Speaker 1: I've nevern this live before. Hello, and welcome to the
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast. Thank you so much for coming live from
Speaker 1: the comedy seller of the Village Underground. We're so glad
Speaker 1: you all came out. With our special guest today, we
Speaker 1: have Ricky Schwatz, who is a columnist who with a
Speaker 1: New York Post and a fellow at Fire. We have
Speaker 1: Jonathan Heights who's a professor at Stern and crowthor with
Speaker 1: Greg Lukyanoff who is president and CEO Acquire Organization who
Speaker 1: looks super cool tonight. These are our special guests and
Speaker 1: the topic on the table today is a no big deal,
Speaker 1: very easy, simple. The topic it won't sort out tonight.
Speaker 1: Why are the last ten years I've been so fucked up?
Speaker 1: What is going on? I mean, is anyone not asking
Speaker 1: that question right now? Like, let's be honest, that is
Speaker 1: the question of the day in so many different ways.
Speaker 1: And we have such great perspectives on the table for
Speaker 1: this topic. So let me open it up and let
Speaker 1: me just open up that broadway right now. And there's
Speaker 1: so many things that can fall into the umbrella. Do
Speaker 1: you think we just want to have any sort of
Speaker 1: opening statements on what you think might be happening before
Speaker 1: we get into the nitty gritty is this, But first
Speaker 1: I just want to say, because a lot of people
Speaker 1: don't know, this is actually not a comedy act. Like,
Speaker 1: if you came here to see comedy, I'm sorry because
Speaker 1: so we're like, we're going to talk about the things
Speaker 1: we've been writing about and it's like really heavy and dark,
Speaker 1: but you came to laugh, So we'll try to make
Speaker 1: it funny. But there's only so much we can do well.
Speaker 1: If we can't make the dark funny, right, there's a
Speaker 1: great convenience said, if I didn't laugh, I would cry.
Speaker 1: And I feel that that summarizes this ten years Gallows
Speaker 1: humored tonight here all right, Yeah, that's that's your opening.
Speaker 1: There are various topics to holnder that girl. I think
Speaker 1: a really big one is social media. You've all written
Speaker 1: and thought about this. Let's start with you, John, actually,
Speaker 1: because you wrote this fasting article for The Atlantic saying
Speaker 1: we're basically in the fall of Babylon right now? Is
Speaker 1: that right? Yeah, Babbel, Yeah, so does sound good though.
Speaker 1: So actually, it all started very suddenly in early twenty
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, when it seemed as though there was like
Speaker 1: a glitch in the matrix or a warp in the
Speaker 1: fabric of space time. And Greg picked it up first
Speaker 1: because he has his tentacles out in all kinds of campuses,
Speaker 1: so he was sort of just you know, he was like,
Speaker 1: weird stuff is happening. And I actually met Greg at
Speaker 1: a party at Jerry Orstrom introduced us. So Jerry is
Speaker 1: over there, and I think Jerry introduced everybody here to
Speaker 1: everybody actually, but it was like something started going weird
Speaker 1: and I began to see it in you and Greg
Speaker 1: had seen it, and so that led to this collaboration
Speaker 1: of writing off this article in The Atlantic, the Coggning
Speaker 1: the American Mind, and we thought that it was just
Speaker 1: a campus thing, and so to get to your question,
Speaker 1: it was, you know, it was like the you know,
Speaker 1: I guess the campuses were like the wuhan of the
Speaker 1: current of the current environment, and it came out. It
Speaker 1: came out, you know, on campuses, especially on the coasts
Speaker 1: in the Upper Midwest, and from there it's spread. So
Speaker 1: we were writing a book on this, the article in
Speaker 1: the book, and we were going to have a chapter
Speaker 1: at the end on when Cobblin goes to work, like
Speaker 1: what happens in office. We were beginning to hear twenty
Speaker 1: seventeen about that gen Z going into office about your generation,
Speaker 1: because she's the exception. But we didn't have enough material.
Speaker 1: We just had anecdotes, so we closed the book down.
Speaker 1: I was thinking, I was so wish we had just
Speaker 1: made a chapter which put the chapter title, and we said,
Speaker 1: because yeah, that's right, So we should have just put
Speaker 1: it like literally a blank piece of paper and said,
Speaker 1: see our website. We'll fill this in in a year.
Speaker 1: But anyways, it's the weird just started there, but then
Speaker 1: it's spread out to the rest of society. What was
Speaker 1: that weirdness? Good? What was how would you describe the awareness? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, in order to be really funny, it's good.
Speaker 1: It's important to talk about fifteen twenty one about like
Speaker 1: the Tudor dynasty and basically what I'm getting at it anyone, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I used to study free speech and censorship in the
Speaker 1: Tudor dynasty, and basically the printing press happened in the
Speaker 1: fourteen fifties and it started it started creating all these problems.
Speaker 1: The which trials increased, There was lots of political unrest
Speaker 1: or elect religious blasphemy and heresy coming out of this
Speaker 1: awful machine. So in fifteen twenty one, Henry it said,
Speaker 1: I have to approve everything that comes out of the
Speaker 1: printing press from now on. I feel and at the time,
Speaker 1: if you would think of the printing press as being
Speaker 1: this infernal machine that ruined everything. One an awful time
Speaker 1: to be alive. And I feel like we're in fifteen
Speaker 1: twenty one right now that essentially we just we just
Speaker 1: back then. They created an invention that doubled the number
Speaker 1: of people in the global conversation. It expanded it by millions.
Speaker 1: We just expanded through social media that the global conversation
Speaker 1: by billions. And of course it's going to be a
Speaker 1: crazy inarchical period. Like basically, I think there's no way
Speaker 1: out of this being a crazy, stupid time. We just
Speaker 1: have to figure out our way out so it doesn't
Speaker 1: drive us all crazy and destroy our countries. You know, Ricky,
Speaker 1: you are our residence gen Zer I am, and you've
Speaker 1: actually had an interesting story backstory about this right with
Speaker 1: your experience in on you and can talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about you know, you're in the front lines. I
Speaker 1: was very much eyewitnessed to everything that they were talking
Speaker 1: about in the Coddling of the American Minds. And I
Speaker 1: read it my freshman year and I recognized, like all
Speaker 1: these symptoms, these things going awry in my generation that
Speaker 1: I couldn't quite grasp what was going on. The last
Speaker 1: ten years that have been uniquely stupid have been like
Speaker 1: half my life at this point. So I at the
Speaker 1: book and it just diagnosed like the root issues of
Speaker 1: like medicalizing speech and feeling that I'm unsafe because you
Speaker 1: say something that I don't agree with, and you know,
Speaker 1: I was. I saw all the consequences of that as
Speaker 1: an NYU student. You know, freshman year, they give you
Speaker 1: your idea. On the back of the idea is nine
Speaker 1: one one. They can't the safety number, and then the
Speaker 1: bias responds hotline and cause you're offended, and so you
Speaker 1: know that that really says a lot. That's a real thing.
Speaker 1: It's a real thing. What happens when you call them
Speaker 1: were like offend, like this train, so it goes to
Speaker 1: its a. It's a hot line. You were flying to
Speaker 1: the administrators. They you wouldn't know better than eyes. I
Speaker 1: was there for the birth of the VRTs. Basically, like
Speaker 1: universities tried to pass speech codes in the eighties and
Speaker 1: they all got shot down in court, but they kept
Speaker 1: on building speech codes anyway that were very similar. But
Speaker 1: as they started getting shot down on court, they were
Speaker 1: kind of like, well, there's got to be another way
Speaker 1: to sort of like police student speech son't offend. And
Speaker 1: the first time I saw this presented, it was a
Speaker 1: program I think at Cornell or Syracuse, and they decided
Speaker 1: to police the dry erase boards on a floor and
Speaker 1: they did like a whole experiment, and guess what. When
Speaker 1: students now knew that adults were policing the floor, they
Speaker 1: wrote a lot more offensive stuff on each other's board,
Speaker 1: and there was a story about them seeing a and
Speaker 1: this they reported this with great seriousness. They found on
Speaker 1: an Asian student's door someone had written I like Rice.
Speaker 1: So they did what anyone would do. They called the police,
Speaker 1: and the police show up, and the students kind of
Speaker 1: like I wrote to that was it. And it was
Speaker 1: really it was really funny because like they were there
Speaker 1: was there was such a loss to explain what happened,
Speaker 1: and they were kind of like, well, she was trying
Speaker 1: to tell people something about herself. It's like, no, she
Speaker 1: was making a fucking joke. People Wow called the police,
Speaker 1: And this happens a lot. That's intense. John, I read
Speaker 1: about to say, you called the hotline. So I've actually
Speaker 1: called it several times because I'm a professor at n
Speaker 1: YU and I used to make jokes in my classes
Speaker 1: and I stopped doing that in twenty I stopped doing
Speaker 1: that in twenty fifteen after all the craziness started. But
Speaker 1: I realized, you know what, you can't know who you've
Speaker 1: offended because it's not it's nothing with intent, it's nothing
Speaker 1: with ejectic content. It's all subjective. So you have no
Speaker 1: idea how many people you've offended. And so I'm trying
Speaker 1: to find out do I have a record, like because
Speaker 1: if I know that, if I know that I've got
Speaker 1: stetten complaints, you know, then I'll, you know, I guess,
Speaker 1: go on the war path and try to, you know,
Speaker 1: make fun of NYU need more or something. But but like,
Speaker 1: so what I need to know is are they really
Speaker 1: keeping tabs on us and keeping records or is it
Speaker 1: just like they created it because there's student pressure and
Speaker 1: now they're not really running it even still, it shouldn't
Speaker 1: be there. So I've called them, I've emailed them, those
Speaker 1: are two ways, because I want to find out, like,
Speaker 1: but they won't return my call, so I it's on
Speaker 1: my list of things to do to pretend that I'm
Speaker 1: filing a real complaint. And you got just to get
Speaker 1: them to call me. I don't you. But the point,
Speaker 1: but the point is that the world is very, very
Speaker 1: different when there's a sort of damage is over your head.
Speaker 1: In fact, I'm just listening to a podcast right now
Speaker 1: by Andrew Andrew Huberman on play, and it's play is
Speaker 1: almost defined as low stakes contingency testing. You try things out,
Speaker 1: you get some feedback, and if it's negative, then you
Speaker 1: don't do that again. But instead, what if in play,
Speaker 1: you know, if you make a mistake, you get a
Speaker 1: finger cut off, you only have ten chances and then
Speaker 1: you're done. So you wouldn't play very much if that
Speaker 1: was the case. And that's what's happened because some people
Speaker 1: don't have to. Hey, but there you go. That's the
Speaker 1: sort of thing that picks you up, like you don't
Speaker 1: you know if you say you know, like I was
Speaker 1: blind to that thought. Oh I can't say mind, you know.
