Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brained behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we will also provide a glimpse
Speaker 1: into human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast Today.
Speaker 1: It's great to have Greg Lukianov on the podcast. Greg
Speaker 1: is an attorney, New York Times bestselling author, and the
Speaker 1: president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and
Speaker 1: Education FIRE. He is the author of Unwarning, Liberty, Campus
Speaker 1: Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom from Speech,
Speaker 1: and Fire's Guide to Free Speech on Campus. Most recently,
Speaker 1: he co authored The Coddling of the American Mind, How
Speaker 1: good intentions and band ideas are setting up a generation
Speaker 1: for failure with Jonathan Height. This New York Times Best
Speaker 1: Hour expands on their September twenty fifteen in Atlanta cover
Speaker 1: story of the same name. Greg is also an executive
Speaker 1: producer of Can We Take a Joke? A feature length
Speaker 1: documentary that explores the collision between comedy, censorship and outreach
Speaker 1: culture both on and off campus. Greg so excited to
Speaker 1: finally get a chance to talk to you. Yes, we
Speaker 1: meaning to do this forever, but COVID turned us into
Speaker 1: nomads for a bit. Yeah, and I'm glad this is
Speaker 1: finally happening. Though, me too, I was a big fan
Speaker 1: of Transcend. Oh, I think you got my first ever
Speaker 1: Ascherbonnable award? Is that right? Uh huh, Yeah, Well, I
Speaker 1: was very honored to get that. I didn't know it
Speaker 1: was the first for the audience. I decided just for
Speaker 1: fun to name my monthly award for my favorite book,
Speaker 1: the prestigious Ascherbonnable Awards, and the very first book I
Speaker 1: ever gave it to it was Transcend. That it was
Speaker 1: a great book, and like I said at the time,
Speaker 1: it goes in the rereading pile, which is the stack
Speaker 1: of books to read big, the stack of books to
Speaker 1: reread quite small. Well, I'm very honored, and I see
Speaker 1: lots of areiaus mutual understandings about the world and what's
Speaker 1: going on, and a call to transcend or tribalism transcend.
Speaker 1: What else do we want to transcender? We want to
Speaker 1: transcend a lot of things, don't we that we're currently
Speaker 1: seeing in the world today. I have to say I
Speaker 1: call myself temperamentally an optimist, but I'm not super You're
Speaker 1: not catching me at a particularly optimistic time. I think
Speaker 1: I'm really worried about the next six months. We were
Speaker 1: talking offline, and I always point out, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: the head of a nonpartisan nonprofit, and I take that
Speaker 1: very seriously. But I will just say I am worried
Speaker 1: about what the next six months are going to look like. Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's important to talk about openly and honestly
Speaker 1: because I think there are a lot of non partisan
Speaker 1: corporations company. I don't know how many corporations are non
Speaker 1: you know, you know, nonprofits that are finding it increasingly
Speaker 1: difficult to not take a stand, Like how do you
Speaker 1: not take a stand in what you see as the
Speaker 1: right side of history? When you think about like Nazi Germany,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, well, we're just non partisan, you know,
Speaker 1: let's just kill all the Jews. You know, we'll be
Speaker 1: non partisan and we won't say anything. You know. It's
Speaker 1: like when you start things getting truly alarming, you know, like,
Speaker 1: at what point is it like it's cool to like
Speaker 1: say something. It's one of those things where I don't
Speaker 1: think we're quite at the Nazi Germany level, and I
Speaker 1: think that it's really important, you know, I'm part of
Speaker 1: I jokingly refer to myself as the youngest member of
Speaker 1: the Old School ACLU, and I actually worked at the ACLU.
Speaker 1: That was like my biggest proudest accomplishment when I was
Speaker 1: in law school was getting to intern at the ACLU
Speaker 1: of Northern California. That was like a lifelong dream of
Speaker 1: mine to do that. And I take that role extremely seriously.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the ways you avoid authoritarian
Speaker 1: outcomes is by, in a non partisan way, committing yourself
Speaker 1: to civil liberties and most of all, of course, my darling,
Speaker 1: my favorite civil liberty of all, unabashed lee is freedom
Speaker 1: of speech. And actually, oh this is interesting, Scott. We're
Speaker 1: coming out with a documentary called Mighty Ira, which I
Speaker 1: am over the moon about. Like I can't emphasize how
Speaker 1: excited I am about this. And this comes from this
Speaker 1: was the brainchild of Nico Prino, the host of our podcast.
Speaker 1: So to Speak is the name of the podcast, and
Speaker 1: he interviewed Ira Glasser, who was the not Ira glass
Speaker 1: because Bolia confused sometimes. He was the executive director of
Speaker 1: the ACLU from I think nineteen seventy nine to two
Speaker 1: thousand and one. He took over right after the skoky situation.
Speaker 1: I'm sure listeners know, but in nineteen seventy eight thereabouts,
Speaker 1: the ACLU defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie.
Speaker 1: And this is particularly, you know, interesting, because you end
Speaker 1: up having largely Jewish lawyers, some of them whose parents
Speaker 1: survived the Holocaust and were actually in camps are nyer,
Speaker 1: what was the person in charge before Ira Glasser? And
Speaker 1: you know, he he lived in a community that was
Speaker 1: pretty much wiped out by the Holocaust, and he was
Speaker 1: most adamant about defending their rights because he understood that really, ultimately,
Speaker 1: it's the civil liberties that actually keep the society free,
Speaker 1: and as soon as you start compromising on it, the
Speaker 1: other side will compromise on it too. So we made
Speaker 1: a whole documentary about the life and times of Ira
Speaker 1: Glasser because we feel like he's underappreciated partially, and he
Speaker 1: did so many many amazing things. You know, he took
Speaker 1: the ACLU to a level of national prominence that hadn't
Speaker 1: been previously, even though it was relatively well known, and
Speaker 1: he really practiced what he preached. He was actually ended
Speaker 1: up being you know, he's a lefty, but he was
Speaker 1: friends with Bill Buckley from National Review and from Firing Line,
Speaker 1: I think was the name of the show. You know,
Speaker 1: he would go on and he's willing to debate anyone,
Speaker 1: and he did it all with good humor and intelligence.
Speaker 1: And one of the causes he was the most serious
Speaker 1: about was actually, you know, racial equity for and so
Speaker 1: one of the things that inspired him to get into
Speaker 1: civil liberties in the first place was quite literally, Jackie
Speaker 1: Robinson going to play for the Dodgers and there's actually
Speaker 1: an amazing there's an amazing metaphor and here, you know,
Speaker 1: he's from Brooklyn and that what happened, and he and
Speaker 1: he explained it. And this is something that I think,
Speaker 1: you know, social psychologist wouldn't enjoy in particular, is that
Speaker 1: just the actual experience of going to the stadium and
Speaker 1: seeing Jackie Robinson quite literally on his team. He started
Speaker 1: to actually feel, you know, understand, you know a lot
Speaker 1: of issues that he wasn't aware of, you know, like
Speaker 1: he uh and of course, you know, the the audience
Speaker 1: itself was well integrated. There were there were people from
Speaker 1: all over Brooklyn coming in to see the Dodgers and
Speaker 1: Jackie Robinson and that really changed his you know, uh,
Speaker 1: the direction of his life. And and one thing is
Speaker 1: amazing about it is that got him that he started
Speaker 1: finding out things like when the Dodgers would go to
Speaker 1: different cities in the South, he couldn't stay at that
Speaker 1: hotel because it was still segregated. And so he gets
Speaker 1: so this small, this small action by the Dodgers, when
Speaker 1: you know, actually of course historical, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: in the grand scheme of things, it would seem relatively modest,
Speaker 1: set off a trigger of events that got a number
Speaker 1: of of people really activated about civil about civil rights,
Speaker 1: and you know, and Ira really he uh basically took
Speaker 1: everything from that experience and that kind of decided the
Speaker 1: course of his life to a large degree. And again,
Speaker 1: I really have to emphasize it was this sense of
Speaker 1: realizing that we're on the same team of the expanding circle,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea of like of actually not breaking
Speaker 1: everybody into smaller and smaller groups, but actually emphasizing the
Speaker 1: fact that, you know, we're all equally people, uh changed
Speaker 1: his life. Well, it's a middleful realization. I just try
Speaker 1: to think of what are the limits of free speech
Speaker 1: as you see it within your organization, in your chart.
Speaker 1: There are certain things that will not defend you. You know,
Speaker 1: if you get fired for being a serial killer. But
Speaker 1: free speech, I get to you know, kill whoever I want. No, actually,
Speaker 1: you don't get to do that in a democratic society.
Speaker 1: And what are the boundaries here? One thing that you know,
Speaker 1: I talk about this in foreign countries a lot, and
Speaker 1: it's actually a very helpful way to understand your own
Speaker 1: beliefs is to defend them in an audience that's not
Speaker 1: at all familiar with the culture you come from. I actually,
Speaker 1: I think that's one of my advantages in general, is
Speaker 1: I'm a first generation American. I still to a degree
Speaker 1: see the US with a little bit of a foreigner's eyes,
Speaker 1: and I think it can be very helpful. And the
Speaker 1: thing that I explain is that they think we're completely
Speaker 1: nuts over here, and that the First Amendment is just
Speaker 1: completely out of control, and that we're crazy about free speech.
Speaker 1: And I have to explain, Listen, it's actually not all
Speaker 1: that different, except for a handful of different ideas, and
Speaker 1: the most important one is one that I wrote about yesterday,
Speaker 1: as Lick would have it, completely coincidentally, called the Bedrock
Speaker 1: principle that comes from the flag burning opinion Texas v.
Speaker 1: Johnson in nineteen eighty nine. And the Bedrock rule is
Speaker 1: that you can't ban something simply because it's offensive. Why
Speaker 1: because offensiveness is too culturally subjective. It changes from year
Speaker 1: to year, it changes from person to person, It's different
Speaker 1: between people from different economic classes. I even point out that,
Speaker 1: as David Hume would love to point out, it can
Speaker 1: even be a different in an individual depending on the
Speaker 1: time of day. So offensiveness just can't be the justification
Speaker 1: for banning particular speech. However, the First Amendment also has exceptions, like,
Speaker 1: for example, incitement to violence, you know, is the one
Speaker 1: that people usually start with, and that's you know, the
Speaker 1: situation of like let's go burn down the mayor's office.
