The Coddling of the American Mind | Greg Lukainoff on Conversations with Tom

hope you enjoy this episode brought to you by our sponsors at peak tea go to peaktee.com impact and you'll get five percent off your first order enjoy the episode [Music] everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here with greg lukianov greg welcome to the show man great let's do it thanks for having me dude i'm really excited about this so i had first encountered you through um you co-authoring coddling of the american mind which was an extraordinary book for me as somebody with a lot of employees that were much younger than me it really helped me begin to recontextualize sort of how they'd come up we will definitely talk about that but the part that i didn't see coming when i first started researching you was all the first amendment work and the documentary uh mighty ira which i had probably heard his name before but didn't really know about him in his time at the aclu and um you know all the stuff that shook down in like skokie illinois and the nazis marching there it's like really crazy how at the absolute center of the first amendment free speech you really are um and i'm really curious one how do you describe yourself and then two i'll want to know how you ended up as a first amendment attorney oh wow that's a that's a long story um hmm well i describe myself still as a political liberal um but i think that i'm a little bit of a retro in the sense of i'm like probably a liberal circle uh circa 1983. you know it is sometimes the way i think of it um but the way i came to free speech um you know i'm a very proud first generation american my um my grandfather fought in the bolshevik revolution we were um uh we could have been labeled cool locks because we were peasants who made good um my great great grandfather meaning you were successful so having having read the um gulag archipelago like yeah what ends up happening to the kulaks is pretty terrifying yeah um and it's kind of funny because in any other country they were um that that's just that's a success story peasants who were slaves until late 1861 to start doing well and we did really well we became professors and lawyers and you know like my grandfather was actually studying at kiev polytechnic right at the outbreak of world war one um and that was you know he's going to be a engineer what was the idea um but do you have any sense what made that first generation of your family successful no it's really interesting my grandfather died when my father was six and it cut off a lot of that history um the uh yeah it's russian so there's constant tragedy tragedy um i don't really know um i don't really know how we moved up so quickly um why did the kulaks get turned against like what was it that made them a target for actual murder well first of all it's really important to understand that kulak isn't really a thing um it it means basically fist in russian and it's made up like it's basically like it's treating a group of people who are very dissimilar as if they are a group of people so you can hate them um what was the thing they used as the similarity to identify them or categorize them uh peasant farmers who own their own land um they were only peasant farmers that were successful or was it any peasant farmer pretty much if you owned your own land you were successful um and uh yeah and and so we didn't fit all that well within the theory essentially if if the entire system is so rigged that you need um a revolution there is this inconvenient fact that there is at least not a sufficient number of the population to be sure and i understand the complaint about that but there was this large you know burgeoning middle class that didn't fit very well within the theory and then what is the revolution for people that don't understand russian history very well what was the revolution that was being called for and why didn't that fit the narrative oh man okay so that's that's a long story partially because um it's all colored by the uh catastrophic disaster that was world war one in in russia um you know you know the there was uh revolts against the tsar in 1905 he set up a parliament now what's amazing is the tsar was tr zard and um alexander ii was trying to set up a um a douma in 1863 1862 and he was um and this is after he he freed the serfs and he was killed on the way by by a revolutionary on the way to like trying to create trying to decrease his own power because the revolutionaries thought that that would um be to placate the masses too much and they'd never get their glorious revolution um that they want what what they've usually kind of a marxist idea of what the what the future would look like so a lot of my family history is like working people trying to actually do do a little bit better in the world but being frustrated by people who who want a uh uh an all-answering oftentimes authoritarian utopian solution um so oh sorry i was just going to say part of the reason that i wanted you to walk through that is the reason i'm so intrigued by what you do and who you are is because i feel like we are we're hearing some of those similar songs being sung now about um you know people being called out for being successful that following you know logic and things is belongs to a certain oppressive group and to leverage those tools is problematic in and of itself and so they want to tear that down and if i remember right and please jump in i am not an expert on this but if my understanding of what happened with the kulaks and you know ultimately the the famines that were born out of basically going hey these are the people that ended up owning the land were the successful farmers they knew when best how best to farm and when you you actually kill them which they did you go in and kill them now all the people that know how to farm are dead and so now farming doesn't happen and people starve to death and it's one of those recognizing and this is like i was saying before we started ruling never did i think i would talk about subjects like this until i actually started to get worried that this was spiraling out of control and that people have these really amazing intentions that history has shown us end in incredibly dark places yeah and something that that's interesting my my father was a radical for being a moderate um when he when he lived in yugoslavia he got kicked out of his um so so my grandfather fought in the revolution we lost um like a lot of whites they got evacuated um through actually through through constantinople which was which is an interesting story of itself um and the poor a lot of the poorer ones went to zagreb um in a place that wasn't exactly yugoslavia yet um which is interesting too um but the the real tragedy in my dad's life is that his father then died when he was six and he was given away as basically like an orphan um in yugoslavia in the 30s which is just an absolute uh an absolute horror show and it's funny despite all this stuff you would think it would make him radical but he was stuck between the nazis and the communists um and he thought both were wrong he actually got kicked out of his um high school because he was anti-nazi and this was after the nazis had occupied yugoslavia um and it's amazing for americans to think what how would you feel if on one side you had the absolute can i say batshit crazy idea of anything you want national socialism and then you've got the the super murderer of stalin on the other side and the fact that he was able to sort of duck and roll with it is something that you know i'm proud of so so anyway that's a long way of saying my family has a has a history of opposing authoritarianism and and i think it's a little bit a part of our personalities too uh my mother's british um uh and she you know she's actually ethnically irish um grew up in britain was kind of self-conscious about being the irish girl so in some ways became more british than the british and i didn't fully understand that when i was a kid so and we grew up in the uh in danbury connecticut which is like in the burbs of new york city um and i gotta tell you like the actual neighborhood i grew up in was amazing because like people have stereotypes about connecticut my best friends were from peru they were from korea they were from vietnam uh the guy got no the guy used to beat me up a lot from puerto rico like we we had people it was really like an amazingly sort of multicultural experience and meanwhile within my own house we had really dramatically different norms about what you should and shouldn't say so my mom had this exaggerated sense of politeness and my father has this idea of politeness is a form of deception you know which is true ultimately but so there's a russian like like for in some cases uh sort of brutally brutal honesty you know and these two things were intention um so i talk about my second earliest memory my first earliest memory is my fourth birthday i got an aquaman toy and a jaws um a jaws doll because it was like 70 seconds and it was christmas when i was four and i got a drum from my auntie rona i'd later find out that um uh rona was just making a joke about you know giving your your best friend kid a drum was just the meanest thing you could do to her but it was a joke so it was this crappy plastic drum and so i was like it was the first gift i ever got that i genuinely didn't like and i'm like looking up at my mom and she's asking me if i like it i'm looking at my dad and i'm like i have to be polite i have to be honest i have to be polite i have to be honest and i just burst into tears and with my older sister i'm the youngest of four saying um oh baby doesn't like his present you know uh starts crying and i'm like and i want to be like no that's not what's happening it's a paradox like there's there's no there's no way to actually resolve this um and so for a very early memory was that you cannot be both honest and polite and then in the actual neighborhood i grew up in everybody's parents had some other idea of what the appropriate thing would say and if you actually took everybody's parents norms for what you were allowed to say nobody'd be allowed to say anything so it had to be free speech had to be the rule basically yeah sometimes he got punched you know um for saying the wrong thing but for the most part you know like people respected each other as individuals would hear each other out and sometimes you know some and often surprisingly often it would actually work out um so i started with as a free speech person from a very early age um the next step is college i was a student journalist and for a lot of people who were in first amendment law where they really get um radicalized into it if you can think of it that way is the experience of having people come into your newspaper office and demand that you fire so and so um and you see the wheels are turning in their heads they're like you need to get rid of this columnist and they haven't figured out why yet they just know that they're angry about that columnist but they but and they and they will figure out because whatever they think is convenient at the time because it's defamation because it's treason because it's harassment they'll come up with some kind of argument if you give them anything and you start realizing that's why free speech has to be so broad and uncompromising because the human brain is incredibly good at figuring out rationalizations for defeating their enemy and there's one there's one final step here um it actually relates to section 230 of the um of the communications decency act which is currently very controversial um but the original part of the communications decency act why it's called that um was a provision that prevented indecency on the internet um even as a senior in in college i was like that is laughably that there's no way you can enforce something that vague and broad and uh and um i got really um uh i got so animated about that i started studying about it and that's when i took the lsat and that's why that's why i decided to go to law school um and i went to law school and specialized in it uh specialized in first amendment law now why is that so controversial now because it's so impossible to police or well the the oh yeah i should have finished the story on the original communications decency act um the it included a ban on decency on the internet um and it was def and in in sort of a a little