What They Don't Want You To Know About Cancel Culture - Rikki Schlott

I feel like if there was ever a conspiracy to try and launch a book a ton of free speech furors at some of America's highest education institutions might very well be it so I'm not saying that you and Greg started all of this stuff off but I am saying that it seems to be conveniently timed yeah um I we convinced all of the IV leagan elite institutions to just self-detonate exactly as we were dropping this book about how terrible and dire the state of free speech is on their campus and the state of discourse so it's been an interesting time for sure also often an unideal time to be a vocal free speech absolutist um because it requires that you defend speech that is often very heinous even in the depths of an unfolding crisis um but certainly I think we're seeing the the consequences of Decades of just the these major elite institutions in America just abdicating the value of free speech completely throwing it to the way side and then allowing radicalism and and some really frightening liberal Tendencies to fester in its place what has happened to the rates of calls for cancellation over the last few years it's been absolutely staggering and since 2014 um fire which is my my co-author Greg lukanov is the the president of the foundation for individual rights and expression and they've tallied more than a thousand attempts to get professors fired 200 of which have been successful in getting them sanctioned um and that actually is twice the rate of the uh 10 years that roughly constitute what McCarthyism was and so if we're looking back in historical context we look at that as a horrendous blate on our record as a country in terms of you know firing people for ideological reasons and we are now outstripping that at roughly twice the pace so I think in the future historians will be looking back at this moment in time and studying it much as we did um and rightfully so the 1950s what is driving this increase why is it ramping up so much what are the the undercurrents that are causing this thing to happen yeah so I think the the major Catalyst here and why we Define cancel culture as starting in 2014 and its modern iteration is because social media allows it to just take off like wildfire and we um we kind of refer to Richard Dawkins is idea of a meme because cancel culture is very uh it's very effective you know you don't have to actually engage with some some's argument you just attack them ad hominum you make an example of them you make sure that no one else wants to tread the same ideological path as them and in the end people see that and watch that and replicate that and I think that social media has allowed for an unprecedented amount of scrutiny on institutions ideas and people which of course is a good thing however we're in one of those like post printing press moments of social unrest where we haven't yet figured out how to navigate this world in which now billions of people are in the cultural conversation and um and anyone could be to torn down at any moment unceremoniously fairly unfairly and so I think you know this is our book is a an attempt to call attention to the issue and also um hopefully get more people on board to figuring out how we get out of this mess because I think that there actually is a lot of um just general desire and a general understanding that that things have gone too far that people are walking on eggshells and that that's not a healthy way to live right so if you're saying that the distribution mechanism of social media frictionless free communication ubiquitous instantly globally accessible that is that's almost like the delivery mechanism driving the virus in some way is there anything deeper than that or is the main driver of this just the fact that humans have perverse incentives there are a bunch of strange things that go on in our psychology and when the opportunity arises is to be able to do this it activates something inside of us or has there been a deeper cultural change too that's driven the cancellation increase yeah I mean I think that the this the seeds have been sewn for decades here where we've just seen a general um institutional creep away from Free Speech values a generational creep as well um and we we definitely believe that cancel culture started in its um kind of fledging form on American campuses in the 80s and 90s when the first wave of political correctness was coming around like Bill was doing the politically incorrect show before I was even born and it was kind of laughable at that point in time but then all of a sudden as soon as social media came onto the Forefront and jenzie unfortunately my generation came to college campuses and began unceremoniously shouting down and tearing down their professors um it exploded out into the open in a way that it hadn't really historically however um the the creep away from classical liberal values has been consistent um and you know one thing that was really frightening writing this book is realizing how different Greg my co-author is um nearing 50 and I'm 23 so we have totally different generational span and the the old idioms and kind of um kind of foundational principles of American society that he grew up with like to each his own and Sticks and Stones I wasn't raised with any of them um we I was I was raised with words can wound you and um oppressed people need to be protected and and you need to be the the warrior to step in on their behalf L they be offended and it's just a fundamental flip and I think that as a culture we've just moved more towards protectionism and and a feeling that we're all feeble rather than this resilient sort of anti- fragile framework that used to be kind of core to to the American Spirit I think it's the British it's the British Spirit too you know like stiff up a lip that's what we were known for the stiff up a lip and you know um musn't Grumble musn't Grumble things are going badly but musn't Grumble uh yeah there's a increase in fragility right a rampant fragility but it's not it's Hollow because it's not like there's an actual change people are living longer than ever before people have got better health care than ever before you're more able to deal with anything from the car accident to the bad weather to the heat to the cold to whatever it is so it's odd that you have real world situations going in One Direction whilst perceptions of how bad it is going in another but just how bad is it now like what what stats have you found to back up just how many people are being cancelled or or what the the sense the cultural therometer is saying yeah I mean fire does these tremendous surveys of student sentiment around the country and we know that roughly two-thirds of students on college campuses say that they're self-censoring um we also know that roughly 90% of professors say the same and that one and 10 have been investigated for what their what should be protected speech um and so I think that one of the things that's interesting is there there tends to consistently be es and flows of cancel culture where people say oh it's behind us and like it's no it's no longer an issue 2016 was a rough moment but like now we're back to normal and then the pandemic happens and it's even worse in the wake of 2020 and then