Speaker 1: In a situation where it's like we're likely to burn
Speaker 1: down the marrior's office. Defamation isn't protected by free speech.
Speaker 1: You know, claiming falsely, particularly knowingly, that someone is you know,
Speaker 1: something horrible, like a pedophile. That's not protected speech, nor
Speaker 1: should it. Threats are not protected speech, definitely, And it's
Speaker 1: also important to keep in mind that this binds the
Speaker 1: behavior of the government and government agents, So it applies
Speaker 1: at public colleges, it applies at a state level, at
Speaker 1: the federal level. But for a lot of what we're
Speaker 1: seeing right now, we're talking about people working for companies
Speaker 1: getting you know, the phrases, and it's become somewhat controversial,
Speaker 1: partially because Trump started using it. But someone gets canceled.
Speaker 1: A private company is absolutely under no obligation to keep
Speaker 1: an employee who says something really, really unpopular that really
Speaker 1: angers people. However, from a cultural standpoint, I've been increasingly
Speaker 1: arguing that we should be We don't have to be
Speaker 1: perfectly tolerant, but we sure I think we surely should
Speaker 1: be more than we're currently being fair enough. And that's
Speaker 1: a very very fair statement that is a generality level
Speaker 1: without talking about specifics. Oh and and and Scott, I
Speaker 1: did want to say one thing, and one thing that
Speaker 1: makes me different from other you know, First Amendment advocates
Speaker 1: is that the dominant metaphor for freedom of speech is
Speaker 1: this marketplace of ideas argument that essentially that ideas will
Speaker 1: battle it out in the marketplace of ideas, and the
Speaker 1: good ones will survive and the bad ones will be discarded.
Speaker 1: And therefore, because we're a democracy, it's really good to
Speaker 1: have this marketplace of ideas. I've always thought the marketplace
Speaker 1: of ideas idea is inadequate, you know, and everybody, even
Speaker 1: the originator of the idea didn't didn't think that the
Speaker 1: good ideas always win. Is actually much simpler. But I
Speaker 1: also very strongly believe that that it's the right way
Speaker 1: to look at this. Is that very simply, and whether
Speaker 1: you put on your your political hat or your scholarly
Speaker 1: hat or your scientific hat, it's always valuable to know
Speaker 1: what people really think and why, full stop. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think there's definitely an argument to be made there. And
Speaker 1: when when things go in the shadows, they tend it's
Speaker 1: just like our own mind, as you know, with CBT,
Speaker 1: but also with the you know, the act approach to therapy,
Speaker 1: which I'm I'm a big advocate of acceptance and commitment therapy.
Speaker 1: You know, the more you do experiential avoidance of things
Speaker 1: within yourself, the stronger it becomes within you. And you know,
Speaker 1: you keep things in the shadows within yourself, you kind
Speaker 1: of build them up to be like evil, you know
Speaker 1: when sometimes you just integrate them into the rest of
Speaker 1: your life and you're like, oh, it wasn't that evil.
Speaker 1: I can deal with it. I can cope with it.
Speaker 1: So just applying the same principles to the real world,
Speaker 1: you know, in analogy, you know, you keep certain ideas,
Speaker 1: and the Shatados were kind of saying that we can't
Speaker 1: handle it, you know, like we wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: deal with it, and it might come outsized to its
Speaker 1: actual threat. Well, and there's also just the simple premise
Speaker 1: that it's probably just better to know. This came a
Speaker 1: little bit from Harvey Silverglate's Harvey Silverglaate is co founder
Speaker 1: of Fire along with Alan Charles Corps. Alan was a
Speaker 1: more conservative leaning libertarian who's a scholar of the Enlightenment,
Speaker 1: and Harvey is a more left leaning civil liberties lawyer
Speaker 1: who lives up in Cambridge. Used to be the president
Speaker 1: of the board of the ACLU of Massachusetts, for example,
Speaker 1: and he used to say, I thought this was a
Speaker 1: very vivid way to say it. I'd prefer to know
Speaker 1: who the Nazis in the room are. Yeah. Right, It's
Speaker 1: a good point. So in a lot of ways. Sometimes
Speaker 1: with censorship, people are saying, I would prefer to know
Speaker 1: less about the world in which I live, and that
Speaker 1: has two damaging things. Is one, you might miss a threat,
Speaker 1: and that's important to know. But two, you might come
Speaker 1: to believe. And this is something that was very well
Speaker 1: covered in a book called Racial Paranoia by an African
Speaker 1: American scholar named John L. Jackson, that it can actually
Speaker 1: start to seem if you need these heavy handed laws
Speaker 1: to prevent some people from saying horribly racist things, for example,
Speaker 1: that you might get the impression that things are actually
Speaker 1: far worse than you thought, and it can actually lead
Speaker 1: to a sense of, as you put it, paranoia. I
Speaker 1: do hear what you're saying. I'm trying to think of
Speaker 1: things from every possible side possible, and I want to
Speaker 1: really dive deep into this with you. So you know,
Speaker 1: there are people, let's say someone who's that from the
Speaker 1: trans community trans rites, and they say, you know, some
Speaker 1: of these ideas are They'll they'll say things like it's
Speaker 1: harming the harming trans people, even sometimes it's causing deaths.
Speaker 1: You know, the certain certain language is inciting. You know
Speaker 1: you did talk earlier about inciting violence is something that
Speaker 1: you know, we shouldn't promote in society. What do you
Speaker 1: do when when you hear those kinds of arguments and
Speaker 1: then you're kind of faced with a choice in a way,
Speaker 1: it's like do we who do we defend? Here? You know,
Speaker 1: are we defending the ones with the that can say
Speaker 1: whatever they want? Or do we defend those who say
Speaker 1: they're actively being harmed? I mean, you have to make
Speaker 1: these choices in your profession. To a degree you kind
Speaker 1: of don't. I mean, ultimately, my job and my function
Speaker 1: is to defend freedom of speech. And I believe it's
Speaker 1: valuable to know what people really think under all circumstances
Speaker 1: and if and surely, you know, people are allowed to
Speaker 1: argue that an argument placism and danger And actually, I
Speaker 1: think that that argument has been unfortunately extremely popular over
Speaker 1: the past couple of years. It's and I actually, I'll
Speaker 1: say this split out. I think that that is a
Speaker 1: dangerous rhetorical tactic that is currently being much overused. This
Speaker 1: happened at the New York Times with when they were
Speaker 1: asking James Bennett, when they were demanding James Bennett be
Speaker 1: stepped down, and that was something that had been in
Speaker 1: the works forever. They wanted to, like the younger staff
Speaker 1: wanted to get rid of James Bennett almost since he started,
Speaker 1: particularly for bringing conservatives, you know, mildly conservative. It's a
Speaker 1: barely right of center Barry Weiss to The New York Times,
Speaker 1: and I forget the Brett's. I forgot Brett Stevens, you know,
Speaker 1: an anti Trump Republican and what's you know. I wrote
Speaker 1: about this on my blog Eternally Radical Idea because I
Speaker 1: just felt like I had to say something about it,
Speaker 1: and I had to remind people. James Bennett was hired
Speaker 1: specifically in twenty sixteen to address the fact that The
Speaker 1: New York Times, since it had so badly guessed wrong
Speaker 1: on Trump thing, that there was a realization maybe we
Speaker 1: were out of touch, Maybe we need to know where
Speaker 1: people are coming from. So they hired James Bennett, whod
Speaker 1: done a wonderful work at The Atlantic. Full disclosure, he
Speaker 1: published Coddling the American Mind, which I say to his credit,
Speaker 1: because it was something that could have been viewed as controversial,
Speaker 1: even though you know, for I at least say for
Speaker 1: several months after and it wasn't particularly controversial. And then
Speaker 1: eventually I think that the Times kind of forgot that
Speaker 1: was the point. So about a couple of months ago,
Speaker 1: Bennett decided to publish an article by Senator Cotton that
Speaker 1: was defending something that I think is just a horrifying idea,
Speaker 1: calling in the troops in order to put down the
Speaker 1: alleged riots going on all over the country. I say
Speaker 1: alleged because in some cases I live in DC. The
Speaker 1: idea that there were completely out of control riots is
Speaker 1: a big exaggeration. And of course what he what conton
Speaker 1: was suggesting, goes against everything you know, I fight for.
Speaker 1: At the same time, he is a sitting senator. He
Speaker 1: is he was, and this is kind of terrifying. He
Speaker 1: was representing what was at the time the opinion of
Speaker 1: about fifty two percent of Americans, and the end the
Speaker 1: position of the President of the United States and so
Speaker 1: and well when they published this, one of the arguments
Speaker 1: that some of the staffers started making to justify and
Speaker 1: to be clear, they wanted him gone anyway they wanted
Speaker 1: Barry Weisse gone, was that the New York Times publishing
Speaker 1: that article was putting black and brown reporters in danger.
Speaker 1: And that's one of those things where under the current climate,
Speaker 1: the idea of saying come on, you know that that's
Speaker 1: not really what happened is he published He let people
Speaker 1: know that what I would consider to be, you know,
Speaker 1: a bad opinion, but opinion that you can afford not
Speaker 1: to know. And I watched all of these arguments come up,
Speaker 1: But I really thought that the idea that like this
Speaker 1: is putting people's lives at risk was something that was
Speaker 1: and I like, flat out I think it was more
Speaker 1: of a rhetorical tactic than empirically justifiable. It's interesting to
Speaker 1: think about people's biases towards what they say, Yeah, this
Speaker 1: could really be a dangerous idea we needed eradicate, depending
Speaker 1: on what side that person is on. If it's someone
Speaker 1: in the far far left, here's someone who's on the
Speaker 1: far right, say something like those ideas are dangerous to us,
Speaker 1: all right, people could kill her alives. Do each of
Speaker 1: us apply these principles universally? Seems like no one's doing that.
