lot in discussion based seminars when I was on campus is that this idea that we're
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  talking about attaching identity to ideas was um pretty much the the beginning of every statement
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  than anyone would ever make because the incentive is to say as a woman xyz or as whatever card you
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  might be able to to play to protect yourself and insulate yourself from identity based attacks
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  it's supposed to give you some sort of credibility and I remember in retrospect I mean my only
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  card I have to play is is the woman card unfortunately I don't have anything else in my
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  in my deck but um as a woman this is my opinion and that was how um all of the conversations went
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  effectively in my philosophy classes but then the second point I wanted to make is wow um to
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  your point about individualism is I mean I think gen z is is really budding up against a reality
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  here where we're we're pushed so far towards intersectionality because it's such a diverse
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  generation and it's the most especially in America probably the most diverse generation of of
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  people to ever live in one society in human history and I think it's really um it's really striking
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  to see the intersectionality where we're starting to see each other as as bend diagrams and I'm
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  this and I'm that and I'm I'm a I'm a woman but I'm also queer but I'm also a color and I'm I
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  whatever umbrella of everything that you can put yourself under but in the end you're making
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  the case for individualism with intersectionality and I think that gen z is it's really budding up
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  against that that reality because if you're all these groups like in the end whatever is
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  overlapping is you and I I think that um that realization is I hope coming down the pipeline as
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  as we um delve more into that sort of intersectionality politics because it just defies all logic
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  to look at yourself that way I wouldn't hold my breath Ricky about that realization coming
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  to pass I mean because the the intersection of the bend diagram is still going to comprise more
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  people than just you live I mean I think there's intimate I think there I think there's infinite
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  um uh circles to draw because how many circles have you got right I mean your politics your geography
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  or sexuality um your star sign I mean in the end we're all individuals and I I mean I think that
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  the intersectionality is it an acknowledgement of the fact that these few essential demographic
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  points are not enough to comprise an individual and and it's an excuse to to broaden that out in a
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  way that I think is is a really lazy and um frankly cheap dodge of the fact that individualism
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  is the ultimate truth and what are the arguments that it might be very nice to to aspire towards
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  this world but in reality the world that we live in is a world in which people treat each other
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  on the basis of the color of their skin and whether or not they're male or female and whether or
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  not they present as male or female if they're trans or whether whether they pass it's a world in
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  which homophobia still exists it's a world in which there are structural ways in which certain
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  communities are disadvantaged and it's naïve to think that we can all just bounce around as happy
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  individuals treating each other as individuals sometimes communities have to come together and say
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  no screw the system stuff the man like we are going to cohere as as a group and we're going to assert
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  our rights as a group but this is one of the values of individuality um is that and this is
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  something that Alan you know of course used to say the earth's probably still says one of the
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  co-founders of fire that you know group rights um don't guarantee individual rights but individual
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  rights guarantee group rights because it needs to be up to you how much you actually think like
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  are you defining yourself as a member of the gay community are you defining yourself as a member
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  of the male community are you define yourself a member of a black community it's got to be up to
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  the individual decide how much or how little they think they are part of their group and then to
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  make that decision first and when you work but the activists would say Greg that the it's not up to
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  the black person who's trying to how a cab whether or not the cab stops even if they don't think of
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  themselves as black and it's not up to the young gay kid whether he gets teased for being a feminine