oh no maybe we're back to normal and then the Israel Palestine conflict erupts and it's just anytime there's a moment of social unrest a a culture that is not actually deeply rooted in its Free Speech values will tend towards a liberalism censorship um attacking disagre or denters from the predominant Viewpoint and I think that we see that time and again and every single time it's been getting more severe so if you look at the case loads that fire um gets from students and faculty across the country uh 2020 was a record-breaking year despite the fact that kids weren't even on campuses so they had an unprecedented case load and you know if you also look at the the raw statistics of the surveys of of Americans consistently roughly four and five Americans will agree that political correctness has gone too far that cancel culture is a problem that they feel that they have to self-censor and I think it's genuinely a tyranny of the minority it's just the problem is that that remaining 20% squeaky Wheels who actually do tear people down have such an outsized impact on society where we're all self-censoring and I felt that myself being an NYU student in the the recent past for sure what was your experience on campus like when you got there I had gone to a um a boarding school that was almost like a mini College before so I feel like I was kind of primed by the time I arrived at NYU um my freshman year of high school was the first time that I realized I just did not agree with the the prevailing Viewpoint um when they on Martin Luther King day is put all the kids in different buildings based on their race to talk about their racial experience and I remember being like this is kind of the opposite of how I've been taught to uh internalize the the lessons of Martin Luther King Jr and um yeah so that was I Knew by the time I arrived at NYU that I was uh kind of going against the grain and when I did get there I was understandably I think in retrospect concerned for my social standing and so I was hiding Thomas Soul books and Jordan Peterson books under my bad which is really embarrassing in retrospect and like now I've been on Jordan's podcast and I'm super cancelled and you know booted from every group chat that I was in basically at NYU but um it was generally a an ideologically oppressive environment I would say I I rarely heard dissenting viewpoints um I took I I did a two years of a Humanities degree before dropping out despite having a 4.0 GPA because you know full tuition for Zoom school was not going to happen um but I would say that generally it was one way or the highway kids would even try occasionally to pop into philosophical conversations and say you know to play Devil's Advocate and then present some unpopular opinion and they would literally be scoffed and hissed at consistently so um I would it just it made me self- censor and I realized once I started writing for the New York Post and being outspoken finally in the pandemic that so many people around me reached out to me privately and said you know I I completely agree with you and I've been in a class with them and I would never have known because you know cancel culture and liberalism thrives by making everyone feel alone but even at a school like NYU there there were a considerable number of kids who actually did feel similarly oppressed but um or ideologically oppressed but didn't feel that they could speak out and and didn't have any examples around them it's strange to think if that's the case 66% of students are self-censoring in some form or another on campus but that there will be a good chunk of those students that will hiss and and mock if you try to even steal man let alone actually have a different opinion I know it seems like it's it's I'm wondering what is motivating those people to be so vehement in their enforcement of a particular ideology that 66% of them don't agree with or at least have criticisms of like what's the I'm trying to work out what's the incentive what what's in it for the counselor m well I think that the the there's like a kind of cluster B personality type that's really been um empowered on campuses I think and and people who are I think genuine Believers at a place like NYU I there are a considerable fraction of people who who generally believe that if they step in on behalf of some you know oppressed theoretical group that might be offended by something that you say which by the way they're almost never the demographic of people that they're defending but I think that there's moral High Ground to it and um and and a sense of righteousness and I I would even go as far as to say like a bit of like a a religious kind of attitude towards it like I I think of John mccarter's book woke racism and and the idea that um this is kind of supplanting this like this ideology in a in a post Faith world is often times occupying that same part of the the human psyche I would say um but also it's so institutionalized at these colleges as well I think that even even if not every Professor agrees with it certainly the administrators are extremely disproportionately leftwing or left leaning and when I was at NYU for example we on the back of our ID cards it says here's 911 here's the phone number for the campus police which you probably could theoretically need it in New York City at any point in time and here's the the Student Health Center and all these emergency numbers and then also the bias response hotline where you could call if you felt grieved or offended by something that someone said and it's a literally an institutionalized snitch culture on these campuses and it was literally on the back of the bathroom stalls too they'd have like posters of like has something happened to you call the bias response hotline and you're you know immediately on the phone with an administrator so I you're walking on eggshells and even if it is just a small percentage of kids who will hiss or who will call you any sort of iser ism um or a phobe at any any opportunity just one kid doing that is enough to shut an entire class down I believe and I I saw it firsthand yeah it's a a very effective leverage one person that has that what's that um panopticon it's kind of like the panopticon right that you have one person that's able to be in the middle and manipulate an awful lot of people around the opinions and the fear it's a race to the bottom in that regard like Whoever has the most the highest Purity level is the one whose opinion is is going to continue to be pushed forward what was that analysis of mass Twitter bands that you guys love yeah they found um this is this is data that we got from the national contagion Research Institute and they followed the growth of the platform gab as Twitter did Mass bans and purges of accounts that were um at various times associated with like Infowars or um there were I think post Charlottesville there were groups of um that they' identified as white supremacists and proud boys and they would do these Mass bans and purges of accounts starting around 2016 and then literally in lockstep there would be a mass Exodus to gab every single time and that the percentage of uh of gabs that included the word ban would go up by like a factor of 10 and so we we analyzed that data basically to demonstrate that when we do fight