Speaker 1: There's no universal You know, we talked earlier about the
Speaker 1: importance of transcendence, and you resonated with my book and
Speaker 1: I resonated with your book. There's a reason why we
Speaker 1: both resonated with each other's works. There's something that we're
Speaker 1: just desperate to transcend. Here. First of all, I don't
Speaker 1: think we like hypocrisy, right, So we can't say let's
Speaker 1: eradicate all discrimination, but then have parentheticals like, well, only
Speaker 1: discrimination against people who are like me, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's really tricky business because also I assume you
Speaker 1: as well want to have empathy for those who are
Speaker 1: queerly in distress psychological distress over something. How do you
Speaker 1: balance that empathy with the arguments you've made about cognitive distortions,
Speaker 1: because these just way to get someone who's mentally distressed
Speaker 1: to be even more mentally distressed is to tell them, well,
Speaker 1: you're really crazy, you really have cognitive distortions. That's not
Speaker 1: really good psychologically in the psychological clinical space to really
Speaker 1: help someone by just saying that to them. So how
Speaker 1: do you balance all this? That's definitely a way it gets,
Speaker 1: it can be framed. But overall, I honestly think that
Speaker 1: Height and I are taking mental health more seriously than
Speaker 1: some of our critics. And and that's you know, might
Speaker 1: sound kind of jarring, but here, here, here's my here's
Speaker 1: my observation going back to two thousand and seven, and
Speaker 1: this came from me having a a breakdown, a psychological breakdown,
Speaker 1: and would you mind reading a section from your book
Speaker 1: that I found so poignant? Well, okay, a little difficult,
Speaker 1: and I should I should preface I'd never actually talked
Speaker 1: about this in this kind of detail with anybody. And
Speaker 1: what was funny about writing it, not necessarily haha funny,
Speaker 1: but was that causingly was that I kind of could
Speaker 1: do this thing. And I was like, I'm going to
Speaker 1: intentionally delude myself and say to myself, this is now
Speaker 1: just between me and my computer, you know, while trying
Speaker 1: to sort of like not think about the fact that
Speaker 1: this would probably end up being the single most public thing,
Speaker 1: very likely I've ever done. H So I could just
Speaker 1: try to be as honest about as possible. So here
Speaker 1: we go. This is so have you never read this
Speaker 1: out loud? I read it one time out loud, not
Speaker 1: in a podcast. I read it. I've only actually read
Speaker 1: it out loud one other time, because you know, it's
Speaker 1: a little it's a little difficult. One thing that is funny, though, Scott,
Speaker 1: is that you can tell him I'm not doing so
Speaker 1: poorly because my h my sort of sense of humor
Speaker 1: kind of asserts itself. So when mechanism. Yeah, exactly when
Speaker 1: I talk about really awful things, and and I know
Speaker 1: I did. Actually one time, I have a psychologist who
Speaker 1: was like, oh, when you talk about rough things, you
Speaker 1: get a smile on your face. Let's try to get
Speaker 1: you know, try to overcome that. And I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm keeping that one because it worked and it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to And you know, of course, if people think that,
Speaker 1: if the idea is that you can't really feel pain,
Speaker 1: I can promise that I do. Just I need the mechanisms,
Speaker 1: the healthy mechanisms I have. So anyway, here goes. This
Speaker 1: is December, I think of two thousand and seven. I
Speaker 1: had spent the day scouring websites for ways to kill myself.
Speaker 1: At almost every turn, I found stories about how a
Speaker 1: method could fail, leaving you still alive but permanently injured.
Speaker 1: This even applied to shooting yourself. I could not risk that,
Speaker 1: so I went to the hardware store across the street,
Speaker 1: looking for strong plastic bags and metal wire. The idea
Speaker 1: was to crush up all the sleeping med tranquilizers and
Speaker 1: anti anxiety meds. I had pick them all at once
Speaker 1: and then wrap my head so that if the pills
Speaker 1: didn't kill me. Suffocation would, but it had to be
Speaker 1: strong enough that I could not claw my way out
Speaker 1: of the bag. If I had a change heart, I
Speaker 1: needed to go through with it now now, I underline
Speaker 1: that as quickly as possible, because why because it was
Speaker 1: the right thing to do, and if I waited, I
Speaker 1: might not go through with it. And I needed to
Speaker 1: go through with it while I still had the will.
Speaker 1: I felt if I felt better, it would somehow be
Speaker 1: a lie. I had a powerful sense that I was
Speaker 1: in touch with some dark, larger truth that I needed
Speaker 1: to die. I don't know if it was briefly sensing
Speaker 1: how strange the thought was that gave me the gave
Speaker 1: me that flash of sanity that caused me to call
Speaker 1: nine to one one. First, I started to explain I
Speaker 1: had a what I had planned in a detached way,
Speaker 1: but soon I was crying. The voice on the other
Speaker 1: side of the line told me to get myself to
Speaker 1: the hospital, and thank goodness, I listened. I walked to Penn,
Speaker 1: got myself checked in. I very nearly didn't get myself
Speaker 1: checked in because I was having second thoughts. I'm like,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, I can't go. I can't I can't
Speaker 1: be detained. You know that they can keep they can
Speaker 1: hold you for three days once you check yourself in.
Speaker 1: And I had, you know, a good psychologist there who
Speaker 1: as I was trying to talk myself out of it,
Speaker 1: he just asked the simple question, is like, Gregor, you
Speaker 1: normally like this? And I just burst into tears, and
Speaker 1: you know, like, basically I didn't know if I was
Speaker 1: normally like that anymore. I was, I mean, Scott, I
Speaker 1: was so far gone. I thought my sister, who's a doctor,
Speaker 1: would help me kill myself because if I explained to
Speaker 1: her how in pain I was, that of course she would.
Speaker 1: And I'm like that. And that's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why when people are very hard to keep hard on
Speaker 1: people who kill themselves. And I've had friends, you know,
Speaker 1: killed themselves, and I come to their defense when my
Speaker 1: friends are angry, because it's like, listen, I was there too,
Speaker 1: and I was far gone, like this is not You're
Speaker 1: not talking to someone who's who's in a state of
Speaker 1: mind that you can actually relate to if you haven't
Speaker 1: been there yourself. Well, well, Greg, first of all, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for being so vulnerable and sharing that,
Speaker 1: and you know this is suicide Prevention month, I believe,
Speaker 1: right or something along those lines. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of people right now during COVID who are feeling the lowest,
Speaker 1: maybe they felt their entire lives. This is just this
Speaker 1: is it? Like I'm bottom bottom out right now? And
Speaker 1: look how far you've grown? I mean, do you do
Speaker 1: you read that sort of mindset and does it almost
Speaker 1: seem like a completely different person? You know? I was
Speaker 1: thinking about that very question, and I was kind of
Speaker 1: like going through this discussion in my head because of
Speaker 1: course I was a little anxious about it, and I
Speaker 1: was and I was like, I heard this sentence, you know,
Speaker 1: in my head, it feels like a completely different person.
Speaker 1: But the truth is, it doesn't It Just that's me.
Speaker 1: That's me right there. I remember this stuff very vividly
Speaker 1: and it was still me in there and just just
Speaker 1: on me that was overwhelmed by feelings that I haven't
Speaker 1: blessedly and I'm an atheist, but I love religious imagery
Speaker 1: had in a in a really long time and I
Speaker 1: and I gotta tell you, Scott, like it helps me
Speaker 1: talk to the most rewarding thing about writing the book,
Speaker 1: period is that I still get people right writing me
Speaker 1: and asking for help, and of course, you know, the
Speaker 1: questions are first like are you a threat to yourself?
Speaker 1: You know the guy I have the whole pattern down.
Speaker 1: And but that's the most rewarding thing of all this
Speaker 1: writing the book or and the article was how many
Speaker 1: people would write me to ask for, you know, advice.
Speaker 1: I even have ad on the things that I advised.
Speaker 1: To be clear, the things that I advise, and I
Speaker 1: say this in the thread, but in case people don't
Speaker 1: read it very carefully, most of my advisor for things
Speaker 1: that are not anywhere near as far gone as I was.
Speaker 1: In that state. When you're that far gone, call check
Speaker 1: yourself in, go get you know, like that, that that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, and if you know somebody's like that,
Speaker 1: check in. But yeah, I have had, I have had.
Speaker 1: You know. I was at clare Mount McKenna and a
Speaker 1: student stood up and he looked. I thought he was
Speaker 1: mad at me, you know, So I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: I said, I'm about to get a about to get
Speaker 1: an earful And he actually was talking about he just
Speaker 1: he had that face because he was just you know,
Speaker 1: struggling with what he was going to say. And he
Speaker 1: said that he read the book. He was there himself,
Speaker 1: and it was really great to be able to say, like, guys,
Speaker 1: I love my life now, like I have two gorgeous kids,
Speaker 1: I have a great wife, I live in a town
Speaker 1: that I love. I'm doing work that it's valuable to me.
Speaker 1: I'm not You're flourishing getting by, I'm thrilled about stuff
Speaker 1: like yeah, likes things are actually kind of great and
Speaker 1: and that's gonna be you too at some point, like
Speaker 1: it it and that kind of thinking when you're really
Speaker 1: in it is impossible, but at least maybe in that
Speaker 1: circumstance you can think, well, you know, maybe there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of hope. It could be so hard when
Speaker 1: there's fields like pressure on your chest, and anyone who's
Speaker 1: had the depression can resonate with that. The world there's
Speaker 1: such a burden. You're a burden to the world. As
Speaker 1: far as sort of stereotypes about my work, sometimes people
Speaker 1: can assume it's all PC all the time, which is
Speaker 1: absolutely not true. You know, we deal with students on
Speaker 1: the on the left and professor's getting on the left
Speaker 1: getting in trouble all the time. But there's also kind
Speaker 1: of a big middle of cases where they don't they
Speaker 1: don't get press attention. And this is like I'd say,
Speaker 1: probably most of the cases we see it fire they
Speaker 1: involved things that are not particularly partisan and therefore not
Speaker 1: interesting to the press, which drives me nuts, which which
Speaker 1: is one of the reasons why I insisted that in
Speaker 1: one chapter in the book, I have the one about
Speaker 1: hyper bureaucratized universities, I open up talking about a program
Speaker 1: at University of Northern Michigan that I feel like this
Speaker 1: one valuable to explain the whole thing. So a student
Speaker 1: went into counseling services at un M and she was
Speaker 1: there to talk through a being raped. She had a
Speaker 1: sexual assault, and she didn't she didn't want to report
Speaker 1: the person, but she wanted to try to, you know,
Speaker 1: get through the feelings about it. She didn't talk about
Speaker 1: any thought of hurting herself. She wasn't planning to hurt herself.