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  to a camp uh even if he doesn't identify as LGBTQ yeah well I guess we're talking about this
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  from a different things and I'm talking about like how individuality actually having an individual
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  focus allows for for group and it just doesn't work the other way around when it comes to actual
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  things like discrimination I mean nobody's denying that all of these things are real and the law
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  actually has uh various ways of dealing with it but um when it comes to you know since we're
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  primarily talking about speech they are are you saying are you saying that that because of these
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  realities we need to give power more power to police speech yes that would be that's the claim
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  that I'm asking you to it's a refute I'm not putting that claim forward yes in other words that
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  yeah if I articulate if I publicly articulate a bigger to view that undermines a community's
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  identity the people inside that community uh feel like it's not good enough to just say well
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  we're all individuals so don't care about my attack on this group and that does then lead to
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  some kind of curtailing of speech or some kind of punishment of the person who seems to be
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  stripping away people's identity and reducing their elite that their group allegiance yeah I think
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  that um it's something that uh Jonathan Roush writes a lot about it is that um the best you know
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  ally of uh individual uh of minority groups has always been freedom of speech and for for
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  for for a very you know big reason uh and this is a major misconception that I I feel like I'm
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  running into more and more commonly is that and actually it's just a flat out wrong argument um
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  that that that I that I've been saying is that freedom of speech exists to protect the majority
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  the powerful the rich and it's like no um the rich and the powerful have been protected historically
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  by being rich and powerful um in in in a democracy um the majority opinion is protected by the vote
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  you literally only need us a i um an idea of freedom of speech for minority uh opinions for opinions
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  that are unpopular with the majority or opinions that are unpopular with the elites who run the
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  country or or both you know um and I think about so you you've got a kind of fact of the politics
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  part of this and the reason why we've turned all this stuff on our heads is that a lot of these
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  ideas are coming out of institutions where the people who think uh who oppose free speech are kind
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  of like who actually you know that there's a political super majority that actually kind of like
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  what am I doing limiting my own power I can actually bring paradise now that I'm actually
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  you know in the one making the rules about um speech well kind of pretending that they're still
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  powerless I mean it's it's one of the reasons why I think you you see this weird self deception
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  in some of the richest companies in the world like institutions like Harvard and Princeton sometimes
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  talking as if they think they're the little guy you know um in in in a lot of these uh uh
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  circumstances so for first of all you know like speech generally is something that uh you shouldn't
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  trust power you know to do right by the powerless um and and that's something that has been
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  shown time and time again that when you give those powers over speech to power it will use it in
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  its own in its own interest and and I think that when you see this happen you know on campus that
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  sometimes they will use these lofty powers um to police speech to more or less protect the
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  brand name of the university it's kind of like well no kidding like obviously that's that's going
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  to be what happens now when it comes to how do how do we deal in a free society with uh the fact
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  that you can actually create say like a hostile environment for for for gay people or you know
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  or or when you were talking about picking picking people up in a taxi you know like that you
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  there are lots you know saying they can't discriminate on the basis of customers there are
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  when you're talking about someone saying something you know rude to someone who's gay the idea
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  the idea that you can ban simply that incident no because we because of the bedrock principle like
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  I brought up but a pattern of behavior that's extremely story then yeah because that's that's