bit of heartbreaking timing you know it spent so many years fighting this and uh the decision from the supreme court came out uh right before i started law school or right or maybe in my first couple weeks or something like that so like oh i want to be involved in this but i was too late um because indecency is just too broad it's just too vague it could apply to virtually anything and the supreme court in an opinion called uh reno baclu said that the internet should be treated very much like you would like the strongest free speech protections available under the law and you know that was that that that was like one of the big causes that brought me into this stuff all right so this is where things begin to collide in terms of coddling of the american mind and this notion that we have and i know you hate the word coddling so i'm not trying to be derogatory at all but we had these good intentions um that ended up becoming sort of bad parenting practices because you weren't giving kids the opportunity to sort of go get hurt physically to get scuffled emotionally and have to sort of figure their way through that and you know develop a robust set of skills for dealing with the world the way that it is colliding with this explosion of speech through the internet and voices that may have once been very very small now suddenly can get you know pretty big attention um and the increasing polarization and the calls for sort of the end of free speech is quite frankly what it feels like is just an average joe trying to make his way in the world here i think as a way into how you feel about this i'd love to ask you about mighty ira so one what was that documentary and two you said you were proud of it why oh my god mighty ira okay so mighty ira um also to go back a little bit to you know how i grew up um the ultimate bad guys as a kid obviously were was the was the clan um you know that there was i remember as a kid um you know uh they also hated catholics too and i was raised catholic but you know just the fact that would hate my friends was truly bad enough but i remember hearing that there was a group of political liberals who would even defend them and who would end unlike the reaction i got from some other people you know first generation american kind of proud of how exceptional and strange this place was i was like and instead of being critical of them i was like that's amazingly principled that those are people who really mean it um you know no make no law means make no law so from a very early age i was inspired by this person i'd never even heard of ira glasser of the aclu and ira glasser was the um he was one of the top people the aclu going back to the 60s but he became executive director of the aclu in 79 right after the skokie um [Music] there was there were nazis neo-nazis wanted to march in illinois um and they wanted to march in a neighborhood that had actually a survivors of the holocaust you know pretty pretty hard stuff and the aclu came in and defended them um and honestly i think that one of the things that really took the teeth out of the nazi movement of the 1970s was people getting to see what a bunch of horrible buffoons these people were what what a joke these people were and so and the person who was willing to go that far and really was became the face of um the defense of of even nazis well actually there were several including ari nair who wrote a book called defending my enemy which is just a masterpiece on freedom of speech this is a this is a survivor of the camps who is saying no no the way we avoid this happening again is not through greater power of authority it's through a tolerance until it hurts but zero tolerance for actual violence it's a wonderful wonderful book um but people like ari nair came up then nadine strassen was just starting at the time a big name in the aclu for a long time and ira glasser you know and so a lot of the fame of the aclu being so incredibly principled that happened on ira's watch and ira is just this amazing model of the kind of civil libertarian i've i've always wanted to be which is to you know care about a variety of issues but be uncompromising on free speech even if it goes to the uh to causes that you think are very important and you have positions on particular things you're not going to try to shut up the people who disagree with you ever that is just completely outside of bounds and i know a lot of people from that generation of the aclu including my mentor harvey silverglate who is the co-founder of fire the foundation for individual rights of edu and education which i'm the president of so this whole really fast why why do you think it's so important to defend your enemy why is what is the danger in the breakdown of freedom of speech like in the in the documentary you guys really do a great job of showing what was going on in skokie illinois which for those that i was not familiar with it until i watched this documentary for those that don't know the story you have these like you said neo-nazis they want to march they end up specifically because they couldn't get to the part of downtown chicago that they wanted to march in they end up sort of on the outskirts and they write letters to all these different little suburbs saying we're going to march to your neighborhood everybody ignore them except one the skokie illinois people now what makes this interesting is they were responding because you have these um jewish people that had survived the holocaust tattoos i mean they're they're maybe only 20 years out it's pretty crazy and they're saying like we said never again and so we're going to rise up they're threatening violence and you get these like sort of obviously the punchline is they end up not marching but the before that there was all this violence leading up to it where just sort of showing their face they were so ready to fight and the nazis were you know ready to fight and so they were actually fighting and it was insane and so that's the you know the moment where the aclu is going and fighting and fighting and fighting and i have to admit like watching it as somebody who you know not being sort of grounded enough in politics to to speak intelligently about the first amendment other than from sort of a user's perspective but watching it i was like [ __ ] like is there a moment where this is too crazy where you just say guys they they they still have the tattoos they're in their i mean maybe 50s but they're not like 90 and that's gnarly to have people march through their town so with that setup i want to know like why is it even in that moment still important enough to give them that right yeah i definitely think there were times during that whole process that yeah and there was times where people were arrested on both sides for actually engaging engaging in violence and that's appropriate but you have to keep a really strong distinction between opinion and action um and it's one of the it's one of the great innovations in human society um and when people are arguing that words are like bullets and they think this is this innovative idea that words of violence is like no that's actually the overwhelming majority of human history we've treated words as indistinguishable as from violence one of the great innovations that have brought us so much good in the world is this strong distinction between speech and uh and action when you say that they they were muddled throughout history what do you mean um that is that essentially you know if you're going back throughout history well one uh well that's a little bit i then i start getting into um you know the blasphemy um law and the um the way that that uh that was like one of the chief um uh ways of limiting uh speech you know in in the old days so prior to what i mean by muddled is that essentially in every and it's hard to find moments in history where you couldn't be very quickly hung or executed for saying the wrong thing um and the idea that people are genuinely entitled to their without now the innovation from that a human's natural state more or less is xenophobic um that you know it's it's really telling that early greek stories include um prescriptions of like please don't kill strangers is one of those things that you see like you know ancient bards essentially telling uh telling people and it's funny because you realize these are epic uh you know some of these people spreading the epic poems are actually strangers going from town to town basically giving stories about why you shouldn't kill me um so the hostility towards non-conformity i think is baked very uh very much into the human species you have periods of tolerance so like i'd say there are periods in the roman empire where there's you know comparative tolerance that that essentially people there's some amount of live and let live with uh like the jewish population and different uh different faiths and that kind of stuff but the real innovation is not just um is what john roush calls liberal science that everybody's essentially entitled to their opinion um nobody gets to call special authority on things and no argument is ever truly over and this requires a very big distinction between the expression of opinion and action whereas you know even throughout western history opinion and action were uh were muddled in things like you know reputational harm that essentially their dueling is is a perfect example of what used to be called a culture of honor that essentially it's up to you to defend your reputation and defend what's yours on your own usually through violence the society that that um me and height end up defending a lot and i defend in particular is has been named a culture of dignity which has these ideas about autonomy separation of uh of of of opinion and action of of um respect for people being entitled to their own opinion teach their own respect for um and and it always comes embedded with some amount of epistemic humility uh just the idea that there are there's not just limits to what i know there's limits to what i can know yeah that that whole um and epistemic is one of those words that i had to look up because i had no idea originally what that meant but uh that's a pretty good definition that you you just know that you're not going to know everything and so stepping into the game with that level of humility is incredibly important so that that context to me is so critical for people under to understand one why i'm so enamored with you as a voice in the world but two as to why i think this moment is so important so i want to go back to the nazis they're about to march in skokie but now with that understanding of when you when you look at history through the lens of normally people misspeak and they are killed for it you begin to understand why it's like hey this was an innovation recognize it as such we have to now protect this innovation because the alternative is authoritarian and we start killing people for saying things we don't like and the way that that flips and becomes you're the person that people don't like that gets killed happens way too quickly and and that's the thing it is that people sometimes call it um uh like the slippery slope fallacy is what you're worried about in the case of the nazis like what would be the big deal if we punish somebody as repugnant as as that and the big deal is that that's completely subjective and who's going to be considered that repugnant is going to move and move and move surprisingly quickly um and this is something that i've seen when people bring up the slippery slope fallacy in my own career it's it it's a slippery slope tendency as soon as you actually give somebody you know the idea that wait wait i can ban things because they're offensive and it's like what we mean by this nazis um but i really hate that comedian you know i think porn is offensive i think and all these things actually happened in the in the early 80s i think dungeons and dragons is offensive i think comic books are offensive all of these things happen um and all you need to do and that that was the that was the thing i learned from working in as a student journalist is as soon as you open a little door for someone's mind to be like wait a second you're giving me a weapon over people i don't like yay i'll i'll take it so you have to you have to police the boundaries of it now now the nazi uh representing nazis is the absolute high watermark of how far you know people are