Ep 13 | Greg Lukianoff | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Who were you

ten years ago?

Well, ten years ago, I was just recently become become the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

That followed about six years of me being the legal director.

And what I was doing there was I was following my lifelong dream of defending freedom of speech.

I went to law school to do First Amendment work.

It's my lifelong passion.

You know, I'm a first-generation American, and I think one of the most amazing things about the U.S.

is freedom of speech.

And I ended up defending it on campus, somewhat to my surprise.

And from pretty much day one, one, I realized back, and day one was 2001 for me,

that things, it was a lot easier to get in trouble on the modern college campus for what you said even back then.

But what led me down the path to the book, frankly, is a very, you know, personal story.

I always had issues with depression.

You know, I just kind of took it for granted.

I'm, you know, Russian-Irish.

You know, it just goes with the territory, I assumed.

But I got into a really bad one in 2007 when I was about two years into my presidency of fire.

And I was hospitalized.

I actually talk about how bad it got.

And what saved me, I'll say it flat out, is cognitive behavioral therapy.

So I'm recovering from this devastatingly, terrifyingly bad depression.

And I'm learning about CBT.

And CBT is this practice by which you learn to talk back to your own exaggerated thoughts that everybody has to a degree, but depressed and anxious people have them in particular.

So you learn this vocabulary, like catastrophizing, you know, like don't catastrophize.

Like if you go on a date and suddenly you say, I'm going to die alone if it doesn't

go well, you're catastrophized.

My wife always makes fun of me because I'm also engaged in a lot of binary thinking.

Not that I think it's good, but I'm always like, either dinner is going to be great or it's going to be terrible.

Like, it's like, and I have to remember this.

Have you ever heard the song I Go to Extremes by Billy Joel?

Yes,

exactly.

We have a lot in common.

We got to talk that down.

Labeling,

particularly interesting for campuses, is a call.

These are all called cognitive distortions.

These are things that people do to distort the world around them.

Labeling, overgeneralizing, all of these kind of things.

And as I'm studying these things that are effectively making me

well, you know, and it takes a while.

It's a daily practice.

It doesn't work if you just know it intellectually.

You have to practice this every day.

But I was doing this at the same time while I was working on college campuses.

And I was looking around going, wow, it's like every administrator is telling to students, by the way, everybody should label, overgeneralize, catastrophize, engage in binary thinking, mind reading, all these things that they tell you not to do because they will make you anxious and depressed.

And I was like, this is funny.

So while I was defending freedom of speech, I'm also like, we're teaching really dysfunctional intellectual habits on campus, whether we know it or not.

But thank goodness, the students

weren't learning it.

At that point, back in 2008, say, 2009, students were, believe it or not, still the best constituency for freedom of speech.

They generally came to the defense of it, better so than usually professors and certainly than administrators.

And so, you know, it's like it was, we were modeling distorted behavior, but the students weren't buying it.

And then seemingly overnight in 2013, 2014,

suddenly the students started demanding people get disinvited from campus at a much faster rate.

They were demanding microaggression policies, trigger warning policies.

They're even being told at places like Oberlin to avoid anything.

They had a list of things that the professors should avoid that included anything that touches on racism, sexism, classism.

It was about 12 months.

What are you talking about?

What can you teach or talk about?

What good book could I write

under those circumstances?

And this really happened very quickly.

And at that point, I was lucky enough to be friends with Jonathan Haidt,

who became my co-author on this.

I talked to him about my CBT idea.

And the reason why it was really connected, it wasn't just me arbitrarily connecting these things.

The students, the thing that really made the students different in 2013, 2014 was that they were justifying why this person can't speak on my campus

by

appealing to sort of a medicalization.

They were saying, not I'm offended, not this person's evil.

I might say that too,

but they were instead saying,

it will medically harm me.

Or actually, not so much me.

It will medically harm someone, some other undescribed person over there.

They will be triggered by it.

It'll be traumatic and you'll be damaged forever.

And I was like, okay, this isn't wrong.

Like, I know enough, because I also became kind of a psychology hobbyist after that.

I knew enough to, I was just kind of imagining the psychologist who, when you come in, you know, to his office and he's kind of, and you tell him he's anxious, like, oh, you must be in danger there.

You must be in a great deal of danger.

And it's like,

totally dysfunctional.

So I tell this to John.

John gets excited about writing an article with me, which is a dream come true for me because I'm already a huge fan of his work.

He wrote a book called The Happiness Hypothesis, which I was a huge fan of.

Also, The Righteous Mind, of course.

And so I was thrilled to write this article with him.

And so we wrote an article called Coddling the American Mind, which came out in the summer of 2015.

And it solved everything.

And that's how we fixed it.

And we were waiting to get our heads chopped off, basically, because we were taking on all these sacred cows in higher education and making the point that these are dysfunctional.

These are teaching people bad habits of free speech, but they're also

teaching the habits of depressed and anxious people.

And then things got so much worse on campus.

The fall of 2015, some absolutely great protests in the fall of 2015, but others of them, they were demanding, demanding, you know, that was the famous Halloween costume

fight over at Yale.

That was the,

we talk about a case in Dean Spellman at Claremont McKenna College, where she clearly tried to write a letter that was very sympathetic to a student, but talked about this idea that people had said that she didn't fit into Claremont McKenna mold.

They interpreted this as if she was some howling racist and got her.

kicked off of campus.

And then things just seemed to get worse.

And for the first time ever, of course, in 2017, we start seeing real large-scale violence in response to speakers on campus.

And

also Weinstein.

Oh, geez, yeah.

That's terrifying.

He figures heavily in the book because his story is just so amazing.

And you always have to remind people, you know,

what was he saying?

He was saying, I actually don't think it's a good idea to divide this campus in terms of race because they literally were telling white professors and white students to get off campus as some kind of social experiment that was supposed to be healthy.

If you know basic group group polarization psychology, no, you're actually just going to make it worse.

Weinstein was entirely right, but he was also an old-fashioned, you know, old-fashioned as of like, you know, maybe

2010.

Way back in 2010.

Yeah, right.

This is what liberals used to think.

About actually wanting people, you know, to meet friends and talk

across personal devices.

So let me ask you two questions.

Sure.

One,

define what liberal means means today.

That's an excellent question.

I've wanted to write an article called The Crisis in Vocabulary, you know, with a big exclamation mark at the end of it.

Who knows?

Yeah, because I don't know what a conservative means.

I don't know what a liberal.

I've always considered myself a classic liberal, but that's always been murky to say because people are like, what is that?

It's somebody who believes in rights.

Right.

But people,

you know, you used to, you lived in San Francisco, you were ACLU,

you were,

if I'm not mistaken, more of of a classic liberal.

Exactly.

So, classic liberals,

that doesn't even seem to play a role in so many people's lives now.

Yeah,

it's very strange because we,

my father, you know, he's a Russian refugee, and he talks about how some of the shifting in the term came from the fact that socialist was a really bad word in the U.S.

So, liberal increasingly came to mean

believes in civil liberties, which I certainly agreed with, but also saw a big role for government, but nobody was willing to say socialist.

So, whereas like in Denmark, you know, they still use liberal to mean someone who believes in lower regulations, but also civil liberties, that the state should play a somewhat limited role, which is more, you know, the tradition I come from.

I do think we were done a little bit of a favor, terminology-wise, that around this time people started calling themselves progressives.

I agree.

Because that gets you back, and I know you're a huge fan of Woodrow Wilson.

Y'all love him.

Love him.

Who helped create the country my father grew up in, which was, which didn't work out all that well yet?

Yeah, no, it didn't.

Yugoslavia.

Not so successful.

No.

He had a lot of really bad ideas.

A lot of really bad ideas.

Okay, so

the next step on that is

you did not get the blowback that you expected.

For the 2015 article.

Yes.

Yeah, the 2015 article.