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  considered really just no longer be speech and that's the way that we deal with it on campus and
• 27:39
  that's the way we deal with it in larger society than I'd say it's but it can't simply be someone
• 27:44
  saying something extremely rude or else that basically is giving power the power to go after
• 27:48
  kind of who ever they want this power dynamic is interesting Ricky I yeah I find it fascinating that
• 27:55
  historically every attempt to curtail free speech has to be couched by the powerful as if it's
• 28:03
  on behalf of the powerless and as if it's fighting against a bigger power I mean you see in authoritarian
• 28:09
  regimes they always cast themselves as the underdog or the little guy who who is trying to fight
• 28:14
  back against some pernicious influence or some community that or some other nation that is
• 28:19
  trying to swamp them in McCarthyism it was freedom just struggling to survive against the onslaught
• 28:27
  of Soviet communism you know the religious right will do this about just trying to maintain
• 28:33
  some shred of dignity and sanctity and purity against an onslaught of filthy satirists or whatever
• 28:39
  it might be and the weird thing about today is that the mainstream dominant elite positions that
• 28:47
  wealthy mostly white university educated people hold have been able to peg themselves to
• 28:54
  genuinely disadvantaged communities and therefore appear to be on behalf of the marginalized
• 29:00
  and the disadvantaged even though what they're actually doing is entrenching a powerful super
• 29:05
  structure of speech codes and exclusion and kind of a soft McCarthyism which is itself
• 29:13
  an enactment of the views of the powerful yeah I mean I couldn't agree more and I think that
• 29:18
  some of the most heinous events in human history have been carried out by people who were claiming
• 29:23
  to be doing so on behalf of the little guy and that's something that we've certainly learned
• 29:28
  loud and clear from history but also I mean I think posturing that speech codes and censoring
• 29:34
  and creating a society full of trip buyers is somehow helping disadvantaged groups or the
• 29:40
  little guy just defies basically every statistic that we have about cancel culture and political
• 29:44
  breakfast we know that the majority of Americans know what cancel culture is they're concerned about
• 29:48
  it the 82% of Americans say the political practice has gone too far so we have a tyranny of the
• 29:54
  minority of overeducated overzealous illiberal crybabies effectively cancelling other people and
• 30:03
  setting up all of these traps for other people to fall into on behalf of the minority groups that
• 30:09
  they pretend to be purporting to do this on behalf of but they are actually the tyranny of the
• 30:14
  minority in the end enforcing that on the vast majority of of Americans who do not want to live in
• 30:19
  that sort of world and especially young people who don't want to live in that and that final
• 30:23
  brother I think the statistics on Gen Z and their attitudes of cancel culture is often surprising
• 30:27
  to people because we have overwhelmingly the most negative view of cancel culture of any generation
• 30:32
  alive and that completely defies the otherwise the trend of of boomers having the the lowest view of
• 30:39
  them and millennials as you get younger more and more pro cancel culture but Gen Z completely
• 30:44
  reverses that trend let's talk about what hate speech is if it is a thing at all because Greg
• 30:51
  when you were talking about Israel Palestine and mentioning some of the questionable ideas that
• 30:59
  have come out of some institutions in expressing immediate reflexive knee jerk solidarity not just
• 31:05
  with Palestinians but with the justification for the underlying causes of the trauma that's given
• 31:11
  rise to Hamas as actions if they don't quite go so far as to say that that Hamas as actions were
• 31:16
  correct I also see on the other side a great difficulty in trying to wrestle with what is the
• 31:24
  sustainability of Israel's position what is the culpability of successive right wing Israeli
• 31:30
  governments in settlement building is there anything going on with the you know the the failure to
• 31:36
  find a two-state solution like you start talking that way let alone start talking about whether
• 31:42
  Zionism as an ethnic concept is as a place in the 21st century and instantaneously any nuance gets
• 31:52
  collapsed into your self-hating Jew or your anti-Semite and the same thing happens on the other side
• 31:58
  where it's quite difficult to walk through the minefield you only get two steps before you step
• 32:04
  on a mine that another person is able to then say oh I can dismiss this conversation I don't
• 32:10
  even have to take part in it intellectually because you're saying something that's beyond the
• 32:15
  pile and you are now an X and we don't we don't have to bite X's how do we back out of that
• 32:23
  yeah I mean it's interesting watching the you know sacred cows of universities change and as far as
• 32:32
  the most so I'm the president of the foundation for individual rights and expression we defend
• 32:36
  freedom of speech all across the spectrum we you know defend Palestinian pro-Palestinians when
• 32:42
  they get in trouble and that happens quite a bit and Jewish students when they get in trouble an
• 32:47
  Emperor was real students when they get in trouble which also happens quite a bit definitely you
• 32:52
  know when I talk to some activists they think that the only thing going on with campus censorship
• 32:58
  is actually the censorship of the pro-Palestinian side that tries me completely nuts because I'm
• 33:02
  like no it's actually you know in the grand scheme of things there's actually a relatively
• 33:06
  small percentage but when things when that many taboos around a topic it does make it almost
• 33:17
  you know incredibly difficult to argue through now what should universities be doing to make these
• 33:25
  kind of discussions to teach people to have more productive discussions around serious topics they
• 33:31
  should be teaching people not to engage in logical fallacies which we call on the book the optical
• 33:36
  course they should not be telling them to engage in like a cheap ad hominem dodges which we call
• 33:42
  the minefield for the kinds that both sides you use in the book and they should not be engaged in
• 33:49
  what we already addressed as the perfect rhetorical fortress and they should not be expanding