willing to go um but the safeguard on that is as soon as people actually start doing things you know conspiring towards violence engaging in in crime then arrest them by all means but we have to be very sharply protecting the power to have any opinion you want no matter how average now i actually take it a step further in my own personal philosophy freedom of speech and it's this the project of human knowledge is to know the world as it is and that means that if you don't know what people really think and why you'll never no you'll never you'll never understand that so there's something very primitive about censorship it's like it's like saying listen if you have the follow even if 75 of you have some crazy idea about the nature of the universe or about your fellow man we don't want to know it's not it's not important somehow which is of course nonsense it's incredibly important to know what people think and not just from a democratic standpoint which it is but also from a scientific standpoint from and from a simple wanting to know what the world looks like um a perspective there's there's something and a child is frankly in my opinion about censorship the idea that if we don't talk about it at the dinner table it will go away and it's like no actually it's still there and actually in some ways because you're not addressing it it might be getting worse yeah that uh i'm gonna latch on to that word childish um that seems like a perfect intersection with uh coddling of the american mind so how how how do we end up here like we go from ira glass or who is jewish if i'm not mistaken defending nazis because he understands that slippers he's a jewish champion of civil rights um and he was with um at the time they sail there are other people like harvey silverblade jewish champion of civil rights um but absolutely the one of the ways they they believed you achieved that is by limiting the power of the state now how does that make coherent sense to population to people to younger people today um there's a really kind of pernicious reason why it doesn't and it takes a minute to explain um when i speak on campuses now and when i speak at high schools which i'm increasingly doing i have to explain this very basic thing that i never thought you had to explain before in a democracy uh the power of the majority is protected by the vote um the rich and powerful are protected by being rich and powerful literally the only thing you need a protection of free speech for is for minority opinions period and that's one of the reasons why when you look at the history of the united states it's only when free speech started becoming powerful which started at first in 1925 it's a it's a confusing story but the first amendment had basically no powerful legal meaning until about 1925 was very weak um then after 1925 it started getting stronger and stronger there was a little dip in the in the second red scare uh but then up and up again it's mostly you know an increasing um increasingly broad interpretation of free speech it's no coincidence that that was the same time that the civil rights movement happened the gay rights movement happened um the women's rights movement happened because all of these movements had tried to start before um including probably i think even the gay rights movement that tried to start in the 1950s it was only when the in the civil rights movement there were people who were trying who were fighting for that you know from from day from day one women's rights movement that goes back to 19th century but they're constantly arrested um for engaging in free speech and as the law finally started to live up to what it was meant to mean in the first place a real broad protection of free speech that's how you started getting minority um opinions out there and he's already getting civil rights and all these other wonderful progressions now why don't younger people understand this and it comes to something that that uh i think people are sometimes hesitant to say and i think they should just stop um in k through 12 and higher education the uh the overall sort of power structure of all these places is very um homogeneous in terms of it being uh politically uh left um and this is established this is just clear in in overwhelming amount of k-12 in most colleges in the country of all of the elite colleges you have um in some departments you have you know 30 to one in terms of left versus right professors in some in some departments you have literally nobody and administrators it turns out are even worse now why does this matter if for decades there's someone in power but they don't want to admit they're in power they don't they don't own their own power um and you're coming up to and they're basically saying that uh they would like to be able to punish that person you don't like um for their free speech what you're experiencing is an inversion of the normal power dynamic where essentially this is the will of the majority uh on campus but it's not willing to admit that it's the will of the majority and the minority opinions are dissenters whether they be a brett weinstein or or a conservative or you know any any group of people who who don't conform but because colleges can't own the fact that they are incredibly powerful incredibly wealthy um uh if you know um uh institutions that do tend to be some homogeneous you end up with uh generation after generation with an impression that free speech is the argument of the bad guy um that free speech is the argument and they've never even taught that it's there to defend minority opinions because there's this total inversion of of their actual experience and decade after decade you you hear people saying well because of that that lousy free speech movement i have to i can't shut down these people you don't like um without ever explaining to them how that came came to be you end up in this kind of perverse situation where people actually are coming to believe the absurdity that free speech is the argument of power and privilege wow okay that is uh that is very interesting that we've sort of intentionally or unintentionally begun to sort of flip the way that people view that um and i i love the way that you said i would have canceled this you know evil heinous person were not for that pesky uh first amendment that's really interesting framing that begins to sort of clarify a lot of of what's going on you have some power and that's and what's and what's messed up and like i don't think it's exaggerating to say that this unwillingness to accept its own massive amounts of privileged power and wealth higher education has also had people um you know including at my album out of stanford who uh you know write scholarship uh about of restricting free speech that ends up being popular in other countries so this kind of free speech skepticism has actually been exported you know to other countries even though we protect free speech really really well in the united states i think i think for in terms of one of the most fundamental human liberties um a lot of what's come out of campus has been just a disaster for for human freedom whoa that that is a a very bold statement um yeah i mean i'm sort of increasingly becoming aware of of what that output looks like as an employer more than anything but uh that that's a really bold statement so now going to um the what you guys talk about in the coddling of the american mind there's this it's almost so weird that i hesitate to take you literally but you've said it so many times in exactly the same way that i imagine you actually do mean it literally that somewhere around uh 2013 2014 or 2014 2015 somewhere in there that seemingly almost overnight all of a sudden students go from being the biggest champions of free speech so the administrators are are you know nut jobs that are writing this stuff that's getting exported to um you know foreign countries very nice people all lovely people but um you know we're we're exporting these ideas that are um potentially detrimental and almost overnight suddenly it becomes the students who are now fighting against freedom of speech how like if we were going to intentionally orchestrate that how could we make it happen at such a specific moment i um i hit that so hard because it's the difference between being someone who studies this and actually being on the ground because i've been defending free speech on campus since 2001 you know and we kept a really close ear to the ground we would hear about an awful lot of cases even obscure schools across the country and it was pretty reliable uh students were good on free speech they got it um they they were they would stand up for professors right so got it better than professors they got it better than administrators and then suddenly um in this semester 2013 it it started more towards the the end of the fall semester 2013 and then really exploded in the spring semester 2014 and then you know here we are it's the first time you start hearing of students are really organizing in good in great number to to ban particular speakers from campus to demand new speech codes based on sort of medicalized rationales um whether they may be um uh trigger warnings or um uh post-traumatic stress syndrome was one of the things that came up um and it was not not in the least subtle and coddling the american mind i mean really the whole book is just trying to figure out what was so different about that class entering in 2014 uh and and i got to tell you doing the research for it it was fascinating we didn't at the time understand that we were dealing with a new like a new generation of students with pretty remarkably different sets of values and expectations um and we predicted in an article we wrote in 2015 that this would be a disaster for mental health um two for it's interesting sometimes it takes a little bit to explain the connection between free speech and mental health but our original article was trying to um explain uh how he got there and we we thought there was going to be you know some modest increase in um mental health issues on campus and it was an explosion instead of you know a modest increase and you know how do we get to the point where you've got people that are um beginning to argue for these ideas that they're not they they have flipped but we're really what we're trying to parse out is how much of this is social media and how much of this is them having to keep everything inside themselves because i social media i get just because of the nature of how it affects like the way that your brain is developing and the constant uh feedback from peers that are hitting you even as you're going to bed and waking up in the morning i mean that strikes me as terrifying um yeah but the the other side why would it impact mental health just to have to stay quiet um just have to repress your your identity and your points of view is is inherently stressful um but when i think about kind of like where where a lot of this ultimately comes from a lot of things that unite my heights thinking about it is kind of the sort of runaway sorting the runaway homophily effect you know that that essentially um social media just sped up a process that was already happening but it's spread it out dramatically lawfully um the the the attracted like like attracting like being for people with similar points of view with similar homo philly is that what that's from you got it got it sorry yeah i'm i'm a little slow thank you and so uh sorting uh i i do think that um not to oversimplify it but i do think a lot of what we're seeing um are problems of society sort of super sorting and weird effects that come out of that and social media is something that sped up that process so and one thing that has been interesting in our subsequent research on the social media effect on depression is that we definitely didn't think it was so much screen time as as social media and it looks like the research on screen time is saying something more that the exp the effect of screen time is more ambivalent and in some cases for some students and understandably actually it can be positive for example but that some of the depressive effect might simply come from the fact that in a situation with social media it's very easy to support to to sort even by temperament so if like uh depressed people start talking to depressed people you know the the depeche mode support group is going to probably get more