Greg Lukianoff

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMBG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. I still think that having billions of new eyes and voices into a global conversation, nothing like that's ever happened before, particularly an instantaneous global conversation.

It's unprecedented in human history. Nothing's ever been even close. And no kidding, it's going to be highly, highly disruptive. And that many eyes can tear down any person, any institution, or any institution, or any idea. On today's episode of the Puck, I sit down with Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression known as FIRE, an organization focused on the legal defense of free speech.

We discuss the insightful discoveries from his prescient bestseller, The Coddling of the American Mind, coauthored with Jonathan Haidt, and the rise of cancel culture he documents in his newest book, The Canceling of the American Mind, coauthored with Ricky Schlot. Lukienoff shares his observations and what happens when thought experimentation is eliminated from discussions and the current state of student protests in The US. There's a lot to cover, so let's get to it. Greg Lukianoff, welcome to the Puck. We are excited to have you.

With all the things that are going on in the world, we wanna get into it. But before we do, can you take a moment and tell our listeners both a little about yourself and about the work you do at FIRE? Sure. I'm the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. We're actually celebrating our twenty fifth year this year, and I've been here for twenty three of them.

When I was hired, I was like employee of like five. We were like a half $1,000,000 organization at the time. We're now a $36,000,000 organization, and we're 120 employees. A lot of the additional money goes to things like our giant campus free speech ranking, which is an expensive but very important endeavor that we do to our litigation. We actually became we used to just focus on education, but now we focus on the whole country, when it comes to freedom of speech.

So I think the bad news is business is booming for First Amendment lawyers and for defenders of freedom of speech. So I think FIRE is going to have to be much larger in the years to come because, we are currently being quite overwhelmed with requests for help. Can you tell us a little bit about your early days at Fire and the biggest differences between then and now? Yeah. Yeah.

No. I my my early days at Fire were, to say the least, not dull. I landed to find an apartment. So I graduated from law school in 2000. I hyper specialized in First Amendment.

It's all I wanted to do. I worked at the ACLU of Northern California. I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty. I took every class that Stanford offered on on freedom of speech. This is what I wanted to do.

And Fire actually found me when it was a new startup, and I moved from San Francisco to Philadelphia. And I came to look for an apartment at 09:10AM on nineeleven. Wow. And got stuck in Philly for a week. And all of my first cases were defending people who said things that were offensive or insensitive about nineeleven.

So I got thrown into the fire pretty early, you know, and there were people who were, you know, losing their job for saying things that were deemed insufficiently patriotic, and there are people who were getting threatened for saying things that were considered, you know, to go get those terrorists, you know, type stuff. But it was a good way to learn because, you know, like defending Samuel Erian, for example, someone who was someone who was later convicted of having actual ties to terrorism. But they fired him for offensive speech in the 1980s. But we knew that was gonna be, you know, the wreckage was still smoldering at the time in New York, and we knew defending the sky could be the end of these little organizations that just started because it was such an unpopular take. But that's where we came up with the sort of secret motto of fire that we were like, this is an unpopular case.

We're a small organization, and if this is how we go down, this is how we go down. And, you know, the saying is, I'm willing to drive this bus into a wall rather than be unprincipled. I get it. And I can't go without noticing that you said thrown into the fire and people getting fired. Oh, yeah.

And that triggered into my mind where the name fire came from. And is it just a coincidence that you say thrown into the fire, fire out? How does that relate together? The working at F. I.

R. E. That we're constantly making F. I. R.

E. R. P. Runs, and that was very intentional. You know, when the two founders, Harvey Silverglade, who is kind of like my dad and he's a left leaning civil libertarian, and Alan Charles Kors, who's a a one of the greatest professors of the enlightenment and Voltaire, you know, out there, founded Fire in 1999.

The actually, they decided the name in 1998. But when they started thinking through the acronym, the joke was, you know, fire in a crowded building. Okay. Right. Yeah.

That makes sense. You're not allowed to yell fire in a Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but first amendment lawyers, like, hate when that gets dragged out because people are usually saying something like, well, we all know you can't shout fire in a crowded building. Right.

That's why you shouldn't insult me. You know? It's like Right. Like, these are not the same thing. Right?

Like, it's kinda like the bane of first amendment lawyers' existence. So, of course, you always have to point out it's not falsely shout fire, and it's not even the applicable law anymore. There's a whole a whole thing about it. So we have a lot of fun with the acronym fire. Well, and and I'm a lawyer, by the way, is training, and one of the things I remember is, you know, time, place, and manner, the, mall cases, but also the famous thing about you can't yell fire in a theater Yeah.

Unless there is a fire in the world. So to frame a business conversation, we read the coddling of the American mind back in 2018, as well as the 2015 article in The Atlantic Yep. Which you co wrote with Jonathan Haidt. And, of course, more recently, the canceling of the American mind, cancel culture undermines trust and threatens us all. But there is a solution, which you co wrote with Ricky Schlot.

We are sitting here amidst a wave of protests on college campuses Yeah. Primarily having to do with the war in The Middle East, and we are interested in any through lines between the work you and your team do at FIRE and that you have been doing. So our conversation is gonna cover coddling, but it'll cover canceling, and it'll cover a bit of what's going on now. Mhmm. But that being said, in preparation for the interview today, we reread Coddling of the American Mind.