• 33:54
  their existing beliefs into semi-sacred taboo beliefs you know the basically like to contradict it
• 34:01
  as a taboo and that's what you would expect from a good educational system and we are actually
• 34:07
  supercharging it instead rather than on teaching or teaching people how not to do this I feel like
• 34:12
  a lot of people are learning in some of the most elite schools ways to not actually have to have
• 34:17
  an argument at all because you just spend all the time figuring out ways to argue around it but never
• 34:23
  actually directly about it and there's not going to be any chance for the dialogue that you want
• 34:30
  if we allow all these cheap rhetorical tactics to keep running up the clock frankly
• 34:37
  and it's not just cheap rhetorical tactics Ricky it's also protest I mean I can't imagine
• 34:41
  trying to give a speech about Israel and Gaza at the moment on a campus that attempted to
• 34:50
  encompass the views of both sides without at least one of the sides trying to shout it down
• 34:57
  get just shouting down just being like we're not going to tolerate hate on campus enough is enough
• 35:03
  yeah I mean we have case after case in the book we go through it like inner spurs throughout our
• 35:09
  case studies of just in unbelievable explosions of a liberalism on campuses across the country
• 35:16
  and particularly at the most elite campuses as well and I think that there is a kind of disproportionate
• 35:22
  attention pain to the squeakyest wheels who tend to be very much concentrated at the most elite
• 35:29
  universities at fires rankings this year Harvard was by far the lowest ranking school for free speech
• 35:35
  in the state of free speech and I think that early institutions rightfully garner a lot of the
• 35:39
  headlines and also push kids into the most like prestigious positions in society as well and so we
• 35:47
  spend a lot of the time talking about that but I do think that it does give us a little bit of a
• 35:51
  distorted view of the broader generation of young people who are coming up even though I don't
• 35:56
  think that we really fully understand free speech by a large of why it's an important cultural
• 36:01
  touchstone that we all need to buy into maintaining I do think that there is a hunger for for more
• 36:08
  young people to to want to fight back against cancel culture they just don't really know exactly
• 36:12
  how to because they've not been taught and and really armed with with the free speech culture values
• 36:19
  that could supplant cancel culture but I do think that all the attention that we pay to be most
• 36:24
  obnoxious in the liberal students on the most elite campuses does kind of distort the view of
• 36:29
  of a generation that's coming up and actually craving some sort of restored ambition to a better
• 36:34
  place and what does it mean to be cancelled to you Ricky how are you guys defining it like there's
• 36:41
  a yeah there's a kind of that you know there's a theme you know we've heard about sort of
• 36:45
  consequence culture not cancel culture I work at the the national public broadcaster here in Australia
• 36:52
  the Australian Broadcasting Corporation I'm routinely asked do I think that makes
• 36:56
  curricular pursuits like this podcast and my other interests will get me fired some day
• 37:01
  do which I say it's entirely possible and then I'll go off on YouTube and I'll do this podcast
• 37:06
  more and everything will be fine and when everything is fine people will say see there was no
• 37:12
  cancel culture Josh might have been put out you know pushed out because he liked triggering
• 37:17
  tripwires and talking about things in a in a delicate nuanced way that you know is not considered
• 37:22
  polite in polite in the elite society anymore but he's done fine he's in the independent media
• 37:27
  what cancellation what is cancellation yeah so we define cancel culture as the uptake of the
• 37:33
  attempts to get people fired censored or otherwise punished for their speech that starts in 2014
• 37:39
  and really accelerates into in 2017 and also the culture of fear that surrounds that that uptake
• 37:45
  and I think a few things to what you're saying is I do think that cancel culture is more than just
• 37:53
  the people who my land on their feet like JK Rowling's an example that people love to point out
• 37:58
  and they say well you know she's still a billionaire and she's just fine and she has her Twitter account
• 38:03
  but we we often concentrate on the celebrities that do land on their feet and they do just fine
• 38:08
  and they do garner the headlines and they are the names that we know but not the countless
• 38:13
  nameless mass of people who have been canceled as well and I can say as as a young person who's
• 38:18
  writing about this issue that I am hearing from a parent after parent after parent you tell me
• 38:23
  that they're a high schooler or their middle schooler has been caught up in a cancel culture
• 38:26
  campaign they'll never make a headline will never hear the stories of all the people who got pushed
• 38:31
  out of corporations who signed an NDA and so it's not just the people who follow who land on their
• 38:37
  feet it is it is accountless mass of people who have been made an example of and then on top of
• 38:44
  cancel culture is not just about its direct victims it's about the the larger self-sensoring
• 38:50
  environment that it creates and I mean for myself for example I think my college career was
• 38:56
  definitely undercut by the fact that I arrived on campus with an understanding that if I wanted
• 39:02
  to fit in and and have a social life at a place like NYU a very progressive university is at
• 39:07
  rate landing libertarian that I needed to self-sensor and statistically speaking we see that
• 39:12
  a majority of students say that they self-sensor at least some point in time and so I as
• 39:16
  much as it's embarrassing to admit and they're now loud and proud on my bookshelves I
• 39:20
  hid books under my bed in my freshman dorm and NYU because I was I was afraid of
• 39:26
  the social consequences of being authentic to myself so I think cancel culture is not just about
• 39:31
  the individual tear downs which can be heinous and add hominem and cruel and cheap and mean
• 39:37
  in a way that we call out very seriously in the book but it's also about the way that it
• 39:42
  distorts and makes an example of one person and just has a ripple effect in society at large
• 39:49
  Greg we don't want people to feel suppressed as Ricky did in their work environment or in a