depressed so i think that that some of the effect of social media is actually uh runaway sorting effects uh we're just sub grouping down and now we get people that i'm sure there are some people in an upward spiral but then there are other people in a downward spiral and that's being exacerbated in sort of my area of like mindset we talk a lot about you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with um and and i've tried to get people to think about it in a slightly more expanded way which is you're actually the average of the five ideas you spend the most time with and if those ideas are being reflected back to you in your depeche mode example of the idea that we celebrate is life is you know [ __ ] and every day you know life's a [ __ ] sandwich and every day is another bite and you know and you just get into that downward spiral and then there's cutting and there's you know all kinds of crazy stuff that you know people can spiral down into so yeah i uh i get now what you mean by how that sorting effect becomes deranging yeah and and we do and i do also still think that the the part of it that talks about the mean girls aspect is also true like because this is hitting young women harder than it's hitting men and you know men generally because you know we're awful when the hormones start kicking in like it's kind of like i remember being 11. i've watched this in other kids you have this like weird sort of island of sanity where you're like what's wrong with all these mildly younger people and then the hormones kick in and you're nuts you're just completely insane but male you know aggression generally is physical or fronting you know in some cases or actual violence or playing football like like i was i was actually defensive tackle believe it or not um uh but for for women generally the aggression is expressed socially uh that essentially it's you know uh fighting alliances with friends and gossip and and all this kind of um you know nastiness that we all kind of remember from junior high and social media makes that uh into just a super weapon essentially like i i can't even imagine what a one of those scenarios would look like um with social media like if they had it back in the day that being said one of the one of the things that i was never able to get enough research on is i do think that in some cases that scenario becoming hot led to the response of the anti-bullying movement and the anti-bullying movement although i have a lot of sympathy for it was very anti-speech it was it was very much kind of like don't offend people don't hurt people's feelings all this kind of stuff um and it and even though i think that a lot of it was well past due i do i was never able to really do a deep dive into the anti-bullying stuff because but i do think that that lines up also extremely well talk to me about that so what would you do i mean i know you have young kids so let's say that there's somebody in class that's being really hateful to them but it's just speech that never spills over into let's say they're not even in intimidating them they're just being mean yeah that that's the thing is um you know i i've been writing these things called coddling caveats or i tried to be very clear and i got some advice while we were writing the book that i actually now think we were wrong to follow which was i wanted to say a lot of times in the book that i'm not good at this stuff myself i am an anxious parent um like all this kind of stuff and so to be clear i'm not prescribing stuff that i think is easily done uh that i find easy that my wife generally has to remind me to do this um when it comes to meanness you know i it was kind of taken at least when we were kids it was kind of like just genuine meanness you know there was a sense of like so what you know like the um leave me alone you know uh and then there was also a fair amount of actual you know pitting which was not appropriate um i got you know i got beat up a lot as a kid um and i wouldn't want any because you were lippy or why why were you getting beaten up a lot a little nerd that's so interesting i was nerdy for sure but i i didn't get beat up a lot but the growing up there was definitely a sense for me and i think you and i are the same generation um yeah so right so growing up for me it was eh toughen up like if you went and cried you'd get made fun of for being the crybaby and people didn't want to hang out with a person who was always like super easily offended and it wasn't even that you didn't get it like i remember i had one friend who would cry a lot and i liked him a lot such a good dude and i always just wanted to be like bro like you're not making friends every time you cry like it turns people off and we and it's interesting in my heart when when it was clear a kid couldn't like couldn't control that you know like i i remember just how much sort of visceral pain you would feel when you'd see someone who this is why i don't have children because i don't know that i could put them in the position to give them the advice that i would give an adult which is that you've just got to toughen up and deal with it which by the way i think is the answer and if i were going to sum up our conversation before we started having it with one quote the thing i really wanted to get across in this whole discussion is prepare the kid for the road not the road for the kid and i just thought yes like that is so true there's no way to remove all the potholes from the world and you it turns into a totalitarian nightmare when you try because people left to their own devices don't gravitate towards that it's a rough and tumble world that we're in and the only way to get everybody to like play nice or fair or whatever is to make it such a nightmare and to use violence as a way to stop people from some of their natural inclinations that the cure ends up being worse than than the disease and so it like you i i don't look at this and say oh this would be easy i look at this and say this is terrifyingly difficult and is absolutely one of the reasons that i didn't want to have kids but when i think about raising a well-adjusted child like they're they're gonna have to figure some things out on their way they they as much as no one wants to see their kids take lumps they're gonna have to take lumps and well and in some ways i think we almost see this too much through a negative lens because taking lumps uh yeah but learning how to um because the uh i i read this book that was like recommended to me as sort of like a counterweight to um calling the american mind which was called the myth of the spoiled child um which i was like great you know like let's talk about this and it really is talking about how to this particular psychologist's mind there isn't enough research to prove that like that's even a thing which is like okay that's funny um but um a phenomena that we've all seen ourselves uh but in our lives but the thing that i found found well the first thing i found so funny about it was it was this book railing against snide and over simplistic dummies you know who who think that spoiling a child was a real thing that was said in exactly the tone that the author was tr was claiming was so wrong it was so uh snide and and dismissive but there was a section where it was talking about just the horror you do to your child when they have the experience of losing um like a game like can you imagine letting them lose was a horror letting them lose and and it was um this idea of like of of failing on a test or failing in the following circumstances and it's like you do know there's another side to that right where essentially when you play a sport for example you go from like i'm crushed that i lost to eventually like okay yeah that's okay you know like and yet that empowerment that happens on the other side of it that can actually even happen pretty quickly if you let it where it's like i handled that i'm autonomous i feel pretty good i feel i feel like i can handle myself the other thing that you end up producing for that poor kid is the sense that because what you're really doing is whispering into the air constantly you can't handle this on your own you need someone up there to handle this for you and that's dangerous thinking for a democracy for one thing um why is it dangerous the the idea that every problem has to be solved by an appeal to authority um is a why it's so dangerous [Laughter] truly you said this in an interview you said that i actually fear centralized authority i am so aggressively on that team but for somebody who that doesn't make sense like of course have a central authority somebody who's looking out for everybody has their best interests is willing to you know go to war to make sure that they're safe and protected that sounds amazing why is that bad because essentially what what you're trying to do with small liberal systems is have uh is see what happens when humans are empowered individually um and and can actually uh have autonomy over their own life if you want an appeal to authority if you want power to be taking care of you um under all circumstances um and to take away you know the difficulty of everyday life you're not actually asking for freedom you're asking for the system as old as time you're asking for authoritarianism you're asking for the czar and one of the reasons why this makes me um why you know like with my family history of course obviously means a lot to me and when i started studying 19th century you know russian thought i was shocked to see um pro czar's theorists actually make this argument the greatest freedom that russians have is the freedom from the czar takes away the the difficulty of rule the difficulty of choice the difficulty of being all these things you have to worry about and some of them you know like your safety of course you do want authority to take care of um but everything else we we take care of the difficulty of being um uh being autonomous the difficulty of being in a democratic society all the responsibility we take that from you so and that's the greatest freedom and i couldn't believe i was i was reading this it sounded like the dumbest argument i've ever heard in my life but the more i thought about it i actually wrote a piece called fleabagneum and uh and censorship gravity uh uh on my blog eternally radical idea it's a very weird post but it's talking about the show fleabag where she get have you watched that i've seen the first season yeah um second season's much better that's what i heard i love the first so i'm i'm dying to see this the first is it's she's a genius um and but she gives a speech at one point uh about ask wanting someone to tell her everything to do um and about how and she starts crying about the idea of kind of like i just want someone to tell me exactly what to do and it scares her how much she wants someone to tell her what to do with this and the thing that i love about that scene so much is because freedom is supposed to be scary or you're not doing it right um but it's the only way to get to that sense of autonomy why does it why does it matter because i'm gonna i'll give you uh sort of what i've seen so one of the ways that i have become effective at being a ceo is that um i'm right often enough that the companies become profitable but the other thing is that i understand humans absolutely crushing desire for certainty they need me to be certain and if i'm certain they'll follow me yeah and all i need to do to alleviate fear i don't even have to give you the answer you wanted i just have to show you that i'm certain that this answer is going to work and then i will weather that storm now it it's very interesting because in the business world i i use that tremendously to my advantage but in the civilian world it scares me to death that people want that so what what is it that because what you're presenting and again i i am with you i just want you to put words on it but what is it that we get from taking on this scary ass responsibility for our own lives of having freedom having autonomy having to deal with all that [ __ ] making those decisions what is it we get from that that's worth the price of having to deal with everything wow it's a great question and you know to a degree it's it's overcome it really is the other side of overcoming your fears that that essentially if you leave someone in a situation where all their problems are handled by