Speaker 1: So it's just very difficult to talk orteague when you
Speaker 1: have to watch every I want to ask you, Ricky. So,
Speaker 1: Ricky and I are working on a on a book
Speaker 1: called Canceling of the American Mind because I'm very creative
Speaker 1: with my titles, and it's about cancel culture. But I remember,
Speaker 1: you know, we have the amazing interns at Fire and
Speaker 1: they were they were still like, you know, optimistic, and
Speaker 1: then I asked them what it was like growing up
Speaker 1: with social media in high school and they all suddenly
Speaker 1: look terribly grave, and I realized, like how much social
Speaker 1: media has undermined interpersonal trust because they could turn you
Speaker 1: into the crowd at any time. You could say something
Speaker 1: when you're drunk, when you're fifteen, suddenly your life is ruined.
Speaker 1: So in terms of like what the environment was like,
Speaker 1: what was it like being in high school during this time, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was pretty tough. I mean, teenagers dealing with the
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen election. I was probably a sophomore in high
Speaker 1: school at that point in time. I would say that
Speaker 1: that was my first little dabbling into what cancel culture
Speaker 1: looked like and people turning against each other in a
Speaker 1: life chapter where you know, with social media, you get
Speaker 1: plugged in prematurely into the world's issues, but you should
Speaker 1: be worrying about like acme and if you have a
Speaker 1: crush on and you know, you have these kids who
Speaker 1: are children that are foist into this like political discourse
Speaker 1: too young, when they're just parroting what their parents say
Speaker 1: because they haven't really formed an idea of their own.
Speaker 1: And so it was definitely really tense. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of interpersonal strife. I feel fortunate that I'm an
Speaker 1: older member of gen Z that wasn't really like when
Speaker 1: I was twelve, I wasn't on Twitter, thank god. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: But when did you give Instagram? What'd you want Instagram?
Speaker 1: I was like eleven or twelve, I think, but very early.
Speaker 1: But that was in the early days of Instagram, before
Speaker 1: it turned into the peace that it is now. I
Speaker 1: would say, like, you know, it's posting pictures of the
Speaker 1: sunset and like what I had for lunch, and you know,
Speaker 1: today it's like here I am doing this and that.
Speaker 1: And I think that for younger girls, even just a
Speaker 1: few years younger than me, I'm more concerned for them
Speaker 1: than for myself. Yeh was like, actually add something that
Speaker 1: we didn't know when we wrote The Coddling, which is
Speaker 1: that so I'm writing a great and I'm both writing
Speaker 1: books falling up on this. The collling was mostly about
Speaker 1: the effects of overprotection creating a generation. You know, colleague,
Speaker 1: just means protection, doesn't mean spoilt, doesn't mean lazy. It
Speaker 1: just means over protected and therefore failing to develop anti fragility.
Speaker 1: And we had one chain after an anxiety. We had
Speaker 1: a couple of paragraphs on social media because in twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen twenty seventeen, the data wasn't clear that social media
Speaker 1: is harmful. They were correlational studies showing small correlations, and
Speaker 1: so after wrote the book, we were challenged by various researchers.
Speaker 1: So I really got into this along with Jane twenty
Speaker 1: digging into, like what are all the studies from I've
Speaker 1: found is that if you look at all screen time
Speaker 1: for all kids, what you find is very small correlations.
Speaker 1: When you zoom in on social media for girls, they
Speaker 1: get much much larger. And what I've learned recently is
Speaker 1: when you zoom in on social media for girls between
Speaker 1: eleven and thirteen, it's much much larger. The point is
Speaker 1: girls go through puberty first around eleven to thirteen. That's
Speaker 1: the age where they're most damaged by this, and even
Speaker 1: if you're just posting for you doing something. Everyone's comparing
Speaker 1: themselves to everyone else, and we've got that sort of
Speaker 1: a theme in our brains. It's called the what's the sociometer?
Speaker 1: It measures how am I doing? How am I doing?
Speaker 1: And if you see everyone else is one of those parties,
Speaker 1: they are doing more than you. That's not the average,
Speaker 1: that's their best. So anyway, all I'm saying is the
Speaker 1: thing we didn't know is that it's eleven to thirteen
Speaker 1: for girls, is the is the most important period to protect.
Speaker 1: We've got to get this stuff out of middle school.
Speaker 1: We really have to have a national movement to protect
Speaker 1: middle schoolers and let them play. They should just be
Speaker 1: playing and talking about appning and crushes or whatever. So so, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a big piece of the puzzle as to why,
Speaker 1: as to why the students coming in in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen were the first ones with this
Speaker 1: new attitude. That's what Greg noticed first. How many people
Speaker 1: in the crowd have actually read kind of the American line. Okay,
Speaker 1: I remember if we had to explain what I can
Speaker 1: say anything, But you have a lot of fans here.
Speaker 1: Something that really strokes me, John, And what you've written
Speaker 1: is you you trace some of this to twenty eleven,
Speaker 1: when the invention of the like and share buttons, and
Speaker 1: I think that's a big part of the story here.
Speaker 1: Can you tind of talk all about that. It's a
Speaker 1: good thing to fill in. We sort of you know,
Speaker 1: you ask you why interview because we started off like,
Speaker 1: why have the last ten years been so stupid? And
Speaker 1: so so the simplistic narrative of progress is actually so,
Speaker 1: you know, let's well a bit like what Greg started with,
Speaker 1: not that you're simplistic, but just like the printing press,
Speaker 1: connective could be double and then you know, if the
Speaker 1: Internet increased, like, okay, increasing connectivity is generally good thing,
Speaker 1: but it has some bad effects. Sure, that's the storm
Speaker 1: of progress, okay, but there's a twist to it, which
Speaker 1: I think is really what made it so so nasty.
Speaker 1: So most of us here in the room can remember
Speaker 1: when you first encountered a web browser or social media
Speaker 1: or an iPhone or Uber. I mean, the technology was magical,
Speaker 1: it was it was incredible, godlike technology. And so this
Speaker 1: was the period of techno deemocratic optimism from the fall
Speaker 1: of the billing wall through the nineties with the Internet
Speaker 1: and even then the smartphone and even early social media,
Speaker 1: and we fought in twenty eleven like, wow, this is
Speaker 1: going to be democracy here on in, you know, liberal democracy. One. Okay,
Speaker 1: the turning point turns out comes in two thousand and
Speaker 1: nine when Facebook adds the light button Twitter as the
Speaker 1: retweet button, Facebook copies with the share button. Suddenly it's
Speaker 1: not just hey, let me connect to you and let's talk.
Speaker 1: That was what we used to call these things social
Speaker 1: networking system, social networking sites to connect people. That's good.
Speaker 1: But after these innovations, they became it became a competition
Speaker 1: to get stuff out, to get more likes and more shares,
Speaker 1: and putting in the the retweet button makes everything go
Speaker 1: hyper viral, if you remember from COVID days, which I
Speaker 1: guess maybe some people think we're still in all though
Speaker 1: very few people here are wearing masks, so I suppose
Speaker 1: this is mostly libertarian craft or acts I heard. But
Speaker 1: when things call hyper viral, that's when it changes and
Speaker 1: we all are in danger all the time of someone
Speaker 1: saying something about us there's no bottom. That's when it's
Speaker 1: no longer playful. Add to this, Add to this, the
Speaker 1: introduction of threaded comments. It's called in twenty thirteen, which
Speaker 1: is it used to be. If Barack Obama posts something
Speaker 1: and somebody with seven followers posts some terrible thing about
Speaker 1: him on the page, that's it. It's a stupid thing
Speaker 1: in a stream of ten thousand comments. But what Facebook
Speaker 1: said is, hey, what if we crank up engagement by
Speaker 1: letting people fight in the comments? And so now stupid
Speaker 1: person with three followers is visible by everyone, and other
Speaker 1: people say you're a racist, you're a moron, and then
Speaker 1: other people know and before you know what, it's everyone
Speaker 1: fighting everyone. It's like those westerns where suddenly everyone's crashing
Speaker 1: a chair and everyone's head. That's so it's twenty to
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen is when is when the platform changes. And
Speaker 1: that's why you saw those first. It was like it
Speaker 1: was like a glitch in the matrix. Yeah, really great point,
Speaker 1: And I also think it's I could spend the whole
Speaker 1: I'd be like, great boy, Jonathan, because I really do
Speaker 1: like a lot of the points you make, and generally,
Speaker 1: and you you made a really good point that people
Speaker 1: really see it as a problem of tribalism, because you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of people will just jump to that and say, well,
Speaker 1: we're living in such a tribal age, you actually see
Speaker 1: it more as a divisiveness. I think it's a really
Speaker 1: important to station to make sure. So you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of my work, especially in my book to Righteous Mind,
Speaker 1: was on how we evolved to be tribal and that's
Speaker 1: how humans live for millions of years, and that explains
Speaker 1: a lot about our religiosity and about our politics and
Speaker 1: about sports. So that's what I was thinking, you know,
Speaker 1: all long, it's about tribalism and us versus them and polarization,
Speaker 1: and that started going up because of cable TV. Cable
Speaker 1: tv really did a lot to enhance tribalism. What was
Speaker 1: new with social media was, yes, it does enhance tribalism.
Speaker 1: It certainly makes it easier type of sense of us
Speaker 1: versus them. What social media did which Fox News and
Speaker 1: MSNBS never did, was it fragments everything. It breaks apart
Speaker 1: everything so that everyone's fighting with everyone, even on the
Speaker 1: same team, and there's no possibility of a shared story,
Speaker 1: even on the left or on the right, there's no
Speaker 1: possibility of a whyd shared story. So social media so
Speaker 1: to have a large, secular, diverse democracy, is sort of
Speaker 1: like a thing that should never exist. It should not
Speaker 1: be stable, but we did it and it was stable
Speaker 1: for a while. If you get the preme is exactly right.
Speaker 1: And what I've been trying to argue recently is social
Speaker 1: media after two thousand and nine, it's like we took
Speaker 1: those parameters and we changed them. We're now so far
Speaker 1: out of the bounce of sustainability that I don't think
Speaker 1: we're going to make it unless we can get back
Speaker 1: into sustainabley. I don't know where the Overton window is
Speaker 1: right now. You know, it's very people away with that phrase,
Speaker 1: but you know, the window of acceptability in a society. Now,
Speaker 1: I feel like, I don't know. Does anyone know where
Speaker 1: the Overton windows right now? Like, raise your hand and
Speaker 1: let us know, because I don't. You know, it seems
Speaker 1: like everything is all the rules are out the window
Speaker 1: of decorum of what we would think, you know, even
Speaker 1: in like what a president could do. Right. I don't
Speaker 1: want to get political, but it's just fascinating, you know,
Speaker 1: the Overton that's a great point, the overturn window. It
Speaker 1: was about like it's like, you know what the over
Speaker 1: window ships. But if what I'm saying is true about
Speaker 1: the fragmentation, then it's not overturned window. It's just a
Speaker 1: thousand shards of broken glass. And if you're not oh wow,
Speaker 1: good metaphor wow it's from it's from Martin Gury. I
Speaker 1: just took it from Martin Gurry, who wrote Resulted the
Speaker 1: great book. Yeah, I've been calling it the Overton people
Speaker 1: for a little bit because it's just so easy to
Speaker 1: get to get in trouble. And meanwhile, one thing I
Speaker 1: do want to focus on is talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about what me and Ricky are working on the next book.