And to put it bluntly, we found it shockingly imprecian. So please forgive us if some of our conversation begins there. Oh, absolutely. And I'm I'm very proud of Codling and the American Mind, so I'm always happy to talk about it. Well and so if I remember right at the end of Codling, you write, this is a book about education and wisdom.

Mhmm. And if we can educate the next generation more wisely, they will be stronger, richer, more virtuous, and even safer. How do you think we're doing? That was actually one thing that I pained a little bit about when we were finishing the book back in 2018, is I don't think either John and I felt all that optimistic in 2018. We actually thought things were gonna get worse before it got better.

And I was more on the, I think it's gonna get much worse. And I think John probably agreed, but we didn't wanna end on an apocalyptic note. You know, we wanted to be more positive. And as things got worse, I was always kind of like, yeah, I mean, we we kind of knew this this was not gonna end well. So, you know, in 2014, that's when we really started noticing something had changed on campus.

And that's something that's true for both canceling and for coddling. Students started showing up demanding new speech codes, demanding microaggression policies, demanding trigger warnings, demanding disinvitations and deplatforming. And what people don't realize is that prior to 2014, at least for all of the previous part of my career going back to 09/11, students were great on free speech. So, it was a really kind of sudden, jarring change. But the observation that I, like, got in touch with Hyde about was just in dealing with my own depression.

I was studying cognitive behavioral therapy. And, this is a way of treatment that's been very effective for me and so many other people where you learn to talk back to your mental exaggerations, your overgeneralizing, your catastrophizing, your binary thinking, your fortune telling. All of these things that we know rationally are are not accurate ways to look at the world, but we all do particularly when we're anxious and depressed. And it turns out if you can figure out a way to sort of talk back to them, you can make yourself less anxious and depressed, and it's worked great for me. The argument was essentially that not only since the students, were coming in and they were kind of giving medicalized explanations for why, they weren't just saying, you know, this Republican can't speak on my campus because I hate him and they're he's evil.

It was this Republican can't speak on my campus because it will be permanently mentally damaging to anyone who's even on campus when that person is on campus. And I'm like, okay. This is distorted thinking. Like, the like, this is an exaggerated kind of sense of threat. It believes that people are more fragile than they actually are, that words are inherently more harmful than we have any reason to think they actually are.

And I went to John in 2014 and said, I think this is going to be a disaster, not just for academic freedom and free speech on campus, but for mental health as well. And so the article didn't come out until 2015, but things got much worse after 2015. And when we started seeing the data on mental health, and it was already becoming pretty clear by the time the book came out in 2018, it was much worse than we thought for young people. And by the time my book, Canceling of the American Mind, came off, the situation for free speech and academic freedom on campus was just disastrous. Like, I always hesitated to call it a crisis.

But when you look at the data, particularly 2017 and after, like, we cannot find another period in which this many professors, and right and left, by the way, have lost their jobs for their opinion, for their research. And this is all happening when viewpoint diversity is already incredibly low in higher ed. So the thing the trends that we saw in coddling have largely gotten well, almost all gotten worse. And in canceling, the number of professors getting fired was starting to drop off, but then again, you kind of eventually run out of which is to burn in in any of these moments. But deplatforming has gone through the roof, and shout downs this past year was unlike anything we're likely to ever see again, hopefully.

You had said that back then you thought it would likely get worse, but you wanted to end on a more positive note. I mean, any way to explain or theorize why you think it's gonna or it was gonna get worse? Well, I because I think there wasn't a lot of will to fix any of it. You know? It was hard enough to convince people that it even was a problem because there were so many layers of denial, like basically ways to sort of dismiss this is a problem that I've faced all throughout my career.

The most effective one is the simplest, you know, and I call it fascio casting, you know, like and by casting, I mean magically declaring someone to a right winger or a conservative or or whatever, and then that means that you don't have to listen to them. Like, you just go you wave a little magic wand, you go boop, you're a fascist. Even if someone is, you know, like me, a lifelong Democrat and so so is hype, and suddenly but and that goes that additional step, then then you don't have to listen to them anymore because they're bad people and somehow, I guess, bad people don't have good opinions, which is one of the theories in canceling of the American mind. So right off the bat, you have this tactic that allows you to not have to listen to anyone. And in canceling, we could call it the perfect rhetorical fortress on the left and the efficient rhetorical fortress on the right, just ways to win arguments without winning arguments.

So it was hard enough to just convince people anything was wrong in the first place because the people in charge of higher education, the people who run it on the ground, have a really strong vested interest in never admitting that anything is really wrong. I will say, since October 7, I've seen a lot more people being like, okay, something's amiss here. This is not sustainable. So, one possibly good thing that came out of a very bad situation, and Bill Maher actually said this when I was on his show. We just don't get a lot of people saying anymore that there's not a problem on campus because it just seems so obvious.

Yeah. No. That I do think that is you know, it seems to be at least the beginning of a lot of focus on this. And, again, recognizing, hey, Houston, we do have a problem here. So, can you also give our listeners a rundown on the concept of safetyism?

Safetyism. So, that's a that's a term that Pamela Presky, who was our chief researcher when we were working on, she was my research assistant during the Coddling in the American Mind. And she came up with the term. We were trying to figure out a term to express the idea that safety had become sacred. And I had much worse ideas on what a nice term would be for this.

