"- If the goal is the project of human knowledge, which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think and what people really think is an inc..."

"Let's start with a big question. What is cancel culture? Now, you've said that you don't like the term as it's been, quote, dragged through the mud and abused endlessly by a whole host of controversia..."

"- So there's so many things I want to ask you here. But one, actually, just looking at the organization of FIRE, can you explain what the organization is because it's interconnected to this whole figh..."

"And I left it just so moved and impressed and with a depth of understanding of how important this person was. - That's interesting. You mentioned to me offline, connected to this, that at least it run..."

"And it doesn't hold up, even our ideas about the way things fall. As you know, Galileo established, like even our intuitions, they're just wrong. And so a lot of the early history of freedom of speech..."

"And so one thing that makes FIRE a little different from other organizations is however, we're not just a First Amendment organization. We are a free speech organization. But at the same time, a lot o..."

"- I mean, that intuitive level that you speak to, I hope that all of us have that kind of basic intuition when a line is crossed. It's the same thing for like pornography. - Yes. - When you see it, I ..."

"And that's where I was worried, I felt like we were headed 'cause a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled was very simply, oh, but they have the right to get rid of this person and th..."

"If you have generations of law students graduating who actually think there's nothing, there's no higher goal than shouting down you're an opponent. - Yeah, so that's why so much of your focus, or a l..."

"- Every time you say something, I always have a million thoughts and a million questions that pop up. But since you mentioned there's a kind of drift as you write about in the book and you mentioned n..."

"- Can you elaborate on Stop-Woke Act? This is presumably trying to limit certain topics from being taught in school? - Yeah, basically woke topics. It came out of the sort of attempt to get at critica..."

"is there also a lean towards the left in terms of the administration that manages the curriculum? - Yeah, there definitely is in K through 12. I mean, my kids go to public school. I have a five and a ..."

"And that is actually in "Canceling of the American Mind" but I have a more detailed explanation of it that I'm gonna be putting up on my blog, the eternally radical idea. - Is it possible it's legally..."

"It can get pretty tedious. But I even made myself read through all of the very specific instructions on how tall the different parts of the temple need to be and how long the garbs need to be and what..."

"And I'm like, no way that was the original ending of that book because this was like, this was clearly a beloved novel that they were like, but it can't have that ending. - Okay. - So it's a long way ..."

"So it's probably better that you learn about it outside of a public school class. - Do you think it's possible to teach religion from like world religions kind of force without disrespecting the relig..."

"Okay, one interesting thing to get back to college campuses is FIRE keeps the college free speech rankings. - [Greg] Yes. - At rankings.thefire.org. - [Greg] I'm very proud of them. - I highly recomme..."

"or First Amendment norms, we also have the best database of, we call the Disinvitation Database, but it's actually it's better named the deplatforming database, which is what we're gonna call it. - An..."

"was Michigan Technological University, which was a nice surprise. The number two school was actually Auburn University, which was nice to see. In the top 10, the most well-known prestigious school is ..."

"The school that did not do so well at a negative 10.69, negative 10.69 and we rounded up to zero was Harvard. And Harvard has been not very happy with that result. - The only school to receive the aby..."

"- I should say, the bottom five is the University of Pennsylvania, like you said, Penn, the University of South Carolina, Georgetown University, and Fordham University. - All very well earned. They ha..."

"but I imagine every university has a bunch of students who will protest basically every speaker. And it's a question of how you respond to that protest. - Well, here's the dirty little secret about li..."

"amongst some of these administrators. And from talking to students there, they were in meetings, extensive meetings for a long time. They show up, do a shout down, then they take an additional seven m..."

"- And so a small number of administrators, maybe even a single administrator could participate in the encouraging and the organization and thereby empower the whole process. - And that's something I'v..."

"in higher education today, which is hyper bureaucratization. - In your experience, is there a distinction between administrators and faculty in terms of perpetrators of these kinds of things? So if we..."

"I would get letters from some of my friends saying, "I am so sorry this has happened to you." And these were the same people who publicly signed the petition to get them fired. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Int..."

"- And this was all throughout my career, a president, a university president who puts their foot down early and says, "Nope, we are not entertaining firing this professor. We are not expelling this st..."

"- And this is one of those like tensions in First Amendment that actually I think has a pretty easy release essentially. You absolutely have the right to devote your life to ending freedom of speech a..."