Speaker 1: I actually wasn't a big fan of the term cancel culture,
Speaker 1: but then we did our studies on it. We have
Speaker 1: a great research department at fire Now. We got Sean
Speaker 1: Stevens in the audience, and what we said we found
Speaker 1: was that a black, white, Democrat, Republican everybody's terrified of
Speaker 1: cancel culture. Everybody knows the term. So if we didn't
Speaker 1: use that term, we'd be leaving most Americans out of
Speaker 1: the discussion and trying to make I don't know, like
Speaker 1: Jason Stanley at Yale happy, which well, you'll never accomplish.
Speaker 1: But one of the wain things about the book that
Speaker 1: we're trying to convey is the numbers are kind of
Speaker 1: astounding that essentially we're getting close to, you know, nine
Speaker 1: hundred attempts to get professors fire with you know, about
Speaker 1: more than two hundred of them actually getting fired or
Speaker 1: forced a step down. Many more than that actually sanctioned
Speaker 1: some way are actually censored in a situation where there's
Speaker 1: very low viewpoint diversity among professors. In the first place,
Speaker 1: I went on Doctor phil which which is very surreal,
Speaker 1: and you know, I pointed out that that the best
Speaker 1: research shows that during McCarthyism there were either there were
Speaker 1: about one hundred, two hundred and thirty professors who were
Speaker 1: fired from nineteen forty seven to nineteen fifty seven for
Speaker 1: being communists. We're way past that number now. And I
Speaker 1: got called out in like media matters, being like that
Speaker 1: can't possibly be true. It's like, no, Actually, the numbers
Speaker 1: that they are literally greater. Yeah. I think on the
Speaker 1: topic of cancel culture, one thing that's often overlooked as
Speaker 1: the adults and never kind of discuss the issue is
Speaker 1: what it's like coming up in that age and being
Speaker 1: true yeah, and being a teenager and you're supposed to
Speaker 1: fuck up and fumble and do the stupid things and
Speaker 1: make the mistakes and not have that be in the
Speaker 1: permanent record, and have grace from your friends and have
Speaker 1: compassion from the people around you. And unfortunately, there's a
Speaker 1: whole age of people who are growing up self censoring.
Speaker 1: That's just all I've ever known, and I think that
Speaker 1: for even just people a few years younger than me,
Speaker 1: I've seen it even worse than I. Hear horror stories
Speaker 1: from parents to their middle schoolers are caught up in that,
Speaker 1: and it's hard to even imagine, well, Rickie, tell us
Speaker 1: about about political identities or political conflicts as you're growing up,
Speaker 1: because I read recently that sort of consciousness of politics
Speaker 1: and opinions about it and getting active, and it used
Speaker 1: to be something that you know, juniors and two years
Speaker 1: in high school did, or there was some age at
Speaker 1: which kids begin to do it, and now it's pushing
Speaker 1: down to eleven or twelve, That's what I read. Did
Speaker 1: you see that and were you were you a political
Speaker 1: minority or were you you know, was there a majority?
Speaker 1: Tell us about that. Yeah, I would say that definitely
Speaker 1: started around like freshman year of high school for me,
Speaker 1: which felt a little premature. I wasn't super politically involved.
Speaker 1: I was always more right leaning, and so a little
Speaker 1: bit of an outside around my campus, which kind of
Speaker 1: made me feel like an underdog, which is something that
Speaker 1: I shook ultimately. But I'm sure that there are a
Speaker 1: lot of young people who feel the same and are
Speaker 1: supposed to identify with a group or a tribe. I
Speaker 1: think before it's even healthy. I mean my politics, I've
Speaker 1: been writing for two years now and they've changed considerably,
Speaker 1: and like, I look back and there's some things that
Speaker 1: I'm like, I mean, I don't agree with that anymore,
Speaker 1: and I've changed and involved as a person, and so
Speaker 1: it's a little unfortunate to see people who are like
Speaker 1: fourteen thirteen dedicating themselves to a path and a tribe
Speaker 1: and going down echo chambers on social media, and so
Speaker 1: I think it's it's really something that's concerning to me.
Speaker 1: I have a causal question because I'm wondering how much
Speaker 1: of this is Do you think it's causing the mental
Speaker 1: health crisis we're seeing among young people right now? I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm a professor. I see it firsthand. I see the
Speaker 1: very high levels of anxiety among my students, the high
Speaker 1: waves of stress and I have noticed a significant increase
Speaker 1: since I've been teaching fifteen twenty years. I can see
Speaker 1: it very clearly. Do you think some of this as
Speaker 1: calls are related to what we're seeing about the high
Speaker 1: anxiety leles? Yeah, yeah, well yeah, I'll take it because
Speaker 1: it's exactly what my next book is on. After we
Speaker 1: published The Condlin, I started collecting all of the studies
Speaker 1: I could, and the story's becoming very very clear. When
Speaker 1: you graph out all the lines of rates of mental illness,
Speaker 1: especially anxiety and depression, they're all pretty stable in the
Speaker 1: early two in the early two thousands, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, all of a sudden, in twenty twelve or
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen, they start going up, way up, And there's
Speaker 1: all kinds of revealing that. So one thing is it's
Speaker 1: the exact same thing in Canada and the UK. And
Speaker 1: so people say, you know, oh, what was caused by
Speaker 1: the financial crisis, And I will know because then it
Speaker 1: would have started earlier and it would have gone down
Speaker 1: as the economy improved, and then Canada they didn't even
Speaker 1: have it anyway, So it's so it's not caused by
Speaker 1: those things. But here's another really important fact that it's
Speaker 1: only it only became clear a year ago the first publication.
Speaker 1: The lines first go up for girls on the left,
Speaker 1: and they go up the furthest So girls on the left,
Speaker 1: really they were like the canaries in the coal mine
Speaker 1: about public Yes, girls right. So there are very few
Speaker 1: studies of teenagers that asked for their politics. Day says yeah,
Speaker 1: But there are two data sets that did, and so
Speaker 1: one was the NSDU, the National Survey on Drug Use
Speaker 1: in Health. They actually did, and they find that the
Speaker 1: liberal girls go up first, followed by conservative girls and
Speaker 1: liberal boys followed them by conservative boys, and the liberal
Speaker 1: girls look the most. And one possible reason is tumblr. Tumblr.
Speaker 1: Tumblr brought people together, not by the social graph of
Speaker 1: who you know, but it's a sort of a fan
Speaker 1: based on what you follow us. You'd get social justice Tumblr,
Speaker 1: which is the most perfect. It's like, you know how
Speaker 1: they achieved like nuclear fusion recently, so it's like imagine,
Speaker 1: it's like imagine that sort of the three great on
Speaker 1: truths of our book. So our book is based on
Speaker 1: the three worst ideas ever, which are what doesn't kill
Speaker 1: you makes you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings,
Speaker 1: and life is a battle between good people and evil people.
Speaker 1: So you take those three beliefs, you'll be miserable if
Speaker 1: you believe. So you put girls on Tumblr and they
Speaker 1: get that three like three laser beams focusing in on them.
Speaker 1: So I'm sorry to make light of it, but I
Speaker 1: you know, but so, yes, we actually know from a
Speaker 1: lot of things, not just the correlationships, but from experiment,
Speaker 1: it is causal. It's going on social media, especially for girls,
Speaker 1: especially when they're in middle school. It makes them depressed
Speaker 1: and anxious, and we don't have this permanent Yeah, I
Speaker 1: had to say from my anecdotal experience, there's a perfect
Speaker 1: causlength between my friends who were on Tumblr when they
Speaker 1: were tweens and the people who ended up struggling with
Speaker 1: their mental health. Right, almost perfect. It's one of the
Speaker 1: things that the gobling American mind has succeeded beyond our
Speaker 1: wildness dreams. We thought we were just writing something that
Speaker 1: was common sense, and we're really proud of the fact
Speaker 1: that it's been influential and it's retrust people. But it
Speaker 1: is frustrating that it feels like we didn't actually we're
Speaker 1: we're not taking serious stuff for the major one of
Speaker 1: the major premises, which is that we're teaching young people
Speaker 1: the mental habits of anxious and depressed people. So you
Speaker 1: should not be surprised that they're anxious to depressed and
Speaker 1: adults are doing this, and in a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: they're doing it because they want to motivate them to
Speaker 1: positive action, which is kind of cruel when you think
Speaker 1: about it. So I kind of wish even though people
Speaker 1: are reading the book, I wish they'd actually take the
Speaker 1: weeks staff actually disempowering. I actually wanted to call the
Speaker 1: book disempowered. We're telling these bright people that they are fragile,
Speaker 1: that they're easily harmed, that they uh and that essentially
Speaker 1: they're living in a social situation that is hopeless. You know, yes,
Speaker 1: feel feral cause I'm want to tell you what I
Speaker 1: when I struggle with this is where is the line
Speaker 1: for caddling? I find myself alterating between forty thousand different
Speaker 1: states during the course of my professor class. You know. Now,
Speaker 1: but let's just focus on two right now. The two.
Speaker 1: It is a lot, but the two main ones. I
Speaker 1: feel like I I go, I feel immedic compassion. Right.
Speaker 1: If I have a student called my office hour, they say, sorry,
Speaker 1: I haven't been able to handle any of the papers
Speaker 1: all semester. I've been depressed. Right. My immediate is like, oh,
Speaker 1: you like that sucks, right, and I want to be
Speaker 1: there for them, and then you know, that sort of
Speaker 1: instinct kicks in, and then you know, and then and
Speaker 1: then it gets to a point where sometimes the students like, oh, sorry,
Speaker 1: I didn't do anything, Sorr, I haven't done anything semester
Speaker 1: because there's a point where I'm like, I'm starting to
Speaker 1: feel like I need to be a little tough hole
Speaker 1: if you're I guess my question is where is the
Speaker 1: caddling line? Because I don't want to Coddling almost feels
Speaker 1: sometimes like it's diminishing the reality of someone. And I
Speaker 1: know that's why I want to bring up this question
Speaker 1: because for me, I feel like I struggle to be
Speaker 1: like I genuine compassionate, but also think some of them
Speaker 1: I've really now adaptive thinking patterns I want to help
Speaker 1: them with as well. You know, I have a five
Speaker 1: and a seven year old, and they're the best thing
Speaker 1: I ever did in my life. And it's just I
Speaker 1: was so scared of having kids, and I had no
Speaker 1: idea it was going to be this fucking awesome, But
Speaker 1: the but I'm trying to I learned so much. I mean,
Speaker 1: my son Maxwell was actually born while we were writing
Speaker 1: the book, and you know, it completely inferred my life
Speaker 1: towards the end of the book. But what I try
Speaker 1: to live, what we what we preach, and I want
Speaker 1: to give an example of how I think about it
Speaker 1: or how how I actually try to live it. And
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound really as pernicious as the name coddling.