And hers was better. It was just simpler. And the idea of safetyism is that the moment when you place not just physical safety, but psychological safety above kind of all else, that essentially any incremental gain on physical or psychological safety cannot be out balanced no matter how much you say the you know, how great the harm is. And this is this is sacralizing something. This is making something sacred.

It's essentially, like, when you believe something sacred, that means there's, you know, no trade offs. That essentially, you know, like, if you have a devout believer, you know, a million dollars to betray their faith, if it's truly sacred to them, they won't. And safety had kind of taken on this sacred status. And we saw this manifest not just in overprotection of children that led to things like the disastrous decline in free play among kids because people were afraid of really low probability events like kidnapping, stranger kidnapping, which barely ever happens, but it was having all these ramifications on increasingly paranoid parents that we talk about, particularly the kind of, more upper SES parents who send their kids to elite colleges. So, you could see that in the physical world.

Now, we always make the point that some of that safety instinct has led to real improvements in the safety of young people. So, we're not saying it's not completely but that's one of the ways it starts becoming sacred is like, well, helmets helped protect a lot of kids, so let's just go a thousand times further. But the the emotional safety argument is the one that's the most harmful for learning because good, difficult questioning, learning, production of knowledge cannot be emotionally safe. The only way it can be emotionally safe is if you actually eliminate devil's advocacy. You eliminate thought experimentation.

You don't take seriously the possibility you might be wrong. And if you're doing that, you're destroying all of our best tools for the discovery of knowledge and for distinguishing truth from falsity. So, the emotional safety safetyism, psychological safetyism, has been probably the most disastrous. And what's we are going through a moment too where I think a lot of people are also questioning whether any of this was even sincere because, like, the same people who were arguing that what's Roald Dahl and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory engaged in impermissible fat phobia in in in some of the characters, and that was, you know, gonna psychologically harm students, so it had to be polarized. That was, things like that.

We saw cases like this all the time, like, earlier in fire history, where it's just, like, tiny little expressions that people don't really people using slang in some cases and then being told that they might be punished. This was at Yale for using the term trap house because apparently it was originally black slang. And then you have a situation in which students are on campus chanting intifada and from the river to the sea, which I believe that a lot of students don't really understand what that means. And there's actually been some Wall Street Journal did an amazing article showing some of these chanters that that's the river and that's the sea. Like, if you're not that's why people are offended by this.

And so many of the students didn't had no idea. But understandably, like, I find those statements offensive. Protected, to be clear, but offensive. But it got a lot of people thinking, were you ever sincere about this or was this just another tactic for winning arguments without winning arguments? And my general belief is that all things being equal, mixed motivations are always human nature.

That essentially I think there were people who really believed all this stuff, who really believed that little tiny microaggressions, you know, no matter how silly, how trivial, can actually really harm people. But in a highly sort of politically homogeneous environment, since we all agree with the in many cases, on some of these campuses, they feel like everybody agrees with the pro Palestinian solution. This isn't offensiveness. This is righteousness. And that's part of the problem with having a low viewpoint diversity situation is it becomes much easier to think that my people are good, good, smart, decent people, and people who disagree with us are stupid and evil.

As you say this, I'm wondering if almost it's like we've fallen into the trap of the old saying, you know, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I mean, when you talk of safetyism Yeah. And you talk about, for instance, the three kind of false new beliefs, one of which is that which doesn't kill you makes you weaker, it's like our whole society as you're talking, I'm listening to this, it's like we got to a point where pain was bad and we were gonna get rid of it. Right? Yeah.

And so if you start out with physical pain, right, and hurting people and killing people and hitting people as opposed to timeouts, the logical extension of that is psychological pain. But I guess it does beg the question, how do you deal with this notion with CBT and otherwise that pain can actually be your friend? Yeah. Well, that that was something John and I, you know, I'm a constitutional lawyer, and John is a social psychologist, and it's weird how often, even when we haven't talked in a long time, how much we find ourselves, like, agreeing on, on things. Like, we just think kind of similarly.

And one thing that when we did the outline for coddling, we both came to it really wanting to include the idea of antifragility. We just read this book by Nicholas Nassim Taleb that we were really impressed by. And the observation in that is that we have a word for things that are fragile, fragile, and we have a word for things that aren't fragile, resilient, but we don't have a word to describe something that's very common in nature, particularly in living things, which is something that actually requires a certain amount of And basically, every living system in some way is antifragility. And basically every living system in some way is antifragile and human bodies are antifragile. A lot of human systems, not I think knowledge producing, is an antifragile system.

It requires some amount of shocks and challenges. Like, the production of ideas doesn't do very well if nobody's actually sort of poking at the truth or falsity of the ideas. It just becomes dogma. But people actually do require a certain amount of challenge. And what people miss is that if you protect your kids from any kind of like physical or emotional pain, what happens when you're constantly told to be scared of something?

It tends to get really bigger in your head. And if you haven't had the actual experience of overcoming it, you get less and less capable of doing so. So, I get frustrated about explaining this sometimes. I'm like, I know it sounds in a shallow way like you're doing something nice, But, added up, it's kind of like going to a kid and whispering into their ear, you know, just at the moment when they really need to prove themselves, You can't really handle this. You need me.