• 39:54
  university on university campuses at the by the same token the state of Victoria in Australia
• 40:00
  which where Melbourne is the the country's largest city has just bound past or law outlawing
• 40:06
  Nazi salutes and Nazi paraphernalia this predates the the Israel Gaza situation this is a moving trend
• 40:14
  in Australian states to outlaw that and the argument would be okay if you have some kind of idea
• 40:21
  that is worth engaging with then maybe we don't want you to be suppressed but if your idea is
• 40:26
  Hile Hitler what's the problem with suppressing it why should we live in a country where that kind
• 40:30
  of hate exists that would making it a legal stops it stops it in public like there have been
• 40:40
  demonstrations where you know a bunch of guys will go up to the town hall steps and do Hile Hitler's
• 40:45
  that will now be yeah so well that's yeah that's funny well for one thing one of the things that
• 40:50
  we've seen you know on campus and actually there was really there was an episode of and Netflix show
• 40:56
  called the chair which is which is about like life at a it's Sandra O stars in it and it's about
• 41:04
  life in a little you know I'm kind of falling down liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere
• 41:10
  and they have a situation where the professor does a Hile to Heidegger talking about
• 41:19
  Heidegger wasn't Nazi and and it's not him saying I love Hitler it's him saying you know screw you
• 41:26
  for getting Nazi and that gets caught on tape and then immediately you know like he's he's
• 41:36
  canceled there's a there's a there's a movement to get him fired and it was funny had seen Michelle
• 41:41
  Goldberg a reporter for the the columnist for the New York Times would quite like actually quite a
• 41:46
  bit calling this out and something that I wrote saying well you know like that's that's just
• 41:52
  fanciful you know no wait sorry as she called it called it out like in in the in the show and being
• 41:59
  like that exact thing happened at at the school like seven months before it was based on a real
• 42:05
  thing that was a fire case where and the message they were trying to convey with the Hile Hitler
• 42:10
  thing was you're being a fascist so I think that there's a very that the the mine that you can
• 42:17
  fix serious societal problems through suppressing things that are uncomfortable or ugly is very very
• 42:26
  short-sighted I think probably nothing did more to stop the American Nazi movement than the fact
• 42:35
  that Nazis were free to um march and skokie Illinois they were defended largely by Jewish attorneys
• 42:43
  from the ACLU um who you know they hated their attorneys and the law isn't like them either
• 42:50
  um but they defended them um and people got to see how freaking ridiculous they were um there's uh
• 42:56
  my my my executive vice president Nico Perino um Aaron Reese and Chris Mulby did a documentary called
• 43:03
  mighty Ira that I'm also the executive producer of which is about the life and times of Ira
• 43:08
  Glasser you know one of the great um civil libertarians of the 20th century he was the executive
• 43:15
  director of the ACLU for 25 years and how ridiculous you know these marchers made themselves look
• 43:23
  is really portrayed only in a way by seeing them yourself um the uh and there's a moment in the
• 43:29
  movie where like the apparently didn't range the the march really well like and things are going
• 43:35
  wrong and I never do and you almost feel like he's gonna shout out it's like you're turning this
• 43:39
  Nazi march into a travesty like there's nothing funnier than actually like seeing these these
• 43:45
  people at work and so they're like the idea that kind of like state powered making the making the
• 43:51
  salute go away is somehow gonna do anything real to address the problem and actually the it's
• 43:56
  worse than that it will generally get people to talk to people you know hate speech laws in general
• 44:01
  to the people who they know won't turn them in who are those people known as people who agree with
• 44:07
  them and who are also also Nazis too and that as then this is there's great social science on this
• 44:12
  you get people who agree to each other talking to each other they start out here and then they
• 44:16
  spiral off into the into the sides and um you know you can break a group of of a dozen people into
• 44:22
  two groups of six from left to right go have them talk to each other and they come out more
• 44:26
  radicalized in the direction that that they came from so I think there is oh I just think there's
• 44:31
  an idea thinking thinking you can you can fix these things just just three censorship and two I
• 44:36
  don't think they understand group polarization and how this can actually make things more dangerous
• 44:42
  and one thing from our from our book that it can give us a super interesting piece of data that
• 44:47
  we've been fortunate to be able to debut is from the national contagion research institute which
• 44:53
  found they did an analysis of mass Twitter bands since 2016 which is when they started purging
• 45:00
  accounts that we definitely had some very unsavory views and connections like white supremacist
• 45:05
  accounts or cowboy accounts in mass and they found consistently that in a month where Twitter
• 45:12
  purged a group of these accounts that gab which tends to be a more radical right wing Twitter
• 45:17
  alternative increased in membership pretty considerably every single time they they looped people
• 45:25
  from Twitter they just went to a place where they would have this confirmation loop feedback bias
• 45:30
  and so we think that that's a pretty serious condemnation of what social media censorship can do
• 45:37
  because it will not get rid of those ideas it puts them in a more obscure and weird
• 45:41
  crevice of the internet where people only hear from people who agree with them and the rest of us
• 45:45
  don't really understand what's going on in that corner of the world and I think an even more
• 45:51
  disturbing version of that in my opinion is what happened when we quarantined the former president
• 45:56
  of the United States from Twitter and allowed him to go into an echo chamber its own echo chamber
• 46:01
  it only talked to his supporters and the rest of us don't really understand what's happening in the
• 46:07
  truth social corner of the internet and and what a serious plurality of American believe in and
• 46:14