You know, we're taking on all these sacred cows and we're waiting.

You know, it's like, oh, they're going to come kill us.

And from person after person, person, from comment after comment, we got this was thoughtful.

And probably the most beautiful thing I read was a young woman writing that

her brother had committed suicide by jumping off of a building.

And she wrote about how she was in a class where they showed a movie that included a scene in which someone kills himself by doing that.

And she realized nobody in that room knew.

that that had happened to her.

And being able to be normal and nobody paying attention to her at that that moment was the first time she felt normal since her death of her brother.

And there were many stories like this about our basic point saying, no, you're not making people, you're not doing people who have aversions to things any favors by saying, oh, by the way, now you can avoid them for the rest of your life.

And that's something that I, you know, I have to say over and over again.

If you say, oh, you don't like spiders, okay, we're not going to talk about spiders anymore.

You're actually giving them more power.

And you can turn something that might just be a strong aversion to something into something that's more like a phobia.

And worst of all, you can turn it into something called a schema,

a self-definition, something that you define as part of you.

And one thing that I think is so messed up about one of the things that you see on campus is we're doing what I would call negative schema training.

We're more or less telling people, it's like, you really need to internalize the belief that you're wounded forever.

That's that's perverse.

Yes.

So you didn't get the pushback that you thought.

I see see

social justice

and

postmodernism infecting social justice to where it is just this nonsense that's happening.

And that's a lot of it's coming from the universities.

So

are the university, are the professors beginning to wake up to this?

Did they not see it?

Because it, you know, it was brought over in the 70s as a plan to to infect.

So are they not part of it?

Are they just so blind with their own education that they didn't think this through, that this is going to happen?

What's happening there?

Well, definitely, you know, there are professors who, you know, would consider themselves lifelong liberals who have become some of our best allies on campus, partially because, well, some of them were good on free speech to begin with.

You know, there are people all across the spectrum who can be both bad or good on free speech.

But one thing that we have seen lately is that professors are starting to get that some of these tools are being turned on them.

And in some cases, in really remarkable circumstances.

Like Brett Weinstein trying to say, just speak common sense about how you get people to get along.

Eric or Christakis, you know, sending out something really that the students from the 1960s would have been like, absolutely, you're defending our autonomy and our maturity.

We can pick our own Halloween costumes without

the nanny state of Yale University telling us what to do.

And she got treated as if what she had actually said was, everybody go out and wear blackface, which was absolutely not what she'd actually said.

If I may use an example that I know you and Fire were

strong on, the

Klan, what was it, the Klan rally of Notre Dame?

Oh, Notre Dame versus the Klan.

Again, a Woodrow Wilson poison, but

they rally, and the students decide that they're going to take on the Klan, right?

Yep.

And tell me what the case is about.

The case is insane.

Okay, so this is a case involving a guy who was working his way through school as a janitor.

So, like, not the man,

but who was trying to educate himself on issues, particularly relating to race relations.

And he was reading a book called Notre Dame versus the Klan that was about, I think, a 1926 march on Notre Dame, in which, because people, you know, you have to remind people sometimes that

KKK was pretty broad in the people they hated, so they also hated Catholics.

But in this case, the Catholics came out to

fight them in the streets.

And this is a book celebrating the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan when they tried to march on Notre Dame in the 1920s.

It gleefully celebrates the fact that these students weren't going to take it.

And a student,

a working-class student, literally, who was reading this book, because someone saw the cover, literally judging a book by its cover,

was found guilty of racial harassment because people found some two employees apparently found the title, Notre Dame versus a Klan, and the picture of a cross burning on the front of it to be harassing somehow.

Nobody asked him what the book was about.

Now, to be clear, even if it was, you know, Mein Kampf, even if it was offensive, you still have a right to read it.

But it's extremely ironic that they went after a book that was manifestly anti-Klan.

So we ended up having to take on IUPUI.

This is Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis.

That's a long name.

You know, on two different occasions to win this completely obvious case that you, you know, shouldn't judge a book by its cover.

I'm a self-educated guy.

I could only afford one semester.

I took it when I was 30.

And

I was planning on going longer, but I got a divorce on my first day of college.

Your first day.

Yeah.

And so I was

really struggling prior to just trying to read as much as I could.

And, you know, it's, you know, Immanuel Kant is not the easiest to go through.

And

as I'm going through this,

the best professor is the one who says, who half the class, I swear he believes X, Y, and Z.

Uh-huh.

The second half of the class, I swear he's on the other side.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, that's Alan Charles Corrid.

I'm not saying actually literally, but one of the founders of Fire is this Enlightenment scholar named Alam Charles Kors.

And if you guys take the great courses, he teaches a lot of them on the Enlightenment.

And he teaches, and I know he's not, you know,

he doesn't agree with Blaise Pascal, who's a big defender of the existence of God.

And he teaches for an hour this absolutely riveting best explanation of how brilliant Blaise Pascal was.

And I know it's like,

it never occurred to you that you didn't 100% agree with him.

And the ability to do that is a lost art among some of these professors.

And that's what,

when I was going to college,

I was reading Mein Kampf.

I want to know what's in Mein Kampf.

It bothers me that it's in my library.

You know what I mean?

But

I made myself read it because I felt like, you know, partially to figure out how much they actually felt being censored made them stronger.

And that's a theme that does come up.

But what was surprising was finding how much he was obsessed with syphilis.

You know, that just keeps on coming up.

Like, how much,

and he really wanted that, he really wanted to be allies with Britain.

There was like all of this kind of like weird little, and of course, his sort of like backseat

historic writing being kind of like, well, we really shouldn't have allied with the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It's like, yeah, that's great, genius.

Like,

who didn't know that?

I read because I wanted to know:

did the German people know?

Yeah, of course they did.

Read the book.

Yes, they knew.

They absolutely knew.

Unless you just compartmentalized and went, no, he didn't really mean that, which probably a lot of people did.

But we're losing that ability.

We've taken the word safe.

I feel unsafe.

No, you feel uncomfortable.

Very different thing.

It's very different.

And actually, it's kind of good to be uncomfortable sometimes.

Look at your story.

What got you to this theory?

Yeah.

Being very uncomfortable with your own thoughts.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and

it's one of these things where it sounds hokey, but I recognize that there were just a lot of things that I had these sort of like phobias of, these

limitations that I kind of had

put on myself that I never would have gotten over unless I actually totally broke down.

And so I have to say, I learned so much from it, I can't really say it was a bad thing.

But boy, was it uncomfortable.

You know what?

My favorite quote is: the truth will set you free,

but it's really going to suck first.

You're just going to hate it.

If you're out of line with the truth, you're going to hate it because you have to go,

am I going to change my life?

I think,

I mean, people

perhaps, and I'm hoping that this isn't true,

that people don't think

big thoughts thoughts because

instinctively they know if I find this to be true, then I'm at a crossroads.

I'm going to have to knowingly live a lie

or it's going to cause me all kinds of pain in my friends and my relationships and everything else.

Yep.

Yeah,

it was interesting.

That year that I got really depressed, you know, I got to live the polarization.

I was, you know, I'd I hang out in

Shambhala Buddha circles in Philadelphia.

I'm on the board of a theater company.

I used to write, you know, plays and

short stories.

And I was head over heels for this girl at the time.

But she was really uncomfortable with what I did for a living, defend free speech on college campuses.

Oh, wow.

And I'd gotten used to that by 2007, that people, because they realized oftentimes I was defending evangelicals or Republicans.

And at one point,

speech.

No, exactly.

And I remember at one point, and this is where, you know, I knew that we were doomed, but

you're catastrophizing.

The relationship, you know, didn't make it.

Oh, you mean them?

You two.

I thought you meant everybody else.

Okay.

Yeah, okay.

I said, you know, I'm willing to defend the free speech rights of Nazis.

I'm certainly willing to defend the free speech rights of Republicans.