You need to be protected by it. And if you fail at this, it's over. And it's like, no, no. That's I know that's not what they mean to be saying, but it really is. It's undermining people's sense of self efficacy, their sense of independence, all these things that, yes, it means that you do take on some amount of pain initially.

But here's the thing. If you want to protect people from pain for the long term, get them used to handling it to some degree. I remember reading this book, that someone recommended to me as like a challenge to codling the American mind. And I don't remember the name of the author, but I wasn't It was called The Myth of the Spoiled Child, but I went into it, you know, great, I'll read it. And I remember reading this part about think about that poor student, you know, like who plays sports and then the first time, don't we want to protect them from the experience of, you know, like losing a game?

I'm like, I was a football player in high school. You know what happens after the second time you lose a game? It's not that big of a deal. Like, it basically goes from something that's really horrible to something you can handle pretty quickly if you're allowed to go through it. But if losing becomes the absolute biggest thing in your head, that's a terrible disservice to do to somebody.

You get used to some of these hard knocks pretty quickly if you're allowed to. And you think, again, when we're focusing on this and you talk a lot about this in the Canceling of the American Mind you specifically take aim at campuses, right? Yeah. Why the focus on campuses? Well, because it's also partially where we have the most data, you know, for how bad the situation got for professors and students getting canceled.

It's very hard to find the stories of, like, everyday people who lost their jobs for opinions in any sort of systematic way. You'll find the occasional thing that makes it into a into a news story here and there. But, you know, if you're not a well known person and you say something stupid at work, it's not going to get anywhere necessarily. Professors are better data points for that because generally, at least if you're in the top, say, 300, 400 schools in the country in terms of, like, population, it's going and population prestige kind of a matrix. It will at least get into the student newspaper if a professor is threatened for their job for things that are clearly public speech, with their research, teaching, etcetera.

And so, we started keeping track of this. And, you know, we found between starting in 2014, we found about a thousand examples of professors being threatened, actually, and the data stops in last July because that's all we were able to collect before the book came out. We found over a thousand examples of professors being targeted. We found about two thirds of them were punished in some way. That overwhelmingly came from student petitions that really escalated after 2017 for professors saying or publishing in some cases, research that they found offensive.

And almost 200 of them were fired. And of course, like people who don't know a lot about the field, sometimes they're kinda like, that doesn't sound like that many. I'm like, okay. The law was established in 1970 between 1957 and 1973. The next biggest case incident of professors getting fired was those nineeleven cases, the nineeleven and Iraq war cases.

Guess how many that was? I have no idea. Three. And all three of those, by the way, include Samuel Erian, the guy I mentioned before, who was actually fired for having ties to Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood, one for actually academic misconduct, and another for not actually teaching her class because she went on a very long speech about something unrelated to the topic of her class. Meanwhile, all, like, these 200 cases, you're talking about 40 of them, more of them are tenured professors, something that I thought was impossible to happen before.

And we know that this is a wild undercount because when we did a big survey of professors, about one in six said they'd either been threatened with punishment or actually punished for their speech, research, etc. And, of course, you know, this is the thing that's so frustrating about the partisan world that we live in. There are people who still really want to dismiss this as a problem because they think it's just an attack on the left. And then I point out, you know, about like almost a third of those cases are ones that initially come from the right. I say initially because usually, since administrators like, do tend to lean to the left, the person actually doing the firing is usually on the left, but still, in that case, it's more the cowardly administrator who cowers because a professor says something that pisses off someone at Fox News, and next thing you know, they're losing their jobs.

But I have noticed that, like, if that's the thing that suddenly makes someone take this issue seriously, it's like, okay. I know you got more respect for what I do when I said that, but I lost total respect for you because it's like you should, even if this was one hundred percent one way or the other, if you care about academic freedom of speech at all, you have to care about the people you disagree with. Otherwise, you're just rooting for your side, and that's not free speech. That's just self interest. Well and the other thing that, you know, you point out and I read and that I thought was really, really important is this notion that liberals, for instance, are more comfortable with change and conservatives are slowing it down a little.

And that even though there's always been a majority of quote, more Democratic professors than Republican, that there's something in the development of products and research and debate and philosophy where in an echo chamber where you are having healthy debate with the other and the the ultimate goal is truth, right, that if the highest purpose is truth, if the highest purpose is to bring people together, then through talking to the other, you arrive at a greater state of wisdom. If you're only hearing yourself and there is no one that's bending the tree and and causing it to be flexible, you're just ultimately gonna build a house of cards that's gonna come crashing down. And so if you'd like to talk a little about that, I mean, to me, it's not a left right issue. It's the idea of creating an environment where people that are other can come together in a healthy, safe debate. Yeah.

I mean, this is the phenomena of group polarization, and that's one of the things that started getting me really interested in social science many years ago. And group polarization is something that you've probably even experienced in your own life that, you know, like if you've ever gone to a sort of a conference with people that you're politically similar to, there's a tendency to come back feeling much more radicalized in the direction of the group, being kind of like, my name is necessary. Kind of like, you know, it's like, my people are right. And that's group polarization, that essentially if you go into an environment with low viewpoint diversity in people who are on the same political side of the fence as you are, you tend to become more extreme in the position of the group. And this the replication of this, a lot of things that don't replicate very well in social science, this one replicates easily.