Speaker 1: She just needed someone to talk to about it. And
Speaker 1: a couple of days days later, after she goes to
Speaker 1: the counseling office, she gets an email from the administration
Speaker 1: or actually having a letter that says, you know, we
Speaker 1: heard that you went to the counseling center. By the way,
Speaker 1: if you discuss your thoughts of self harm, with your friends,
Speaker 1: you will be disciplined. And I think it was based
Speaker 1: on a misunderstanding of contagion that essentially, you know, how
Speaker 1: if one person commits suicide and there's a possibility that'll
Speaker 1: be a little cluster, but that's not the case when
Speaker 1: people simply talk about it, and in fact, talking about
Speaker 1: it is one of the healthiest things you can do.
Speaker 1: And when defending it was amazing hearing these administrators say
Speaker 1: things like, basically, if you could boil it down, it
Speaker 1: was like, well, you know, your friends are vulnerable too,
Speaker 1: basically saying it's like, so you're saying that I should
Speaker 1: isolate myself and I'm a burden to my friends. And
Speaker 1: what's amazing about that was when you're in the depressed mindset,
Speaker 1: you're absolutely right. And this was just such a messed
Speaker 1: up thing. And we fought this in public as actually
Speaker 1: one of the ways who we actually become friends with
Speaker 1: Jesse singaal who's become popular, you know, partially dealing with
Speaker 1: a lot of the anti woke stuff, but his first
Speaker 1: kind of interaction with us was really about a case
Speaker 1: that was not in the slightest bit political. It was
Speaker 1: just a deeply inhumane program at university, and we found
Speaker 1: out that that at least dozens of students have been
Speaker 1: getting the same letter every semester. Okay, good, I'm really
Speaker 1: glad that we're starting to teared out some of these
Speaker 1: misconceptions around your around you and you're, what you believe in,
Speaker 1: what you stand for, and all this book about this,
Speaker 1: that's a good one. Let's talk about some more. Because
Speaker 1: the title of this book that you wrote with Jonathan
Speaker 1: is the Coddling, And if I'm correct you, you didn't
Speaker 1: choose the word coddling, right. I don't like the title
Speaker 1: of my own book, and I'm stuck with it now.
Speaker 1: It's funny. So the long story again twenty fifteen. I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about this idea, so actually they should fill
Speaker 1: in some gaps. Two thousand and eight. I start studying
Speaker 1: cognitive behavioral therapy in order to overcome my depression. I
Speaker 1: will also like to be clear, I was also helped
Speaker 1: by medication. I don't want to be very clear about
Speaker 1: that because I don't want to say it like I
Speaker 1: did it just with talk therapy. I will say, however,
Speaker 1: I am one of the very many people who react
Speaker 1: very poorly to SSRIs so, but the other ones you know,
Speaker 1: I'm currently on some that help me tremendously that aren't SSRIs.
Speaker 1: So I start doing CBT. And I'm sure your audience
Speaker 1: knows this, but CBT to me is just incredibly profound
Speaker 1: also in simplicity. And what you do is, you know,
Speaker 1: several times a day, particularly when you feel particularly sharp
Speaker 1: emotions come up, you write down what your thought was
Speaker 1: when you when you had that unpleasant experience, so it
Speaker 1: can be you know, like I always give, like going
Speaker 1: on a date and it goes poorly, and you say
Speaker 1: to yourself, I'm going to die alone. And you look
Speaker 1: at that and you ask yourself, is this a cognitive distortion?
Speaker 1: And you say, well, that's mind reading. I don't really
Speaker 1: know if she hated me, that's fortune telling. I don't
Speaker 1: really know that that's what the future looks like. It's
Speaker 1: definitely catastrophizing. It's a ridiculous overstatement of what happened. And
Speaker 1: it's not the power of positive thinking that you're you're
Speaker 1: working towards. You're just trying to see it a little
Speaker 1: more clearly and rationally, so you're trying to get to
Speaker 1: your prefrontal cortex. You're trying to bring yourself back into
Speaker 1: your rational brain and by the end of it, you
Speaker 1: don't get to everything's going to be swell. You get
Speaker 1: to I had a bad date and it really made
Speaker 1: me sad, you know, which is really what happened. And
Speaker 1: what's amazing is you know, and this is something that
Speaker 1: I really tried to hammer home to Hype, my very
Speaker 1: much beloved co author. He was absolute pleasure to work with.
Speaker 1: But every so often he talked about it just being
Speaker 1: like really simple, and it's like, it is simple, but
Speaker 1: you have I but it's a discipline. You have to
Speaker 1: do it, and do it a lot, and do it regularly.
Speaker 1: You have to do these little exercises constantly. Right, We're
Speaker 1: not like these robots that were just like we read
Speaker 1: all change change changed, you know if then you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be nice if you could just put the
Speaker 1: chip in. And it took and it took a long time.
Speaker 1: But you know, I'd say, like I remember, like the
Speaker 1: election of Obama, you know, like I remember looking at
Speaker 1: myself and being like I'm happy, like I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 1: I'm actually not just okay, I'm I'm actually happy. And
Speaker 1: partially because I could see those voices that will be
Speaker 1: like you know you're broken, You're broken, and I'd hear it.
Speaker 1: And whereas it sounded just like the gospel truth to
Speaker 1: me a year earlier, it was it didn't sound right anymore.
Speaker 1: Like it sounded like, well, that's a that's a little
Speaker 1: that's a little over the top brain. I love that.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like you had installed a medicip yeah
Speaker 1: in the in the program. Yeah. And I feel like,
Speaker 1: la silly. So how does this relate to campuses? This
Speaker 1: relates to campuses? By back then, earlier in my career,
Speaker 1: students were awesome on free speech. They understood offensive comedy,
Speaker 1: they understood challenging professors, they understood the the you know,
Speaker 1: the sixties free speech movement. They still had like a
Speaker 1: strong kind of like affection for that. The problem in
Speaker 1: my early career twenty one to twenty twelve was administrators.
Speaker 1: Administrators were the ones who were pulling all of the
Speaker 1: kind of like exaggerated stuff. And to give you an example,
Speaker 1: like free speech zones. These are things I've fought all
Speaker 1: over the country, and one of the big spectacular ones
Speaker 1: I fought early on was the free speech gazebo at
Speaker 1: tech Tech University, twenty foot wide, gazebo for all free speech,
Speaker 1: for all of protected activities, and you always have to
Speaker 1: point out things like that includes reading a book. I've
Speaker 1: like go Over wrote, this has no clue what they're
Speaker 1: talking about. But keep in mind Texas Tech has twenty
Speaker 1: eight thousand students, and so I had one of my
Speaker 1: friends who has a math degree from MIT, do the
Speaker 1: dimensional analysis on it. God forbid, all twenty eight thousand
Speaker 1: students wanted to exercise their First Amendment rights at the
Speaker 1: same time, and you'd have to crush them down the
Speaker 1: density of uranium two thirty eight. It is what he
Speaker 1: worked out. So I was seeing so many cases that
Speaker 1: involved catastrophizing, that involve fortune telling that administrators were really,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, trying to tell students, you're not nearly
Speaker 1: scared enough, you're not nearly freaked out enough, You're not
Speaker 1: aware of how fragile you are. All this kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: And millennials, who get a bad rep were not really
Speaker 1: buying it, you know, like the the administrators were selling
Speaker 1: it and the millennials were not buying it. And what
Speaker 1: changed was the school year twenty thirteen twenty fourteen in
Speaker 1: the school year, and it wasn't the least bit subtle,
Speaker 1: was a dramatic change in attitude about free speech among students.
Speaker 1: It was something that like, you know, I had friends
Speaker 1: who were columnists calling me just basically asking, like, what
Speaker 1: just happened because you suddenly saw one, you know, there
Speaker 1: were there was suddenly a big spike in disinvitations, you know,
Speaker 1: speakers being disinvited because they're assumed to have, you know,
Speaker 1: hateful or hurtful views. You had the first time I
Speaker 1: ever heard of trigger warnings being demanded on campus, the
Speaker 1: first time I actually saw students demanding new different versions
Speaker 1: of speech codes. And what was especially you know, fascinating
Speaker 1: about it to me was that it was justified overwhelmingly
Speaker 1: in medicalized language. It wasn't saying, uh, you know, that's repressive,
Speaker 1: jerk can't speak on my campus because he's you know,
Speaker 1: horrible Republican until surely they said that too. It's because
Speaker 1: it would be traumatic to me in a in a
Speaker 1: medical sense. Actually, no, no, that's not exactly, that's not precise.
Speaker 1: Almost never was someone saying that it was, with some exceptions,
Speaker 1: that it would be traumatic to me. They were saying
Speaker 1: that it would be traumatic to some undisclosed, vulnerable group
Speaker 1: on campus or sometimes disclosed to have that person speak
Speaker 1: on campus. And you know, there were shoutdowns a Brown
Speaker 1: for example, you know, the disinvitation of Condolly's rice. You know,
Speaker 1: it got a lot of people's attention. But people really
Speaker 1: started paying attention to this when it no longer fit
Speaker 1: the stereotype of going after conservatives. It was when they
Speaker 1: went after the chancellor of Berkeley, for example, or when
Speaker 1: they went after Christine Leguard at the International Monetary Fund.
Speaker 1: That's some people went, wait, what what just happened? And
Speaker 1: like I said, be on the ground. It was really noticeable,
Speaker 1: and so I went to Hight, who was newly a
Speaker 1: friend of mine. We became friends, overwhelming the over feeling
Speaker 1: like we were kind of like trying to be honest
Speaker 1: brokers in the middle of the culture War, and there
Speaker 1: weren't that many of us, so we should probably become friends.