some third party there's always that sort of fear in their belly that essentially if they didn't have the support they would they would never make it um the sort of pride and confidence that you can leave after having lived through a real a real crisis it shouldn't take a real crisis to give to give you that experience of autonomy feeling fully realized all of these kind of things and i think in terms of a thriving fulfilling life um if you're always if you're always whispering into your own ear that you can't really handle life on your own that you can't really handle most situations on your own that's that's depression that that's and that's one of the reasons why i think uh one of the reasons why you have such high rates of depression um and unfortunately suicide and anxiety among a lot of these students going to elite elite schools because they're being told their entire lives yes you're very bright but you're not capable of handling your own life because the real world is terrifying but of course as soon as you actually um face some of those terrorists since you know it's kind of like getting through your early 20s you know which can for a lot of people can be a very dark time and then you come out on the other end of it you're like this isn't so bad i can do this and it and it feels like being a fully realized person um and but you need to be able to you know have that internal locus of control that that internal sense of autonomy for things like you know actualization for mental health for creativity all of these kind of things can you live a a fulfilling life where you can't make any where you don't feel confident that you can make any decisions meaningful decisions for yourself maybe um but it's not one i'd like to live i i will say that i don't think it's possible and the reason that i don't think it's possible and the reason that i think autonomy is so critically important and that people have to get it together and take control of their own life is so i'm i'm flirting with this idea i call the physics of being human and i believe that the human mind no matter where you're born no matter what time period there are certain things that your mind is compelling you to do so we are an active species so yeah if you leave us alone we're going to map out our environment try to figure it out try to dominate it get resources from it food water shelter all that like you don't have to tell people to do that they will just do that it's a natural impulse same with sex you've got these um things that are propelling you forward i think one of them is this desire to have autonomy that that it is pre-programmed into your mind and no matter what i do if you don't have that there will be a certain level of anxiety now i'm the guy that just said people love certainty and they love to follow you but there is this what you were talking about there's this thing running in the back of their mind that says i don't know how to do this and because i don't know how to do it if there isn't somebody there and you have enough moments in your life where you're paralyzed because there's nobody there to help you and that is so demoralizing and terrifying and such a horrible place that you carry that then forward with you in your life so i believe because that we have this um subconscious process running in the human mind that tells us that we need to do hard things in service not only of ourselves but other people no matter who you are unless you're a sociopath that is running in the back of your mind that you have to get good at something that matters to you and matters to other people and then and this is the key if if i were to sum up the one thing i'm trying to get the world to understand it is this skills have utility meaning if you learn how to do something you're no longer beholden to anybody else so i'll i'll use movie terms here real fast so one of the most horrifying moments in any movie ever for me or book for that matters it's based on a novel is a moment where oliver and oliver twist comes up and says please uh can i have some more and he doesn't get to decide whether he has more of course the guy goes ballistic and you just this is exactly why i ended up getting into business i went into film and i couldn't get films made the way that i wanted the maid and somebody gave me the key insight hey you're coming to the world with your hand out and if you want to control the art you have to control the resources so i thought oh my god that's amazing if i go get rich then i can do things that i want to do but to get rich i had to get good at something the world cared about and i had to be able to offer more value and so that process of going in and fighting to get better every day and then realizing oh my god i can actually i've learned a set of skills that allows me to get a group of people galvanized around one idea moving in the same direction with speed we can create things of value and now not only do i have resources financially but i have intellectual resources that i can leverage to get other people to help me do something to have a meaningful impact in the world now when i think about how i feel about myself now where i know i have that locus of control i look at the world and go whatever it is that i set my mind to i can make a major impact in the world versus how i felt you said early 20s is a dark period that [ __ ] was really dark for me and the reason it was dark was i had a big dream and i had no idea that a that i even needed skills to go and get better that i could acquire new skills because i thought that i was born with a certain set of talents and that was it so once i realized oh okay so steve jobs says look around the world it was built by people no smarter than you meaning if you want to go build a bridge go learn how to build a bridge you want to build houses build houses be a great teacher be a teacher author whatever you can learn how to do it go actually do it and then the world will begin to change from your inputs either in small ways or big ways depending on where you want to play so when i think about that whole causal sequence absolutely being true and being an echo of these uh sub-processes that evolution has baked into our mind whether we want them there or not regardless of who our parents are no matter what time period we were born into there are these sort of evolutionary pressures pushing us in these directions if you hand your locus of control off to somebody not only do you now have an inability to manipulate the world around you not in a negative way but to change the world around you but you also never realize that desire to have autonomy and to get skillful yeah and and the fears just seem bigger and bigger i mean that's something that all of us have experienced and something i am trying to like i am already teaching i have a four-year-old and a three-year-old um and and i am trying to very much say you know face your fears do this thing you know like like plant yourself get get embodied and because i've uh that kate julian wrote this some piece for the atlantic that was sort of like a continuation of some of the things and coddling and it really hit hard the harm of having um anxious kids and that how much you have to address your your childhoods um your child's uh anxiety and how much of that anxiety actually comes from the parents in the first place and there was a horrifying line that like you really have to take seriously like if you if you have a kid who's afraid of dogs um that if you accommodate that too much it spirals into the in the into 12 things that they're afraid of and some something that can be really horribly life-limiting it's it's absolutely amazing piece um that i was able to read able to you know that i recommend um uh by kate julian but to your point about sort of like small empowerments and knowing how to do things um i think one thing that the effects that i actually don't talk about very publicly and i'm going to talk more about it is i'm dyslexic i i'm i it means that honestly as an adult it doesn't hurt me all that much um i listen to everything i can i listen to audiobooks i have the the apps that read things to me spell checks uh godsend dictation you know like all of these kind of like fixes make it more like a minor inconvenience as an adult so um but i always think that gave me one huge advantage i i always knew i wasn't good at everything and so i had to delegate on the stuff i wasn't good at but i also was desperate to know how to do something and you know we were poor when i was a kid so i felt so unsafe in a literal financial sense because we were you know we were really struggling when i was a kid until my dad started working again when i was 12. but i still had that mentality that i needed to learn how to do something so i became a cook um and once i knew how to cook it was just like and this was in high school i was like well i can always go be a cook and and i meant it you know like it was like and my brother's the same way where it's just like yeah you know like everything falls apart i still have something that i can do and that gave me a sense of sort of like safety and everything else the fact and it didn't come from outside it came from like you know like one of my best friends the carpenter it's kind of like i know how to do all this stuff like if if if everything falls apart i can i can still do these things i'm excited to tell you all about peak tea listen up my friends if you're looking for ways to support healthy immune function right now you need to hear all about peak tea peak is a brand our team here at impact theory has loved for years and they just released a game changer in vitamin c supplementation it's an elderberry liposomal sea called daily immune that one of our impact theory 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that if you actually were to teach people how to do practical things and i mean this for students at every level it would give them a sense of empowerment that's only possible by actually doing things not just saying oh let's increase your self-esteem talk to me about trigger warnings that's something that um you know given all the things we've talked about today doesn't strike me as the best way to move through the world that while there are no question that there are some things that people have been through that are so traumatic that i would get why they would want to avoid them in the future but much like you on freedom of speech you need to fight for your enemies uh right to say what they're going to say no matter how horrible and despicable i would think that in terms of healing and moving forward that just trying to like you said with the you know if your kid is afraid of dogs and you really try to protect them and coddle them that that actually gets worse it doesn't get better that you'd be better off like i make rules in my life and i will tell you one rule for myself no matter what has happened to me in my life i want exactly zero trigger warnings i do not want people trying to prepare the road for me like i would rather steal myself so that i can navigate trigger warns are kind of a funny one because they have such symbolic power power in in in the country that they're definitely something that there are people who seem to be willing to fight and die on the hill of trigger warnings are good and when i first heard about them um i was a little bit like puzzled by exactly what to make of them and definitely like you know like most movements in censorship the the um the intention's always good someone someone thinks they're saving the world or saving the soul of america or in this case trying to help people who are genuinely hurting but it was interesting that they came up on campus with such a vengeance in 2013 2014 because they'd more or less just been almost laughed out of existence on the internet because in feminist circles um they're being made fun of because because originally they started from very understandable you know someone saying trigger warning about to talk about sexual assault but every time people started using them they got requests for more and more and more things that people were claiming to be afraid of or or triggered by and it just wasn't sustainable now this makes sense because if people understand what triggers people it doesn't what triggers people doesn't necessarily make sense that essentially if you are the victim of assault it's not