Speaker 1: So my when my sons are watching something scary on
Speaker 1: tea be and they tell me that they want to
Speaker 1: change the channel that they want to watch. And I'm
Speaker 1: not talking I'm not talking about like like slasher films.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about I'm talking about cartoons. And I'm like, listen,
Speaker 1: here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna sit next to
Speaker 1: you and we're gonna watch this all the way to
Speaker 1: the end. Because and then when they get to the end,
Speaker 1: I ask them, was that as scary as you thought
Speaker 1: it was going to be? And the answer is always
Speaker 1: absolutely not. And then I just try to emphasize a
Speaker 1: lot of times pain in life is created by the
Speaker 1: avoidance of pain, but essentially the thing that you're scared
Speaker 1: of is going to become the big scary bear, and
Speaker 1: you gotta learn to face it. Otherwise we're disempowering you.
Speaker 1: So I mean, that's that's that's the one thing that
Speaker 1: I and I would completely I completely endorse, endorse that.
Speaker 1: But that's but you can do. You get to choose
Speaker 1: what you do with your child. Yeah, Now, the problem
Speaker 1: that the situation professors are in and actually just just
Speaker 1: so in this room, how many of you are teachers,
Speaker 1: are educators in some way raise your hand high bunch, Okay,
Speaker 1: And how many of you are managers or supervisors who
Speaker 1: have gen Z employees. Okay, that's the first person I've
Speaker 1: ever heard a claud for that. I teach you, know,
Speaker 1: I teach you in a business school. And and people
Speaker 1: are really having a lot of trouble incorporating gyms even
Speaker 1: having a lot of difficulty. So so here's here's why,
Speaker 1: here's why they answer your question is so difficult because
Speaker 1: each of us on our own might have an idea
Speaker 1: what to do, but we can't stick our next up
Speaker 1: unless we have backing from above. So what we have
Speaker 1: to do is you have to have you have to
Speaker 1: have the whole organization, with the whole university or the
Speaker 1: whole company have a sort of a common set of understandings.
Speaker 1: And so that's why we put actually chapter one of
Speaker 1: the Coddling online if you go to the Coddling dot
Speaker 1: com right there on the front page in front of
Speaker 1: linked chapter one, which explains anti fragility, and if you
Speaker 1: understand that idea that what doesn't kill you actually makes
Speaker 1: you stronger, with some limitations that we'll cover that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not always. You know, sometimes taking risks makes you fal
Speaker 1: and it doesn't think he's stronger. But we're not talking
Speaker 1: about physical risks here, we're talking about emotional risks. Anyway,
Speaker 1: My point is it's almost impossible to dificult for any
Speaker 1: one person to solve this themselves, because if you give
Speaker 1: tough love, they could report you and or you know,
Speaker 1: so none of you, we all make the same calculation
Speaker 1: of it's just not worth it and I have so
Speaker 1: much other stuff to do it so so so it's
Speaker 1: crucial this this problem cannot be solved individuals. It has
Speaker 1: to be solved collectively by groups. So of course what
Speaker 1: we recommend is that you buy copies of the college
Speaker 1: everyone in your university. But short of that, just send
Speaker 1: them the link to the chapter get the discussion going
Speaker 1: because what I what I you know, what I tell
Speaker 1: managers is and what I tell gen Z students is
Speaker 1: if students like, go to your manager and say, you
Speaker 1: know what, I really want to be excellent in this job.
Speaker 1: I really want to grow, so please tell me what
Speaker 1: I'm doing wrong, give me feedback, because managers are afraid
Speaker 1: to give feedback to their gen Z employees. And I've
Speaker 1: heard some say especially to the women, which is terrible
Speaker 1: because that means the women aren't going to grow as
Speaker 1: fast as the men. So you have to have a
Speaker 1: common understanding of anti fragility, and then you have to
Speaker 1: have a two way for about strength and growth, and
Speaker 1: in that way you can create compets of rationality in institutions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I would say in terms of my generations, probably
Speaker 1: the flattering attribute in the workplace is the fact that
Speaker 1: we jumped at HR and we're always ready to report.
Speaker 1: And I think that's rooted in having always had parents
Speaker 1: watching us when we're playing together and the retattle or
Speaker 1: having a biased report hotline when we go to college
Speaker 1: and have someone to tattle, And so we're always externalizing
Speaker 1: these interpersonal conflicts and looking for somebody else or a
Speaker 1: third party or a figure of authority to adjudicate things
Speaker 1: for us. But in a corporate workplace, that that's for
Speaker 1: you as too, people to figure out what. Unfortunately, managers
Speaker 1: are being put in that position by young people. And
Speaker 1: that's what you just said. That's the very definition of
Speaker 1: what's called moral dependency. Moral dependency is when you don't
Speaker 1: solve moral conflicts on your own, you learn to appeal
Speaker 1: for someone else to punish him. And that's what makes
Speaker 1: it difficult to work with. Are you all worried about
Speaker 1: all the mentality? That's all I was concerned about. Can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about that and how you
Speaker 1: see play out on social media? How you see your
Speaker 1: entire lives be ruined? Do you? Yeah? Well, I mean
Speaker 1: that's what the you know, the book canisling in the
Speaker 1: American mind. It is ultimately about well I passed you softball?
Speaker 1: And what's been happening on campus? I mean, I've worked
Speaker 1: working on campus. In two thousand of one, I was
Speaker 1: the weird lawyer who specialized in first ament law. I
Speaker 1: worked at the ACLU of Northern California, you know, studied
Speaker 1: tudor nasty censorship like this is why why I was
Speaker 1: put on this earth, even though I'm in atheist, so
Speaker 1: I feel like that's my mission in life. Two thousand
Speaker 1: and one, I already I was very surprised at how
Speaker 1: easy it was to get in trouble on a college campus,
Speaker 1: and how much worse things have gotten since twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: and particularly in twenty twenty scares the shit out of me,
Speaker 1: like genuinely. And what what scares me even more is
Speaker 1: looking at a playing field where you've got people claiming
Speaker 1: the like free speech, like eat eat of musk and
Speaker 1: on making it look great. And then at the same
Speaker 1: time there's been this sort of general way I call
Speaker 1: it the the slow motion train wreck that I could
Speaker 1: see it when I was at the a c l
Speaker 1: U in ninety nine, that there was an attempt, a
Speaker 1: deliberate attempt by some thinkers to switch the political balance
Speaker 1: of free speech, which was a core liberal idea, to
Speaker 1: be actually be what the bad guys say, and that's
Speaker 1: actually really taken root. Now. On the other side, there
Speaker 1: used to be more libertarian influences in the Republican Party.
Speaker 1: Now with people like Sohar Marbani and Adrian Romule, you're
Speaker 1: having like a real turning against freedom of speech from
Speaker 1: both sides. So we're a little freaked out. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there that table there, like you, I want
Speaker 1: to talk about comedy right now? Can we shift it
Speaker 1: to comedy? I want to be grave you. Greg, you
Speaker 1: were an executive producer of a awesome documentary I loved
Speaker 1: it called can You Take a Joke? Along with right
Speaker 1: Gnome Dorman, who we want to get a huge shot
Speaker 1: out his own the university. But well, this documentary and
Speaker 1: I love this idea. You know where a lot of
Speaker 1: comedians don't feel comfortable going on college campuses right now? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they and and a lot of professors don't feel college
Speaker 1: campuses right now as well. What's a common between these
Speaker 1: two things? Well, we the problems with Can't We Take
Speaker 1: a Joke? Actually, raise your hand if you've actually seen
Speaker 1: Can't We Take a Joke? It's really it's on Netflix, right.
Speaker 1: I'm still really proud of it. And this actually this
Speaker 1: came directly out of the comedy celling. This was inspired
Speaker 1: by non Norman. My first book was called Unlearning Liberty,
Speaker 1: warning about like we're teaching young people bad habits for
Speaker 1: living in a free society. Kind of panned out, which
Speaker 1: came up ten years ago, but nobody listened to me.
Speaker 1: So we did it. So I did a podcast here
Speaker 1: and Lee camp who kept on emphasizing he was the
Speaker 1: most far left person on the panel, actually set towards
Speaker 1: the end of the of the podcast, I don't like
Speaker 1: playing campuses anymore, or because he can't use your good material.
Speaker 1: And I was like, even like the soap professed like
Speaker 1: far the left person doesn't want to play them anymore.
Speaker 1: So we started doing this little projects basically making the
Speaker 1: argument that Lenny Bruce would not survive five minutes on
Speaker 1: the modern college campus. And we made this documentary. I'm
Speaker 1: super proud of it. The only problem is it came
Speaker 1: out in twenty fifteen. We didn't even have a word
Speaker 1: for cancel culture. We got Adam Croll in it, we
Speaker 1: got Penn Gelette and if Gilbert Godfrey rest his soul again,
Speaker 1: I'm an atheist, feel like religious imagery. Gilbert Godfrey completely
Speaker 1: kills it in this thing. But the only problem was
Speaker 1: we just came out with it too soon. So we're
Speaker 1: actually thinking about doing a follow up. Can't we take
Speaker 1: a joke too or something like that. And I can
Speaker 1: add about comedy because so when I planned to graduate school.
Speaker 1: I actually thought that I was going to study humor
Speaker 1: because when I didn't know what I was gonna do
Speaker 1: with my life, I briefly thought that I might be
Speaker 1: either a comedian or a comedy writer. But I don't
Speaker 1: know that. But but it was just it was just
Speaker 1: like a few months and then I really don't. I
Speaker 1: don't think that's to do it. So I think that
Speaker 1: is said, you know, those those who can't tell jokes
Speaker 1: study jokes. I want to go to graduate school and
Speaker 1: get a PhD in humor. I didn't respect a spec
Speaker 1: script for friends how to do did? We didn't tell it?
Speaker 1: So we both ended up in the right line of work.
Speaker 1: But you know, but I learned a little bit about
Speaker 1: about the psychology of humor and uh Freud. Uh. You know.
Speaker 1: Freud wrote a book, A Joke's Unconscious, and this is
Speaker 1: one of his most readable and sort of reasonable books.
Speaker 1: And he makes the point that that any really funny
Speaker 1: joke has either sex or aggression. So there are jokes
Speaker 1: that have no sex or aggression. I'll tell you one.
Speaker 1: What did the hot dog vendor say to the Buddha?