ideas that could be very offensive and unsavory and and I I understand why people are offended by white supremacist views and proud boy views I'm not defending them however when you remove them from from the the common square in places where they might interact with other viewpoints or where they might get quote tweeted and publicly shamed you end up creating even deeper more entrenched Echo Chambers and so we were very fortunate to get this data from NCI because we now can provably say that censorship does not make these ideas go away it just puts them into more obscure crevices of the internet where people are more likely to agree and have a positive feedback loop so um we we were extremely fortunate that that had not been published before um we had done this book and and I think it's a a demonstration of the importance of a platform actually tacking towards free speech because those views are not gone they're just somewhere else and none of us hear about them but they very much exist in in another crevice of the internet what do you think cancellation is trying to achieve like what you just explained there it doesn't seem to work it pushes these ideas underground in some regard it can throw them into Echo Chambers where there are presumably no dissenting voices what what is it trying to achieve I mean I think it's just predicated on a think a fundamental misunderstanding of how how dialogue works and how minds are changed in hearts and and minds are one over I think I think there's been such a an alienation from the classical liberal values post Enlightenment that that made society free and and made dialogue robust and made debate healthy and um in the realm of ideas and not ad homenum and you know for for example I I've never learned John Stewart Mills on Liberty I never learned the importance of free speech and growing up even going to Great Schools and doing a Philosophy degree at NYU I didn't understand the importance and and just how profound those post Enlightenment ideals are and how much they need to be bought into by the entire culture and community in order to thrive and I think that those some people who engage in cancel culture are genuinely meped but other people I think do believe that if they shut down and I don't know castigate anybody who has a bad belief that that somehow actually does expunge it from society which is provably untrue I think it's it's polarized us even further um but I I do think that it's just because people are are no longer taught the the importance of you know he who knows only his side of the argument knows little of that and and the importance of being able to exist in the realm of ideas and then frankly it's just a an easy cheap tactic to win arguments without winning arguments because if I can attack you for being a sis hat white male I don't actually have to deal with the fact that you might have an ideological argument that that Corners me or makes me uncomfortable in my own predispositions what are some of the mechanisms for enforcing cancellation that people might not realize are part of the cancellation machine I would say one thing that people seem not to talk enough about is how early it's starting and especially in the in the social media age I grew up I had an iPhone when I was 10 or maybe 11 I was on Instagram by the time I was 11 surely and I am now like the human receptacle for every parents horror stories about what's happening to their middle schoolers getting cancelled for like a two-c Snapchat video or someone screenshotted something and now everyone's seen it and I think that one of the enforcement mechanisms going forward in the age of everybody having this insanely excessive digital footprint and all of their adolescent blunders being forever immortalized in a way that I think any older person should shudder at the thought of um that's one way that it's being enforced is that there's an entire generation of young people who were coming up just surrounded by trip wires even in their teenage years that they're arriving on campus in college already primed for the fact that they have to self-censor or that they could be called out at any point in time and I think that that's self-perpetuating because that's making less and less people even want to stick their neck out in the first place but then I also think that cancel culture is is so dangerous and so powerful not just for the people whose lives are torn down and completely ruined but also for all the people around them that see that and see them having been made an example of and then will refuse and understandably so To Tread that same territory what's that what's it called like a a a some kind of ideological bias test that people get asked uh and it's almost like the culpably deniable test of of becoming working out where your politics are it's not part of some uh induction it's not even part of a code of conduct but people are just sometimes throw a little question like what do you think about Jordan Peterson like have you ever listened to Ben Shapiro have you done know this thing and that's one of the more sort of soft introduction ways to this that slowly over time results in you being denigrated at or or disparaged or made to feel other and um yeah it's not just people calling for removal of accounts and bans and protests it's there seems to be sort of a softer kind of alienation of people that have different views which importantly is culpably deniable right there's no point at which you've done the thing because I think that people who are seduced by the prospect of being a white knight or who like the idea of performative empathy because it makes them look more whilst having to do nothing moral or people who just want to enact power and enforce this over other people the game is beginning to evolve in the way that memes often do where if you it's now low status to be seen as someone that calls for cancellation because cancellation itself has become a meme so now the methods of cancellation need to become increasingly subtle they need to develop as the defense mechanisms develop as well yeah I mean I think it's it's I think we've seen coordinated sort of Twitter mob tear Downs although I would say that 2020 was kind of a an exception to that but to your to your example um or to your point an example of that would be in 2020 and after the death of George Floyd if you didn't post the black Square then that was a a moral the ideological Ro shock test yeah exactly and I mean there were people who I I have friends who were completely castigated and and and unfollowed and blocked for not having done so I I mean I didn't do it and that wasn't didn't go over too well at NYU um but that would be the perfect example of like a a soft like do you buy into to the prevailing ideology at that point in time um and I would also say to that point there's definitely like a a slow and subtle quarantining that I saw of when I was in um in classes at NYU and in my more philosophy oriented courses where it would kind of become clear that maybe one or two people are a little more heterodox and it was just like a slow people are going to start kind of sitting on the other side of the classroom when they come in if that person's over there um to the point where it was like this kind of bubble as though we were ill