necessarily watching a movie about a salt that's going to trigger you from from a psychological perspective it could be a particular smell it could be the color yellow that's not the brain doesn't work all the time in this perfectly linear way that watching a movie about war can make you feel like you're back in the war it can actually be something it can be a random song playing that can cause you triggering so the fact that we that triggers are not nearly as linear as people would like to like to think they are um but you know our initial um opposition to them or other initial concern to them was that um it was kind of like uh telling people uh in the in the legitimately safe space of the classroom um that they can that it's this is still such a big scary thing that we we should never even talk about it now in our opinion that has the power of making uh things that you're frightened of not uh seem bigger and bigger and bigger and more powerful and that was that was kind of our theory that essentially you know um uh and when cape man attacked height about it um he was saying that uh oh that's like saying uh in the new york times uh said something to the effect of uh oh like height would just like to uh uh deal with people with arachnophobia by throwing spiderman sorry by throwing spiders on them and i gave away the punchline but heights response was like no what i'm saying is you shouldn't you should you should be able to talk about spiderman around someone with arachnophobia you know like that essentially like it's a very different uh just being able to talk about something is actually very different now here's what kills me though there have now been like four studies maybe even five on trigger warnings not a single one shows any benefit at all um to them several of them show that they increase ambient anxiety the the people who don't have ptsd um are suddenly a little bit more afraid one of the studies um gave some good reason to believe that increases people's sense that words are inherently harmful which is of course a very serious harm in a democracy and one of the studies i believe showed that people with ptsd had actually made them worse even for people with ptsd so there's now a body of of um of research that that says this isn't this isn't actually helpful this actually can be counter productive but the people who believe in it just won't give up on it um and and it's it's like but what else can you do other than prove that it's not helpful and if you really genuinely have compassion for the people that you're trying to help you should be able to be moved by what does actually help them yeah that's that's exactly where i come down on the issue is i get why um people you know when you're feeling when you have compassion for somebody else and you hear that something might be distressful for them it's like oh man yeah of course like i i don't want to upset you but when you magnify that out over however many people and you know some of them it's in good faith some of them honestly are just their sensitivity level is dialed way too high um and so it's like you can't even have conversations now and it just begins to stunt other things like freedom of speech or education like just not being able to talk about certain things um and that's where i come down to okay well what really works and if trigger warnings worked and it was making the world a better place and people were you know more they were able to heal and then move on like okay cool i would get it um but it it feels a little bit like the tyranny of the minority to me so it's you know a small handful of people on any given subject and now it's like so much of the discourse is clogged with you know trigger warnings or shouldn't you avoid that or a nice person wouldn't talk about that it's like jesus like we can't talk about anything because something is offensive to everybody and that's that's even before people start using it sort of pathologically of just trying to shut down somebody they don't like and using it as a cudgel um so where do you think we go with this like as a first amendment attorney is this something like is there a way to memorialize this like how do we keep this from spiraling how do we get colleges back to the point where people went there with a radically open mind uh that's a um that's a great question and i i have to say i'm feeling pretty pessimistic about it um at the moment um more so than i have in in some time uh partially because i do think that the layer upon layer of different sort of um ideological assumptions and rhetorical tactics means that uh you know the people the people on the other side of free speech can always win um and you really just have to get out of the system entirely something that i was never all that bullish on that i'm now very bullish on and this is breaking news as far as any podcast i've ever done um there's something called the calvin report um have you heard of it at the university of chicago um i think in 1967 uh the guy who came up with the um the term heckler's veto is a famous uh jurist famous lawyer um and he wrote a report for the university of chicago during the time when uh universities across the country had activists who were demanding that they take political positions and i i've had i've had a real uh rude awakening on on something that was very dear to my heart is that i always kind of assumed that the free speech movement you know starting in berkeley in the 1960s that the um opponents of that were essentially conservatives who wanted patriotism and mom and apple pie um and i'm embarrassed to realize that actually the argument was mostly you know at the time campuses were still decidedly liberal it was but it was more like two or three to one rather than you know 30 to one but the professors wanted the university to be a special place that did its best to be outside of politics because it's our institution for creating ideas it's our institution for it's one of our epistemic institutions you know like because reality is hard to know and we need these special uh areas and so the cow in 1967 the university of chicago came out with the calvin report basically saying we have a very special function of society we should be very hesitant to ever take political positions um we should always be open to the possibility we might be wrong all this stuff that originally for for most of my career i was like well that's nice but universities you know can can engage in free speech of their own and departments can engage in free speech of their own but what's happened um without this having completely abandoned the monastic idea of higher education we've ended up in a situation where uh where the that idea has almost like uh been flooded out and i do think that some schools and i think this for some corporations have to get back to being able to say no we we we are we we it's not our job to decide what the truth is in advance the more we freight truth with assumptions that we have the less likely we are to get it i call the the um ideological uncertainty principle you know that essentially the more you uh the more you assume it has to go in a particular direction the more likely you're gonna uh you you're gonna get to get the truth wrong so increasingly you know i i have all sorts of ideas for reforms for higher education but the most radical one that i've come uh i've come to after a you know long period is that some schools have to say listen we're neutral on political issues um we believe that our department should be neutral on political issues professors and students are free to have whatever opinion they want but as an institution we are uh it's not our job to decide what truth is it's not our job to impose our politics on you um and i think we need institutions like that so this was i think i've heard of this but under a different name so um the university of chicago is that the one yeah they were known as like sort of the the big stalwart says sort of wokism were sweeping the nation they didn't and i remember brett weinstein um saying if if there were some universities that were woke and other universities that weren't then you would get i think he says game theory basically the ones that provided the worse um graduates because you know they were the education itself was getting muddied by politics they would end up losing out to the people that weren't woke and were still using you know just straight scientific method and you know putting out the most um people with the highest level of useful skills out in the world and so over time that would sort itself out and his big lament i think was this that chicago university of chicago sort of the last holdout um had finally sort of given up as well and um embraced a lot of these other policies university chicago hasn't given up but it is being eroded we have a case involving dorian abbott at the moment where um he's a professor who came out and said something that was very like um common humanity identity politics uh talking about we're going to you know um help elevate women not by uh by trying to foster excellence and and finding people who are uh who who get by uh not not evaluated on their identity but on on their success and all this kind of stuff that would have been um absolutely coherent even 15 years ago is now treated as if it's a demonically horrible thing to say that they won't he doesn't think they should be engaging in different kinds of um affirmative action and um you know identity politics and there was a massive movement to just out to just get this guy kicked out you know there was change.org petition against them he now has like a section where he only teaches like one person he's been turned into a pariah even at university of chicago and that's bad uh that essentially what what the right response you know for in for an institution that's supposed to figure out truth is you're entitled to your opinion and this is not the end of the world that someone at the university disagrees and the idea that we're even reached the point where it's it's a massive controversy when someone says something um that wasn't controversial 15 years ago is being treated like a pariah that's that's a problem for the for the production of ideas and what it leads to unfortunately is a huge epistemic crisis that essentially when you look at people on the right who now believe in hoaxes and the election was fixed and all this kind all this kind of stuff um i absolutely blame them for being superstitious and for and and for um uh believing conspiracy theories and i think i i think that that i don't forgive them that at all i do however understand that they don't really trust what comes out of higher education all that much they don't trust what comes out of mainstream media and if you look if you ask people in these institutions it's like well that's just crazy i'm like really really you see you see no reason why they why they think that it's rigged against their point of view and when you don't have institutions that everybody trusts um that's really hard for democracy so like one one place where my brain's been at it's like we need some absolutely brand spanking new institutions that involve people who are trusted by people just simply to tell us what the world actually looks like to some degree because it's hard to know what the world looks like it takes work to know what the world looks looks like and if you don't have any source that that that um that inspires uh you know cross partisan trust we're in real big trouble and people not trusting a lot of higher education after what i've seen for 20 years i don't entirely blame them that's not to say that there aren't scientists within higher education that are absolutely amazing and understand the world better than anybody on on certain topics but as an institution i don't blame him for being kind of skeptical uh of it when particularly uh when you make it so that there was a situation where there was a professor who came out with a study um about police violence and just in the last year and it was essentially withdrawn because conservatives were using it people like heather mcdonald were making arguments based on it and that's crazy like the idea that kind of like so already there's very few people who will make controversial arguments in some of these departments already there's tremendous group think in these departments but if someone publishes something that is factually