Speaker 1: He said, make me one with everything. I think, okay,
Speaker 1: but notice the reaction, nobody really laughed, right, It's like
Speaker 1: plug but right. So this is Bride's point that you
Speaker 1: can have clever jokes, but to get real laughter, to
Speaker 1: get a real like, it has to have sex or
Speaker 1: aggression in it, he said. And so and that's like
Speaker 1: part of normal society, and normal people have conflicts, and
Speaker 1: normal people and normal children tease each other, especially boys
Speaker 1: have to tease each other. So humor is woven. It
Speaker 1: has huge numbers of social functions. It's an essential part
Speaker 1: of society. But what happened the day that someone decreed
Speaker 1: that it's impact not intent, that it doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: you mean. It doesn't matter if it's a joke. If
Speaker 1: a member of these seven groups was harmed by it,
Speaker 1: then it's a prosecutor build offense. Even though the vice
Speaker 1: response team you have to say, you apologize for the pain,
Speaker 1: the pain that you've caused. That's the formulas, and now
Speaker 1: is formula I apologize for the pain I cause. And
Speaker 1: so what happens when humor is now subject to anyone
Speaker 1: taking offense means there's only one stable position. If you
Speaker 1: think about this is like a complex Society's like a
Speaker 1: complex dynamical system with only a couple of stable equilibria.
Speaker 1: Ac should s there too, They're only two stable e bulibria.
Speaker 1: One is complete humorlessness. How about no jokes ever? And
Speaker 1: that's what universe is a into. There used to be
Speaker 1: jokes and confidences. It used to be academically playful. It's
Speaker 1: to be fun to be a professor. Playfulness is so
Speaker 1: rich for actually good ideas. You know, we've also what
Speaker 1: I think is really interesting. I feel like there's a
Speaker 1: deep human instinct and what I felt like was happening
Speaker 1: partially in social media is like, Okay, who am I
Speaker 1: allowed to hate? Because it's very aggression that you're talking about.
Speaker 1: I feel like, yeah, it's everywhere that essentially we figured
Speaker 1: out a way to sort of figure out ways to
Speaker 1: demonize each other in a way that is actually briefly
Speaker 1: satisfying but destroys lives that gets you no closer to
Speaker 1: the truth. And that's kind of what I was getting
Speaker 1: out with the fifteen twenty one thing. The pretty press
Speaker 1: eventually actually have incredible benefits, but we're definitely not there yet.
Speaker 1: You know, something to align the comedian said in that
Speaker 1: documentary is he said the comedian's purpose is to find
Speaker 1: the line and to intentionally go over it. It feels
Speaker 1: like that's the last bastion in society where we can
Speaker 1: do that, right, Because everyone's trying to find the line
Speaker 1: and then call them all on the phone. We'll throw
Speaker 1: them the line and then call them all as opposed
Speaker 1: to their profession is to find the line and see
Speaker 1: how they can go over in a way that makes
Speaker 1: people laugh. Maybe that's all we have left in society
Speaker 1: these comedians. Yeah, I say, it's it's not that everyone's
Speaker 1: trying to call. It's that five percent or three percent
Speaker 1: are and the rest of us, the middle eighty percent
Speaker 1: of the country or whatever you want say, the middle
Speaker 1: eight percent of the country is really quite reasonable. This
Speaker 1: is a really important rule. Wherever you go, almost to
Speaker 1: everybody's reasonable. But what's changed is that is that with
Speaker 1: social media creating this viral dynamic, it's all about the
Speaker 1: change in dynamics. After Sean Stevens and I wrote a
Speaker 1: series of bit of articles at Heterox Academy on the
Speaker 1: new dynamic that social media may possible. So don't lose
Speaker 1: your faith in humanity. Just just be upset about the
Speaker 1: crazy system that humans are now in that makes us
Speaker 1: have to live more humorless lives. Yeah, on that note,
Speaker 1: in terms of not losing your faith in gen Z
Speaker 1: as well, I think our squeakiest reels are ridiculously squeaky.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the percent of people across
Speaker 1: the con generations and their opinions on cancel culture, overwhelmingly
Speaker 1: the most negative opinion on cancel culture is gen Z
Speaker 1: because they came of age in it, and they just
Speaker 1: have the tyranny of the minority that is so loud.
Speaker 1: But there's so many of us who are looking around
Speaker 1: and seeing their friends dropping like pies and know that
Speaker 1: there's something wrong about this that you probably get a
Speaker 1: lot greg being part of fire in this organization that's
Speaker 1: an advocate of free speech. Is the line between free
Speaker 1: speech and hate speech. I've been willing to discuss this
Speaker 1: with you for a while. Where do we have clear
Speaker 1: ideas where that line is anymore? Yeah, well, we get
Speaker 1: this a lot. And hate speech is one of those
Speaker 1: things that really can't be defined without subjectivity, and it's
Speaker 1: the bedrock principle. And a lot of times people point out,
Speaker 1: like in Europe they have hate speech laws and they
Speaker 1: think our law is so different. The primary difference is
Speaker 1: simply this partially because we are a generally genuinely pluralistic society.
Speaker 1: We have people with lots of different ways of talk,
Speaker 1: lots of lots of different beliefs. The bedrock principle and
Speaker 1: First Amendment law is you can't ban something simply because
Speaker 1: it's offensive. And it's kind of funny. I read this
Speaker 1: book Stanley Fish. It is this longtime critic of the
Speaker 1: First Amendment, long time He actually wrote a book called
Speaker 1: There's No such thing as Free Speech and It's a
Speaker 1: good thing too. And I read it and it's kind
Speaker 1: of like, Okay, you're actually pointing out that there are
Speaker 1: some exceptions to the First Amendment, and therefore it's all arbitrary,
Speaker 1: is what he jumps to, which is just a sleep
Speaker 1: point of view. Even Stanley Fish, it's like, you can't
Speaker 1: actually define hate speech. It's too subjective. And I have
Speaker 1: to say on campus hate speech was a concept that
Speaker 1: was originally introduced in about the nineteen seventies, became popular
Speaker 1: enough in the nineteen eighties that universities introduced speech codes.
Speaker 1: Those speech codes got defeated in court. They became racial
Speaker 1: and sexual harassment policies, and they are abused all the time.
Speaker 1: I mean, like it's completely nuts, like how often people
Speaker 1: get in trouble this, But to tell you how bad
Speaker 1: the free speech situation is the moment past two weeks
Speaker 1: there was an event you see, Davis that was actually
Speaker 1: trying to show that move that movie by Matt Walsh,
Speaker 1: you know, like, you know, offensive to some people, absolutely,
Speaker 1: but students actually showed up with bags of ship and
Speaker 1: started started throwing them movie. There's a different what's just
Speaker 1: in students who are host hosting students Yeah, fellow students. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's not hate speech. What's that? What I'm saying
Speaker 1: is like talking about how bad the situation has gotten
Speaker 1: for free speech on canvas, and my overall take on
Speaker 1: a lot of like the thing that the philosophical part
Speaker 1: that's left out of the overly academic way of looking
Speaker 1: at freedom of speech is very simple. It's always valuable
Speaker 1: to know what people really think, full stop, and it's
Speaker 1: especially true when they think challenging difficult things. We are
Speaker 1: living in a fantasy if we think we're not better
Speaker 1: off knowing someone raising their hand tells me I'm a Nazi.
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, thank god, I know that I'm not
Speaker 1: going to be friends with you. Yes, microphone here, I
Speaker 1: compley agree, I'm gonna do a yes and as they do.
Speaker 1: But you know what about it doesn't mean we asta
Speaker 1: to amplify the assholes, you know, like I'm not I
Speaker 1: agree everything you just said. But once we start normalizing,
Speaker 1: you know, with like you know, like Kanye West going
Speaker 1: and all these things being like fuck Jews right like,
Speaker 1: and it's like, okay, well, you know, can we stop
Speaker 1: amblifying that? You know, it's like and I'm not saying like,
Speaker 1: no free speech. I'm not saying like everyone shut down
Speaker 1: the microphone. But I do think there's some things like decorum,
Speaker 1: certain things in society, some ideas. So here's the I
Speaker 1: think the one place where I'll disagree with Greg And
Speaker 1: it's kind of dangerous here with all these people from
Speaker 1: fire and all my but I actually think free speech
Speaker 1: is not the crucial idea on campus. That is what
Speaker 1: I what I so, what I think we need to
Speaker 1: do is for each institution look at what what is
Speaker 1: its tilos, what is its purpose? What is its function?
Speaker 1: And when you have that clear, then you say what
Speaker 1: are the proper norms around speech that would help it
Speaker 1: meanings to those So I thank god I live in
Speaker 1: a country where we have the First Amendment, and so
Speaker 1: we're talking about what the government can do. I'm totally
Speaker 1: with you, But the arguments on campus about free speech
Speaker 1: and the First Amendment I think don't quite hit the mark,
Speaker 1: because I think what we need is free inquiry. We
Speaker 1: have to have the ability to people to say what
Speaker 1: they think and for people to feel confident questioning it.
Speaker 1: But here intent is actually important because if a student
Speaker 1: is challenging something with the intent of challenging them of
Speaker 1: whatever they say should be allowed. But if someone but
Speaker 1: in this modern environment allows for trolling, it allows for
Speaker 1: all sorts of things. And so you know, if ile
Speaker 1: Anopolis wants to come control, I mean, I think students
Speaker 1: should go and I think he actually is an interesting
Speaker 1: person to listen to. But should a person be able
Speaker 1: to do that in class? Should there be trolling in class? Like? No,
Speaker 1: so I even misunderstanding, but I think that the First
Speaker 1: Amendment is not exactly what we need to be talking
Speaker 1: about on campus. Oh no, and it's not. But this
Speaker 1: is a disagreement with Robert Post, who's a scholar at Yale,
Speaker 1: with Stanley Fish, is that they just try to make
Speaker 1: that there's like this free speech thing, and then there's
Speaker 1: like freedom of inquiry over here, and I think that's
Speaker 1: just wrong. I think free speech is the big, big
Speaker 1: circle that includes things like academic freedom that has somewhat
Speaker 1: different rules. Jonathan Roush wrote this incredible book called Kindly Inquisitors.
Speaker 1: It talks about liberal science, and that's actually a smaller
Speaker 1: sort of circle like within freedom of speech. But there's
Speaker 1: this idea that kind of like free speech First Amendment
Speaker 1: can't actually cope with what's going on on campus. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: if you look at the case law, they actually make
Speaker 1: these distinctions every day quite well. Nobody's arguing that someone
Speaker 1: can stand up in class and shout down their professor.
Speaker 1: The professor controls the class, they have the freedom to grade.