or there was something wrong with us um and I I've also watched how growing up that way has I think polarized young people even more because if you grow up if you're being racially segregated when you're 14 on Martin Luther King Jr day and you're having political ideologies shut down your throat from pretty much day one it's understandable why some people especially young people become the reactionary opposite or can go down some rabbit hole on the internet um and like I I'm fascinated to see I'm sure you saw that statistic that um girls and boys are like forking politically right now and I think there's what do you make of that um I you know I think it's I think part of it is a little bit of a reactionary thing for boys and understandably so I think that I I tacked right when I saw how weird the left was around me when I was in school but I also feel like politics are like there's almost a feminization of the left a little bit and a lot of um I think a lot of even cancel culture or or attitudes about free speech and and needing to protect other people from harmful speech almost hijack the the female proclivity to be more empathetic or or to um you know emotional Ally reason more than rationally reason which is obviously you know you do the whole like on average and of course there are exceptions to that rule but I mean even if you look at students attitude on free speech and the percentages of students at various schools who will say that it's sometimes acceptable to respond to speech with violence consistently like the top five schools are all all women's schools with the highest percentage of people saying that they would respond with violence to speech and so I do think that our political binary is taking on a little bit of a gendered tone and then you also just have the the reality of growing up on the internet and ending up down rabbit holes which happened to me politically and I was like all the way on the right one year and then all the way on the left one year and it's it's understandable how how that could cause a polarization I think for sure have you looked at Corey Clark's work do you know who she is name sounds familiar but evolutionary psychologist phenomen Al and she sent an email to every psychology lecturer in America she contacted them all to ask about uh Trends around self-censorship specifically looking at what sorts of topics this put it in the second book it's so she's so great uh she was on the show a couple of months ago and um consistently female teachers skew towards there are certain things that shouldn't be spoken about there are harsher judgments that should be for the lecturers that do talk about this sort of stuff and shock horror the two areas that were the most uh derogated the ones that you shouldn't talk about behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology why well because there are immutable facts or it posits that there are immutable facts and sex denialism or sex difference denialism has no place to slot in in either of those worldviews yeah that's interesting and also to that um effect fire will ask students what issues are like the touchiest on campus that they feel that they can't speak about and consistently they're the most important political issues of the day which is super disturbing like in 2020 all of a sudden it was racial issues and then this year um affirmative action was like all the way at the top and the Israel Palestine conflict is always up there and it's like the things that you would most want a college campus to be the Forum of different ideas colliding in a in a an intellectual and robust and healthy way it's the ideas that are the the most touchy of transgender issues are always at the very top or post row was uh the issue of abortion and it's it's it's super disturbing to see that the things that you'd most want to have kids hash out or at least hear and understand competing viewpoints on are consistently the ones at the bottom of the Barrel in terms of what they're actually willing to touch as well well forget the fact this is important to the development of a brain that's trying to work out what's true in the world they're the most interesting things M they're the ones that that that are actually interesting to talk about you decide totically seal off a bunch of different things and you're left with stuff that no one has a really strong opinion on or that no one can become offended by and you go well by definition those things aren't very passion inducing they're not exciting to talk about so I think back to you know I went to UNI 2006 and I was at Newcastle uh for five years so I did two degrees while I was there there wasn't a single point while I was there where politics even came in I was doing a business degree I was regularly in lecture theaters with 250 or 300 students and there wasn't a single time when it came in what it was pre me too so I guess you know there was some reckonings kind of around social justice and male behavior and male female sex Dynamics and and and politics as well you know it's it's pre-trump it's pre largely pre- social media Facebook was available the that I went if you only had a a University email address that was when it was still gatee kept by having a University email address it was only for people that attended like accredited institutions or whatever but that it my experience at University despite being mostly boring was completely bereft of any uh control like we were degenerate Club promoters and and like Jim Bros so I guess we may have disregarded them had they've been there in any case but I didn't notice any of this and it makes me it makes me sad it makes me sad to think that I I still have faith and I still believe that University is a very good formative experience because I look at the transformation that I went through absolutely 100% of it outside of the lecture theater but I look at all of the changes that I went through and I think if I hadn't had that I would it would have taken me significantly longer to have got to the stage where I was socially uh in terms in terms of my life experience in terms of my networking ability in terms of how much business experience I got all of those things it was like a you know a crash course Navy SEAL hell week of just learning to be around other people and losing your keys and getting drunk and having an argument with a friend at 3 in the morning all of the experiences outside of the University thing were important but if every single one of them is colored with this like sword of damic that's hanging over your head in case you say the wrong thing and now the fact that you do have a gullible surveillance state co-opted by volunteers that don't realize they're doing it like someone has CCTV footage at all times we had this idea this is like the least academic insight into uh the proliferation of smartphones back in the day we used to do a t-shirt Barrow called Carnage and this was 2007 2008 2009 it was a license to print money you put one of these things out and it just sold out immediately and there was tasks on the back things like pulled a pig got off with three randoms shop swapped shoes with somebody people would write the first half of the alphabet down the the right side of their arm and the second half down the left side of their arm and