Speaker 1: And I talked to him about the whole CBT idea
Speaker 1: that essentially I feel like administrators were trying to whether
Speaker 1: not intentionally, but we're trying to teach students the habits
Speaker 1: of anxious and depressed people by teaching them this exaggerated
Speaker 1: sense of fragility, this exaggerated sense of threat, all this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, and that and the students weren't buying
Speaker 1: it up until right now, and that suddenly the students
Speaker 1: were mouthing these arguments that have been made for some time,
Speaker 1: but it seemed like they were actually believing them. And
Speaker 1: of course the consequence that we saw coming was that
Speaker 1: this would result in it, you know, probably a modest
Speaker 1: increase in anxiety and depression among college aged students. So
Speaker 1: we wrote an article about it in twenty fifteen. It
Speaker 1: was a cover story in the I guess we've been
Speaker 1: in September Atlantic in twenty fifteen. And as I oftentimes,
Speaker 1: you know, we'll say when I give speeches, and then
Speaker 1: we solve the whole thing. Now there's no more outrage
Speaker 1: on campus, exactly, no more fergility. We managed to write
Speaker 1: it right before things got way worse. And what we
Speaker 1: didn't have at the time was although I had plenty
Speaker 1: of reports, by the way, sometimes I have to remind
Speaker 1: height that, you know, since I was closer to campus,
Speaker 1: or sorry, closer to you know, many campuses at the
Speaker 1: same time, I was getting plenty of reports that counseling
Speaker 1: centers were overwhelmed. But you know, height is a good scientist,
Speaker 1: so he wanted to see the data. He wanted to
Speaker 1: see what the data look like, and so we wrote
Speaker 1: the We wrote the article. It was well received. But
Speaker 1: then in the in twenty fifteen, that's when you had,
Speaker 1: you know, big explosions of protests on campus. Some of
Speaker 1: them we were psyched about. Others were protests. So we
Speaker 1: were psyched to see, you know, prou them people using
Speaker 1: their free speech. And this was a sort of an
Speaker 1: outgrowth of Black Lives Matter. But they sometimes oftentimes we're
Speaker 1: asking that, you know, this employee be fired for something.
Speaker 1: They said, that this professor be fired for what they said,
Speaker 1: that this at university at UMass Amherst. That this newspaper
Speaker 1: no or no, it was Wesleyan, sorry Wesleyan. That this
Speaker 1: newspaper you know, stopped getting funded. And so it was
Speaker 1: one of these times where we'd been wanting, you know,
Speaker 1: a one, one thing that you can rightfully criticize millennials
Speaker 1: for was some amount of political apathy. So it was
Speaker 1: nice to see the apathy. And but then we were
Speaker 1: a little bit distressed to see that a lot of
Speaker 1: the activism was decidedly on the other side of free
Speaker 1: speech and this. This kind of kept on going with
Speaker 1: dips and peaks and valleys until the scariest thing that
Speaker 1: I've seen in my career was the explosion of violence
Speaker 1: right after the election of Trump. So you have, of course,
Speaker 1: the Milo riots. I know everyone hates Miley Anopolis, I understand,
Speaker 1: but the riots, if you sit down and watch how
Speaker 1: bad they were and how many people who you know
Speaker 1: got hurt, and overwhelmingly people who weren't even there, you know,
Speaker 1: like who were just innocent bystanders or reporters. For example,
Speaker 1: during that you had the assault on Alison Stanger at Middlebury.
Speaker 1: Allison Stanger, she was defending Charles Murray, you know, controversial
Speaker 1: person who's written on rac and intelligence. Alison Stanger was
Speaker 1: there to debate him because she's, you know, a good liberal.
Speaker 1: She is you should have on our show. She is.
Speaker 1: She is about as decent, absolutely about as decent and
Speaker 1: thoughtful of a person as would be imagined. And she
Speaker 1: got a permanent head injury from being assaulted while defending
Speaker 1: someone she disagreed with but thought that she should be
Speaker 1: able to debate them. That's pretty badass. She's a pretty badass.
Speaker 1: And I also love the fact that she's able to,
Speaker 1: you know, go to some of these conferences where she's
Speaker 1: surrounded by people who are conservatives and say things that
Speaker 1: they don't want to hear, and I'm like, so she
Speaker 1: continues to be just an amazingly brave and awesome person
Speaker 1: that then you had lesser known. Things like the at
Speaker 1: clare Mount McKenna, students completely surrounded a place where Heather
Speaker 1: MacDonald was supposed to speak. She had to be like
Speaker 1: rushed off to a new location, nobody could actually attend
Speaker 1: her talk, and so that that really scared us. And
Speaker 1: so we were we were actually already writing the book,
Speaker 1: but were just in early stages. And you know, it
Speaker 1: came out in twenty eighteen. Okay, So we started out
Speaker 1: with how we got to the title. So back in
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, you know, I was working on this article
Speaker 1: with John on and off for about a year, and
Speaker 1: we were really proud of how it came out. At
Speaker 1: the very last minute, my proposed title, which had always
Speaker 1: been the incredibly boring but more accurate to what my
Speaker 1: argument was arguing towards misery, which is really what I
Speaker 1: was saying, was essentially that we're teaching teaching young people
Speaker 1: the habits that will make the magine depressed. That's what
Speaker 1: I wanted the title to be, and at the last
Speaker 1: minute they decided to change it to the sexier Coddling
Speaker 1: of the American Mind. At the time, John was convinced.
Speaker 1: I hated it. I was like, no, people are going
Speaker 1: to think we're saying kids today are spoiled, which is
Speaker 1: not at all what we're saying. We're saying this is
Speaker 1: entirely our fault. It's something much. And I also didn't
Speaker 1: like the connection to the sort of reference to Closing
Speaker 1: of the American Mind Vallein Bloom. Not that there's anything
Speaker 1: super wrong with the book Closing in the American Mind.
Speaker 1: It was, you know, a book written by a Yale
Speaker 1: professor or about what he thought were problems on campus
Speaker 1: back in the late nineteen eighties, largely relating to things
Speaker 1: that could roughly be called PC but not exclusively. But
Speaker 1: it had no relationship to that book other than having
Speaker 1: you know, like a critique of higher education that was
Speaker 1: about it. And so I ended up with this title
Speaker 1: that I you know, I'm like, great, everyone's going to
Speaker 1: just run with coddling as being our point that kids
Speaker 1: that they are too coddled, and the good news was
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly people didn't initially do that. They were they actually
Speaker 1: understood that we were saying something a lot more nuanced
Speaker 1: than kids are spoiled. We're saying that we're, you know,
Speaker 1: teaching bad psychological habits. But when it came time for
Speaker 1: the book, I, uh, you know, when when I was
Speaker 1: talking to people about it, I was like, no, no, absolutely,
Speaker 1: no way. Now it's not gonna be called coddling the
Speaker 1: American mind. What we signed the contract under was the
Speaker 1: title Disempowered. Again, uh, much closer to what I wanted
Speaker 1: to say, And I actually really liked the title Disempowered,
Speaker 1: because what I feel like we've done is we've taken
Speaker 1: incredibly bright, incredibly enthusiastic young people and told them, by
Speaker 1: the way you can't really handle your life on your own,
Speaker 1: by the way you are much more fragile than you
Speaker 1: think you are, By the way words can harm you,
Speaker 1: by the way you're not resilient, by the way you
Speaker 1: can't do things on your own. By the way, we're
Speaker 1: not going to teach you life skills that make you
Speaker 1: feel like a competent, fully realized human being. So that's
Speaker 1: what I wanted to emphasize, is that is really this
Speaker 1: is something that's being done to them, and the publisher,
Speaker 1: you know, when we were a year into it, didn't
Speaker 1: really like it. So we started coming with other examples,
Speaker 1: you know, Misguided Minds was one we had for a while.
Speaker 1: I didn't really love that one. I actually, you know,
Speaker 1: at one point in frustration, was like, how about this
Speaker 1: the Great American Psychout? And that was kind of like
Speaker 1: my joke title that I had in my head, but
Speaker 1: basically making the point that I feel like, when you
Speaker 1: talk yourself into into something negative, that's psyching yourself out.
Speaker 1: And then at the last minute we were told that
Speaker 1: the publisher, you know, the distributors, are insisting that it
Speaker 1: be coddling in the American mind And so we went back,
Speaker 1: you know, we didn't really have a choice, and we
Speaker 1: went back and just explained all we mean by coddling
Speaker 1: is that sometimes efforts to help people, to protect them
Speaker 1: can actually harm them. That's it, That's all we mean
Speaker 1: by coddling. We don't mean kids are spoiled. We actually
Speaker 1: think they got a pretty rough, you know, raw deal
Speaker 1: in a lot of different ways. So, yeah, not a
Speaker 1: fan of the title, but I always just urge people.
Speaker 1: It's like I know you might be critical of the title.
Speaker 1: Please read the book. We even made a video to
Speaker 1: this extent. I know, I love that video, and send
Speaker 1: me that link again and I'll put in the show notes.
Speaker 1: I'm glad that I can give you an opportunity to
Speaker 1: dispel some myths that probably been bugging you for for
Speaker 1: a long time. You do choose to use to frame
Speaker 1: of this in terms of the fragility anti fragility framework,
Speaker 1: So I think one potential criticism of that could be
Speaker 1: and I'm sure that you've gotten people who read your
Speaker 1: book and are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, those snowflakes, like
Speaker 1: the ones that have serious mental illness right, like someone
Speaker 1: is like depression. Oh, they're just anti fragile and kind
Speaker 1: of using that framework as a way of not having
Speaker 1: to have compassion for the suffering of a person. Now,
Speaker 1: when you get people saying that, so, what do you
Speaker 1: say to them? It's hard for anyone to read the
Speaker 1: book and attribute that to us. Generally, when I've had
Speaker 1: people try to who've actually read the book and try
Speaker 1: to say that to us, they will even couch it
Speaker 1: in terms of like, I know, you guys don't want
Speaker 1: to put it this way, but we think blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: you know, like we think that these guys are snowflakes
Speaker 1: and liberal snowflakes. Yeah, and we just point out one
Speaker 1: we hate the term snowflakes, and two I'm saying it
Speaker 1: really is our fault. And three it's not just about
Speaker 1: politics that I think that some of the very same
Speaker 1: causes that you know are causing some of these what
Speaker 1: we believe at least contributing to this big spike in
Speaker 1: mental health. It wasn't subtle at all among young people.
Speaker 1: Are things that are actually transpartisan that essentially that's you know,
Speaker 1: paranoid parenting is something that is something that for the
Speaker 1: kind of students who go to elite colleges, that's pretty
Speaker 1: common whether you're right, left or center. And that's one
Speaker 1: of the six causal threads we talk about about why
Speaker 1: we think we saw such a dramatic disconnect between millennials,
Speaker 1: and what we would discover was what we were seeing
Speaker 1: for the first time in twenty thirteen twenty fourteen was
Speaker 1: a critical mass of people from Generation Z were born
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five, nineteen ninety six or later. And that
Speaker 1: you know, when you look at the at the different
Speaker 1: sort of personality and attitude pollings about any number of things.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty sharp discontinuity between millennials and a generation Z.