Speaker 1: We've adapted our thinking of on freedom of speech that
Speaker 1: is appropriate on campus. And I do think that trying
Speaker 1: to really distinguish freedom of speech from academic freedom and
Speaker 1: free inquiry is is a mistake. But I do like
Speaker 1: the idea. I do think there's something to the three
Speaker 1: is good faith versus bad faith, and I think that's
Speaker 1: what Like I'm a john here, like you know, when
Speaker 1: you're talking to an asshole, like you know it right,
Speaker 1: Like maybe you don't. But but like a lot of times,
Speaker 1: like yeah, maybe people are tricked all the time, but
Speaker 1: how many how many people you've met the first time
Speaker 1: you're like, oh my god, this guy's an asshole. Later
Speaker 1: for some of the all of that, I become friends.
Speaker 1: But that's a good one. Some sometimes they're fun. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they're fun. But that's a good point. But I do
Speaker 1: think we need more good faith debates and disagreements in
Speaker 1: our side today and less bad faith. Oh yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's a major point. Like one of the things that
Speaker 1: we talk we're talking about counseling of the American mind
Speaker 1: is what we call the other rhetorical fortresses. That essentially
Speaker 1: there's a right wing rhetorical fortress. It's like, you don't
Speaker 1: need the liberals experts or people who bashed Trump. But
Speaker 1: I left it since it was partially grown out of academia.
Speaker 1: It's just layer after layer of ad hominem and distractions
Speaker 1: and things that aren't actually arguments that all they won't
Speaker 1: actually get to the you never actually have to get
Speaker 1: to the actual arguments someone's making. And what we're what
Speaker 1: we're pointing out is cancer culture is just one part
Speaker 1: of the way that we distort the way we argue,
Speaker 1: and that we can actually stop, we can actually call
Speaker 1: bullshit sometimes when people are just relying on you know,
Speaker 1: snark to try to dismiss the arguments, like, no, we
Speaker 1: need to create spaces where people can address the argument
Speaker 1: and actually in a truth seeking manner, not just you know,
Speaker 1: score of social points. Absolutely, And I also worried about
Speaker 1: the algorithms. You know, the social media algorithms are solving
Speaker 1: for assholey, you know, like like you know, the X
Speaker 1: that they're solving for is like how much divisive this
Speaker 1: is there? How many shares in a negative way? How much?
Speaker 1: You know, and that's what gets amplified. So that's what
Speaker 1: I say, when the weak, we think we can have
Speaker 1: some control over what gets amplified by changing those algorithms.
Speaker 1: R Yeah, I think a lot about kind of a
Speaker 1: with Twitter. I'm not It's interesting. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: debate about anonymity, for example, whether or not you should
Speaker 1: allow it, and I think that you should allow it,
Speaker 1: particularly because Twitter Twitter is global, but I think there
Speaker 1: should be streams within it where it's basically if you
Speaker 1: want to participate in this like in this debate, you
Speaker 1: actually have to be a real person with a reputation
Speaker 1: on the line, and there has to be rules because
Speaker 1: I do actually think you could create and I think
Speaker 1: we've I'm still a little hopeful that we will figure
Speaker 1: out a way to use the communication with billions of
Speaker 1: people with a billion different lives to actually do better disconfirmation.
Speaker 1: There's a very simple way to do a lot of
Speaker 1: what I think we need to do, which is people
Speaker 1: seem to think either you're either you're using your real
Speaker 1: name or you're anonymous, and there's a gigantic place in
Speaker 1: the middle called authentication. Absolutely, it's just it just means
Speaker 1: that in order you know, look, we take an hoober,
Speaker 1: we don't know the person's name, we just know their
Speaker 1: first name, but the company knows their name, and if
Speaker 1: they cheat us, then they're in trouble. And so imagine
Speaker 1: if Twitter followed up on a tump Trump must be
Speaker 1: tweeted authenticated, You tweeted authenticate all humans. Now, so what
Speaker 1: if in order to open an account on Twitter or
Speaker 1: Facebook you have to first you get passed out to
Speaker 1: another company, whether it's clear or whether it's there's all
Speaker 1: kinds of things. Using crypto, you know, blockchain, you just
Speaker 1: get passed out to some other way of authenticating that
Speaker 1: you're a real person. Now, I think we need to
Speaker 1: do agegating. I think we've had to get to edge gatingcy.
Speaker 1: But the people who are then actually on the platform
Speaker 1: are real people who if they make death threats or
Speaker 1: rape threats, the company can kick them off and they
Speaker 1: can't just get prosecuted. We've under prosecuted actual threats. So
Speaker 1: I think there's the biggest perform we can make to
Speaker 1: make social media less destructive of everything is just have
Speaker 1: platforms requiring authentication before you can participate with a fake name.
Speaker 1: But there is a problem. It's the international audience and
Speaker 1: because you'd actually have to give your name in you know,
Speaker 1: and basically we're not giving it to the government, you'd
Speaker 1: be giving it to They're already dozens of of ways
Speaker 1: to do this and some will be evolved that could
Speaker 1: that could be completely unhappable because all all Twitter has
Speaker 1: to know is not your name. They just have to know, yes,
Speaker 1: this account this person checked out by someone else. That's
Speaker 1: all you need. Yeah, on the sense of you of
Speaker 1: having antoninimity of your citizen of China, Russia or Turkey,
Speaker 1: for example, be anonymous, you would still be anonymous, but
Speaker 1: you can still be authenticated. And even if you're worried
Speaker 1: about about edge cases of some people, we're past the
Speaker 1: point where we can say, you know what, we need
Speaker 1: one platform where everyone can be on it. And if
Speaker 1: that means there's no authentication in most people or bots
Speaker 1: and assholes, well you know we need to do that
Speaker 1: because there's some dissidence in China. Yeah, what a horrible
Speaker 1: thing to give the end of your life. And some
Speaker 1: godner's want to say, you've spent half of your life
Speaker 1: arguing with bots. Yeah, freaking suck. You know, like if
Speaker 1: it was revealed right that half of your arguments were
Speaker 1: actually with bots, I kind of make the solution to
Speaker 1: a degree, one that doesn't have the same expectations. That
Speaker 1: is just a fundamentally different social media platform. If we
Speaker 1: want to our huge words truth that I actually think
Speaker 1: this would be a a great time to have a little
Speaker 1: Q and A and I want to tell you how
Speaker 1: we're doing it, so you can wind up. And this
Speaker 1: this is the microphone for the Q and A. So
Speaker 1: if you can just wind up if you wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you a question, and we're happy to answer your
Speaker 1: questions here. That's not a question. Don't be shy. Do
Speaker 1: you have a question? Hello? Please say your name if
Speaker 1: you'd like to you. It was a Cardigan. My my
Speaker 1: name is brand So higher education. So I have two questions.
Speaker 1: I'll make one. So, I actually assigned the first chapter
Speaker 1: of college at the American Mind at both universities that
Speaker 1: I caught in the past. One is a public institution,
Speaker 1: one's a private institution. How to go at the public institution?
Speaker 1: It's received very well, there's a lot more initial pushback, yeah,
Speaker 1: without actually reading the text. So I'm curious here thoughts
Speaker 1: about that. The demographics are very different at the public institution.
Speaker 1: It's a lower socioeconomic background. Private institution, more wealthy background.
Speaker 1: Second question is what you recommend for somebody who is
Speaker 1: young and navigating this space and higher education, who's not tender. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll take the first one, the John Prick. The second
Speaker 1: one about tenures. The class differences are profound, and I
Speaker 1: send up sounding like a Marxist a lot. But I
Speaker 1: was definitely really horrified when I got to Stanford. I
Speaker 1: mean again, I was working since I was eleven. I
Speaker 1: went worked at early to go factory sparrows, and I
Speaker 1: actually did construction and I show up at this place
Speaker 1: where I felt like people had a hard time in
Speaker 1: my human rights classes. These are high IQ people, but
Speaker 1: they seem to think that sort of like rich white
Speaker 1: liberal or progressive values were kind of universal truth. And
Speaker 1: it was very strange to constantly be like, you guys
Speaker 1: know nothing about what the actual rest of the world
Speaker 1: looks like. Meanwhile, you know, my dad's Russian and grew
Speaker 1: up in Ugoslavia, my mom's Irish, you grew up in Britain.
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time abroad. It just seems
Speaker 1: so incredibly simplistic and silly. And this is not nearly
Speaker 1: as bad at public school if you have actual working
Speaker 1: class kids, if you have a public school with genuine diversity,
Speaker 1: it tends to make this all seem kind of silly
Speaker 1: and weird. So it's always the case that we still
Speaker 1: see bad free speech cases of public universities, but they're
Speaker 1: mostly about abuses of power. They're about Dean Warmer. But
Speaker 1: in higher ed it's become the like weird you know
Speaker 1: of incubator of this very sort of like honestly, like
Speaker 1: I one of these schools, what was it? I forget,
Speaker 1: but it was one of like the it was like
Speaker 1: a finishing school, and I was pointing out, skide guys,
Speaker 1: you're acting like the Victorians that we used to make
Speaker 1: fun of. You're acting like the upper class people, but
Speaker 1: you just have different norms that you think are progressive.
Speaker 1: It really it's a major difference between schools. On the
Speaker 1: second question, what's your field English? Not English? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you know what I'm gonna say is if so, first,
Speaker 1: here's the good thing. When there's incredible pressures for orthodoxy,
Speaker 1: what that means is in the vast realm of things
Speaker 1: that could be studied, almost like by an electromagnetic force,
Speaker 1: everyone concentrates in a certain area and they leave almost
Speaker 1: everything empty. And this sort of happened to me by accident.
Speaker 1: I used to be on the left and I was
Speaker 1: studying moral psychology, and I was trying to help the
Speaker 1: Democrats stop losing. And once I started like reading good
Speaker 1: conservative libertarian ritings, like oh wow, there's all these amazing
Speaker 1: ideas out there that I, you know, I never knew,
Speaker 1: And it turned out I had the whole field to myself.
Speaker 1: Nobody else was raising in these areas. Now, I already
Speaker 1: had tenure bad that time, so it was easy and
Speaker 1: I could take some risks, you can so, but we
Speaker 1: live in a different world now where if you love ideas,
Speaker 1: you don't just have one avenue to a tenure track
Speaker 1: and then tenured position. In fact, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of people in this room already who are intellectuals who
Speaker 1: are not on the tenure track because things are really
Speaker 1: opening up. There's a really good argument. There's a really
Speaker 1: good article I just read somebody sentience me in tablet
Speaker 1: like today or something about how the intellectuals used to
Speaker 1: not get universities and it's just it's just the baby
Speaker 1: boom people they you know, awarding the draft, whatever it was,
Speaker 1: they all moved into universities. But I think we have
Speaker 1: to see that was a temporary period. And guess what,
Speaker 1: universities are doing a terrible job of curating public intellectuals.
Speaker 1: So if you have, if you have good ideas, if
Speaker 1: you have have and remember the humanity is like we
Speaker 1: still love the humanity because it was about being human
Speaker 1: and now it's not, and so nobody's mansoring it anymore.