  like the viewpoints I mean we just see these Twitter sort of these truth social screenshots that
• 46:18
  might pull it around Twitter here and there but like are we not better off for for knowing what
• 46:24
  the former president of the United States who very well could be the next president of the United
• 46:28
  States is tweeting or thinking or would be rather just allow that to to exist in its own little
• 46:34
  magosphere I think basically all of the the instances of mass social media censorship or
• 46:40
  high profile social media censorship like that have seriously backfired in a way that is
• 46:46
  statistically and I think just philosophically obvious I mean it depends on your measurement of
• 46:52
  success here right there you know they may fail these bands may fail if your metric is does it
• 46:59
  make those people doesn't wipe those people off the face of the earth and stop them from spreading
• 47:03
  their ideas with each other but if the metric of success is are we able to create a social media
• 47:08
  environment in which people who are not that shit crazy are able to talk constructively about
• 47:15
  things without having neo nazis jump into their timeline and start arguing with them then
• 47:21
  there then that is an upside that doesn't mean like just let the credits if you want to if they
• 47:25
  if you're quarantining them and they're going off and doing their crazy thing but you can block
• 47:30
  and on some level who gives a shit yeah I mean you can you can block and you can mute and all of
• 47:35
  these and I think actually a good measurement does how much safer it makes your society overall
• 47:40
  and what I'm saying is that we by having like the something that feels good look on the short
• 47:45
  term can actually have really pernicious long term effects that you actually send these groups
• 47:50
  off to become much more dangerous and much more radicalized and you take them out of the public
• 47:53
  view as well um you know like the and there's also you know a simple promise about conspiracy
• 47:59
  theorists if you're battling a conspiracy theorist who believes that there's a conspiracy to shut them
• 48:03
  up do absolutely nothing like a conspiracy to shut them up a lot of these things don't
• 48:10
  don't handle the light of day very well they don't stand up to evidence and they can end up being
• 48:15
  your your harmless crackpots as opposed to your truly dangerous person who suddenly found their
• 48:19
  island of dangerous misfit toys yeah I mean maybe the thing about maybe there's a different social
• 48:24
  media that rubs me the wrong way which is that you're talking about an environment in which there
• 48:28
  are algorithms that are putting their finger on the scale to select for content that is going to
• 48:34
  aggravate people going to get engagements going to get people to like or comment or share
• 48:38
  therefore there's a bias towards reinforcing things you already believe demonizing ideas that
• 48:44
  you don't believe and the nuanced position is is proactively drowned out by the algorithm uh
• 48:51
  so there I felt like you know it's on some level can we curate this shit like do I have to constantly
• 48:57
  be do I have to constantly be hearing the volume turned up on the craziest stuff I'll just leave
• 49:03
  the the platform but I take your point reggae about the general principle I mean it and also
• 49:08
  Greg about the ridiculousness of extremists when you actually shine a light on them and look at
• 49:14
  what they're doing I mean I was mentioning the neo Nazis at Melbourne Town Hall doing their
• 49:18
  Hitler salutes and when you saw close-up news footage that was very sensational of this melee
• 49:25
  of far-right activists it looked terrifying and then you see a wide shot it's 23 23 dudes
• 49:33
  let's all sit and stand in the middle of nowhere and a bunch of passes by filming them on their
• 49:38
  iPhones yeah fan aliens yeah it's a fun I mean this this was the thing that I I I realized accidentally
• 49:45
  walking because I used to live in DC during the Clinton administration and I didn't realize that
• 49:50
  Bill Clinton went to the church they would go to was on 16th Street so I'd be doing like my Sunday
• 49:55
  walk I remember running walking by all these horrible funny-looking you know dudes like holding
• 50:03
  like things that signs that said things like Jew hordes like things that made no sense at all
• 50:10
  as some Jews are always great and may have had a point and for every one of them there was
• 50:16
  seven or eight protesters you know on the other side so it's kind of like so some of these laws
• 50:22
  they don't actually they exist in a world where there won't actually be the counter protest part
• 50:27
  you know like right that's that's actually that's how it works in the rural that's that's how
• 50:31
  civic society takes place but I did want to add and just so you know we're with Ricky talked a
• 50:36
  little bit about cases that we can't know about in cases that are hard to quantify I did want to
• 50:41
  give the audience a little bit of of a sense of how bad this is in higher education and how much
• 50:46
  trouble we think higher education is in and I usually have to start off by giving the explaining
• 50:52
  to people you know what a bad moment in academic freedom looks like in the modern era and what I
• 50:59
  mean by the modern era was it wasn't until between 1957 and 1973 that the American First Amendment
• 51:06
  came to really strongly protect academic freedom and campus free speech like before that
• 51:11
  people thought that you can fire professors if if they were coming us for example and the law
• 51:17
  wasn't instructed that they couldn't the but after 73 probably one of the biggest like
• 51:26
  paroxysms or what we call mass censorship incident incident was 9-11 and that was when
• 51:33
  that there was and that was right when I started my career all these people getting in trouble for
• 51:38
  in some cases saying and sensitive things about the attack like anyone who can blow up the Pentagon
• 51:42
  has my vote was was my actual first letter defending someone and or in some cases like my friend
• 51:48
  Mike Adams criticizing someone who said America had a coming so there there was an intense case
• 51:55
  and the normal situation for mass censorship is national security something real everyone's
• 51:59
  freaked out and there were then there was a big uptick of these there was about 17 professors
• 52:07
  targeted in the years after 9-11 from 9-11 related speech and also a rockware speech about three
• 52:14