Speaker 1: And we didn't know that back in twenty fourteen, but wow,
Speaker 1: we learned so much writing the book, and really it
Speaker 1: became a detective story about what was so different and
Speaker 1: it ended up being this incredibly rich topic. And so
Speaker 1: the conclusion we came to was that it was a
Speaker 1: confluence of what led to particular the situation on campus
Speaker 1: and also the situation of mental health was and as
Speaker 1: far as like the claim that gets challenged the most,
Speaker 1: and you know, I'd be happy to be disproved on this,
Speaker 1: but I would at the same time, you know, want
Speaker 1: something that could actually explain why the discontinuity was so sharp.
Speaker 1: Was the first thing we talk about is social media.
Speaker 1: The next thing we talk about is political polarization. The
Speaker 1: next two are both parenting related, and those are paranoid parenting.
Speaker 1: Kate Julian wrote a cover story for The Atlantic a
Speaker 1: couple of months ago that really hit that even harder,
Speaker 1: which was talk more about that, but it was amazing piece.
Speaker 1: Then the one that surprised me the most that we
Speaker 1: ended up deciding we wanted a whole chapter devoted to
Speaker 1: and that was free play. We were really surprised at
Speaker 1: how consistently with every every scholar we talked to we
Speaker 1: were hearing that unstructured free time plays lack of unstructured
Speaker 1: UH free time can play havoc on all sorts of
Speaker 1: outcomes for students, you know, whether it's mental health, or
Speaker 1: sense of autonomy, creativity, all of these things. And realizing
Speaker 1: that since we were particularly talking about the kind of
Speaker 1: kids who would go to the elite colleges, you know,
Speaker 1: these are these poor poor things have been structured from
Speaker 1: six am to when when they go to bed at night,
Speaker 1: and that can really do damage to your idea of
Speaker 1: your own your own locals of control. And then the
Speaker 1: last two, which are related to why so intense in
Speaker 1: particular colleges is UH hyper bureaucratization, concerned for liability, all
Speaker 1: of these kind of like cold hearted things that don't
Speaker 1: get enough attention but dominate my work at fire are
Speaker 1: you know, over regulations over your brocratizations, all of these
Speaker 1: things that you're suddenly paying seventy thousand dollars a year
Speaker 1: for that that are results of fear of liability and
Speaker 1: mass and the explosion of administrators on campus. And then
Speaker 1: the final one, which is also the one that conservatives
Speaker 1: like to point to the most, is just changing ideas
Speaker 1: of social justice. That's where you get to different ideas
Speaker 1: of intersectionality, where you know, essentially, if you look at
Speaker 1: everything as kind of like a battle between you and
Speaker 1: the and the oppressors, but you also add to it
Speaker 1: the idea that that all your identities intersect, that you
Speaker 1: end up with ever smaller and more and more isolated
Speaker 1: groups that feel sort of attacked on all sides. Now,
Speaker 1: we do say that intersectionality, the principle, the idea that
Speaker 1: our identities intersect, absolutely true, no doubt about it. But
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean that it has to turn into
Speaker 1: this kind of like war of all against all. Even
Speaker 1: if you come to that conclusion, we can you unpack
Speaker 1: that a little bit more. Well, you know, essentially, if
Speaker 1: you take intersectionality to its absolute in a way that
Speaker 1: it wasn't originally intended to have a meaning, If you
Speaker 1: take it to the level at which you know, all
Speaker 1: your identities intersect, eventually you get back to individuality. I see, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and yeah, the most sacred part of who
Speaker 1: you are. Yeah, it is an intersection of identities, you know,
Speaker 1: with a large amount of part of that identity is
Speaker 1: personal and that that makes you idiosyncratically you And and
Speaker 1: this is actually something where I think that we've had
Speaker 1: enough space and nuance for me to explain this. There
Speaker 1: is one way in which I like the term snowflake
Speaker 1: and that and that's this is that people actually are
Speaker 1: you need and people will say things like no, you're
Speaker 1: not unique, or no you're not gonna you know, you
Speaker 1: can argue that someone might not be special, but you
Speaker 1: can't argue that every individual is unique. It's funny because
Speaker 1: you said earlier you don't like snowflake. I was going
Speaker 1: to say, actually I like the word snowflake in a
Speaker 1: different context, So yeah, I'm glad you said that. Well,
Speaker 1: that's really funny because actually I do like it as
Speaker 1: a positive thing, like the idea that you are individually unique.
Speaker 1: So intersectionality, you know, the intersection of identities can actually
Speaker 1: be interpreted very positively. But like a lot of things,
Speaker 1: even if it's academically true, when it starts getting used
Speaker 1: as a way to argue a rhetorical tactic, and even
Speaker 1: if people aren't they're not thinking of it as a tactic,
Speaker 1: but when it becomes sort of like who a battle
Speaker 1: of who's more oppressed, kind of nobody wins. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: your uniqueness is the conglomeration of all your identities. To me,
Speaker 1: that still doesn't feel quite right, because I'd like to
Speaker 1: think I'm more than just even my identities, Like I
Speaker 1: don't even have that many identities like I like, am
Speaker 1: I allowed to opt out? You know? You know how
Speaker 1: you like keep getting like email lists? Do you want
Speaker 1: to opt out of? Like am I do? I have
Speaker 1: to be on the identity train? Like am I allowed
Speaker 1: to just be a collaboration of like my interests, my value.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's things other than identity, right is Danny
Speaker 1: the only thing we're allowed to be? And that's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why, like I talk about it coming
Speaker 1: back to individuality is kind of like, you know, a
Speaker 1: big part of my identity clearly is I'm a comic
Speaker 1: book reader. A part of my identity is the street
Speaker 1: that I grew up on and the friends I grew
Speaker 1: up with, and my you know, first job and all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. I guess we're talking about racial
Speaker 1: gender identities, which are the most prominent in discussions right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and fair enough, someone could say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I can't change having black skin, right like, you know,
Speaker 1: that's that's my day. And I would be respectful to
Speaker 1: that that point, But you know, I was just more
Speaker 1: making the point like, do I have to view everything
Speaker 1: throughout that lens when it comes to me understanding myself? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And that was something that we talk about in the book,
Speaker 1: is different forms of identity politics and what they mean
Speaker 1: for political success and happiness and the thing that we
Speaker 1: talk about and it's something that's been observed a million times.
Speaker 1: We just chose our own name for it, which was
Speaker 1: common enemy group politics, like the idea of like who
Speaker 1: do we find who is the bad guy? And common
Speaker 1: humanity identity politics? How do we love that distinction? Thank you?
Speaker 1: How do we get to how do we figure out
Speaker 1: what we have in common? And I think that just
Speaker 1: flat out the one that's been more successful, to say
Speaker 1: the least, is common humanity. I think about particularly here
Speaker 1: the gay rights movement. I'm actually having dinner this weekend
Speaker 1: with my good friend Jonathan Rausch and his husband Michael.
Speaker 1: Jonathan was one of the early people really fighting for
Speaker 1: gay marriage early on and He talks about how what
Speaker 1: a big difference it made when people started towards and
Speaker 1: this was a movement that was particularly pushed towards late seventies,
Speaker 1: which has just come out of the closet. Let all
Speaker 1: these people who think they don't like gay people remind
Speaker 1: them that they're you know, sister, uncle, cousin, that person
Speaker 1: they really love, that professor they really loved, is gay,
Speaker 1: and that it started a long process. But it makes
Speaker 1: a huge difference when you start seeing the common humanity
Speaker 1: of other people. Yeah. Absolutely, And you know a lot
Speaker 1: of these ideas are in are abstract principles, and I do,
Speaker 1: I do see the perspective of those who I mean,
Speaker 1: they're really living in really harsh circumstances. Maybe they're those
Speaker 1: who face discrimination on daily basis, who say, well, that's
Speaker 1: easier said than done. I'm there are people who have
Speaker 1: such a thing as self defense, right. They didn't they
Speaker 1: didn't ask for it. They didn't they didn't ask to uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's what came to them. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm right there with you at these abstract principles. And
Speaker 1: then I also want to have compassion for those who
Speaker 1: have it a lot, a lot harder than I do
Speaker 1: on a daily basis. So well, that's one of the
Speaker 1: reason why I don't knock people for this stuff. I
Speaker 1: like that, Yeah, I like that. You don't do that,
Speaker 1: Yeah I don't. I don't. You know, I think that
Speaker 1: you know people's pain and then and that they have
Speaker 1: it is you know, it is essential. It's important to
Speaker 1: have compassion for even people you disagree with. But when
Speaker 1: it comes to you know, fundamental rights, ultimately, my my
Speaker 1: belief and one of my core beliefs, is that ultimately
Speaker 1: we'll all be better off if human rights are respected,
Speaker 1: and human rights include the right to free speech, the
Speaker 1: right to free thought, and that we also and this
Speaker 1: is one thing that I will say that I'm not
Speaker 1: a libertarian, but since I do civil liberty's law, I
Speaker 1: have friends who are libertarians. And one thing that I
Speaker 1: do one concept that I have taken from libertarianism that
Speaker 1: I think is worth repeating for sure, and I just
Speaker 1: simply added naive to it, which is the concept of
Speaker 1: naive statism that essentially, you got to remember a lot
Speaker 1: of times when people are thinking about big ideas quote
Speaker 1: unquote solutions to problems, they are relying on an idea
Speaker 1: that we can create some kind of government apparatus will
Speaker 1: fix all of these things. And the thing that I see,
Speaker 1: and I will critically say, because I mean, I'm on
Speaker 1: the left side of the spectrum. You know, I'm in
Speaker 1: a bubble of Actually my bubble is better than most people.