Speaker 1: That means it's a huge market for you. So I
Speaker 1: think there is space opening up for public intellectuals who
Speaker 1: got some academic training and then we're kicked off the
Speaker 1: off the ranch and then found, you know, like the
Speaker 1: first humans into North America. Like you're gonna have huge
Speaker 1: mega faun at a sleigh. It's gonna be great. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're friends, angel Edwardo. I wanted to ask you on
Speaker 1: this on the free speech thing. I argue about free
Speaker 1: speech a lot, and one thing that I get a
Speaker 1: lot is this kind of what I would call the
Speaker 1: mind virus arguments, which is kind of Elon muscuses that
Speaker 1: for you as well. Yeah, but I think he needs
Speaker 1: a different thing. This is the kind of thing where
Speaker 1: someone will say, oh, you know this, Joe Rogan had
Speaker 1: this person on this podcast and it was awful, and
Speaker 1: we need to make sure he doesn't have a podcast
Speaker 1: anymore because he had this person. And I say, well,
Speaker 1: how do you know that this person selling these terrible things?
Speaker 1: He said, well, I watched the Internet podcast and I said,
Speaker 1: but are you okay? You heard all these ideas and
Speaker 1: then they were yeah, I'm but all these idiots there.
Speaker 1: So I'm just curious. I'm curious what you guys think
Speaker 1: about that particular. Yeah, I'm I'm tempted to make my
Speaker 1: next book something called Fight the guardians, which is about
Speaker 1: like people who actually see Plato's Republic and see the
Speaker 1: guardian class who who you know, people aren't real, but
Speaker 1: the ideas are real and we're the only ones who
Speaker 1: know it. And there it should be a dictatorship of
Speaker 1: the smart, dangerous people. And I think that there is
Speaker 1: so much elitism in this. There's so much kind of like, oh,
Speaker 1: we care about disadvantaged people, but they're you know, basically,
Speaker 1: then treat them like they're dumb and evil, like they're
Speaker 1: stupid and evil people. And so yeah, the any elitism,
Speaker 1: you know, to a degree is not as dangerous when
Speaker 1: it's not tied to authoritarianism. But both on the right
Speaker 1: and the left, you know, there is this rise of
Speaker 1: kind of like we are the smartest and we when
Speaker 1: these other people are dumb and we have to take over.
Speaker 1: It's all it's not thinking like people are free society
Speaker 1: where we're supposed to be equal democratic citizens. Was what.
Speaker 1: It's a cultish meteg Thank you, Michael him Is Paul.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna a little backstories because like, don't then you're
Speaker 1: gonna all move me because I'm basically an outgroup just
Speaker 1: based on this conversation, I work in diversity inclusion that
Speaker 1: my friend, so I work in I work in diversity
Speaker 1: inclusion today. I started off in euroscience researcher for Chris
Speaker 1: Stanford Graphical Columbia. All that you guys ended up moving
Speaker 1: to the applied side of human sciences, which naturally today
Speaker 1: means you're gonna work in diversity inclusion for certain companies.
Speaker 1: And I consult with chief diversitary officers. It's basically like
Speaker 1: therapy sessions. The average tenure for a chief agrisity officers
Speaker 1: around one point five years max. And what's astonishing to
Speaker 1: me is I use your book all the time. I
Speaker 1: use wol Gang, I use a parasitic mind and the
Speaker 1: virgity delusion because I'm trying to restore confidence in what
Speaker 1: this was before the Me Too movie Black Lives like
Speaker 1: the heart of the and I was fundamentally about transcending
Speaker 1: our differences in apparent What I want to know, obviously,
Speaker 1: the comminished man. I already know Scott because he did
Speaker 1: a podcast with us a while ago. But I want
Speaker 1: to know, like there's this war right Obviously, the and
Speaker 1: I was ideologically captured by the liberal left and the
Speaker 1: liberal at a time, unfriends sented social division and distrust right,
Speaker 1: so we're dealing with that, how to restore a movement
Speaker 1: that actually has a pretty good cause. Right at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, no one chose to be white,
Speaker 1: no one chose to be black, and one a fair world,
Speaker 1: and this movement, to me, it's that the point where
Speaker 1: he needs a regrant rights. I just want to say it,
Speaker 1: awesome question, Thank you for that. So I recently finally
Speaker 1: decided what I am. That is because you know, coming out,
Speaker 1: I want to do this before we talk about this
Speaker 1: the other day politically. Here about politically, I am an
Speaker 1: anti identitarian. And what I mean by that, what I
Speaker 1: mean by that is, you know, so when I was
Speaker 1: born in nineteen sixty three, you know, that was one
Speaker 1: hundred hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. In
Speaker 1: that hundred years, how much progress, like some but not
Speaker 1: one hundred years worth of progress. And then you go
Speaker 1: for nineteen sixty three to nineteen seventy three, how much
Speaker 1: progress on civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, seventy to
Speaker 1: eighty three each decade on every possible front you could
Speaker 1: care about, social justice, Incredible progress all the way to
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen when our first black president was just re
Speaker 1: elected when gay marriage proposals passed everywhere and it was
Speaker 1: about become the law. Gol Land. So I used to
Speaker 1: be on the left, and you know, every thing you
Speaker 1: care about with rights and diverse inclusions was making incredible progress.
Speaker 1: So if you're in that space in twenty thirteen, you
Speaker 1: should be saying, Yay America, whatever it is that we've
Speaker 1: been doing, let's keep doing it. But instead, because of
Speaker 1: these changes in social media that allowed little viruses were
Speaker 1: nurtured in a few English departments and then I departments,
Speaker 1: they spread out and they took over universities and from
Speaker 1: there elsewhere, even though most people don't believe it. So
Speaker 1: I really am coming to see that the issue is
Speaker 1: not left right. The issue is are you an American
Speaker 1: who believes that this amazing polyglot, large diverse nation we
Speaker 1: should be continuing to make identity matter less? Or do
Speaker 1: you believe that we should stop what we were doing
Speaker 1: up to twenty thirteen to say, how about we make
Speaker 1: identity be everything? How about that? How's that going to work? Okay?
Speaker 1: So I thought we have to all unight, you could
Speaker 1: all unite in saying, like you know this identitarianism is
Speaker 1: a bad thing. Of course, You're free to be you know,
Speaker 1: Jewish or Italian or Chinese or gay or anything you want,
Speaker 1: of course, but free to the Italian you can identify us.
Speaker 1: I'd love to hear back from you, what do you
Speaker 1: think of what? I agree? One hundred percent Scott. Actually,
Speaker 1: just so, I just did a talk with a bunch
Speaker 1: of corporate executives last Wednesday, and I used Scott's artwork
Speaker 1: to cap it off, basically self transcendence, and it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: we really recognizelfs. But I agree. I just what I'm
Speaker 1: what I'm finding is that there is such a level
Speaker 1: of just kind of the people that are Indian I
Speaker 1: that were there before all that that's one camp. And
Speaker 1: then there's the group of people who were quickly reactively
Speaker 1: promoted into a role absence any previous understanding of this field.
Speaker 1: And in addition to that, the fact that it's become
Speaker 1: very weaponized know how to like it used to be
Speaker 1: university and everything included, and they never stepping included, They
Speaker 1: never steep included and belonging. All you need to add
Speaker 1: is an end word, and you can call it the
Speaker 1: Biden movement. And so it's just ridiculous. It's it's it's
Speaker 1: become really insane, and I don't I'm struggling with and
Speaker 1: how do you how do you regain the reins for
Speaker 1: something that's gone so far off the rails to the
Speaker 1: point where there's people who believe in it and it's
Speaker 1: worse facets. I'm conscious by training all that it's worst
Speaker 1: facets with such conviction at the highest levels of corporations
Speaker 1: and at the highest levels of media, and at the
Speaker 1: highest levels of epidamia, every single area of our information ecosystem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a there's a book there by the way,
Speaker 1: so we believe what you're saying so much. We actually incubated.
Speaker 1: She was actually in can't we take a joke? Carol
Speaker 1: Foster has this program for actually getting people to talk
Speaker 1: to each other, like each other, become friends, take themselves
Speaker 1: a little less seriously, like something that will actually leave
Speaker 1: people feel closer. Chloe bat I love you, you know,
Speaker 1: has a great program. There is I think we need
Speaker 1: to innovate in the DEI space exactly in the way
Speaker 1: you're saying, I actually believe or not. Like one of
Speaker 1: my one of my best friends is the DEI person,
Speaker 1: you know, and I think that I think that there
Speaker 1: is I think there is an effort of what to
Speaker 1: kind of restore to something that actually brings people together
Speaker 1: as opposed to the divide. Yeah, and in the business world,
Speaker 1: companies actually have to ultimately make money and be successful.
Speaker 1: Universities don't. And so there's no sign there is no sign.
Speaker 1: There's no sign of a pendulum swing in the academic space,
Speaker 1: but there is clear movement in the corporate space. And
Speaker 1: so you can't beat something with nothing if you if
Speaker 1: there are better alternatives, and several executives have said to me,
Speaker 1: if someone would come up with a kind of diversity
Speaker 1: training that actually work, we'd all do it. But so
Speaker 1: one thing I'd suggest is, whenever, whenever somebody's pushing something,
Speaker 1: say what's the evidence for that? Is there evidence that
Speaker 1: this work? Before we make people spend time and money?
Speaker 1: Is there evidence? Because there never is, So that might
Speaker 1: be one strategy to sort of stall until other positive
Speaker 1: stre appreciate it. Thank you, What were you doing with
Speaker 1: the act? I saw you wanted to say something. I
Speaker 1: was just going to add that. I think there there
Speaker 1: might be like a logical short circuiting of the entire
Speaker 1: it was identity politics and an intersectional identity politics. And
Speaker 1: I think because my generation is so diverse and fits
Speaker 1: into so many ven diagrams, when you're saying, I'm this
Speaker 1: is my sexuality, this is my race, and this is
Speaker 1: my gender, and you're layering it over and over and over,
Speaker 1: and it's not just about one immutable characteristic. The ultimate
Speaker 1: argument that you're making is that I'm an individual and
Speaker 1: I'm more complex than these groups. And so I think
Speaker 1: gen Z and our demographical diversity might just short circuit that,
Speaker 1: like identity politics instinct. I asked you you welcome, Thanks,
Speaker 1: thanks for a wonderful Oh yeah, I talk. I can
Speaker 1: say that again to the micro I have a wonderful part.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for a thanks for I still
Speaker 1: appreciate what you just said again, which is right me.
Speaker 1: We all just need to read more books. Okay, So
Speaker 1: I'm I'm sorry. I'm a higher education person here, but
Speaker 1: I find that one of the things I notice in
Speaker 1: classes is I teach, I teach what's your field? I
Speaker 1: teach eighteenth and nineteen sent My research field is eighteenth
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century Spain in Europe. I love it either too.
Speaker 1: But my teaching is Spanish in general, like middle to
Speaker 1: upper levels Spanish in a large public university our one.