"- Heckler's veto. That's so interesting 'cause I feel like that comes into play on social media somehow because there's this whole discussion about censorship and freedom of speech. But to me, the car..."

"- It would actually be really fun to talk about this particular aspect of the book. And I highly recommend if you're listening to this go pre-order the book now. When does it come out? - October 17th...."

"Okay, so in the book you also have a list of cheap rhetorical tactics that both the left and the right use. And then you have a list of tactics that the left uses and the right uses. So there's the rh..."

"- I just wanna see Ryan Reynolds singing with Will Ferrell. I mean like. - Sometimes that's all you need. - I need that in my heart. - Yeah. Not all the time, just a little bit. And right back to the ..."

"And you see this all the time on social media and it's kind of, you know, I was a big fan of John Stewart's Daily Show, but an awful lot of what the humor was and what the tactic was for arguing was t..."

"But if I'm arguing about CHOP, someone bringing up January 6th isn't super relevant to it. Or if I'm arguing about January 6th, someone bringing up the riots in 2020, isn't that helpful. - We took a l..."

"And I'm like, you gotta understand, I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners and think about like, change the name of Kansas to Croatia, change the name of Kansas to some- That's what it soun..."

"of the United States perpetually. And believe me, like we were poor when I was a kid and I got to go to one of the fancies. I got to go to Stanford and I got to see how people, they treat you differen..."

"I mean, like, I feel like the book, so "Coddling the American Mind" was a book that could be sort of a crowd pleaser to a degree, partially because we really meant what we said in the subtitle that th..."

"- It's really weird how that happened. Maybe you can explore why a thing that kind of sounds good at first... - [Greg] Yeah. - Can become such a cruel weapon of canceling and hurting people and ignori..."

"it can be kind of sticky and it's weird because- - Because it's effective, that's why it keeps on getting used. Essentially, it should have hit someone because I have a great liberal pedigree, everyth..."

"but I feel like you were recently called right wing. FIRE, maybe you by association because of that debate. - Oh, the LA Times. - [Lex] The LA Times. - Oh fun, let's talk about the LA Times. - So yes,..."

"Or it's like, where's FIRE on this? It's like, here's our lawsuit about it from six months ago. So it's a favorite thing. And also John Stewart Daily Show like the whataboutism, and the kind of like i..."

"You should care when Republicans get in trouble, you should care when California has a DEI program that requires this, California community colleges has a DEI program, a policy that actually requires ..."

"- Censorship is censorship. If we can take that tangent briefly with DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. What is the good and what is the harm of such programs? - DEI, I know people who are DEI cons..."

"We talk about this in "Coddling of the American Mind" as the difference between common humanity identity politics and common enemy identity politics. And I think that, I know some of the people that I..."

"So right now, it's almost 200, it's around 190 professors being fired. So I want to give some context here. The Red Scare is generally considered to have been from 1947 to 1957. It ended by the way, i..."

"But unlike during the Red Scare where people could clearly tell something was happening, the craziest thing about cancel culture is I'm still dealing with people who are saying this isn't happening at..."

"We need another political litmus test, which is nuts. And that's what a DEI statement effectively is 'cause there's no way to actually fill out a DEI statement without someone evaluating you on your p..."

"to make schools still more ideologically homogenous. - Why does that have a negative effect? Is it because it enforces a kind of group think where people are afraid, start becoming afraid to sort of t..."

"The person that I always think of that wasn't a right winger that would be like "go to hell" if you made him fill one of these things out, it's Feynman. I feel like if you gave one of these things to ..."

"It's hard to measure that. - Yeah I mean, when you ask professors about, are they intimidated under the current environment, the answer is yes. And particularly conservative professors, already report..."

"actually of expressing controversial views, I think that it's the reason why we're gonna actually be studying this in 50 years. The same way we studied the Red Scare. The idea that this isn't happenin..."

"It is not an opinion I'm at least bit comfortable with. I do think that departments take on momentum when they become a place where you're like, wow, it'd be really unpleasant for me to work in this d..."

"and you actually probably will be hated even more. And the most interesting part of the research we did for this was just asking every prominent black conservative and moderate that we knew personally..."

"- Social media practically invented the perfect rhetorical fortress. - So that each one of those stages has a virality to it. - [Greg] Yeah. - So it could stick and then it can get people really excit..."