You can basically take, like, a dozen people, figure out where they are politically, put six into the Republican group, six into the Democrat group, and have them discuss a hot button political issue. And you will find that the positions that they held before that meeting were way less extreme than the ones they held after. So having people who disagree with each other is very healthy for the production of ideas. It's one of the reasons why FIRE is very committed. I mean, people, you know, it might go against the stereotypes that we might have, but we're decidedly more left leaning as a staff than to the right.

But our left leaning staff wants people from the right in our organization because we find they keep us intellectually honest because they challenge our biases and this kind of stuff. That's one of the reasons why viewpoint diversity is so important. That's why thought experimentation, devil's advocacy, is so important for the production of ideas because we're all biased and we're all very good at rationalizing what we already believe. So you do need I think the first thing that campuses can do is to create an environment that is safer for that kind of disagreement, thought experimentation, devil's advocacy, but it really does help to have people who actually disagree with each other talking in the first place. Well, and I think that one of the reasons that's true is and and wearing my lawyer hat for a second.

You know, we have objective law Yes. But then we do equity. Yeah. And the idea is we need to know that you go 55 on the freeway, but you can go 65, or you have to go 35 if it's foggy. That having someone to balance out our idealism with practicalities is something that any rational society needs to have because otherwise, we do focus on trying to be perfect, and we blow the whole thing up.

Yeah. Agreed. And, of course, you know, when I hear perfect, because don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. I'm always I always wanna add the sentence. And by the way, there's no such thing as perfect.

Right. Right. Except the pursuit of perfection, the process of seeking truth, like, when you're never gonna get there, but it's it's the process. Yeah. Exactly.

So I I'd like to pause at a question you ask in cuddling. The protests today are near exclusively arising on college campuses Mhmm. And potentially divestment oriented, but also they have varying aims directed at their administrators. Yeah. Why do college students direct so much of their passion and effort towards changing their universities and finding enemies within their own communities?

Yeah. I definitely think that that's a little bit of the sort of, when it comes to enemies in their own community, I tend to think that that's a little bit of this quasi kind of almost religious sort of sense of morality on campuses these days that essentially you know, the pagans, you know, like, to make a religious kind of comparison. You know, like, those people, you don't know what to do about them. But the, you know, the person in your own religious denomination who's a little bit of a heretic or said something, like that's the one you really need to swat down because that's a threat to the belief, a belief of the group. But there's also a very practical reason for that when it comes to the social part of it, is that also the pagans don't care if you hate their guts, but the people in your group, you have some power over them.

So, like you can enforce some order among your own people. And this is why generally, the right can only cancel the right, and the left can only cancel the left. And one of the reasons why a lot of us kinda feel a lot safer being feeling like political nomads because it's kinda like, I don't have any tribe to cancel me at this point. So that explains the social part of it. When it comes to the political fixation on their own universities, I think there's one sense in which it makes a little bit of sense is that higher education is a massive, wealthy, powerful industry.

Columbia is a powerful school. Harvard is a powerful school, genuinely so. So there is a sense that maybe they can really change things in the real world. However, saying that they have to, you know, divest in some cases, like, the the students aren't even really clear on what investments the schools have with Israel in the first place. And in some of the arguments I've seen, they're essentially saying, well, they're invested in index stocks, more or less.

So it's like, well, we're all invested in index stocks. Kind of like the is that really all you want them to do? Is that really gonna change anything? So I do think that some of these protests to actually be effective would probably make a bigger difference if they're focused at the government, if they're focused at, you know, local certainly, if they're focused on local elections or something like that. That could be huge.

But focusing on the campuses themselves, you know, it has proximity as a benefit. It has university presidents often cave to demands of protesters, so maybe there's the idea that it can actually succeed. But it doesn't really do all that much to change in any meaningful way the real world. I mean, there were a lot of protests of, you know, apartheid in South Africa in the eighties, of which, you know, I'm very sympathetic to those those protests. But the things that were going on on the international scene are the things that changed what was going on, you know, in South Africa.

And the people who actually did more Right. To put this who that were not just engaging at their university, but engaging in actual politics, that made a much bigger difference. So, I think in some ways, the focus of university protesters to really fixate on their own universities as the locus of the problem is missing the forest for the trees. What do you think about this current phenomenon about people wearing masks as they protest on these college campuses? Yeah, the mask situation, of course, is a little complicated because the law is a little mixed when it comes to anti masking laws.

Anti masking laws were generally passed to prevent the Ku Klux Klan from protecting their anonymity when they were out protesting, partially because the Ku Klux Klan was also engaged in murder and violent intimidation and all these other things that police wanted the power to be able to identify you and stop you. You know, there was also an idea that they didn't really like the idea that people could sort of hide from the public shaming of revealing themselves as being Klansmen, something that wasn't true in the 1920s. But certainly by the 50s and 60s, people were increasingly embarrassed to admit that they were. So, a lot of jurisdictions have anti masking laws, and they haven't been enforcing them. Now, of course, one of the things that makes it a little complicated too, though, is we've had COVID and there are a lot of people who are still wearing masks claiming that it's really about COVID.