Speaker 1: So one of the ways that I tend to get
Speaker 1: around this kind of polarization of class and I think
Speaker 1: that this is this is the first thing, and then
Speaker 1: I have another question to the very first quick thing
Speaker 1: is one aspect is the personality of the teacher, the
Speaker 1: moral commitment of the teacher or the moral personalities doing
Speaker 1: for parents or families who see higher educationment so I'm
Speaker 1: only talking about But then another aspect is why people
Speaker 1: are seeking higher educator and why people see higher education.
Speaker 1: People see higher education and maintain themselves into terrible debt
Speaker 1: all for it. Right, I've asked my students, what is
Speaker 1: the thing that you're most concerned about, and it's their loans. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's their loans. So this is not, though, something that
Speaker 1: has to do with liberal conservative counseling. It's about higher procritization,
Speaker 1: but it's about a lot of things. So one of
Speaker 1: the things that I'm wondering about, and it's something that
Speaker 1: I'm not demanding a particular kind of language for discussing,
Speaker 1: but one of the things I'm wondering about is the
Speaker 1: role and I say this carefully. Okay, I say this carefully.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to be some I'm not. It's hard
Speaker 1: to about money, and it's hard to talk about finance,
Speaker 1: and it's hard to talk about the fact that when
Speaker 1: we see TV, for example, when we see something that
Speaker 1: is on Instagram, when we see anything that is presented
Speaker 1: in the university, there's a lot of money behind that.
Speaker 1: And when you see things on television in particular, everything
Speaker 1: nothing gets before the screen unless it is carefully scripted, groom,
Speaker 1: make up and whatever. So we have a line from
Speaker 1: as individuals, whether we go to higher education or not,
Speaker 1: what is our world. I don't want to use the
Speaker 1: word capitalism. I don't want to use them money. I mean,
Speaker 1: you talk about how people get canceled, so I get canceled.
Speaker 1: I feel like I get canceled. If I want to
Speaker 1: bring up how do we talk about the influence of
Speaker 1: corporate control over our media. So let's let's be real.
Speaker 1: We have platforms here, we have billionaires who and they
Speaker 1: have Yeah. Okay, so I'll take this. I'll take this
Speaker 1: in part made. And also this is my sister Rebecca,
Speaker 1: who is a professor at Bio State. I know you
Speaker 1: got height. So so Rebecca and I so so Rebecca.
Speaker 1: So Rebecca is a is a true liberal. She is
Speaker 1: very no you know, hold on, hold so she's so
Speaker 1: so she's she's always been on the left. But she
Speaker 1: also saw very clearly. I mean, in fact, one of
Speaker 1: the first place I heard about cancel culture was you
Speaker 1: on your job talks in the nineties. The fact that
Speaker 1: she studied Madrid was like, oh, you shouldn't study Madrid.
Speaker 1: You need to study the marginalize it, you know, the margin.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, yes, so yeah, so okay. So I
Speaker 1: think what you're pointing out, what you're pointing out is
Speaker 1: that there are a lot of dynamics of conflict that
Speaker 1: corrupt or damage what we do on campus and money. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: so I think we I think I think we can.
Speaker 1: We mentioned this in the in the books, we have
Speaker 1: a chapter on chapter on your organization. So when universities,
Speaker 1: universities have evolved over such a long period, but in
Speaker 1: the eighties, that it can much more corporate, much more corporatized.
Speaker 1: We've got that. We call what many multiversities multiversities sixties.
Speaker 1: I do so, but I just what I just want
Speaker 1: to question whether if you raise that if you raise that,
Speaker 1: will you be shamed and mobbed and fired or will
Speaker 1: you just be like either dismissed or someone will disagree
Speaker 1: with you because it's not if it's not really a
Speaker 1: cancel culture. What I don't hear you all addressing and
Speaker 1: I know I'm trying. I was, Okay. The thing that
Speaker 1: I find find frustrating and it's not exactly corporatism. It's
Speaker 1: a weird combination of incentives. And I don't really get
Speaker 1: whether it isn't more just outright anger at the fact
Speaker 1: that hire a education has acted like a cartel. Thank you,
Speaker 1: they raised their money together, they have They have overwhelmingly
Speaker 1: increased the barocratization. That's what you're paying for. You're not
Speaker 1: paying for more and better professors, you're paying for more administrators. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: this is putting you in debt for the rest of
Speaker 1: your life. We've got to break the system. A Margaret
Speaker 1: University of a bustin. How do we discuss the fact that, like,
Speaker 1: for example, nineteenth century corporations, Greg, you could know about
Speaker 1: this nineteenth century corporations. Yeah, Jonathan, this is one of
Speaker 1: the greatest psychologists of our generation. Staying aroun here Jonathan'
Speaker 1: school I just want to say he's had a huge
Speaker 1: impact of my own work on daydreaming and mind wandering.
Speaker 1: So so thank you. This is really really stimulating. And
Speaker 1: I'm John I think I heard you saying that you
Speaker 1: that you think we should really take social media out
Speaker 1: of the hands of thirteen wherever was the eleven thirteen
Speaker 1: soas to delay to sixteenth. Yeah, so I'm wondering. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm putting myself in the shoes of one of those
Speaker 1: adolescents and imagining not being happy about, you know, having
Speaker 1: that restriction and feeling like this is a maybe it's
Speaker 1: not coddling, but it's a kind of it's a kind
Speaker 1: of coddling. It's like you are not mature enough to
Speaker 1: be able to handle this material. And so I'm just questioning, like,
Speaker 1: but yourself, imagine you were. Is that a contradiction and
Speaker 1: and does that really sit well with you? It's so
Speaker 1: well with me. So here's why. So when you and
Speaker 1: I were young high school kids smoked and you could
Speaker 1: get cigarettes in a vending machine, and I'm sure people
Speaker 1: said like, well, you know, what are you gonna do
Speaker 1: band vending machines, Like of course, you know, kids are
Speaker 1: gonna get cigarettes. But eventually we realize, you know what,
Speaker 1: we kind of have to bandit machines and we have
Speaker 1: to kind of try to try to stop this from children.
Speaker 1: The basic argument in the caddling wasn't social media is
Speaker 1: destroying them. It's the fact that they are overprotected and
Speaker 1: not given life experience. What kids need is to be
Speaker 1: out unsupervised. America is a great experiment in self governance,
Speaker 1: but yet we never let kids be self governing. Is
Speaker 1: Laras Kenezi here? I thought she was on the list somewhere,
Speaker 1: is Lunar here? I don't know. Anyway, Yes, let grow
Speaker 1: go to letgrow dot com support us anyway. My point
Speaker 1: is kids need to be out having real interactions and
Speaker 1: adventures and getting into trouble and getting out of trouble
Speaker 1: and getting lost and getting that. They need to do
Speaker 1: all that stuff. As soon as they get the phone,
Speaker 1: and especially with social media, they go out, they sit
Speaker 1: there and they're on the phone. They literally don't play.
Speaker 1: So this I believe is inhibiting development. It's almost that
Speaker 1: they have emotional scurvy. And as long as as long
Speaker 1: as they have as long as they have a phone
Speaker 1: with social media, that's the end of childhood. That's the
Speaker 1: end of experience. So yes, it seems superficially like a contradiction.
Speaker 1: But if they were going to have experience, we have
Speaker 1: to delay social media until it's less damaging. And now
Speaker 1: that there's evidence that it's especially damaging for eleven to
Speaker 1: thirteen year old girls, yep, I think it's in the
Speaker 1: class of cigarettes. What about riding bicycles and doing the
Speaker 1: class of cigarettes? Riding the danger there was trivial. What
Speaker 1: would you say about one in four girls being damaged?
Speaker 1: Is that a lot or a little? I mean most
Speaker 1: of them aren't damaged, So what you know? Whereas bicycles, Look,
Speaker 1: if bicycles were killing one quarter or severely maiming one
Speaker 1: quarter of the children a road that I would say
Speaker 1: the same about bicycles. But bicycles give them the experienced.
Speaker 1: Bicycles give them the independence to get away from adults
Speaker 1: and have adventures. Thank you. Time for one more short question,
Speaker 1: the bigger things. So I was going to apply for
Speaker 1: a job open science librarian at NYU, which required a
Speaker 1: diversity segment. I could not having been to Headox Academy conference,
Speaker 1: I could not bring myself to write it. But much
Speaker 1: more significantly, at the University of California, Berkeley, they require
Speaker 1: like very elaborate statements that are basically political confessions. So
Speaker 1: what do we do about these? Yeah, I'll take that.
Speaker 1: So we have I mentioned the research team. I used
Speaker 1: to kind of pretend to be fires social scientists because
Speaker 1: I was really interested in things like psychology. And then
Speaker 1: finally we started getting like really great employees at pal Leprewski,
Speaker 1: for example, was a chief researcher for a while, but
Speaker 1: we now have people like Sean Stevens, and we just
Speaker 1: had someone Comby Fry was amazing, but we just had
Speaker 1: someone named Nate Honeycutt, and he actually did research. He
Speaker 1: simulated the situation. He actually got you know, panels of
Speaker 1: administrators and professors to review DEI statements. Because the claim
Speaker 1: is that you can talk about listen, we're not, we're not.
Speaker 1: This is in a political litmus test. You can talk
Speaker 1: about viewpoint diversity, you can talk about religious diversity, you
Speaker 1: can talk about economic diversity. You don't have to talk
Speaker 1: about just the sort of like liberal identitarian line on this.
Speaker 1: And he did the experiment and you absolutely have to
Speaker 1: talk about the identitarian line. It is absolutely a political
Speaker 1: litmus test. And to me this is insane because we
Speaker 1: already have a tiny number of conservatives in Hire and
Speaker 1: to begin with, they have multiple hoops they have to
Speaker 1: jump through. The situation is actually getting worse. There are
Speaker 1: secret tributals, the possibility of cancelations, and on top of
Speaker 1: that with someone actually looked out at Hire It and said,
Speaker 1: you know what, there's too much intellectual diversity here. We
Speaker 1: need a political litmus test. So we're figuring out ways
Speaker 1: to fight it. Well, we're actually considering litigating it that
Speaker 1: there's different forms of a financial legislation, I guess, but
Speaker 1: it is a political litmus test. Excellent, it is wrong.
Speaker 1: I want to thank everyone for coming tonight. A couple announcements. One,
Speaker 1: if you like when you heard today, if we subscribe
Speaker 1: to the Psychology podcast. Another thing is if please leave
Speaker 1: at that exit today and don't come if you want
Speaker 1: to talk to us, like, don't come up. There's a
Speaker 1: show right after this. Let's be respectful. We will be
Speaker 1: outside if you want to talk to us for a
Speaker 1: couple of seconds on a the whole leaving. Finally, let's
Speaker 1: just give a big roun apultal amazing guests say that
Speaker 1: use it there it is