they'd try and kiss one person from each letter of the alphabet like this is classic Mid naughties American Pi style like University Behavior but one of the questions I asked a friend was like where did that sort of Larry British sort of student culture go and he said as soon as the smartphone came around no one could make mistakes on a night out without fearing that it would Define them for the rest of their life that you have you know you kissed some person that's like uncool or embarrassing or whatever you do it in 2006 people laugh about it and then it's either forgotten about or you can deny it outright and do whatever but in the age of the Internet it's you know cemented online for the rest of time and it defines you absolutely I mean and I think that the impacts on young people are so much more profound than we've even really started to talk about I mean I'm 23 and I'm just at like the the beginning of just burgeoning into adulthood and being the first cohort of people who are able to reflect back on what it means to have an a Smartphone when you're 10 and to have the threat of anything popping up at any point in time and any anyone born post 2000 who tells you that they don't have something unsavory somewhere that they would rather not have come back to haunt them is absolutely lying to you I think we're ultimately going to a ceasefire on this front because it's going to get so bad we're never going to have a politician who um Can Survive Oppo research for the rest of time now that we've been so overly online and I think the the sad thing to me is that young people demonstrably know this like I the amount of of concern that I've heard from my peers and and from from people reaching out to me about their own children um and also the the polling if you ask Generations what what their view is of cancel culture positive or negative the most positive view is Millennials and then it gets more negative as as you get older except for jenzi completely reverses that Trend so even though Millennials have the most positive view of cancel culture jenzi has the most negative view even more negative than Boomers because we grew up with it like we grew up looking behind our shoulders but the problem is it's a very small squeaky wheel minority of Our Generation that is at the helm of these cancel campaigns and we'll like Twitter shame their boss but the rest of us have not been given the the restorative kind of free speech oriented classical liberal set of values to supplant cancel culture we just know we don't like this but we're not quite sure how to fix it or put her finger on it or stop attacking people at hominum and and living in the realm of ideas so I think there's a a tremendous amount of anxiety and unrest and being a young person who grows up unable to make social faux paws as everyone does when they're an adolescent or you know have their Marxist phase and then realize a couple months later that that wasn't for them but that's part of growing up and exploring and you know I think um young people just really have not been taught the the values required to um interact in the intellectual world with the the epistemic humility of realizing that you might be wrong at any point in time and that anyone that you talk to knows something that you don't know um and that your opinions aren't part of your personhood and and extending that same um generosity and Grace to somebody who you might be disagreeing with um and I think that's really profound and I also um just to go back to what you were saying on the on the University front like I'm I dropped out of NYU with a 4.0 GPA not because I have some sort of disain for education and learning but the really sad reality at that point in time and such an ideologic IC Al homogeneous environment was that I had to drop out for my love of learning in defense of it and it's not because I don't believe in the importance of education but I think in its current form it is so distorted and these institutions of of higher education have just appointed themselves the sole Gatekeepers to success and poate society and have had absolutely no Market pressure placed upon them and it's going to require more young people proving that it's not the only Pathway to success to actually I think Shake um Society from its complacency and challenge these institutions to actually be better and to serve people who are their patrons talk to me about the relationship between Free Speech laws and Free Speech culture yeah I think that this is one of um the most interesting insights from the book where you know there are three countries with extremely robust Free Speech laws on the books which aside from the us almost to if you were to read them you might think that it's the first amendment and they are turkey North Korea and Russia so having a free speech law on the books means absolutely nothing if your culture in practice does not abide by them whereas on the flip side one of the most vibrant points in intellectual history was the French Enlightenment at a point in time where there was absolutely no legal protection for free speech on the books at all whatsoever but because there was a a salon culture and a a culture in which at were interested in the free exchange of ideas and leaning into intellectual Society Free Speech was able to flourish and I think that it's really important to realize that merely having the First Amendment on the books or merely having its equivalent on the books in another country is not adequate to actually fostering a culture that operates in a free speech way um and there's a a great quote by a judge named Learned Hand which does not really sound like a real name to me but and I'll bungle it but roughly um roughly the quote is that you know Liberty lives in the in the hearts and minds of of every man and woman and if it lies there it doesn't need a court or a law to protect it but if it dies there no court or law can save it and I think that we're seeing this slow and subtle cultural shift away from Free Speech Norms that all of a sudden like throw social media in the mix and you can burn any heretic at the Stak and it'll happen like that because it's it's really hard to grow up in the west today and realize just how crazy it is that we don't burn our Heretics at the stake in the scheme of human history we live in like the Teeny tiniest little sliver of time where we actually don't do that but all of a sudden now we're doing it in the digital sphere because that is Mankind's Instinct and so just having a law on the books doesn't really matter unless everyone Buys in and actually abides by the the cultural code that that it is really required there was a really interesting Insight I saw from the New York Post article that you guys did where it was talking about how Free Speech culture and ideological diversity can make the world more chaotic and because most humans don't like this a good contingent of those people will happily trade their freedom for increased predictability that if you're exposed to new opinions and ideas that don't conform with you you have to confront the fact that maybe you're wrong and you know accepting that you are wrong to the ego is tantamount to destruction it's almost an invalidation of you entirely oh my God if I'm wrong about this what else might