And she actually said, I think Nazis might be worse.

I think Republicans might be worse.

And I was like, oof.

So, and that was 2007.

And we've gotten much more polarized since then.

So

what are the factors that are playing in?

Why was there the change in 1314?

What happened to...

Why do you say in 2006, the students are still kind of balanced and they're still fighting for free speech, and then all of a sudden, boom.

Why things got so much worse in 2013 2014 is the social science detective story of the whole book yeah because it really did seem to be overnight and john really noticed it my co-author um a bunch of columnists i'm friends with everybody in at fire was like what did something just happen um what just happened on campus because and i always say it's not like it was all that rosy prior to 2013 2014 but those were administrators telling students that they had to follow ridiculous speech codes suddenly the students were completely agreeing with the administrators so the whole book is trying to figure out what what happened.

Now, the most powerful theory out there at the moment that does seem to have some explanatory power is

social media.

This is the first generation that grew up with smartphones with social media in their pockets.

And this is what Jean Twangy calls, who's a researcher

of differences between generations.

calls iGen.

And she noticed that in all of the polling, people born 1995 and after have a lot different characteristics than millennials.

So we always have to explain this is not a book bashing millennials.

I actually think millennials get a little bit of a hard rap.

I think they really do.

But iGen,

when it comes to everything from anxiety to depression, even to the fact that there's a lot fewer moderates among iGen, which is just a total

reflection of the society we live in.

The way you can sort of surprise people is saying, do you know there are more conservatives among people born after 1995?

And there are more liberals.

It's all at the expense of the moderates

have been hollowed out.

So we definitely found enough research to convince us that social media plays a major role.

In what way?

Two important ways.

First, of course, polarization.

We ground a lot of the book in some really well-established research on how easy it is to make even people who look alike really dislike each other and how easy it is to give people a sense of a sense of us versus them.

It's amazing to me.

I hear this all the time.

I've always gotten along with my family.

I could always talk to my family, but I follow my family on Facebook and I can't talk to them anymore.

I mean, these are people you've been around your whole life.

That kind of says maybe you shouldn't be reading Facebook, at least with your family and your friends.

Well, Facebook, both Facebook and Twitter really pat you on the back for having a really thick echo chamber.

Yes.

They make it feel good.

And unfortunately, as John and I talk a lot about, it really plugs into this kind of tribal natural sub-programming that we have where it just feels great to have this group that it becomes sort of a quasi-religious experience.

And so I think for conservatives, it's like when Rush Limbaugh came on, he was the first guy.

Then, you know, in 2008, a lot of conservatives felt like, is this just me?

I mean, we're all socialists now.

This isn't, what happened?

Right.

And so Facebook, it has helped people find tribes and go, okay, it's not me.

Right.

But it's also now convincing them that it's you

against them.

And that's why we call this problems of progress.

We always want to be really clear about this because I'm painfully aware of the fact that my dad was born in 1926 in Yugoslavia.

His dad died when he was six.

My life is freaking cake by comparison.

Everything is easy by comparison.

And we call them problems of progress, partially because there were social scientists who are looking forward to the future and saying, you know, now that we're not as industrialized and people can have greater

freedom of movement, that we can increasingly live in communities that reflect our values.

And that sounds absolutely lovely.

And that's what we've done.

But it does have a dark side.

And that dark side is tribalism.

Wait, wait.

Does it have to, though?

For instance, I have, I love San Francisco.

I love San Francisco.

I am not living in San Francisco.

It's hard to have a good argument in San Francisco, I can say somebody used to live there.

There are parts of Texas.

If you're from San Francisco, I don't recommend you go have an argument, okay?

But

why does that community in Texas have to be ruled by the same rules that are in San Francisco?

Why can't we say, you want to live like that?

Great, live that way.

Why can't we leave each other alone?

Why does the tribal nature have to be a warring nature?

It doesn't necessarily have to be, but we definitely don't value it

because

that's the difficult first step, is you have to value talking to people on the

other side of the aisle, who people come from different places.

So I was a holy terror when I lived in San Francisco, and I was hanging out with all the people.

I would go to Burning Man with them.

But when it came to actual political arguments, I was constantly frustrated when I lived there.

And people would talk about Middle America.

Usually, like the stand-in for Middle America was Kansas.

And with real contempt, not all of them, but there would be some, occasionally someone would just go off, you know, usually white, fairly privileged, you know, dude would talk about how much she hates the people from Middle America.

And I'd just be standing there with like a mouth open, being kind of like, okay, my dad's from Yugoslavia.

Imagine someone saying,

oh, those Croatians, they're all so ignorant and backwards.

Like, wouldn't that set off a little bit?

Because as a first-generation American, when people talk about different regions with that kind of contempt, I'm like, no, no, no, that's not cool.

Don't generalize like that.

But there was nobody pushing back on that.

And I think that's part of the problem of an echo chamber is that it tends to push you all in one direction.

However, actually, this is fun

to remember this.

You know all those experiments that they did

from the 40s on up where they would have a classroom where there'd be people saying, which line is longer?

And

most of the people say the shorter line is longer.

It's a setup.

And to see how people will conform.

And sadly, you know, a lot of people will.

Most people will conform.

They'll say, okay, I guess I was wrong.

The shorter line is actually the longer line.

But it only takes one person to go, oh, just to call, this is nonsense.

That's obviously the longer one to break that spell.

So there is some good news in the research.

History, isn't it always the person who says, I will not conform?

They're usually killed, yes.

But isn't that the person in history that changes everything?

Absolutely.

And this is actually that when I talk about First Amendment, when I talk about freedom of speech,

the premise I begin with is everybody understand free speech is not normal.

Our natural instincts are to burn, crucify, behead, make, drink hemlock.

This might sound familiar to some people.

That's the way

we have a history of treating dissenters.

The idea that you should actually listen to them, that sounds crazy, you know, 500 years ago.

If you know anything in history, it's always been the people who were crazy, right?

That you went, no, they weren't crazy.

One of my favorite stories in American history is George Washington is dying.

He has pneumonia and his lungs are filling up.

He can't breathe.

And his

usual doctor, the one that everybody loves, said,

bleed him.

A young doctor who is also standing in the room, says, okay, I know this sounds crazy,

but I don't think he can breathe.

And I've heard there's this new thing.

If I take a tube and I pop it right here,

give him a trach,

I think we can save him.

The older doctor said, are you out of your mind?

Yeah.

He was killed.

That kid was crazy.

No, he wasn't.

He was ahead of his time.

And

even even if those crazy people say things,

there's usually a germ.

I mean, you know, there are some crazy people who are just

crazy.

Right, but

there might be a germ.

I don't understand why we can't.

I don't want to live in a nation of all artists.

Uh-huh.

We'll never get anything done.

It'll be horrible.

I don't want to live in a nation full of accountants.

Right.

There will be no art.

They need each other.

They really do.

What happened to the idea that we need each other?

I just don't see a lot of people valuing at this point.

I think we've gotten so close to the precipice right now, people are starting to go, wait a second,

this is not the way

I want to live.

So far, the response to the book,

where we

slaughter a lot of sacred cows, and we've been pleased that we haven't yet been fully called heretic.

When I talked to Jonathan about the righteous mind,

I was so excited to talk to him.

I read it and I said, this is such a great book.

I was like,

this is part of the answer.

You know, if we can get people to understand the language that we're missing, this is it.

And he bummed me out so badly.

He said, yeah, it's not going to work.

I said,

this is the answer.

And he said, you have to get so many people to do it and they're just not going to do it.

Do you think that's that's changing?

I hope so.

Because if something can't continue in a particular direction, it won't.

And we can end up in a really ugly place if we keep going in this direction.

And particularly if you look at the

sort of exaggerated polarization we have now, imagine it 10 times worse.