based but can be used by someone you don't like you withdraw it like that that's why should anybody trust what you come out with if it's that stacked against certain outcomes do you have a sense of of how we've become so blind to this like as as sort of a late entrant to thinking about the culture wars and stuff um and as a business person i'm always asking myself okay what is my goal and what works what's actually going to get me to my goal and um it seems so self-evident when something isn't working how is it that we're living through a world where people can't see the the sort of history death loop that we're in they they i would assume they would take as is absurd on its face the following statement which to me seems self-evident that the only way to get everybody to think the right way is through violence and that that that experiment has been run and it leads to the greatest atrocities of the last 200 years you know i mean maybe more than that so how are they blind of the governments of um hitler and and stalin that was definitely on a scale of thoroughness that was really hard for any previous civilization to achieve just absolutely monstrous anyway sorry so how how does this blindness come to be it just seems so weird like it there's really smart people in fact you and brett weinstein were talking about the fact that really smart people tend to get drawn to some of these ideologies and so what is it about legitimately smart people like i'm not looking down on them i'm i'm worried and so i'm asking the question of hey these amazing compassionate wonderful people are missing what seems to me to be hey whenever you're like running a test the whole idea of running the test is to have learned from it and so it's like we've run these tests of trying to force everybody to think in the same way they end in bloodshed of like magnitudes that are terrifying why does that not seem obvious to them that's a there's so many different answers to it i mean i could go all the way back to plato who i think is a totalitarian monster who we dress up as if he's a as if he's an okay i've never person anybody say that before who wanted power for himself and people like him people would talk about oh the the republic was just a metaphor for the soul it's like no it was his very academic idea of the way the the way the world should be run and they should be incidentally run by people like plato i hope like like plato himself um and i i and i think that there's there's a there's a monstrousness um in in sort of platonic philosophy that is essentially the idea of the forums is essentially that this the the the the ideas in my head are more real than you and they actually say that that the ultimate real things in in uh the ultimate real things and it are otherworldly you know um uh perfections of the beauty and of the circle yeah i mean the world of the forums was a real thing uh-huh and so the academic idea that essentially my academic theory my my beautiful permanent eternal construct um is all that matters is a formula for great evil um what can because we can substitute sort of the perfect circle with utopia so it's like my idea of and i'm trying to put it in in today's the minds of people existing today are you saying that some percentage of them are thinking the utopia itself is is more real or more important more important thank you i wanted to use that but i wasn't sure that you would go for it so the utopia is more important than you uh and therefore this it's that whole um terrifying example of if you want to make an omelette you got to crack some eggs um is that what you think like they're in the grips of that sort of mental loop i think that it's a very common uh mental loop i i think that most i think that there's a huge human drive towards conformity one of the reasons why i find plato so incredibly instructive is because this idea of the ideas are more important than anything else and that they're permanent by the way and i and i have access to them and you don't um that's evil in in my mind the great and one of the greatest innovations in human history was i forget who the philosopher was who called it this was the discovery of ignorance the belief that um uh in the grand scheme of things you know extremely little um all of us know extremely little and that none of us are very bright in isolation and i it might be part of my personality i actually take great joy in not knowing things it feels wonderful you know to to be an on to not have certainty um but i too you know sometimes feel the pil the pull of certainty and once you once you have the idea that the idea whether that's the utopia whether that's um you know perfect equality perfect perfect justice is the greatest of all ends people are just abstractions and some of them are in the way and i think that that unfortunately is a very normal part of the way human thinks and we have this harder system that it requires doubt and tolerance and um always recognizing you might be wrong and that there's a speech by learned hand in 1944 that has a line that i love quoting because um it confuses people um when i say it now it's uh the true spirit of liberty is that which is not that that is not too sure that it is right and people like what what is that what is what is that a cone like what does that mean but it is ultimately this idea that yes you can work for progress but you always have to take seriously the possibility you might be wrong and if you if you think there's absolutely no chance that you are wrong um and that you're absolutely on on the right path towards salvation or god or utopia and nothing can stand in your way that's when the greatest evils in human history happen and these these weirder less comfortable less certain ideas of human autonomy and freedom and doubt and empiricism and all this stuff that's a very hard way to live you know for people it's much easier to come to these sort of like simplis simplistic binaries or ideas of utopia or all that kind of stuff so i think there's always a call bringing it back our institutions though that are supposed to break us up this way of thinking are k through 12 and higher education particularly higher education and unfortunately i think they're pushing us in a in a oversimplified over politicized idea of humanity of society um that uh did try to come into existence several times and was a huge failure and and somehow rearing its ugly head again i'm not sure how we exercise the the sort of simplistic moral utopian certainty that keeps on asserting itself from you know the 19th century on um i hope we can i thought we had in in 1989 and 1991 but literally as someone who's you know family fought the communists since uh since before they even had a name but london literally fought them and not you know my not my actual granddad not my great-grandfather uh you know fought them the idea that this is i'm reading more stuff about literally like people talking about communism being like like a swell thing again even though you know with it within our own lifetimes it was so conclusively a a a disaster um and that's partially because there was never a reckoning on campus to deal with the ideology was just allowed to stay the same um and it didn't have to comport with the real world and once you get far enough away from the examples of these collapses being fresh in people's mind let's go for utopia again what's the harm this this is what really worries me so there's a a point when my wife and i are in an argument where it starts civil and there's you know emotions aren't too heated and we're doing just fine and you know you can see the exit ramp and we know how to you know navigate our way and then there'll be something that will hit on that's just you know maybe one person's raw that day for whatever reason and you can feel the emotions escalating and i have learned to articulate a very simple idea in the middle of that argument which is we are now at the point where no matter what we say this is going to end up in a full-blown argument because now it's not like logic and rationality don't matter anymore this is all just emotion and once we have the fight then we can calm down again because it reaches sort of that that crescendo of absurdity where we go okay this is dumb you know we're not even arguing about the thing anymore we're just pissed but knowing that there is a moment where a tipping point where you can't go back now until you go all the way it's kind of like if a cac once you take it you are going to vomit and i i'm very hopeful and the reason that i've started um talking to people like you is i'm very hopeful that we are not at that moment yet but i am hyper aware that as a society we are racing towards the moment where the only thing that will calm us down again is great tragedy and people will once again have to see what happens when the sword of damocles falls when we try to build the utopia like what this sort of like because eventually you get into the mix of it you go oh now i get why this sucks right but that it can be and unfortunately too many lessons in my own life i've had to learn the hard way people have tried to tell me and you know i just couldn't see it until i was in it and then when you're in it you can sort of unwind but the thing that i i have working in the inner cities has taught me one very powerful thing frame of reference is everything so i can just tell you from experience that iq is distributed evenly right so you go into the inner cities you're going to find people there that are extraordinarily bright and i will define iq as the ability to process raw data quickly but if the if iq is more or less the hardware the what i call the frame of reference is the software what do you believe to be true about yourself what do you believe to be true about the world the easiest one is something that's near and dear to your heart cognitive behavioral therapy if you don't realize that it is a cognitive distortion to do fortune telling or all-or-nothing thinking or catastrophizing like if those just seem true to you and you don't recognize catastrophizing isn't true it's your mind projecting and you deciding to believe that that is actually true if you don't recognize it then there is no difference between that and truth and so you see i've before this was a controversial statement i've been saying this for a long time now i'm sure one day people are going to show up my house with uh pitchforks but i would say that generational poverty has nothing to do with money and has everything to do with mindset meaning if i were to take a child let's say they were six months old and they were from impoverished parents and i raised them in a wealthy environment they'll grow up just like a wealthy kid right they'll be educated all the intellectual prowess didn't didn't matter same genetics but raised one way or the other makes all the difference and so i tried to break it down to what is this really and came up with this concept that i call frame of reference and i the way that i came to it was we were growing so fast as a company hiring so quickly i had to find shorthand ways to interview people and i started asking this magic genie question you'll just have to trust me that it made sense that one of the things i was trying to understand required me to figure out what they wanted out of life and so i would ask the magi genie question and i asked it i don't know 250 or 300 times so the question was hey a magic genie is about to show up they're going to grant you one wish and one wish only you can't wish to cure cancer or bring somebody back from the dead has to be just for you what do you want say that again from the comic books there's a character called molecule man i want his powers i'll have to look that up something tells me i have thought about what if a magic genie would ever come what would you do and the answer is the ability to through simple language manipulate molecules so i'd be so curious to know if that actually is his power well molecule man um and when when people uh hear me say this kind of like so you want the power of a god i'm like well he can control molecules and energy um and so when i since i'm a nerd and i go through like the process i have actually have thought at great length like what if you have the whole justice league how much of the world could you fix and it's not that much except for firestorm firestorm who can like change the change matter