Right. It does seem clear that a lot of these cases that some of the students are are wearing the masks in order to protect their identity, in order to intimidate other students, in order to, you know, get away with things that they sometimes wouldn't be allowed to get away with. I definitely think in those cases, the most important thing to do is to actually go after students who engage in harassment, intimidation, true threats, you know, in some cases, physical assault or the threat of assault. And that's all stuff that I don't just think should get you in trouble, particularly if you're engaging in violence and particularly if you're targeting, say, Jewish students, for example. I think you should be expelled.

I mean, like, that's violence is not an extreme form of speech. There's sometimes people seem to think this. It's the antithesis of what freedom of speech is for. And so, some of these cases where you've seen, you know, students at Columbia linking arms and then marching forward to chase Zionists off of a part of the campus they had every right to be in. No, that's assault.

And the thing is, like, people don't realize that this is assault is that if you put someone in a situation where they know you're gonna be pushing them out of there, that's assault. It's also discriminatory harassment when you're directing it at Jewish students. So, I think a lot of the things we've seen on campus, it's been a pretty exhausting period for FIRE because we've had so many questions. Sure. And when we've been sort of sounding the alarm on how bad things have been for free speech and academic freedom for a long time, and it's been really bad over the last many years, But the last couple months, there's been a lot the answer is oftentimes, okay, that's protected and we're there for the students in this case, like University of Texas at Austin calling in the cops before anybody engaged in anything but protected speech.

That's an easy case for us. That's obviously protected. We're there for the students. But students, you know, who are building permanent settlers or semi permanent encampments or camping on campus for weeks and basically taking over what's supposed to be common space, they can't do that. But worst of all is the shouting down of speakers, the shoving of students, the threatening students in a variety of ways, engaging in discriminatory harassment, which is a high bar as far as we're concerned, but it can be met and we've seen it met in the past month.

There's been an awful lot of stuff that's like, no. You not only can they not do that, you have to prevent the students from doing that. And, of course, like, taking over buildings and smashing windows and, you know, actually getting in pitch battles with police officers or what, that guy who tried to, like, take a custodian hostage. Right. No.

Like, that should also be prosecuted. Absolutely. So going back for a second and trying to understand the changes that have taken place, you touch on the origins of the movement of what we now call cancel culture in the eighties with call out culture. Mhmm. How are those different from our environment today?

Callout culture, the main place we were seeing that when coddling came out was in high schools, really. Like, essentially, like the idea that someone does some perceived sort of transgression, usually something involving speech, and they become the hated pariah of that particular school for a while. I think that that's not necessarily commendable. I think that that's something in in which I think it's rationalizing a certain amount of sort of one up and trip and sort of a a way to bully students in a sort of newfangled way that lets you get away with it. That that a certain level of call out culture, even though it can sometimes be pointing out real bad things, oftentimes it ends up being a very cruel exercise against someone who usually meant no harm.

So, callout culture has a lot of the aspects of, you know, cancel culture and that's one of the reasons why I see call out culture on in k through 12 as sort of what eventually gave birth to cancel culture. And this is one of the reasons why it was so great to write with my coauthor, 23 year old genius, Ricky Schlot, because she's, you know, she's a kid. And she was around. She had she had a, a cell phone in her pockets since she was 10. She always apologized to her mom for revealing that fact, but it's like she did.

And she was on social media. And a lot of the things that she grew up with were these kind of pylons that really, you know, just really struck me as kind of newfangled bullying. And so we give the sort of beginning date of cancel culture as around 2014 because that's when we really started to see both in the data, but also on the ground, a big uptick in people losing of campaigns to get people fired for speech that would be protected under the first amendment as an analogy to that, losing to get people fired really beginning around 2014. When I remember saying this one time when we'd done all of these interviews about the book, and she says, I always kind of find that funny, though, because I grew up with cancel culture. I grew up with all of these sort of campaigns to go after people.

And the reason why we picked 2014 is it's because her generation, Gen Z, started hitting campus in large numbers. And it really started to dawn on me. Oh, my God. The whole country is arguing like a bunch of junior high schoolers because, like, this is an aggressional technology that was more or less perfected among kids. And so, when you look at the dynamics of some of this Nellie Bowles just came out with a book called The Morning After the Revolution that gave some additional examples of just this.

And she's actually one of the things I appreciate about it, she's very honest about being a counselor previously in her career, being at the New York Times, being the person who occasionally delighted in going after someone when there was a mob, a self righteous mob, to ruin someone's career for oftentimes a relatively small infraction. So it's an unfortunate, very real part of human nature that it's understandable that we would be overwhelmed by it when the technology that allows it to be so fast and easily assembled just didn't exist previously. Like, social media is perfect. Like, it is if you wanna create the appearance of a massive mob coming out of nowhere, you need something like social media. But I think it's taken us quite a while to start developing a little bit of an immune system response to this.

And I've been trying to give advice on people, you know, in the corporate world, like, what to do if someone there's suddenly a cancel mob coming for your employees. And I have seen that situation improve somewhat in the past couple of years. So I I think there is some some common sense winning over. But the simplest one is don't do anything right away. Basically, like, if there's a if there's a cancel culture mob that wants you to get you know, fire your IT guy because of something they tweeted, sell them.