And if some of the characteristics that we're seeing in iGen, you know, with the lack of moderates, with

some of these ideas

where they're essentially um ideas of i individual fragility but that gets and ends up being used almost like kind of like a weapon that essentially since everybody's so fragile you may not believe the following things or even speak the following things and on the other side you've got you know a population of conservatives who've just you know had enough and and hate all of this stuff and are talking and getting angry among their own people and what i've seen in the last couple of years is sort of like the echo chamber you know on on the left on campuses and the echo chamber that's a little bit more on the right are starting to collide.

And we're just seeing the first sort of glimmers of what that looks like, and it and it's not pretty.

I'm very concerned, only because, student of history, everything is a cycle.

To everything, there is a season.

We've had a good economic season through all of this, which is great.

We hit a serious downturn.

Forget even a downturn.

We have Silicon Valley working toward a 100% unemployment rate as a good thing.

When that kicks in,

if we are doing this, how do we pull it back?

What does the average person on either side of the aisle,

how do they, let's say you have a kid who's an iGen, which is what ages?

Born after 95?

That's

born after 95.

I think it ends maybe around 2012.

Okay.

So

if you have a kid who's iGen and they're in college

and you're seeing this madness, how do you reach to them?

It's kind of funny.

Height is much more pessimistic about this.

Yeah, I know.

And it's kind of funny.

Like

we're good friends and we take turns sometimes.

Some days I'm like, it's hopeless.

And he's more like, oh, don't catastrophize.

And sometimes I'm like, come on.

If I could wave a magic wand and have one thing, and actually maybe your listeners can help with this, because I've been talking with the college board and the National Constitution Center, Center,

Jeff Rosen, who's brilliant, and we seem to be thinking the same thing.

If it could be a norm for every high school in the country

where you basically have to do an Oxford-style debate, but with one rule, you have to take the opposite side of what you actually believe,

that helps a lot because it's very easy if you're in an echo chamber, if everybody agrees with you and some people disagree with you more adamantly than others, it's very easy to think people who disagree with you are either stupid or evil.

And that's a very easy perception to come across.

But law school

is pretty good for because you see in yourself, you start seeing in yourself that when court is assigned, you hear what the case is, and your initial impressions of it is like, oh, yeah, totally.

That should totally go towards the plaintiff.

But then you get assigned to the defendant, and within like a couple of days of reading, like, oh, it's totally a defendant.

And you realize how pliable, how convincible you are.

It really helps you understand some of the tribalism and to understand that generally people aren't motivated.

Just a quick digression, but it'll make sense.

One of the most frustrating things about the book has been that people sometimes only respond to the title.

And I've done some radio shows where it's really clear that

the host has only read the title.

Like, oh, so coddling.

And usually, if they're a little bit more left on the spectrum,

they think coddling's

offensive.

But if they're more right, I've gotten a couple people saying,

how good intentions and bad bad ideas.

And it's like, well, what are the good intentions?

I can't believe you're saying that these, you know, these left radicals have good intentions.

And what I just say is kind of like, generally for movements in humankind, people don't stand at the top of the mountain and say, in the name of evil, follow me.

But I will tell you, don't all of those people stand at the pinnacle and say, I know I'm right.

Yes, exactly.

Certainty is the certitude is the problem.

Certitude is the problem.

And it's one of these things where, and I've heard people say that you have to go towards certainties and we're just really tempted towards it and all this kind of stuff.

And I think it's true, but it is really possible if you work at it to have that wonderful sense of like looking at a gigantic library full of books becomes like looking at a night sky full of stars.

You know, it's just wonderful, the things you don't know.

Being certain about something is not bad as long as you say,

but I am open to new information

until I am absolutely positive until some new piece comes that I didn't know about that might change everything.

Well, and I talk about free speech as being a natural consequence of the fact that individually we're not all that clever,

even the smartest of us, we need to consult with the best ideas and occasionally some of the worst ideas in human history.

I will tell you, some of the

you know, I obviously was not for Barack Obama, and I get into people on the right are like, how could you possibly say this?

Barack Obama made me a better man.

He absolutely made me a better man.

I am glad in some ways that Barack Obama was there

because

he threw me up against the wall and challenged what I thought I knew.

I had to,

I learned about anti-colonialism.

I learned about the progressive era.

I learned about the Constitution deeply.

I've learned so much.

Same with Donald Trump.

You know, we can either look at this as a bad experience or a good experience that you learn from.

You know,

learn from it.

Learn from it.

But are we?

Yeah.

I mean, I have a very expansive, you know, view of freedom of speech that comes down very simply to it's important to know what people really think, period.

And

I say this, and people, they're kind of of like, well, because a lot of the way people try to challenge freedom of speech is by saying, well, what if they have terrible ideas?

It's like, do you think you're safer for not knowing those terrible ideas?

Do you think that, and also, I'd want to live, if my kids were, we were living next door to somebody who was a real racist,

I don't want him saying all the politically correct things.

I want him, I want my son going over there and coming dad.

Dad, you know, he was just saying, Great, we know who he is.

Don't go there anymore.

You know what I mean?

I talk about censorship as being

a little blue, but like taking Xanax for syphilis,

where essentially you're just taking something that makes you feel better, but you're just getting sicker by the minute.

And

it takes a little bit of looking at things a little bit more sometimes, like an anthropologist.

Oh, yeah.

So I went on Smir Connors' show, and

I was there to talk about why, to talk about the disinvitation of Steve Bannon from the New Yorker Festival.

And, you know, a lot of celebrities got up in arms that they were going to do an interview with Steve Bannon at the New Yorker Festival of Ideas.

And I was there to see.

Festival of what?

Of ideas.

Okay.

Yeah, ideas.

And I was there, you know, of course, with my First Amendment technical hat on.

I'm like, well, of course, the New Yorker can invite whomever it wants.

But with my marketplace of ideas, sort of like knowing what people really think hat on, I was like, okay.

And then the responses I got on Twitter were the funniest.

People were like, so you're saying you would have honored an interview with someone from ISIS?

And I'm like,

I would love to hear it.

It would be one of the most interesting interviews you can imagine I you know you stare into the face of evil that's great and then the other stream that people were going for was but now he's irrelevant and I'm like he was this arguably the second most powerful person in the White House like two weeks

you're kidding yourself and now and now he's talking to all these groups in Europe so it it is this you know we we talk about this um uh me and Pamela Peretzky she she's uh she was our chief researcher for the book and John we talk about uh moral pollution a lot basically just the idea that once you get super tribal,

it becomes this much more kind of superstitious idea that if I'm in the presence of, if I shake the hands of, if I'm anywhere near, you know, the bad,

the bad man, it's somehow like it's going to rub off on you like some kind of evil pox.

I think one of the most vile voices out there is Louis Farrakhan.

I'm glad I can hear exactly what Louis Farrakhan is saying.

I don't want him silenced.

You know, you could invite him to your mitzvah, and he'd be like, oh my God.

I thought you were a great guy.

I had no idea.

Right.

Are you

concerned?

Let me just take a quick

offshoot here.

How concerned are you about the growth of

Google with its algorithms now being taught

what to recognize hate speech?

Yeah.

I mean, what hate speech is, at first I don't believe in hate speech, but what hate speech is to one person is not hate speech to the the other person.

Are you concerned about the loss?

I mean, the colossal overnight loss of, I would call it a digital ghettoization.

Yeah.

Hate speech has always been kind of the boogeyman that you have to deal with when you're dealing with free speech on campus.

And the first thing you have to explain is there's a whole generation of students who largely believe that hate speech is protected.

Sorry, it's unprotected speech.

They think it's a special category of unprotected speech.

And that's just not true.

It's too vague.

It's too broad.

It wouldn't fit any of the First Amendment analyses.

But then you have institutions like Google, you know, who I've always had a great deal of respect for.

But then you look at cases like what happened to James DeMoore, you know, who wrote something that was,

you know, I think Height wrote about it, saying it was, you know,

wasn't perfectly right on everything, but it was also a

dispassionate argument of what the stats say about gender differences, including preference.