I be wrong about and this denial of ever having to admit that we're wrong especially in a world where everything that we do and say is permanently cemented on the internet for all of time to people to scrutinize I thought that was very interesting and I I think from my perspective that seems to be right a more chaotic world with a mult multiplicity of ideological viewpoints and diversity of opinion is unsettling in many ways to people and they will happily trade the accuracy and the truthfulness uh and the freedom that they have in order to increase the reliability and predictability that they have about the world going forward yeah absolutely and I think that that's made even worse by the fact that polarization has I think made politics so much more tied to individual identity than it has been in the past as well so an assault on your ideas feels like an assault on you as a person and I think also to the the point of chaos I mean if we if we look back historically we're in the very beginning ages of what it means to now have billions of people in the cultural conversation thanks to social media it's you know been roughly a decade since it's been invention of the printing press and when the printing press was invented Henry VII was trying to license who can print a a pamphlet and there were hundreds of years of religious wars as a result and that was a really chaotic and uncomfortable time where I think it's actually pretty understandable why the powers that be and the people that were beholden to them wanted to squash out all the new voices that entered the cultural conversation and challenged the norms and we look back and we think well that was a great thing and literacy rates Rose and that created the Enlightenment and the world as we know it but we're still in that early kind of chaos days of social media and I think the fact that things haven't gotten worse than they are at the moment is actually kind of amazing um and and a testament to the fact that there are still some people who do believe in in free speech and and the wisdom of the populace but um I I think like the Twitter files just go to demonstrate how how threatening new voices in a cultural conversation can be to the social Fabric and to um the kind of levers of society what do you say to the people who claim this isn't cancellation culture this is consequence culture this is just people being brought to account for having heinous reprehensible views I mean I think that the the swath of views that have become cancelable offenses has grown so considerably I mean we just have like case after case in our book of um there's there's one and Carol hoen who was a Harvard Professor who God forbid one on Fox News and she and she's lovely and she's tactful and she's careful with her words and she went on Fox News um to discuss some issue of gender she wrote the book T um about testosterone and she extremely tactfully said you know we can respect people's gender identity and use their pronouns however we have to also acknowledge the fact that biological sex is real and on a on a fundamental level and for that she was effectively squeezed out of her job to the point where and I know you know this story but to the point where she she told us um in an interview for the book that she was actually um suicidal for the first time in her life and so if the the group of cancelable offenses is now including acknowledging biological reality as a professor in your own field um or you know going all the way down to now middle schoolers that whose parents call me constantly and and reach out to me or email me um to say that their seventh grader has now been canceled for something which I mean it's SE in seventh grade that just shouldn't even you shouldn't even be politically aware you're worried about boys and acne and not politics at that point in time um and just the sheer number as well but if it really were about accountability culture I think the truth that a lot of people who've witnessed these cancel mobs form um Can attest to is the fact that apologies do not make it better it's not about saying oh I I did tweet that 10 years ago but I completely disagree with it now and I apologize for offending you because that doesn't fix it it's not actually about making people account for the any error that they might have made or any misstep it's about making an example of them and shaming them yeah it's having your morality stand on the shoulders of someone that you can easily accuse I mean the Carol thing we went for breakfast me her uh William Costello a couple of months ago and uh that woman cries more easily than anyone I've ever met she's like the most empathetic I think she cried six times on Rogan like four times on my show she's just such a touchy feely lovely person that's really delicately trying to move through this she's a really perfect example of whatever we want to call it like um soft mechanisms of cancellation because at no point did anyone come to her and say you can't teach anymore but every teaching assistant that she was supposed to be working with refused to help in her class so if you don't have a teaching assistant like how are you going to you can't do your class and I think she had one of the most popular it like quite a well attended class at har so it's okay well I guess I'm kind of like on the bench for now and then when you're on the bench for that so long you just end up kind of falling away so and it's so interesting to think that the the apology doesn't make any difference because if that was what you were after then the apology would fix the problem it's like hey interesting how interesting I didn't know about this particular statistic about this thing because no one from an ideologically Pur Purity spiral Spiral driven world can believe that someone would be sufficiently epistemically humble to actually ever be able to say that it's like no no no no this is you your identity and your opinions and your ideology are one and the same you know we saw this with Rogan the variety of cancellations that he went through a couple of years ago and what people do I thought it was really formative people try and say here is an individual instance or a collection of instances that may seem small here but we know that they are representative of this big iceberg that lies below the surface this is the The Smoking Gun that tells you that this person is the bigoted racist transphobic homophobic whatever thing that we always knew that they were and this is this is finally the crack the Fisher has shown through this facade that they've created so all right well what you had with Joe and what you know increasingly I would like to think people will see with other online content creators or writers or anybody all right well that might be true but I also have 5,000 hours of him talking to people on podcasts and it didn't come up then so he's either the best liar and and deflector of his bigoted racist views in history or that's unrepresentative overall and I don't know it seems to me like I would like to think people give what used to be called the benefit of the doubt but I don't know that that seems to be increasingly rare now yeah I mean I think that also to that point the benefit of the doubt is often given to anybody's like ideological friends but then