It's like, listen. We have a two week cooling off period. We will we will be looking at this, you know, with HR in two weeks. And I can guarantee you in all all but the most serious cases, it's gonna be gone by then because the thing about these mobs is they don't have a great deal of patience, and the energy dissipates surprisingly quickly. So I think a lot of people over the last ten years have lost their jobs for things that appeared in the moment, like, the most serious thing going on in the entire world that would have gone absolutely nowhere if they had just waited.

And that makes sense. I mean, again and that's gonna bring us to CBT in a minute where you can reframe these things. But you also mentioned Ricky, your coauthor. And so that that reminds me, Ricky calls herself a techno optimist Mhmm. At the beginning of the book.

Do you agree? I I talk about being still somewhat of a techno optimist. Not entirely, of course, because that'd be naive. But I still think so part of that that six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty was about the printing press, like, essentially figuring out how did England respond to the negative downside the the negative effects of the printing press, or what they saw as the negative effects, which included the rise in sort of religious heterodoxy in England and then the rise of the Protestant Reformation and then of the Catholic Reformation going back and forward between those two in a bloody confrontation that in Europe resulted in hugely costly, costly wars. So, the point I'm trying to make there is that the printing press was the original disruptive technology.

It brought millions of people into a much faster moving global conversation, and it was utterly transformative for that. And in the short term, it must have felt like a disaster because it meant more witch trials, because the big Malphicarum book that taught you how to identify a witch was one of the best sellers. It led to massive bloodshed in civil wars and in religious wars. And so you could you almost can't blame Henry the Eighth for wanting to put the genie back in the bottle. But in the long term, in the long term, having that many eyes on new problems and having that much dissemination of information and knowledge that fast through so many different people led to the Scientific Revolution.

It led to the enlightenment. It led to all of these things that we now see as being incredibly positive. I still think that having billions of new eyes and voices into a global conversation, which is never nothing like that's ever happened before, particularly an instantaneous global conversation. It's unprecedented in human history. Nothing's ever been even close.

And no kidding, it's going to be highly, highly disruptive. And that many eyes can tear down any person, any institution, or any idea. And that's okay to a degree because some people, like Harvey Weinstein, for example, some institutions and some ideas needed to be torn down. But it can't build anything yet. But I still have some hope that a differently constructed, say, social media platform that tries to take advantage of all these additional voices and eyeballs and minds on problems could actually potentially be a boon for the production of knowledge and for, you know, solving problems.

So I I do still have some techno optimists in me, and I just feel like we're in a stage where the technology has so disrupted society. It's hard to see past it. As you're saying that, it reminds me of things I've read in the past where we see things like gunpowder or a gun or nuclear energy. And is it negative or is it positive? But part of it has to do with you can take a nuclear bomb and you can blow up a city, or you can harness an energy and light a city.

And so I almost look at it as, like, typically, at least, these things are neutral, but we, with our free will, we can learn to use it in a very productive way, like fire. Fire can keep us warm, and it can cook our food, or it can destroy cities. So if I'm hearing what you're saying, there is that optimistic feeling that we will eventually learn how to use this, and light will overcome the darkness that we're currently experiencing. Yeah. And that essentially you know, this many more minds on our problem can potentially fix things.

And being a student of of these big disruptive technologies, the biggest change is generally never going to be top down. It's never gonna be the new regulation that makes the problem go away because that just hasn't really been true. That certainly didn't make the printing press go away, and it certainly didn't make the problems of radio go away. In fact, some of the things that Germany did, for example, to bring the radio under control to prevent the rise of the Nazis were tools the Nazis ended up using and were handed to them on a silver platter because they had centralized the control of the radio networks in by the time Hitler came to power. So a lot of the actual positive change come from bottom up cultural change.

And when you have a technology as disruptive as this, a big part of the solution is people have to get kinda used to it first, and they have to start developing norms around how they use it, why they use it, and what it is and is not good for. And as far as, like, solutions that that are somewhat top down that John Haidt writes about in his latest book, Anxious Generation, I always get more worried about big state solutions. But one that I couldn't agree with more is the idea of, you know, schools should be places where if you have a cell phone, you check it in at the beginning of the day, and you don't get it back till the end of the day. You wouldn't let kids, you know, like, have a fax machine, a TV, or radio at their desk. Like like so why would you let them have all these things when it's just miniaturized?

So I I think there are policy positions that you can take that will that will help it, and I think that something like that, not having that device in school could also help speed up the the cultural change. Because if you have someone who actually has the experience of every day from, you know, 8AM to 3PM, they don't have phones and they actually just the world doesn't end, it might really help them start to really see the upside and downside of this technology. And I agree. I also one of my pet peeves is you go to a restaurant and you watch people sitting at dinner or at your own family table and everybody's on their phone. Oh, yeah.

You know, we we're missing that opportunity for intimacy and real dialogue when we're so constantly distracted by that text or that reminder, so to speak. So I think it's great to remind. And and again, if we start with kids, that's fantastic. But all of us, I think, would do well to remember that we not to be controlled by these devices, but use them as tools. Yeah.

Agreed. So I wanna take a moment and talk about your own relationship with CBT. Mhmm. You obviously write about that in Codling, but would love to talk about its benefits to you personally. Can you tell our listeners why learning about cognitive distortions is so important?