"- One interesting case that you cover, about expertise is with COVID. - [Greg] Yeah. - So how did cancel culture come into play on the topic of COVID? - Yeah, I think that COVID was a big blow to peop..."

"- Well this might be a good place to ask a little bit more about the freedom of speech. And so you said that included in the freedom of speech is to say things that are wrong. What is your perspective..."

"And I go further, my theory on freedom of speech is slightly different than most other constitutional lawyers. And I think that's partially because some of the ways, some of these theories, although a..."

"- I personally, I don't know what you think about that, but I personally think that freedom of speech in cases like that, like KKK on campus can do more harm in the short term, but much more benefit i..."

"- I remember Steve Bannon got disinvited from the New Yorker festival and Jim Carrey freaked out and all sorts of other people freaked out and they got disinvited and I got invited to speak on Serash ..."

"But even now, documentaries are like, there's a huge incentive to do as quickly as possible. There's not an incentive to really spend time with the person. - There's a great new documentary about Floy..."

"is like when you get to see the Nazis in Skokie, they come off like the idiots that you would expect them to. There's a moment when the rally's not going very well and the leader gets flustered and it..."

"And I worry that one of the things that is absolutely just a fact of life in America is like we do see each other more as enemy camps as opposed to people on the same team. And that was actually somet..."

"- That's offense archeology. - [Greg] That's not my term though. - Oh, okay. - [Greg] It's a great term. - Well that's a great term. We steal from the best. Digging through someone's past comments to ..."

"- [Greg] Yeah. - From a free speech culture perspective, how to be a good parent. - Yeah. I think the first quality you should be cultivating in your children if you want to have a free speech culture..."

"'cause we are in that unavoidably anarchical period. And I do worry that there are attempts in states to pass things to try to put the genie back in the bottle. Like if we ban TikTok or we say that no..."

"is it reveals raw aspects of humanity that sometimes we prefer to pretend don't exist. - Yeah but also, it's totally new, like you said. It's just the virality, the speed, the news travels, the opinio..."

"that's just a very difficult problem to solve. - Have you ever watched "Fleabag?" It's absolutely brilliant. A British show and it sets you up. One of the reasons why like people love it so much is it..."

"But that path scares me to death. - Yeah, but see the way you phrased it, that scares me too. So there's several things. One, you could be constantly distracted in a TikTok way by things that keep you..."

"and all this kind of stuff. - And I'm definitely more in the, we're in an inescapably anarchical period and require big cultural adjustments and there's no way that this isn't gonna be a difficult tra..."

"That they will always be honest. I think you are establishing yourself as someone who is high integrity, where they can trust that person. FIRE wants to be the institution that people can come to. It'..."

"What's your overall take? I mean, I'm mostly impressed. - So there's a few really powerful ideas for the people who edit Wikipedia. One of which is each editor kind of for themselves declares, I'm int..."

"The way they word stuff will be biased, the choice of words. But the Wikipedia editors themselves are so self-reflective. They literally have articles describing these very effects of how you can use ..."

"there's a certain way to do it. I think Wikipedia will often lean, they really try to be self-reflective and try to stop this, but they will lean into the drama if it matches the bias. But again, much..."

"and it gave overgeneralization and fortune telling, mind reading, all of these things that they teach you not to do. And what you do in CBT is essentially something makes you upset and then you just w..."

"And that was one of the things that the CBT is what led me to notice this in my own work, that it felt like administrators were kind of selling cognitive distortions, but students weren't buying yet. ..."

"And because everyone knows I'm so public about my struggles with this stuff, everybody who fights this stuff comes to me when they're having a hard time. And this is a very hard psychologically taxing..."

"So I was getting a little depressed and anxious. And the thing that really helped me more than anything else was confessing to my staff... Books take a lot of energy so I knew they didn't want to hear..."

"It would be that taking the stand might actually have a happy ending. - One thing that just stands out from that is the pain of cancellation can be really intense. And that doesn't necessarily mean lo..."

"be the worst version of themselves or to possibly take their own life and it's not as real. - Yeah, well that's one of the things that we do in the book to really kind of address people who still try ..."

"being like the biggest debate in philosophy and being like, well the problem first is there's nothing basic about humanity. - Yeah, what gives you hope about this whole thing, about this dark state th..."

"- And above all else, if you're weird, continue being weird. - [Greg] Yeah, please. - And you're one of the most interesting, one of the weirdest in the most beautiful way people I've ever met, Greg. ..."