For some reason, like the taboo around saying that men men and women might actually be drawn to different fields.

Is that really the end of the world?

But anyway.

But yeah, the idea of

a handful of institutions having so much power over what we can read and what we

scares me.

And if they start actually policing hate speech, I get worried that the work that I do, where we're, you know, and I always have to be clear, 99 out of 100 cases that we're dealing with are more like the guy getting in trouble for reading a book or for

cracking a joke

that anybody off campus would be like, I don't even understand what was offensive about that, is going to get in trouble.

Meanwhile, though, I do have some sympathy for Google and for Facebook because they're being pushed towards this by some really idiotic laws coming out of the European Union.

You know about this whole right to be forgotten thing, right?

Right.

Right to be forgotten.

Forgotten?

Yeah.

Is this like transgender naming?

No, no, no.

Okay.

This is much, much worse than that.

Right to be forgotten.

One of the European courts

issued a decision talking about

individuals have a right to be forgotten.

And

there was a law passed that tried to

make this controlling law for the entire EU that put it on Google.

If someone came to you and said, that article about me is old and irrelevant, so you have have to remove it or face a huge fine,

yeah,

face a huge fine unless Google for some reason decides to actually put up a fight to keep it.

So it's like it's all downside for Google.

Subsequent decisions say that it can't just be for Google Europe.

It has to be for Google for the entire world.

And it comes from this kind of ridiculous idea that, you know, like if, you know, so what, you know, so what if I murdered someone 20 years ago?

I have a right to be forgotten,

to be forgotten.

And it's just so, it's among numerous dunderheaded laws that I see

coming out of Europe that are actually having spillover effects to the whole rest of the world.

So in some ways, you know, I am worried about the internal politics of Google, but I'm also worried about how

different governments are sort of taking advantage of every opportunity to limit them.

That's the thing I love about our Constitution.

Yeah.

It doesn't, you don't have a right to be forgotten.

Yep.

You know?

18th Amendment is, is it the 18th was prohibition?

No.

Yeah, 18 is still there.

Yep.

The 21st repeals it.

Yep.

But that scar is still there.

So you learn.

You know, perhaps you read it all and you go, hey, we did that once before.

Let me take,

let's go through the three bad ideas.

Oh, sure, sure, yeah.

Okay.

So part of the idea of the book was

to kind of recreate sort of what we did in the original original article.

And basically saying it's as if we are giving a generation of people, of kids, of younger people, the worst possible advice you could ever imagine.

So

we create this situation of going up to this, you know, supposedly wise man,

and he tells us

three pieces of what he thinks are wisdom.

What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.

Always trust your feelings.

And life is a battle between good people and evil people.

And we do this as kind of a joke in the beginning of it, and we have, it's me and John going, that's like, those are like the worst ideas we've ever heard in our entire life.

And so the first one, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Weaker, is obviously a play on Nietzsche.

What does it kill you makes you stronger?

And of course, we recognize it's like, yes, there are things that are short of killing you that can still, you know, leave you in worse shape.

But it stands for a great truth, which is, you know, both, so we tried to make all the great untruths things that were both

bad in terms of modern psychology, what modern psychology would tell you, and bad in terms of resilient ancient wisdom, which is surprisingly coherent on a number of issues.

One of them is that people need challenge.

You're going to see that in practically every culture.

It would be absurd to say people don't need challenge.

But what we see on campuses that we dub safetyism is, and also for parents these days, you know, K through 12,

this idea that kind of like there's no limit to how safe you can be.

And they also expand that into that weird kind of definition of safety that means like emotionally unperturbed.

So

the concept creeps in two different directions, that there's no amount of physical safety that's too much or it comes with no bad side.

And by the way, let's add an emotional safety too.

And of course, you know, what we talk about in the book is Nassim Taleb's idea of anti-fragility.

Human beings aren't,

we're not fragile and we're not merely resilient.

We're actually creatures that need stressors.

We need to be challenged or we atrophy and die or we grow healthy and strong.

You know, probably best represented by astronauts.

If you

send them up into no gravity, their joints start decaying really quickly.

But on the other hand, you know, if you run every day and you lift a little bit of weight, it's amazing how much you can improve.

I think it's interesting.

They're doing studies now on

what they think the effects will be on living on Mars.

And they believe that after, I think it's 20 years of living on Mars, that you actually won't be able to mate with an earthling because you will no longer be technically what we call human.

Wow.

So you actually, you're changing.

And

I think it's interesting that

part of being human is having the pull and the drag on you.

Absolutely.

And so what we see with this obsession of safety is that there wasn't really meaningful pushback saying that, listen, we can take this too far.

It can actually be harmful.

But of course, it can be harmful.

It's just the same way we tell people, you know, you don't overcome phobias by, you know, bubble-wrapping the world from your phobia.

So that's great truth number one.

The second one I actually like because it sounds so darn romantic,

which is...

Follow your feelings, Luke.

Your feelings are always right.

And every, you know, a lot of, well, not every, but, you know, movies and sci-fi and a lot of stuff that I love does a lot of times have a, I have this idea of your feelings are always right.

And in one sense, it is correct to say that your feelings are always telling you something, just it's not always what you think it is.

Susan David

has this great quote where she used to take me paragraphs to say that.

You run into that where you feel like you took a book to explain something and someone gets it down to like a pithy phrase.

She says, feelings are information, not directions.

Why you're angry, why you're jealous,

why you're guilty.

Without interrogating those things, we could be way off base on where they're actually coming from and what they're trying to tell us.

So have you ever read Gavin De Becker, The Gift of Fear?

No.

You should.

He's one of the best protectors in the world.

And his book, Gift of Fear, starts out with...

Everybody always says when there's a serial killer, you know,

you know, I thought something was weird, but I dismissed it.

But my dog, every time he came by, that dog, my dog went crazy.

And he said, the difference,

we both have, dogs and people have a gift, and it's a gift of fear.

Yep.

Dogs don't analyze it and then rationalize it away.

You have to examine it because the dog's not always right.

Right.

You know what I mean?

You just might smell like someone that they don't like.

Correct.

A book I always like to recommend is called The Upside of Your Dark Side,

which talks about how all these quote-unquote negative emotions can actually have,

that we have a built-in system for defending yourself if you're wronged.

All of this stuff is so heretical now.

This is the stuff that was ready to be deleted from Kindle or burned.

Yeah, exactly.

So upside of your dark side, really got to recommend it.

But the emotional reasoning one is really dear to my heart for obvious reasons, because overcoming depression and anxiety is partially talking back to your feelings going kind of like okay I know I'm terrified right now but guess what nothing's actually happening right now

and the amazing thing about CBT and people sometimes really get hung up on the fact that there's a T at the end of that and it's therapy and it's like aren't you recommending the therapeutic state that got us into this and I always have to say if you think about what CBT is actually saying it's saying it's basically applied stoicism.

It's in line with ancient philosophy.

It's in line with Buddhism at the same time trying to to actually, you know, the practice of seeing your thoughts is not necessarily, you are not your thoughts, is like a distillation sometimes of Buddhism.

But unfortunately, on campuses, it's as if we're saying, you know, if you're ever offended, we have to do something about that.

Don't examine if you should be offended.

Don't be examined.

Don't examine if it's rational.

Don't examine any of that stuff.

But being offended is enough.

And that's a really dangerous

behavior to cultivate because you end up leading to a situation where people can really convince themselves that the entire world needs to be silenced.

It's,

you know, you said you, you are not your thoughts.

I believe you are your thoughts.

And we're just teaching,

we're teaching people not to examine their thoughts and just be comfortable living in their fear, aren't we?

Well, the you are not your thoughts idea, and this is one of the fun things about meditation, and I'm terrible at meditating, by the way.