Yeah. I mean, the thing about cognitive distortions is that they are illogical ways of arguing in the sense that they point to common flaws that people engage, common exaggerations, and they're not power of positive thinking. Sometimes people think it's a cognitive intervention, so it must be about, you know, thinking happy thoughts or something like that. It's actually about unleashing the power of rationality. And, you know, if you ever studied philosophy, there's all of this idea that essentially rational thoughts, rational wisdom can actually make you happier.

And the truth is, you know, a lot of people had to ask, okay, how exactly is that true? But it actually turns out if you get in the habit of rationally talking back to your exaggerated thoughts, it actually really can you make you happier. And if you look at the different cognitive distortions, they point to lazy and bad intellectual habits, even if they're not making you unhappy. So, overgeneralizing is a bad intellectual habit. It's the it's where racism comes from.

It's where a lot of human evils come from is our tendency to wanna categorize things in too simple, too overgeneral of a way. And that's the big cognitive distortion. Emotional reasoning, I think, is actually one of the most interesting ones, but it also is something that is very much embedded into wisdom traditions the world over, which is that sense that, like, when you feel scared, that that must mean that something's coming to hurt you or kill you. But there's a great, saying, her name is Susan David. She put it this way, and I felt proud that I could say this in a paragraph, and she got it down to this very simple saying.

Emotions are information, not instructions. Like that pang of jealousy that you feel at a moment or that pang of anger in some circumstances, when you step back from them, sometimes they're actually for me, a lot of times I would get really angry. It's usually because I'm annoyed at myself. Like, I've been able to, like, trace that back. Or sometimes the thing you're actually feeling, like you're misidentifying why you're feeling jealous or even if you're feeling jealous at all.

So, there's always information in your feelings, but without thinking about them more, it's not always what you think it is. And I feel like on campus, we've been teaching people, you know, like, if you feel offended, that's good enough reason to get rid of a speaker, to get someone silenced, to get someone punished, and that's emotional reasoning. Like, it that's not really necessarily what's going on, and it can't just be that anytime someone feels something that we immediately are forced to act, you know, on that. So, I think that if there's a lot of wisdom in the concept of cognitive distortions, I think they are great rules to learn for how to learn how to argue fairly with yourself because that's a key to being happier and less anxious, is to actually not have the I'm fairly neurotic as a person, but I become less neurotic due to due to CBT because I, you know, like, some of these voices don't sound they don't sound that persuasive to me anymore. But it's also a way to argue fairly with each other and argue fairly in general.

Like, are you overgeneralizing? Are you catastrophizing? Are you engaged in binary thinking? Are you discounting all positives? So I think there's a lot of wisdom in the concept of cognitive distortions and has much broader application than just cognitive behavioral therapy.

I love what you're saying, and that makes sense. And I'm thinking about it as it applies to my own life. And one of the things in the last few years I realized was that for me, when I use the word feeling Mhmm. I realize more and more that feelings come from our thoughts. And because as the body keeps the score, we have this frontal lobe and we have kind of the also the autonomic nervous system where our thoughts are running wild that generate these feelings.

And as you say, by taking control of that and witnessing yourself and learning to recognize that our thoughts are coming from different places, you can start to master the hard drive and and start running the software as opposed to it running you. And I I wonder, is that helpful at all to think about our feelings coming from that autonomic nervous system sometimes and learning to try to take control of that? Yeah. I think that's a lot of what you learn when you do, meditation is, you know, watching thoughts and feelings just kind of arise and how they make you feel and learning to not necessarily instantly interact with them. I actually just wrote a review of, Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True for my substack, the eternally radical idea.

And the whole thing is about how to use sort of meditative thinking as a way to interact with social media. Right. And then essentially, if you think of a Twitter or x as sort of like the collective unconscious of the species because it's the first time we've ever really seen billions of people saying just whatever comes to their mind, an instant reaction to, something happening in in in the real world in real time. That's a lot like the way your brain works. You know, it's just all these ideas sort of popping up and feelings popping up in and out of existence.

And when you do a lot of meditation, a part of what you're trying to do, and I point out that a lot of times meditators don't like to say that you're not really trying to do anything, but to a degree you are. You're trying to get in the habit of, like, being able to watch a thought go by and not actually have to interact with it. So, and I think that that is, you know, very similar to what we're talking about, the autonomic nervous system. Makes sense. So, finally, you quote Eric Hoffer.

Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil. Yes. Who is our current devil? I think the devil, like, as we currently see it, you know, I I think that for some people, the devil is oppression, essentially. It's the idea that sort of oppression is everywhere.

It's a all pervading force. It explains practically everything about interaction between human beings. And I certainly agree that oppression is a problem. But if you conceive of it in sort of a cosmic way in which we are all participants in it and particularly with an ideology like intersectionality, in which if you really fall down the rabbit hole, overwhelming majority of us are oppressed in some way, but we're also almost all oppressors. And if you come to something where it's that pervasive and it's an all explanatory part of reality, you're probably oversimplifying something about it, and you're seeing every single interaction through a moral matrix.

And I think that life is more complicated than that. It's not just a story of oppressed versus oppressed. There's a lot more going on in human complexity, in human beauty, in human reason, in human progress. So I would say that that we have identified a devil. That is, of course, to some extent true.

But if we oversimplify humanity, our fellow citizens, through that lens, we can miss a lot of the beauty, grandeur, and hope that should already be out there. Greg, that's a wonderful way to wrap up. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Greg.

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