  of them were fired and that's really bad when you look into it a little bit more it actually turns
• 52:19
  out one of them was fired for academic misconduct at work Churchill after having his speech rights
• 52:25
  vindicated personally with something fire fought as well. Samuel Arian was actually exonerated from
• 52:31
  him just saying death is real in a tape recording from 1989 wasn't what got him fired it was
• 52:36
  actual ties to terrorism and three that that was a case where someone devoted a lot of her
• 52:45
  technical writing class to a long argument about the Iraq war and basically made the argument like
• 52:49
  you didn't teach your class you know for a long time so we're not rehiring you so but still three
• 52:56
  you know like that's that that's a bad couple of years now we're looking at for since the
• 53:02
  beginning of cancel culture in 2014 and going through about the last July our data indicates
• 53:07
  over a thousand attempts to get professors punished or fired that's about two-thirds of them have
• 53:12
  been punished in some way almost 200 of them fired and you know to give a sense of it and it's
• 53:20
  not actually a fair comparison this is a law didn't apply back then if you look at McCarthyism
• 53:24
  the study the biggest study that was done during McCarthyism and we're still in cancel cultures
• 53:29
  also when you should count and by the way McCarthyism was 1950 1947 1957 so that's 11 years
• 53:35
  they found about 62 63 commons professors were fired about 90 for their opinion overall and a lot
• 53:43
  of times that's rounded up to about 100 and we think now with lots of decades to look into it there
• 53:48
  might be more closer to 150 so we're talking about numbers that are actually larger than the number
• 53:52
  professors fired under under McCarthyism but it's actually worse than that because because we know
• 53:58
  in a lot of these smaller schools none of none of this gets makes the light of day like there's no
• 54:04
  news coverage of the eight hundred straight rank school in the country for example but the
• 54:11
  but one in six professors say they've been investigated or threatened with investigation
• 54:16
  for their academic freedom free speech etc one in six which is a just crazy number considering
• 54:21
  there's already no viewpoint diversity in some of these departments or very little it's amazing
• 54:26
  they can find this many you know heretics to burn and one third say that they've actually been told
• 54:31
  that they shouldn't pursue controversial uh a controversial research so it it we document that
• 54:38
  this is happening on a scale that we have no comparison to the nothing in the last 50 years comes
• 54:42
  even vaguely close to this um and we do point out by the way that one third of the punishments
• 54:49
  of the professors who are punished those actually come initially from the right um and that means
• 54:54
  you know uh Fox News uh turning point USA like all all of these groups that actually do campaigns to get
• 55:00
  crazy lefty professors fired now of course you know the administrators are actually doing the
• 55:05
  firing oftentimes not themselves right but still um you know and it's interesting to watch if
• 55:10
  suddenly for some people that suddenly makes them care more about the topic and it's like okay well
• 55:15
  that made you care more about the topic than i care less about your opinion about the topic because
• 55:20
  you should take a lot of principle position yeah it's not an experience it's it's not a principle
• 55:25
  position and and i just like what when you uh in the book we talk about all the different sort of
• 55:32
  conformity inducing devices there are short of cancel culture you know in higher education today so
• 55:38
  I think it paints a more desperate picture of what higher education looks like in the United
• 55:45
  States particularly elite higher education than even i initially intended to um i actually got very
• 55:50
  depressed while writing the book um coming to realize all the different mechanisms you can have to
• 55:58
  you know either slightly discourage someone from publishing something what are those
• 56:02
  graying you talked about it you just mentioned uh conformity inducing mechanism that
• 56:07
  full short of cancel culture what's an example uh diversity equity and inclusion statements
• 56:13
  that essentially this is something that uh and then what amazing thing is this happened in 2020
• 56:18
  when we were seeing an unparalleled uptick and professors losing their jobs for their opinions
• 56:22
  and students getting published we've never seen a year as bad as a 2020 and 2021 ever um in
• 56:28
  fire history and it's probably you know the worst year um since the law was established in 1973
• 56:33
  at minimum um and just to unpack that that's because we were at a moment of heightened uh racial
• 56:41
  and social justice reckoning is it it was was it emits the in the wake it was the George Floyd murder
• 56:45
  and what a sense that if you're not on the right side then you're on the wrong side of history
• 56:49
  and and and also everyone had a whole lot more time to be locked up and shooting other people
• 56:54
  down at their cell phones so yes this should be bad news principle too everybody became their
• 56:59
  Twitter avatar you know and yeah that person is much less much less compromising and much more
• 57:05
  you know um righteous uh and yeah that that that was the context and of course I'm a civil
• 57:11
  liberty the civil libertarian like so so when I saw about horrifying murder of George Floyd I was
• 57:16
  like okay well here are the following five or six reforms that we can do we should do right now
• 57:20
  we should get political well together to to actually pass something um that could actually
• 57:25
  prevent this from happening in the future and but unfortunately on campus it it turned into into
• 57:30
  into a situation where people were producing like old columns that people wrote years ago or old
• 57:35
  tweets or old videos that people made when they were 14 in an effort to get people canceled to get
• 57:40
  to get people with their admissions to schools uh you know uh pulled uh pulled but the the diversity
• 57:46
  equity and inclusion um statements you know they're they're they're about uh depending on how
• 57:52
  they're phrased they're they're mandatory at almost every stage in higher education um now the
• 57:59
  the kind of things you have to fill one out before you go to to higher ed and for almost any job
• 58:05