And I occasionally have people saying, that must mean you're a great Buddhist.

I'm like, no, no, I really need it.

I'm not good at it.

But I have, you know, after like a weekend, you kind of reach a point where you can see sort of your thoughts sort of bubbling up, and you don't necessarily have to do anything about them.

Correct.

You can just watch them.

You write, you write in the book, your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

So it's just guarding your thoughts,

examining them.

And, you know, for me,

I got this,

when I did the National Constitution Center, I got in this funny argument with Jeff Rosen that was really, actually kind of awesome.

We were talking about is it okay to

have bad thoughts?

And he talks about how a lot of Buddhism is going towards right thinking.

And meanwhile,

I'm more of the...

You can think whatever you want as long as you don't think they're telling you what you need to do.

But then again, I used to write science fiction.

Okay, so

that's great untruth number two, yeah.

Number three.

Number three, life is a battle between good people and evil people.

And that one is the great untruth of us versus them.

Now, of course, I do occasionally get the question like, are you saying human evil doesn't exist?

And I say, I absolutely believe human evil exists.

And I think the best definition that's come up, that anyone has come up with it, is F.

Scott Peck's definition in a book called People of the Lie, where he basically says that human evil on an individual level is our people who are sociopaths who also get joy from hurting people.

Would you, would you, because I know you write about

you write about him.

Would you put Foucault in that category?

I don't know enough about him.

I know they didn't really practice

what he preached, so to speak, but I don't know much about personality.

I'm just thinking about this.

Anyone, I think postmodernism,

the way he described it when he came here and started using it after the Paris riots,

was with the intent to destroy, to destroy the Enlightenment,

everything that came with the Enlightenment.

That to me, anytime somebody is doing something covertly that is trying to destroy, because I cannot find a

I can't find a good reason for postmodernism and postmodern thought

when the goal is,

no, the Enlightenment, no, science, empirical data, that's all bad.

There is no truth.

I can't find

a good human

reason for that.

What is that building?

It's interesting because I've known people who are self-described

existentialists or even nihilists who are perfectly fine,

who somehow it's just a sort of fun game that they play in their head.

that's different than setting out to

when he arrived,

when he arrived and he brought this into the university system, the story is that they were on the tarmac in Boston, and one looked at the other and said, you know, what we're doing is we're planting a virus in this culture.

Interesting.

That

kind of bad.

Yeah.

And I do think there are dangerous ideas.

But all we're really saying is the relatively old-fashioned notion.

For the most part, people are both a combination of some good motivations, some bad motivations.

Some people have better control over their impulses than others.

And if your first assumption is that if you're on the other side of the political fence for me that you're evil,

you're doing it wrong.

When I left Fox, You know, you can't be hated by half the country and not go,

gosh, am I that?

Yeah.

You know, what part of that am I?

What's true?

What's not on this?

And one of the first things I did was I tried to ban the word evil from my lexicon

because it's,

you know,

that's a pretty intense word.

And

in trying to talk to people, let's say on the right or the left, let me just use the right, talking to people on the right and saying, no, let me

Democrats, they don't want to destroy America people will in their head see well this guy this guy this guy does well that guy that guy that guy is not all Democrats yeah you know and we we are so labeling and once you say oh the Democrats want to destroy America or the conservatives want to destroy this group

That's evil.

Yeah.

Well, and the problem is, of course, it feeds and group dynamics.

That's another thing that I'm Scott Peck talks about is that when you really want to see some of the worst things humankinds have ever done, it's in situations of sort of where people have their war hats on and there's diffuse authority, where essentially nobody's really taking responsibility for any individual, any individual thing.

But part of the problem is that it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy because, you know,

and I like to blow conservatives' minds by saying this part.

You should understand that there are people that I'm friends with in San Francisco

when they go on like anti-Obama rants, I'm like, and they think he's a neocon.

And I'm not kidding.

Like they think he's essentially right of center or like a right wing, like basically like, and it's like, yeah,

I actually know these people.

But unfortunately, the more we get our war hats on and the less actual exposure we have to

people from the other side of the fence, the easier it becomes to make them into cartoons and people that you don't,

that have nothing useful or productive to say.

And I do feel, you know, I almost feel like I have to apologize for this.

The, you know, I was, I thought of myself as being, and compared to a lot of my classmates, I was, you know, open-minded when it came to, you know, heretical ideas on campus.

But, you know, when I was in law school, you know, it's Stanford, it's the Bay Area,

you know, labeling someone as a conservative thinker was a way like, oh, well, you know, I didn't realize, you know, that I shouldn't be reading Edmund Burke or Thomas Sowell or Camille Paglia.

And then, of course, I finally did, and I was like, oh, really?

Like,

this is

ideas you're trying to protect me from?

And then realizing that thoughtful people all over the spectrum were able to talk about what was valuable in Burke and certainly

and Soule.

I mean like absolutely an amazing thinker.

And that's part of what I call like the first protection of what I call the perfect rhetorical fortress, that we're spending all of this

cognitive energy on college campuses to try to figure out ways, reasons for why you don't have to listen to somebody.

And, you know, defense number one is, well, you're conservative, so I don't have to listen to you.

Done.

Done with 50% of the population.

But as you get in deeper,

like a lot of the privilege theory, and of course privilege is a real thing.

They're comparatively privileged people.

There's no question about that.

Americans.

Americans, for example.

Certainly compared to

where my dad grew up, for example.

But when you make it really sort of like draconian, really

about kind of like what race you are and what your background is.

If you follow the sort of the privilege hole all the way down to the bottom, it applies to 100% of the entire population.

But here's the trick.

You don't have to call privilege on someone if you don't feel like it.

So

you now have an intellectual tactic that gives you multiple levels of defense for having to listen to anybody you disagree with.

We've done it.

We've come up with this perfect fortress.

So you never have to have to listen to anyone you agree with disagree with, but still have the option of listening to everybody you do agree with.

And it's so pointless.

So it's one of these things, like, watch the way people argue on Twitter.

And, you know, people on the right do this too.

They're kind of like, why should I listen to some lip tard from

Massachusetts?

But on the left,

the tactics are like, well, first I'm going to call you out for

being a white male heterosexual.

I was like, well, actually, I'm gay.

And it's like, well, and the next one, but you're a conservative.

So I don't have a vision live.

Actually, I'm not.

I have to, you know,

that you can go down and down and down.

It's like, wow, there's like 50 levels of defense you have for ever having to, before before you actually even get to the argument.

And as far as like literal cultural fixes, you know, just it's just another ad hominem.

It's just another way to basically say, I don't need to actually address what you're actually saying because you.

And it's just not productive.

It just leaves us nowhere.

All right.

So let's dismantle all three of these.

Nice.

Give me the cures or the steps that we should all be taking with all three.

Let's start with

the bad idea, number one.

What doesn't kill you, makes you weaker.

Do you want the the deep ones or the easy ones?

Surprise me.

I buy a little of both.

Yeah, you know, it's one of these things where I don't want to get too bleak because I do think that some, because you know, conservatives a lot, when I talk about what I do on campus, which is defend freedom of speech, there's a lot of like, oh, it's lost forever, the academy's gone, kind of like people will never have free speech there again.

And I'm like, but have we even tried, you know, giving lectures about freedom of speech ever?

I think the biggest problem is we are a culture that is teaching everyone you're wounded there's no recovery

the second thing we're teaching people is you should not talk to to others

and

the problem is I think we're running I had a train of thought here but I lost it.

I think the problem is we're

running out of time.

And

if we don't get these things fixed pretty quickly,

it is pretty pessimistic, isn't it?

Yeah.

And that's where, you know, on our bad days, John and I are both like, ugh, you know,

how are we going to fix this?

But for younger kids, you know, I definitely, you know, like I said, I have two kids under three.

Delightfully, some of the things that could be the best are the things that kids enjoy the most.

We have a whole chapter on play.