Speaker 1: I actually really do try to have friends across the spectrum.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, you know, one argument that
Speaker 1: I felt like I was getting in all the time
Speaker 1: was just reminding people, you know that actual people are
Speaker 1: going to be running that program, right and that includes
Speaker 1: you know, Trump odin Republicans are going to be running
Speaker 1: that program too. And that's the thing that I feel
Speaker 1: like when I would be when I was working for
Speaker 1: the A C. L You in San Francisco, I felt
Speaker 1: like I was constantly having this argument over and over again,
Speaker 1: where it was like, I know, you think those hate
Speaker 1: speech laws are going to be good. They're going to
Speaker 1: be but you know who's going to be in charge
Speaker 1: of them. Your greatest enemies are going to be in
Speaker 1: charge of them. So there's a lot about there's a
Speaker 1: lot about civil liberties and law that that and that's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why I think that there's still
Speaker 1: so much to be said for the for the Founders,
Speaker 1: for all their faults, is that it was a great
Speaker 1: service to us to both be optimistic about human potential
Speaker 1: and a not small amount cynical about human about human nature.
Speaker 1: And I think that a lot of you know, separation
Speaker 1: of government, common law, common law, jurisprudence, a lot of
Speaker 1: the systems we have in place are and are and
Speaker 1: always have been to deal with stuff that we're just
Speaker 1: not all that good at. Yeah, And it just seems
Speaker 1: like this time in our history we're losing sight of
Speaker 1: a lot of those insights that they had many years ago.
Speaker 1: We're losing we're forgetting what human well we'll not forget.
Speaker 1: We're seeing I guess full force what human's nature is like,
Speaker 1: but we're not seeing the potential as much. And that
Speaker 1: saddens me, you know, as a humanistic, optimistic guy. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: And and and the permit one moment of snark. I
Speaker 1: was going to say, you, you might be surprised to
Speaker 1: know this, Scott, but Congress is actually supposed to do things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fair enough, Like and and sometimes when I when I
Speaker 1: look at the way government's running right now, it's just
Speaker 1: it's just like, Wow, that wasn't we we put so
Speaker 1: many checks and balances like in the way of that
Speaker 1: and we're just not using them. Well, this this Trump
Speaker 1: guy dreamed some swamp so much that he's he's Trump
Speaker 1: and he's trumping everything. I always say, I worked for
Speaker 1: a nonpartisan nonprofit and but you know, the thing I
Speaker 1: wrote yesterday was talking about how Trump is suddenly talking
Speaker 1: about again not suddenly, he's talking about the flag burning amendment.
Speaker 1: You know, they actually know he put them in jail,
Speaker 1: put them in jail for a year if they Yeah,
Speaker 1: my favorite, do you develop a little bit of a
Speaker 1: dark sense of humoring this stuff? My my favorite was
Speaker 1: when he was saying that they'd lose their citizenship if
Speaker 1: they if they burned a flag, And I'm like, huh,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, Like so like what would happened to me?
Speaker 1: Like suddenly I'm stay like, well what happens? Can you
Speaker 1: just be neutral citizenship? Is that? Does that exist? Exactly?
Speaker 1: I'm sweet? Yeah, So I wrote I wrote about that
Speaker 1: yesterday in terms of the bedrock principle, also making the
Speaker 1: point it's like, be careful what you wish for, dude,
Speaker 1: Like the like the principle that undergirds the flag burning
Speaker 1: opinion which, by the way, you should like people should
Speaker 1: read it, Texas Johnson is a beautiful opinion and it's
Speaker 1: about the right to burn an American flag. And in it,
Speaker 1: you know, it says we just can't ban things because
Speaker 1: just because they're offensive. And I was like, dude, you
Speaker 1: know who has the most to lose from that no
Speaker 1: longer being part of the law you Floyd Abrams actually
Speaker 1: wrote wrote something saying like, listen, he would have been
Speaker 1: arrested in other countries for some of the things you
Speaker 1: said during the campaign. It's like, no, you actually you
Speaker 1: want to keep this this element. They are good, this
Speaker 1: kind of it's a very logical and very fair argument.
Speaker 1: I think you need to keep making over and over
Speaker 1: again because I think many of us are not aware
Speaker 1: of that, and we can we can all fall into
Speaker 1: our traps where we forget you know, that that things
Speaker 1: could change very quickly and suddenly what we're arguing for
Speaker 1: comes against us. Right. Oh yeah, and that's a very
Speaker 1: important point. Hey, I'm really appreciative of the time you've
Speaker 1: spent on this show. Now, you have so many fans
Speaker 1: that when I put up at a call on Twitter,
Speaker 1: you know, anyone have questions for Greg looking on off,
Speaker 1: I got a million questions. Do you have an extra
Speaker 1: bonus ten to fifteen minutes to answer some Twitter questions?
Speaker 1: Or absolutely cool? Okay, so Amy Alcon I know Amy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's the advice guy, very fun of the universe. This book,
Speaker 1: by the way, her her book on a lot of
Speaker 1: like a lot of the things she builds her advice.
Speaker 1: Her most recent advice book around which I think is
Speaker 1: nice manners for people who occasionally say fuck. I think
Speaker 1: it might be called what it is, but one of
Speaker 1: the one of the major sort of psychological premises it
Speaker 1: really hits home is embodied cognition, which is an interesting
Speaker 1: idea which I haven't given too much lot to. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: she's a badass, a woman for sure. So she said,
Speaker 1: talk to him about what a difference CBT has made
Speaker 1: for him and continues to make, and why he decided
Speaker 1: to be open and coddling about his feeling suicidal. Greatly
Speaker 1: admire him for this. Also, what about him upbringing personality
Speaker 1: led him to be the champion of free speech on campus?
Speaker 1: Feel free to answer any all that or past well?
Speaker 1: Part one I think we answered to to a large degree.
Speaker 1: Part two, How I got so passionate about freedom of
Speaker 1: speech is you know, for lack of a better word, multiculturalism.
Speaker 1: And actually, I think I didn't realize how powerful this
Speaker 1: one factoid about my life actually is because I usually
Speaker 1: talk about my father's Russian upbringing and my grandfather fighting
Speaker 1: fighting in the Bolshek Revolution, and his grandfather being a
Speaker 1: surf and you know, like we're surf stock. We were.
Speaker 1: My great great grandfather I lose track of the greats was,
Speaker 1: you know, bought his way to freedom in eighteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty nine. You know, if he'd waited a couple
Speaker 1: of years, he would have gotten it for free, because
Speaker 1: these are Alexander the Second declared surfed him over. But
Speaker 1: we were actually we were killing it in Russia. We
Speaker 1: were something that would have later been called kulos because
Speaker 1: we were peasants who went from being serfs to being
Speaker 1: professors and judges and land owned very quickly, and I
Speaker 1: am proud of that. But then the bulsh Revolution broke
Speaker 1: out and we had to run because people like us
Speaker 1: were shot in the back of the head. And so
Speaker 1: my grandfather uh took his family to Zagreb in Yugoslavia,
Speaker 1: where the where the poor whites went. The richer ones
Speaker 1: went to Paris like Nabakov and so my and then
Speaker 1: my father's dad died when he was six, and my
Speaker 1: father was was made it an orphan. He saw his
Speaker 1: brother his mother couldn't support him anymore. So he grew
Speaker 1: up all over Yugoslavia in just awful, awful conditions. He
Speaker 1: was born in nineteen twenty six. My father is much
Speaker 1: older than most people. So long story I've always taken
Speaker 1: very seriously, like the Russia part of it and the
Speaker 1: opposing totalitarianism. What I probably undervalue was how much having
Speaker 1: a father who grew up all over Yugoslavia made me
Speaker 1: think about things like the culture wars, because he grew
Speaker 1: up in a situation where there people who looking at them,
Speaker 1: they're the same freaking people, you know, like they look
Speaker 1: the same as each other, and they are at each
Speaker 1: other's throats to kill each other over perceived historical differences
Speaker 1: between the two of them. So Yugoslavia is like one
Speaker 1: long story about like what a uh, you know, a
Speaker 1: world looks like where you know, it's just the war
Speaker 1: of all against all. So I definitely grew up with
Speaker 1: a strong suspicion of totalitarianism at a deep belief in
Speaker 1: American pluralism, and the actual neighborhood I grew up in
Speaker 1: was kids. You know, there were a lot of other
Speaker 1: first generation kids and immigrant kids, and so multiculturalism like
Speaker 1: being in an environment where there was no single dominant
Speaker 1: ethnic group and a lot of the kids weren't even
Speaker 1: you know, like American multi generations. They were relatively new
Speaker 1: or or flat out new. Got you have to get
Speaker 1: used to the idea that if like Danny When's mother
Speaker 1: decided what we'd be allowed to say, there'd be all
Speaker 1: sorts of categories of things that we that we shouldn't say.
Speaker 1: If my mother decided, like what we'd be allowed to
Speaker 1: say would be very British because my mom is you know,
Speaker 1: thinks of her self to British, you know, all the
Speaker 1: norms would be different. And in that situation, what makes
Speaker 1: sense free speech That essentially you actually you get some
Speaker 1: amount of patients. People don't necessarily know where we're coming from.
Speaker 1: Immediately you hear people out. It is true occasionally people
Speaker 1: get punched that that did happen sometimes, but ultimately the
Speaker 1: you know, particularly the stark contrast, by the way between
Speaker 1: Russian culture, which has a which has a pretty biting,
Speaker 1: kind of like brutal honesty is a is something that's
Speaker 1: that's sort of stereotypically Russian and my mother's sort of
Speaker 1: exaggerated Irish Britishness where politeness was absolutely the most important
Speaker 1: thing in the world. And very early on I realized
Speaker 1: you couldn't be both honest and polite. So I started
Speaker 1: with a real passion for free speech that came from
Speaker 1: being a first generation kid. And then I went and
Speaker 1: did journalism in high school and sorry, I did journalism
Speaker 1: in college. And when people come into your office and
Speaker 1: are like, you got to fire that columnist, and then
Speaker 1: you watch the gears turning because they don't know why
Speaker 1: you have to fire that columnist, yet they just know
Speaker 1: they're mad and that person has to go. And so
Speaker 1: I just got more and more forgive the expression radicalized
Speaker 1: in the direction of free speech. And then finally the
Speaker 1: Communications Decency Act of nineteen ninety five came out. They
Speaker 1: were trying to ban quote unquote indecency on the Internet,
Speaker 1: which laughably unconstitutional, unbelievably unconstitutional, and I really dove into that,
Speaker 1: and that's why I applied to law school. I specialized
Speaker 1: in First Amendment. People thought I was nuts to put
Speaker 1: all my eggs in that basket. I probably was. I
Speaker 1: was very lucky that there was a really plumb job
Speaker 1: as soon as like a year after I got out.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you know, it's one of those things where
Speaker 1: I hyper specialized in it. I took every class Stanford
Speaker 1: offered on constitutional law on First Amendment, and then when
Speaker 1: I ran out, I did six credits on censorship during
Speaker 1: the Tudor dynasty. We could have had a whole other
Speaker 1: podcast chat just about you at you like your life
Speaker 1: and your family home. My gosh, you're an interesting cat.