it's precisely the opposite if they just don't like someone instinctively um and I I think you know it's been instructive to see like Rogan survive cancellation attempts and and Barry waste to make a career out of it basically with the free press and the awesome stuff that she's doing there um or shipal and and seeing Netflix finally actually toughen up and and um say no to their employees that were trying to wreak havoc over a single joke I mean I do think that there have been examples of of cancellation going so far that there is a band of people who are willing to come around and actually support you and champ in you as a result and I think that that Jo organ's a perfect example of that um but I you know I worry that those are only people who are in a powerful enough position when it first happens to them that people know um and there's so many just like unheard stories or even I I think that one of the problems is like on a college campus it's much easier to quantify how often this is happening because people often have legal recourse but in in the private spheres it's impossible for us to tally how many people have been cancelled not only because some people will just shut down and never say anything but also because there are so many examples of people who will talk to you off the Record about it but they've signed an NDA because that was their their Severance agreement with whatever company they were squeezed out of um and you know um Jennifer SE who left Levis she refused to sign an NDA and and turned away a million dollars of payout to um because she had criticized covid policies and School lockdown which apparently means that you can no longer be an executive at Levis um but you know she she refused to sign an NDA and we only know that that even happened because she she had the spine to actually say no I want to maintain my intellectual autonomy but um yeah I mean I think that there's there's so many high-profile tear Downs that thankfully people are starting to land on their feet and support one another but um you know I fear that the 2024 election will be another wave of all of the same stuff and I I'm not feeling great about the future of cancel culture in the near future so oh yeah what what are your predictions give me give me the weather report moving forward for the Stormfront of cancellation yeah I think I am hugely concerned about 2024 as is my co-author um I I especially considering that we have such polarizing options on both sides of the aisle I'm I'm very concerned that 2020 and 2016 were just like little trial runs for how how polarized and how at hominum we're about to get um at least in the US and I think that you know the the Ripple effects of American politics are really felt across at least the english- speaking world and often just the cultural West in general so I'm not feeling fabulous about the near future I'm extremely nervous as we seem to be um kind of just powering ahead towards an election between two historically unpopular incumbents so um I don't know I'm not feeling great but what what are your predictions on on that front do you think that the social unrest is going to continue it's a difficult one I would guess yes because the memes of production for creating Trends online and going completely super viral have become more sophisticated like this is one of the things that's interesting people look at the algorithms on social media as if they are the things that give us the content but they also train the content creators so if you think that the memes that came out in 2016 were sophisticated and built to limic hijack you and if you thought that the things that happened in 2020 were oh my God like look at all of this stuff wait until 2024 each time that it comes back around there is a new iteration of people and sometimes AI now creating stuff that is even more compelling that's even more outrage inducing so I don't know I'm in Texas so I feel a little bit like I'm insulated from anything sort of too crazy even being in Austin people call it a blue dot in a red ocean I've never seen any of the blue dots here it just seems to be like just a red ocean but um yeah it's it's going to be it's going to be very interesting and I don't know it's so right to say that most of the people that survived their cancellations with people who already had tons of momentum you know Chappelle Rogan JK Rowling Etc um and there's definitely a part of some sides of the cancel mob picking fights with people that they know can't fully defend themselves you know like Carol hoen again is a good example of that like she's so kind it was obviously going to emotionally impact her if you're someone that even knows has even seen five minutes of her on a podcast you know that this isn't someone that's going to come out of the gates swinging like Dave P right it's someone who's to be very impacted by this and also doesn't have a million person Twitter where they can Wrangle a huge audience of people that come around and also like what's the lesson to take away from that everybody should have a huge mailing list of email address everyone should build up a massive substack as like a break glassing case of cancellation thing that's not realistic yeah no absolutely I mean and I think that um I think that we're only seeing just the beginning of of how profound that's going to get I I worry about 24 I worry about every single moment of cultural unrest that we have going forward unless we actually return to the values that make a divers a diverse democracy possible I think that um that's pretty much impossible and we will end up going towards a Marxist sort of divide and conquer situation which makes enemies of everyone unless we actually can start looking at view point point and and living in the realm of ideas and the realm of of personhood in two separate planes um and so I think until until we really have a cultural Reckoning and it gets really ugly which I think it's coming in the near future um I don't think that that things will get much better but I'm curious you so Austin is not as blue as as they say it is I don't know if it's me just spending time with lots of bigoted reprehensible people uh like neuro diverent degenerates but they seem to be they all seem to be like you know relatively Free Speech relatively open to new ideas um yeah I I haven't se I mean there's like some stuff stop having kids.org does like this goth parade every year down Broadway there was some stuff to do with like PR Lifey things but that's not that's not because it's BL that's just a a variety of opinions being shown via Street protest um what else have I seen there was a pronatalism conference here two weeks ago you know there's a lot of different stuff going it doesn't seem to be very heavily controlled um thinking about that though you the complete unlikeliness of people building up some huge online platform so that they can then deploy it to protect themselves in case of being cancelled what are the potential solutions to this Beyond make it worse so everyone hates it more and then it getss better are there any more fluffy Solutions than that any less apocalyptic ones of course um yeah so we the the final section of our book is Solutions oriented and I think um a lot of it is just throwing everything at the wall and hoping