I love this.

Teaching people about their own anti-fragility.

Let kids play and let them play in a way that's that adults aren't actually running it.

Yeah, amen.

My wife and I were in the car after I read this, and I said,

you know, kids have to ride their bikes and they need to ride, you know, get out of the, we live in a gated community, get out of the.

She said, oh my gosh, there's so.

And I said, no, honey, there's, it's not.

It's not.

I've been reading a lot of Steven Pinker.

It's not.

It's not that bad.

In fact, it's really good.

But there's two problems.

The adult doesn't want, yeah, but if it happens, then I'm a bad parent.

Um, and you, the, and the, and the, the stats

don't matter to people.

Yeah, and that's something we talk about.

And we try to, we try to show compassion for everybody in this book.

Um, we bend over backwards to, to, to, to, to do that.

So I try to figure out like why parents who are living in the safest age possibly in human history, probably in human history, almost certainly in human history, um, are acting like it's the height of the crack crack epidemic in New York City in terms of murder.

We've got to x-ray your candy for Halloween.

Yeah, which is, of course, nonsense.

Nonsense.

But then I remember, you know, of course, it was when I was a kid, you know, I started college in 1992.

And for my entire life, it had been a safe bet that it was going to be more dangerous in terms of murder rate country the next year.

And so a lot of people who are my age or even close to my age who are having kids did grow up in a situation where it seemed like, you know, projecting forward, I used to write like dystopian science fiction about what 2000 would just be everybody, you know,

having to arm themselves with multiple machine guns because it was just that dangerous.

But then amazingly,

everything started getting a lot safer.

And we still don't know entirely why, which is amazing by itself.

But now we live with this major disconnect.

You know, like the affluent parents think that their kids are going to be kidnapped at any step.

And, you know, statistically speaking, they're just, that's just extraordinarily unlikely.

Have you seen the movie Taken?

But then you get such a cool opportunity to get Liam Neeson.

She has amazing skills.

But yeah, but so one problem that it does lead to is finding the other parents who are willing to, so your kids can have someone to play with.

But now I think there's some energy to do this.

So like in my neighborhood, I'm going to be talking to other parents about let's have a free-range kids group where the park that's right next to us, you know, like our kids are, you know, our kids are able to get together and they have permission to go play.

You know, They have cell phones, for goodness sakes now.

If they actually get in trouble, they can call.

So play is a big part of it.

Probably one of the simplest ones is petition your local public school to have the playground open for the hour before and for two hours after school.

Your kids are going to want to hang out and play with their friends if they're allowed to.

So play is a big part of it.

We also have come around to gap years.

taking a gap year between high school and

college and you know if once again if I could

wave my magic wand, it would be, you know, if you live in New York City, you go work in Arizona,

you know, in a real job, or you go to some, basically you go away somewhere.

And

the way that could happen actually relatively easily is if colleges showed that they really valued it, that you would get extra attention if you had some real life experience before going to school.

And by the way, the research there is really strong.

When I went to law school, it was shocking how, well, not really shocking if you think about it, but really dramatic the difference between the students who had just come right out of college and the people who had jobs beforehand.

And overwhelmingly, the people who had jobs or had other lives before they went to law school got better grades, they had better attendance.

I went at 30, and I could not believe the people, the other kids in class, I'm with underclassmen.

They didn't care.

And this is amazing.

Yeah, it was almost one-on-one with me and the professor because they didn't care.

They just wanted to get through.

I wanted the information.

Yeah.

So gap year is definitely part of it.

When it comes to colleges,

the biggest enemy in this is the idea that there's nothing that can be done.

There's so much people that can be done because, you know,

a lot of your listeners, you know, like

they, people will send, you know, their little check to their alma mater or to where they want their daughter to go or their son.

and never ask them, do you have a speech code?

Do you teach anything about freedom of speech in the orientation?

Practically no schools do.

And it's a sophisticated concept.

It's something that really has to, you really have to understand it.

And like I said, through debate, through formal debate, you can actually practice it.

And that's how it really becomes a life skill.

You should get rid of your speech codes.

You should have classes on this stuff.

I'm always thinking about high-rigor, low-cost ways to signal to employers that I'm dealing with with an autodidact, with someone who actually really likes to study for, I don't know, something goofy like the love of ideas.

There's a lot of things we can do.

And we have the website, thecoddling.com, and we want more suggestions, too, because

we can't give up given we've tried so little so far.

Michael Reckenweld, you know what Michael Reckenwald is?

I know the name.

Anti-NYU professor.

Uh-huh.

Got in trouble.

Oh, yeah.

I just talked to him a few weeks ago, and he said, I wouldn't send my kids to school.

I wouldn't send, I would, I just, I wouldn't, I know, um, you know, Mike Rowe, who believes in, you know, college is not for everybody.

Yeah.

Where do you stand on college, especially with an outlook of the future?

Yeah.

Google and Apple and everybody saying, we're not even taking, I don't care about your diploma anymore.

Show me what you've done.

Well,

I have a lot of thoughts thoughts on that.

I think about it all the time.

There's this interesting idea that Jane McGonagall has on EdgeBlocks, where a set of...

Edge of EduBlocks, it's basically like a blockchain little thing that you can get on your ledger, basically on something you carry with you that's your account more or less.

Wow.

That tells you that if you want it to, you can tell somebody like every little class you took on something.

And as soon as I heard this idea, I realized for FHIR, for where I work, because the great thing about FHIR is we are actually people all over the spectrum who believe in freedom of speech.

We practice what we preach.

The fact that my, you know, I'm more of an old-fashioned ACLU liberal, my executive director is a Christian Republican, and I love that.

Like, we have arguments for and different religious backgrounds, you know, like

it's just absolutely phenomenal.

But when we're interviewing people, the one way in which we're trying to figure out if you're one of us, we want to know if you're a free speech nerd.

We want to know if you read, you know, philosophy on your spare time, or you read about Louis Brandeis or, you know,

or about Eliot's Edition Act.

And if rather than knowing that you went to fancy school A, I could see, oh, actually, on your own time,

you did 10 great courses on law and 50 books about Supreme Court justices, then I realized you're really one of us.

And that could be a really low-cost way of signaling.

Now, to be realistic, the Princetons and the Stanfords and the Harvards and the Yales aren't going anywhere.

They're international brands,

but it's still kind of criminal that they're able to charge $70,000 a year.

And I think people should really be revolting about that.

I think the amount of debt we put a generation into

and it's holding back innovation, I'm sure.

And it's just a crummy thing to do.

And then, of course, for the kids who can afford all that, that gives them a huge leg up.

It feeds into all sorts of ills.

So I think that some of the mid-tier colleges have to really rethink their entire model.

Low-cost, high-rigor, things that people can do.

I was even thinking about a system where you kind of trick people into,

if someone wants to take like the online class so they can knock out some credits before they go to college, at the end of it, it's like, by the way, you got a super high pass.

Do you want to go on to the next level?

And the final level of which would be a free in-face one year of college, but it will be like

a super international competition.

We really got to rethink some of these things and make sure that they achieve, but they have to achieve a couple things.

They have to say that someone is hardworking,

smart, but also shows that they can work as a team, that they can,

but we can do that at a much less expensive way.

Because right now, what we're doing is we're looking at people from these fancy schools.

And really, the only hurdle for like a Harvard is, well, you got some high IQ people who are hard workers, and so just don't ruin them.

As long as they're not that much worse off when they came out, they're still probably going to be relatively good hires.

And that's incredibly inefficient.

Meanwhile, for us, you know, like one thing that has really been amazing is we've gotten a lot of great students from Indiana University, for example, but all of them were ones who had, by the time they were 20, had written great pieces on freedom of speech.

And it's like, that is a much better signal to me of what kind of person you are.

So we've really got to be more creative in the way we think.

All right, take me to feelings.

Tell me what we should be doing on feelings.

Well, in some ways, we should be taking them both more seriously and less.

And by more seriously, I mean we want to be really clear here.

There is a mental health crisis going on right now on campus.

Is it connected?

We think it is.

We think that essentially, you know, and

not to be too dismissive of it, but I think that we're teaching the generation the habits of anxious and depressed people.

So we shouldn't be shocked they're anxious and depressed.

So we've got to rethink the way we parent and all sorts of stuff.

But for the kids who are already there, the kids, and then here's the worst thing we discovered.

The single worst thing we discovered was that suicide's going up for the first time in decades and dramatically.

If you take the average overall,

suicide for boys since the first decade of this millennia has gone up by 25%, which is an absolute disaster.

For girls, it's gone up 70%,

which is awful,

which is an absolute calamity.

And if you count from two, and if you actually take the lowest point of the year, 2007,

so if you go back almost exactly 10 years, it's doubled since 2007.

So, there is a real serious mental health problem going on here, but partially because I think we're disempowering students, we're teaching them all these dysfunctional habits.

But once they're already there,

this idea that, you know, I'll just give them a trigger warning.

No, that means you're actually not

taking it seriously enough.

We have to make sure that there are apps that can get you in touch with serious psychologists that

they need to know about the existence of resources.

But, you know, my preferred

form of intervention for anxiety and depression is CBT.

And like I said, people

can get over the therapy part of it.

Because if you look at what it teaches you, the amazing thing is it teaches you how to argue fairly with yourself.

And turns out that arguing fairly, not everything's swell, not rose-color glasses, but just being reasonable can make you less depressed and anxious.

But the wonderful implication of this too, though, is as soon as you direct it outward as well and be like, before I open my mouth, am I overgeneralizing?

Am I labeling?

Am I catastrophizing?

Am I binary thinking?

If people could learn that both through the inside, we'd have a better mental health situation.

If we could have learned to do it that outwardly facing, we'd have a much better political situation.

I want to be really careful here because

you know this, and I want to make sure people know that you know this.

I've had suicide in my family, and I've been clinically depressed too.

This therapy is not there.

There is a stage where medicine is critical.

You're absolutely right.

And that's absolutely worth saying.

And we do say it in the book.

We made a point of saying that.

And I have,

it gets me a little choked up, I got to say,

I had another friend kill himself at one point.

And I was walking down the street with one of my best friends, one of my groomsmen.

And he talked about how selfish it was for that friend to kill himself.

And even though this is one of my best friends in the world, he didn't know I was hospitalized as a danger to myself.

And I had to, you know, I said, like, listen, I wasn't in my right mind.

You can't blame people in other circumstances.

And there is a point where what I needed was supervision.

I needed my family.

I needed

medication.

And you have to make sure that those resources are available because after a certain point,

it becomes

logical.

Yeah.

It becomes

logical.

I talk about this in the book.

And the mess, funny, I mean, funny, dark funny is that, you know,

someone was,

someone criticized an early draft saying, doesn't Greg know something about depression?

You know, like, this is all so cold the way you're talking about it.

I'm like, okay, I'll write what actually happened to me.

And I convinced myself, which is sometimes

a habit that I have from fiction writing, this is just between me and you, computer.

And I realized I put down things that were.

Things I'd never told literally anybody.

My wife had never heard them.

I'd never actually said them out loud.

It's so funny.

You've done that with the microphone.

You've done it with the computer.

I've done it with a microphone.

This is just between us, right?

Yeah, it's so crazy.

And the messed up thing was I did have little flickers of sanity during when I was really trying to.

But the yelling back in my brain was, no, you have to do this now before you feel better because this is the true thing.

Like basically, if you continue to live, you're living a lie because what you actually need to do is end your.

And it's just like.

And you convince people, people say it's selfish.

No, no, no.

Oh, no.

Not at that point.

You think you are doing everyone else a great service.

I actually was so messed up at one point, I thought I could actually ask my sister for help.

And I hope she doesn't hear that because that would probably make her cry.

But I,

and just, and I mean, my sister who loves me very much.

And of course, that's completely insane to think.

But you are insane.

But you are temporarily.

So, yeah.

So I'm glad you brought it up because we talk about suicide prevention when you reach a certain point.

And be on the lookout for your friends when they get like that.

But, oh, which brings me, though, to a messed up case here.

Yes.

Because not all of this stuff is all that ideological.

Some of the stuff we see on campuses are

lawyers trying to protect the bottom line of their universities.

This is one of the scariest things I've ever read.

University of Northern Michigan had a policy that if you went to the counseling center, you would get a scary letter from the dean of students,

from the disciplinary dean, saying

you'll be brought up on charges if you talk to anybody about your thoughts of self-harm.

Besides us.

Yeah, besides us.

And we first found out about this from someone who went in.

She was been sexually assaulted.

She was just going there to talk about that.

She didn't say anything about self-harm, but nonetheless, she gets this scary letter.

And

with my personal experience with it and everybody else who knows anything about it, I'm like, are you telling me that you told people who were in some cases kind of depressed that one, they should isolate themselves and two,

that they're a burden on their friends?

And there were some quotes that sounded exactly like that.

And that comes from one of the motivations that can also be somewhat more easily fixed.

Universities,

they react, they overreact to the threats of lawsuits.

So in this case, they had this misconception that if they did that, that would protect them from lawsuits for suicide.

It's bad science, it's bad law.

It was amazing and so cruel that they thought that.

But they also, also federal regulation, making sure that that's clear and makes sense.

Because some of the motivating factors in this stuff isn't ideological at all.

It's university administrators thinking that they're somehow protecting the institution and they don't really care who they hurt.

Let's try the last one.

Sure.

What do we do, good and evil?

We're open to ideas there.

We definitely, you know, John definitely thinks that we have to have more viewpoint diversity on campus.

You have to know someone smart who totally disagrees with the reigning orthodoxy.

I have to tell you

never, no university, even

maybe a couple, no universities would allow me to teach media.

Now,

why?

Yeah.

You know, if you have a wealth of experience, I'm not saying that I should, but if you're a conservative, there's no way you get on campus.

Yeah.

So how is that going to happen?

Yeah, and it has to be if the people value it, and right now they don't.

You know, if you start actually taking viewpoint diversity seriously, like Heights really been trying to get them to, and he is, he does have, there are 2,000 members of Heterodox Academy, which is not bad for a new organization.

And as soon as you get that, if it's just an echo chamber, you produce dumber and dumber

ideas if you have nobody to say, that actually sounds pretty goofy.

Can I ask you a question?

How is it that

the people who have

tenure

to protect ideas,

the people

that are

know Galileo,

how is it they haven't realized that they've become the church?

This is as far as something that has just been a huge disappointment to me, because in theory, tenure makes perfect sense to me.

But other than some really notable exceptions, great people like Alan Charles Corrus, who I mentioned before, some, you know, Robbie George,

there are a lot of professors who just, for that matter, Cornell West, his friend, who don't stand up, who they have the best protected jobs in the universe, pretty much.

And nonetheless they don't stand up for the rights of students or for their fellow faculty members when they get in trouble and it's just like how much more protection do you actually want so unfortunately i would you know i i these tenured professors could actually be a force for good in some of these situations but they're just not that's too bad and

sometimes because i love robbie george and cornell westie i love that

and those guys are those those guys are a force right and and and peter singer i love the way that you have that's the way it should be yeah i want to hear Peter Singer and Robbie George talk about the ethics of life.

Yeah.

That's what I want.

And those are absolutely amazing talks.

I think Heather McDonald, I actually realized that we totally agreed on one thing, which was

everybody should listen to great courses.

And maybe a good way to get a good, cheap education would be have someone listen to all the lectures, read some of the books, and take a test at the end might actually serve you a little better than learning a lot about

some of the courses I took.

Thank you.

Such a pleasure.

Thank you.

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