Speaker 1: Oh thanks, I love them very much. I'm glad. Actually,
Speaker 1: that's one nice thing about COVID is I've I've gotten
Speaker 1: to see more of them. Good. Good. So Dan Dolmoar
Speaker 1: wants to know how how's he doing because I know
Speaker 1: you had a recent health scare. Yeah. So I had
Speaker 1: a pretty rough twenty nineteen. It started with us getting
Speaker 1: rear ended on the way home from seeing our family
Speaker 1: up in New England back down to DC. You know,
Speaker 1: kids in the car. Thankfully, I had moments of being
Speaker 1: mildly skeptical of how aggressive you know, child seats are,
Speaker 1: thinking like maybe we're kind of going over the top
Speaker 1: and there's a less you know, intrusive way to do this.
Speaker 1: After getting hit, you know, in a rear ending accident
Speaker 1: that really hurt me and my wife, I'm never skeptical again.
Speaker 1: Like the kids were completely fine and we were pretty
Speaker 1: badly injured. My god, so he just kept on going.
Speaker 1: My so we got head injuries. We were so out
Speaker 1: of it we didn't understand that we had head injuries.
Speaker 1: It took us, you know, talking to a doctor to
Speaker 1: be like, yeah, all the things you're describing that's making
Speaker 1: you not think clearly is because you got a head injury.
Speaker 1: And then my this wasn't a surprise, but it was
Speaker 1: still devastating. My wife's father died. I loved him very
Speaker 1: much too, his amazing power of man. Like, you know,
Speaker 1: we went to the funeral and wake, you know, delirious
Speaker 1: from head injuries, and it just it was one thing
Speaker 1: after the other like that, and I thought I was
Speaker 1: in the clear. And then the summer of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: I find I have a very rare tumor in my jaw.
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, you know, just get it out. It's like,
Speaker 1: actually we can't get it out without removing say twenty
Speaker 1: five percent like severing entirely like your jaw. And I
Speaker 1: was like, you're kidding me. And what they wanted to do.
Speaker 1: And if I have one characteristic, it's that I'm a walker.
Speaker 1: I walk everywhere. I've made my entire staff get used
Speaker 1: to the idea that I that they're going to talk
Speaker 1: to me while I'm walking on the phone. They wanted
Speaker 1: to take my fibula, and take my entire fibula, and
Speaker 1: you could break my dignity, but you can't take you
Speaker 1: can't take my fibula. So I was horrified. I and
Speaker 1: I looked for doctor after doctor or the doctor. I
Speaker 1: was trying to get in front of the guy that
Speaker 1: was considered to be the best guy in DC. But
Speaker 1: you know, and I pulled every string I possibly could,
Speaker 1: and finally he was the twelfth doctor I talked to,
Speaker 1: and he was the first one to be like, they're
Speaker 1: they're telling you something that's too aggressive. It's something designed
Speaker 1: for metastatic cancers. This one generally is not metastatic, so
Speaker 1: you can actually cut the margins a little closer, and
Speaker 1: that they'd patched the difference with something called morphogenic pome protein,
Speaker 1: with the idea that the two sides of your jawul
Speaker 1: would heal together, which is miraculous. I mean, I know
Speaker 1: the technology has been around for some time, but it's
Speaker 1: still you know, it would tell your body to grow
Speaker 1: new bone. And I spent you know, the surgery was
Speaker 1: was no picnic, and I had to have a titanium
Speaker 1: plate in my jaw, which I still have and I
Speaker 1: look a little funny. But since oh absolutely, and since
Speaker 1: I couldn't, I didn't well, I didn't want to go
Speaker 1: to get the follow ups during COVID. I didn't know
Speaker 1: for a good nine months if the surgery had been
Speaker 1: a success, and I was, you know, starting to kind
Speaker 1: of convince myself that that maybe it wasn't. Given you
Speaker 1: what I thought was swelling and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And I found out last week that the surgery was
Speaker 1: a success. The two sides of my jaw had fused
Speaker 1: to get other due to that miraculous morphogenic bone protein.
Speaker 1: And so I've been feeling like a million bucks since then,
Speaker 1: because like the single biggest thing was because if I
Speaker 1: had to have more of that surgery, the thing I
Speaker 1: was told was it's gonna hurt a lot more. It's
Speaker 1: not gonna go as well because you've already messed with
Speaker 1: things in there and having that off of my mind.
Speaker 1: And this is the kind of cant This is the
Speaker 1: kind of tumor that generally doesn't return. Like once you've
Speaker 1: gotten rid of it, I should be done with it.
Speaker 1: Knock on wood. Yeah, I'll knock on wood too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well cool, thanks for that update. I know a lot
Speaker 1: of people, a lot of people really care about you.
Speaker 1: So oh, thank you. Appreciate that update. I got actually
Speaker 1: surprisingly like warm fuzzies from Twitter a lot. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: you heard you? Are you said Jonathan beloved. You're pretty
Speaker 1: beloved too, my man, So oh, don't forget that. Uh
Speaker 1: so our robson uh just asked him how he felt
Speaker 1: when he won the gold When I won the gold? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what did I win the golden? I was wondering that myself. Oh,
Speaker 1: I know what it is. I know what it is.
Speaker 1: That's right. I haven't heard this joke in a long time.
Speaker 1: Greg luganis. When I was a kid, the person who
Speaker 1: had the name that was closest to mine was the diver,
Speaker 1: the Olympic diver. Greg luganis so I Willing who won
Speaker 1: the gold medal in the Olympics. I did actually get
Speaker 1: that affair amount. I actually got luky an Off an
Speaker 1: awful lot as a kid too, But yeah, I got
Speaker 1: Greg Luganis. I never really like, didn't hurt my feelings
Speaker 1: because I was like, oh thanks Olympian, cool metal. But
Speaker 1: it was a pretty bad butchering in my name. Oh, Evan,
Speaker 1: you said you also got Greg lukianof. Isn't that your
Speaker 1: an actual name luky Anoff? That that was what I
Speaker 1: would That's the way people would mispronounce my name and
Speaker 1: it would kind of well no, but in that case
Speaker 1: it was It was honest. It was an honest mistake
Speaker 1: because if you look at the spelling of my name,
Speaker 1: what you're supposed to know My dad came over in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties when he was in his late twenties,
Speaker 1: and he went to University wisconsinant of Madison. It's very
Speaker 1: cue to hear with the Russian accident goal Badgers, but
Speaker 1: you're supposed to know that the I and the A
Speaker 1: together in that transliteration stands for that backwards are, which
Speaker 1: is the Russian letter. Yeah. So I tried to get
Speaker 1: my family to change the spelling of our name to
Speaker 1: l u k y A N o V, which is
Speaker 1: much closer to how you actually said it, and you
Speaker 1: said my name very well. But they wouldn't they wouldn't
Speaker 1: change it. Okay, Well, well I'm going to end in
Speaker 1: this amazing podcast interview with with something positive, So right,
Speaker 1: Susan Groff asked, what might be some rays of hope
Speaker 1: you've seen since publishing the book? Please give us something.
Speaker 1: I was hoping you weren't going to ask me that
Speaker 1: because I didn't want to, because right now I'm for us.
Speaker 1: I'm super duper pessimistic at the moment. Since writing the book,
Speaker 1: I mean, I at least have been pleased by the
Speaker 1: fact that overwhelmingly people have been charitable to it, even
Speaker 1: if they disagreed with it. You know, they made good
Speaker 1: arguments and that's productive, you know, just the I did
Speaker 1: have one review written of it that was kind of
Speaker 1: blew me away because it was just like, this sounds
Speaker 1: like something this bad person would say, and that's like
Speaker 1: something that the Trump would have said, and like it
Speaker 1: was basically just this entire guilt by association, dark comparison,
Speaker 1: things like, Wow, you've made no subject of argument. You've
Speaker 1: just been like they might be like bad people, and
Speaker 1: I'm like okay, but overwhelming. I feel the conversation has
Speaker 1: been very constructive. I will be honest, short term, I'm
Speaker 1: not super optimistic. Short term, I think, particularly the next
Speaker 1: six months politically have me scared, frankly half to death.
Speaker 1: I think that I'm seeing things that really scare me
Speaker 1: in the administration. You know, that makes it sound like
Speaker 1: it's that the are already like the election is going
Speaker 1: to be contested on campuses. You know, I've seen this
Speaker 1: big uptick in you know, speech policing, and you know,
Speaker 1: you should check out some of the examples because they're
Speaker 1: they're you know, some of them are just ridiculous. But
Speaker 1: here's why I am hopeful about free speech. Free speech
Speaker 1: works really well. It's really good for telling you what
Speaker 1: problems you have, and particularly the ones you want to ignore.
Speaker 1: So freedom of speech. My best hope in it is
Speaker 1: that the societies that are more open, that have more
Speaker 1: free speech, will always have an advantage over those that aren't.
Speaker 1: And I hope that people, even just out of their
Speaker 1: own self interest, will continue to defend this fundamentally important
Speaker 1: human right, even though so many forces conspire against it.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Greg for being such a voice of reason
Speaker 1: and compassion in this this I don't even know how
Speaker 1: to what adjective to use their time. I don't even
Speaker 1: know what the rate word there is. It's crazy. Doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to quite capture what we're experiencing. But an a
Speaker 1: dull If that's true, that's true? Oh great, God bless
Speaker 1: you man, and thanks for being on the Psychology Podcast today.
Speaker 1: Thanks for Ami Scott. Thanks for listening to this episode
Speaker 1: of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in
Speaker 1: some way to something you heard, I encourage you to
Speaker 1: join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a
Speaker 1: reading and review of the podcast on iTunes and subscribe
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Speaker 1: next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.