and it occur like um and when you start you know when you wanna like make mars habitable or clean up take all the mercury out of the ocean or all this kind of stuff like you need to start thinking really big and so like my wish molecule man dude that is hilarious you were the only person ever that has had the same answer that i have that is incredibly wise of you sir now sadly that was not the answer that people were giving me i asked like i said 250 or 300 times every single person gave the same answer and the answer was one million dollars now they were there for a job so sure i get it but i thought why don't they ask for an impossibly large amount of money why not a trillion dollars or a money printing machine that would give currency that will always be accepted yeah but financial debt right but instead they asked for a million dollars and i realized to them from their frame of reference one million dollars was an unimaginably large amount of money and that's when it hit me oh my god like their vision of what is possible is so small that that a million dollars is just like oh that's outside the realm of possibility whereas for me it was like you can't even buy a house in l.a for a million dollars this is crazy like you you've got to be dreaming bigger what what's um what's really funny about this is that i have both the the the same personal experience working with inner city high school kids in dc in the 90s and i got to work with like the really bright ones too um and there was kind of almost nothing sadder because the the dc um inner city schools at in the 90s were horrifying like you know you know i i had students coming like right after they've been a shoot like right after that but they've been shooting and they were you know kind of a little shook up because it happened multiple times and these are like these are kids who have to really hide their smarts because they they'll get beat up for it you know um but also i grew up poor you know like i i i didn't think i wasn't sure i was going to go to college i started working in restaurants when i was 11. um i definitely had a little like a pretty strong working-class kind of uh kind of bias and it was only so and i went to the first for college i went to the first school i visited basically i visited school i had done well on the on the sats they gave me a scholarship i was like sure okay um and so i i i went there and i and i got and and i kind of thrived in college i got to finally like be a nerd um and let my nerd out of the closet and um there was this time when i was doing something for the fulbright program and i met this dude who was a barrister slash lawyer human rights uh international practitioner who did stuff in south africa and and and in europe and and it was and he was talking to me and it was like something inside me was cracking like it actually felt physically painful to think for a second like could my life look anything like that because it just there was still this powerful separation in my mind between me and people who are doing really amazing things those were different kinds of people and so when i worked with the nurse and this was this was like right before i started working with these kids and yeah like there is a sense of kind of like what is what's the big sky option you know like what what what um and and one one big limitation on this by the way is the fact that police one of the is that classes kind of pull economic classes kind of police themselves to a degree but there is a sense kind of like so you know let's let's for some of these kids so i i go to college you know and i leave all my friends and they they uh what's what's out there for me that that uh that isn't some kind of betrayal of the people that i come from was something that that i you know i saw a lot about um that i that i found very disempowering but yeah believe me that that mindset aspect the idea that there is something out there that could be beyond you know your previous frame of thinking was it was literally physically painful the first time it occurred to me that's a great way to say it and that's why this moment is so freaky to me because that frame of reference is so hard to break like you said it can feel like a betrayal or it feels like a physical schism and there is a frame of reference right now that is utopian and so people want this pure utopia and when you argue against it you sound like a monster it's like because the the utopia if it could be real really is amazing it sounds absolutely fantastic and the problem is that once you put it back in the real world and make it about actual human beings then it is so unrealistic as to require what we've already talked about multiple times that draconian like you would have to enforce it through violence intimidation um just literally crushing people down and that's where it's like man how how do you get somebody to turn away from a utopia like that sounds about as hard of a frame of reference to pull somebody away from as i can imagine because you're asking them to accept a lesser view right you talked about the i think it was the tsar that ended up getting murdered by a revolutionary because it was like that's not enough like it's better but it's not enough better and so [ __ ] you we're going to kill you and so and it might be enough better that it placates the population and and that would be a disaster because then we won't get to we won't get to perfection and one of the things that i i've had lots of arguments about this stuff in backyards in san francisco and of course i can always pull the actual family history card um but the uh but one thing that i always have to point out is none of these systems deal well with human diversity if you care about diversity um and i'd explain this in terms of communism like the idea that kind of like if you're going to be paid the same amount for working 40 hours a week really well um and you could get away with 20. isn't there also a moral argument that you should spending that 20 hours with your family it's not it it so if there's a singular moral vision um it never works with human diversity um it never works with human skills human knowledge and the idea that some of these utopias are done in the name of diversity it's like yeah but utopias can't compute diversity like they they need conformity um or they don't work uh more enlightenment like systems that actually like kind of like the one we have where essentially we figured out a system constitutionally one of the reasons why i love the constitution so much is where even if people are acting horribly the system can still hold together whereas in communism when you require everybody to be angels that gives the sociopaths superpowers um whereas if you create checks and balances that say like listen even if you're being lousy we we've got a way of dealing with this internally then you have a stable system but all of this thing takes it can't be simple it takes being honest about human limitations and and the fact that for example you know and there's something that i have to say sometimes when i'm dealing with like due process cases um i remember um you know dealing with uh with a case with um wendy murphy who was talking about how people accused of assault on campus should essentially have no due process and she started on a radio show started shouting at me it's like you're saying that women lie um and it's like i haven't said anything like that this was my second time on a radio show and i said well actually all due process requires is that people can be mistaken they don't even necessarily have to lie but also at the same time people lie um and the idea that people can be dishonest people can be abusive of course we can be you also have to you know you also have to make sure that you're not being gamed and all of these sort of all of these like um uh perfectly uh normal parts of human nature uh they don't match well with the with the utopian uh vision and that's one of the reasons why they will all end up as authoritarian nightmares so if we both agree that we have a frame of reference problem you've got people stuck in a loop of wanting to build the utopia which is actually quite noble and you know you want to commend the level of compassion um how do we one do you think that we're already past the tipping point is it inevitable that we're just going to continue you know on these divergent terrifyingly divergent paths until you know something truly erupts into either authoritarianism or um civil war type violence or do you see a way out and if you see it what is it um i'm i i'm gonna practice the episode of humility i preach and say honestly i don't know um i think that the fact that trump continues to dispute the election right now and you have something like i think the latest ones about three quarters of republicans think that the election was a fraud i'm afraid that that's going to blow up and i think that the the the right and the left are weird mirror images of each other and i think that we we can face disaster from from from both uh and i'm afraid that there's going to be a blow up there's going to be something really scary happening in the next couple years and i'm not sure exactly what but it's you know when you have that many of the population who believe the election was stolen that could get that could get really ugly really quickly i hope that like um what happened with timothy mcveigh in the mid 90s a horrifying oklahoma city bombing that did that got a lot of people in whoa whoa no no no no we don't nobody wants that that that's that's not the way we we handle this stuff i hope it doesn't come to something that horrible but for the first time in my i've never heard someone call for martial law um in in us history and michael flynn taking out that that ad saying that he wants martial law and when you already have sort of a utopian movement on on the left and you have sort of a i don't know what to call it you know sort of like a a nationalist populist movement on the right that's a that's a scary phenomenon and i honestly don't know how it ends what i do know is we need to start thinking and this is something that i think you could probably help with we need to start thinking about institutions that people trust um the american psychiatric association came out against toxic masculinity you know for example um which is absolutely taking a position more or less against man the uh the american association of university professors actually came out in some cases against professors the new york times you know fires james bennett because he ran a uh editorial by a sitting senator um a lot of these institutions have lost people's faith for understandable reasons and increasingly i think that there needs to be at least a couple institutions that people all over the spectrum can look at and go well at least i trust these guys and i don't think that exists at the moment um and i think it desperately needs to even just one would help well said well said i think that's a good place to tap out greg man thank you for all the stuff you put in the world dude you're just a voice that i am really really into all the first amendment stuff i highly encourage people to watch the documentary nico perino it was his passion project and man he ran with it and if you haven't already read the coddling of the american mind whoo is that a good one no problem that is absolutely extraordinary where can people engage with you thefire.org my organization is the foundation for individual rights and education we defend free speech due process academic freedom on campus but increasingly we're taking on the role of educating people about small liberal concepts and and freedom of speech i also have a blog called the eternally radical idea which is also on fire eternally radical idea being free speech it's always a radical idea to every generation partially embodied by the fact that in every generation people oppose it yeah sad but true guys really truly somebody that has blown my mind i hope you guys will dig into the stuff that we've talked about and i hope you from a contextual standpoint understand why i'm so obsessed with this this has to do with frame of reference and thinking in a way that allows you to achieve your exciting and hopefully honorable goals and that is certainly my only desire and speaking of exciting and honorable if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care you