  that you could get all all the way up and when you look at the way these are phrased they're asking
• 58:11
  you for your you know to show your commitment to e.i. principles and it's like okay that's
• 58:16
  something clippness test there is literally no way that you can evaluate this without evaluating
• 58:20
  someone's politics and if someone came in who was more conservative and kind of like actually I
• 58:25
  believe you know all people are equal or actually I I don't buy into a lot of the ideology that's
• 58:31
  baked into d.i. you believe me you're not getting the job but also you don't have to blame for that
• 58:35
  matter uh because we did an experiment um that an eight honey cut fire uh before he came to fire
• 58:40
  did an experiment where he got a huge number of professors together to actually evaluate various
• 58:44
  d.i. statements and he wanted to see if the like most uh doctrinaire sort of um uh why be called
• 58:52
  like a woke like version of uh of the d.i. statement and then he had ones that emphasized viewpoint
• 58:58
  diversity socio economic diversity uh religious diversity and the only one that would get you hired
• 59:04
  routinely was actually the one that was the most doctrinaire um the other ones would not
• 59:09
  even the socio economic one which which killed me because I think that that's actually the
• 59:13
  the diversity that's most lacking in higher education is not a tune and not enough poor kids you
• 59:18
  know frankly so by having that at every stage when they're clearly political at mistests in a time
• 59:23
  where viewpoint diversity is already very low you um you're you're you're you're already you're
• 59:28
  weeding it the pool even further for more conformist uh students and then add to that what
• 59:34
  Ricky brought up the bias related incident programs the fact that you can literally you get a phone
• 59:38
  number sometimes to anonymously report your professors and anonymously report your um fellow
• 59:43
  students for offensive speech it's yeah and so we try to layer them on on on topic we sort of
• 59:49
  to show like how we should be doing the precise opposite we should have non conformity um inducing
• 59:54
  pressures and Ricky those incentives to essentially dobbin a classmate or snitch as you would say in
• 1:00:00
  America uh the it's is it making people worse at arguing for their own positions I mean I've had
• 1:00:07
  a few conversations recently with friends and colleagues where I've been amazed at how bad they
• 1:00:13
  are at start articulating why they believe what they believe they just say they just
• 1:00:19
  parrot what sounds to me like something that they've read somewhere on long ago that they've seen
• 1:00:23
  in a YouTube talk and I try to interrogate it and they go I mean because it's good like I mean
• 1:00:31
  why why would you want to be nasty to people why would you want to be a little people I would
• 1:00:34
  you want to make people feel bad like what's the point that's and I'm like because I like ideas
• 1:00:42
  because I want to find out what's true and sometimes that requires trading on people's
• 1:00:46
  toes are people getting worse yeah I mean certainly I think um John hate calls this
• 1:00:53
  institutional stupidity and I definitely saw that at NYU when you have a group of people that
• 1:00:58
  just all at least vocally agree with one another and have not actually had to defend their view
• 1:01:05
  points against anyone else I mean I think devil's advocacy is something that is just completely
• 1:01:08
  gone to the wayside um I remember when I was in in class one time a kid said I'm gonna play devil's
• 1:01:14
  advocate and he obviously was probably like the the most vocal right leaning person in in the
• 1:01:20
  classroom and he was like hisses and snares at him even though he was posturing that it's not
• 1:01:25
  even his own beautiful get the devil get the devil yeah I mean it's it's it's disturbing to me
• 1:01:31
  because um when I was at NYU I'm I've told this story before but I I've self-centered for two years
• 1:01:38
  and then the pandemic happened and I said screw it I'm gonna write I'm gonna write about the free
• 1:01:42
  speech problem on campus and I wrote for the New York Post um just about feeling like I couldn't
• 1:01:47
  be authentic to myself and how I think that's a problem on campus and I thought I was completely
• 1:01:51
  in totally alone when I hit send on that uh op ed and that I was uh ready to just be completely
• 1:01:57
  piled on and I did get some uh for people who canceled me from from group chats etc but um by and
• 1:02:04
  large the response was actually super super positive even from an extra extra ultra progressive
• 1:02:09
  elite university like NYU where people were reaching out to me in mass um like kids that were in my
• 1:02:15
  classes kids that lived across my hall kids that um like I'd seen and interacted with on a daily
• 1:02:21
  basis uh professors deans who I would never have known actually felt the same way as we and actually
• 1:02:27
  had different viewpoints um and who all reached out to me and said I completely agree with you but
• 1:02:32
  just don't tell anyone that we had this conversation so that's how the institutional stupidity self
• 1:02:36
  perpetuates is that there's there might be people around the table who might want to challenge ideas
• 1:02:40
  but they're all too afraid of doing so and so um those who have the dominant viewpoint
• 1:02:46
  really uh come out the other end having not really seen their views challenged even if there
• 1:02:51
  might be someone at the table who who thinks otherwise I want to talk about uh sensitivity training
• 1:02:57
  and uh the gender difference between uh our attitudes towards cancel culture uh if there are any
• 1:03:03
  and uh and how we should fix all this and what the future looks like but uh to our three listeners
• 1:03:07
  I will bid uh but you all farewell and I hope you've enjoyed this conversation with Greg and
• 1:03:11
  Ricky if you want to subscribe uncomfortable conversations dot sub stack dot com um yet is there
• 1:03:17
  a gender split between our attitudes towards cancel culture Ricky?
• 1:03:22
  to hear the rest of this conversation go to uncomfortable conversations dot sub stack dot com slash
• 1:03:27
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• 1:03:34
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• 1:03:39
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• 1:03:44
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• 1:03:49
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