that something sticks but we think that parenting is a large portion of it um especially with young people and that a lot of the um the the sense that words can be violence and wound you are the result of helicopter parenting and and a um just complete abandonment of the sort of ideas of anti fragility that prior Generations were raised with Jen Z was very coddled and protected and made to be anxious and feel as though they're feeble and um endangered by the world around them and my co-author um his previous book is the coddling of the American mind which um concentrated quite a lot on parenting and its impact on politics and gen z um and so we think that there's a lot about leading by example as a parent and raising kids who will not be cancellor and understand their own vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of their friends um and I I do find a tremendous amount of Hope in the fact that young people are so put off by cancel culture that if they were just given the positive restorative framework to fight back against it and um kind of a social pact that would be mutually protective that there's there's some hope there going forward um we also think that divesting away from the the elite University system just being the only way that people end up in in positions of power in society is a healthy thing um and that people who are hiring um should consider kids coming from large State schools and kids from different backgrounds or people who didn't finish college or people who went down a different path and that we shouldn't just have this funnel of kids coming from consistently the the most elite schools or the schools with the worst attitudes towards Free Speech which I think it's no surprise that we're seeing uh absolute chaos erupting on campuses like Harvard right now because if you abdicate free speech and you suppress students and and send bad ideas underground for decades on end all of a sudden in a moment of cultural unrest they're going to explode and that's precisely what we're seeing right now um and so we believe that you know opening our minds to alternative education systems and not allowing these schools that seem to breed cancel culture and counselors to you know take the Reigns of society consistently with every graduate class that's a positive um and also even people who are running corporations uh can I think take one note out of Netflix's book after The J Dave Chappelle controversy where they said you know if you can't tolerate the fact that we are going to publish viewpoints that you disagree with as as a platform for ideas and expression then you can leave um I think that's that was a remarkably unique and brave stance to take and actually coinbase did that um a while ago their CEO Brian Armstrong was like we're just not going to make any institutional statements and if that's a problem for you you can go and like 10% of their employee base did actually go but like that's not the 10% of people that you want to work for you so I think um on the the level of Corporations we can um I think there are a lot of we hear frequently Greg and I both from corporate leaders who are terrified of their like 23-year-old tires and that's just such a bizarre power imbalance and it's very fixable if you just create a free speech culture from the GetGo but I also think weirdly um after October 7th there's a lot of people rediscovering the importance of institutional neutrality and of free speech and free expression and you know it's I think it's a really revealing moment for schools to suddenly say oh you know we had a statement about Kyle written House's aquid and BLM and all these completely irrelevant things to the interworkings of a university but we can't make a statement on this of course I think it's it's shocking that this is the moment that they finally discovered that institutions are full of people with viewpoints and do not have viewpoints themselves but maybe there's a silver lining that this moment of just absolute chaos in in institutions where Free Speech was not valued for so long where they're suddenly hiding behind the veence of free speech like maybe this is where we actually buy in and we realize we're all vulnerable in a world where a liberalism is allowed to re Supreme what would you say as a piece of advice to someone who is threatened with cancellation or is going through it have you got a A Todo and not to-do checklist for those people yeah I think um obviously it's it's so dependent on the level of supportive people around you but I think the most important thing for everyone who is concerned about cancel culture to say now as as an individual before anything happens to them or anyone that they know is that if someone that you know and care about and like is attacked you commit that you will stand up for them it's not that I I agree with their viewpoint but they're a good person and tearing them down is not the right thing to do and I think that if we afford that to other people that um and hopefully expect that in return from them if the the mob comes for us that's one way to fight back I think the power of someone else standing up for you is really profound and unfortunately cancel culture thrives because everyone else is scared to stick their neck out there and like when I was writing about free speech at NYU for the New York Post which is not really the most popular thing to do surprisingly um you know I have so many people messaging me and saying oh I completely support you and I completely agree with you but just don't tell anyone that we had this conversation and that that's got to stop and we have to Short Circuit this but on the front of if you actually are targeted with a cancel culture attempt it's funny this is actually a point where my co-author and I have a little bit of disagreement where he says never apologize under any circumstances period And I don't fully agree with that I think if it's something that you would apologize to a friend for or something that you genuinely didn't mean I don't think you apologize and try to Plate the individual who's treating you unfairly but if you genuinely don't agree with the tweet that you sent when you were 14 because who does then I think you say that's not me but I don't think that you ever try to Plate the mob that's the number one thing is if someone is attacking you unfairly you don't try to respond to that with with undo rationality when or ever compromise and apologize for something that you don't actually feel any remorse for for sure Ricky schlot ladies and gentlemen where should people go they want to keep up to date with the things that you're doing where should they go on the internet um my Twitter is just my name Ricky schlot and Ricky SCH slot.com and um I think probably by the time this comes out I'll be launching a new podcast um under Bill Mars umbrella Club random so um that will be forthcoming in 2024 very cool I enjoy the prospect of you joining me in the muck and the Meer of the podcasting world I am super excited to I've been learning from you doing all my homework uh waking up to Modern wisdom so thank you my pleasure I really appreciate you thank you for today if you enjoyed that episode then here for a selection of the best clipss from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe