Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns, starting around 2014 to get people fired.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
fired, expelled, deplatformed, et cetera, for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I say would be protected because we're talking about circumstances in which it isn't necessarily where the First Amendment applies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But what I mean is like as an analog to, say, things you couldn't lose your job as a public employee for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And also the climate of fear that's resulted from that phenomenon, the fact that you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it wasn't subtle that there was an uptick in this, particularly on campus around 2014.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
John Ronson wrote a book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It came out in 2015, already documenting this phenomenon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I wrote a book called Freedom from Speech in 2014.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But it really was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And when it comes to the number of professors that we've seen, you know, be targeted and lose their jobs, I've been doing this for 22 years and I've seen nothing like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So FIRE was founded in 1999 by Harvey Silverglate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He is a famous civil liberties attorney.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He's a bit on the show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He's the person who actually found me out in my very happy life out in San Francisco but knew I was looking for a First Amendment job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'd gone to law school specifically to do First Amendment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And he found me, which was pretty cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
His protege, Kathleen Sullivan, was the dean of Stanford Law School.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And this remains the best compliment I ever got in my life is that she recommended me to Harvey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And since that's the whole reason why I went to law school, I was excited to be a part of this new organization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The other co-founder of FIRE is Alan Charles Kors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He's just an absolute genius.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He is one of the leading experts in the world on the Enlightenment and particularly about Voltaire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And if any of your listeners do like the great courses, he has a lecture on Blaise Pascal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And Blaise, of course, is famous for Pascal's Wager.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I left it just so moved and impressed and with a depth of understanding of how important this person is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
uh, was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think that for those of us who have devoted our lives to freedom of speech, one thing that we are into, whether we know it or not, is epistemology, the study and philosophy of knowledge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Freedom speech has lots of moral and philosophical dimensions, but from a pragmatic standpoint, it is necessary because we're creatures of incredibly limited knowledge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We are incredibly self-deceiving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I always love the fact that Yuval Harari refers to the Enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because that's exactly what it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It was suddenly being like, wow, hold on a second.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
All this incredibly interesting folk wisdom we got, which, by the way, can be surprisingly reliable here and there, when you start testing a lot of it,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
is nonsense, and it doesn't hold up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Even our ideas about the way things fall, as Galileo established, like even our intuitions, they're just wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And so a lot of the early history of freedom of speech, it was happening at the same time as sort of the scientific revolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So a lot of the early debates about freedom of speech were tied in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So certainly Galileo – I always point out like Kepler was probably like the even more radical idea that there weren't even perfect spheres.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But at the same time, largely because of the invention of the printing press, you also had all these political developments and –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I always talk about Jan Hus from the – a famous Czech hero who was burned at the stake and I think in 1419.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But he was basically Luther before the printing press.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Before Luther could get his word out, he didn't stand a chance and that was exactly what Jan Hus was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But a century later, thanks to the printing press –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Everyone could know what Luther thought, and boy, did they.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But it led to, of course, this completely crazy, hyper-disrupted period in European history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I'm a First Amendment lawyer, as I mentioned, and that's my passion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's what I studied, and I think American First Amendment law is incredibly interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
In one sentence, the First Amendment is trying to get rid of basically all the reasons why humankind had been killing each other for its entire existence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That we weren't going to fight anymore over opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We weren't going to fight anymore over religion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That you have the right to approach your government for redressing grievances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That you have the freedom to associate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That all of these things in one sentence were like, nope, the government will no longer interfere with your right to have these fundamental human rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And so one thing that makes FIRE a little different from other organizations is, however, we're not just a First Amendment organization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We are a free speech organization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But at the same time, a lot of what I think free speech is—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
can be well explained with reference to a lot of First Amendment law, partially because in American history, some of our smartest people have been thinking about what the parameters of freedom of speech are in relationship to the First Amendment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And a lot of those principles, they transfer very well just as pragmatic ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So like the biggest sin in terms of censorship is called viewpoint discrimination, that essentially you allow freedom of speech except for that opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, it's – and it's found to be kind of more defensible and I think this makes sense that if you set up a forum and like we're only going to talk about economics to exclude people who want to talk about a different topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But it's considered rightfully a bigger deal if you set up a forum for economics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But we're not going to let people talk about that kind of economics or have that opinion on economics, most particularly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So a lot of the principles from First Amendment law actually make a lot of philosophical sense as good principles for when – like what is protected and unprotected speech, what should get you in trouble, how you actually analyze it, which is why we actually try in our definition of cancel culture to work in some of the First Amendment norms just in the definition so we don't have to bog down on them as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
If you're saying that something is or is not economics, well, you can say everything's economics, and therefore I want to talk about poetry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There'd be some line drawing exercise in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But let's say at once you decide to open up to poetry even.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's a big difference between saying, okay, now we're open to poetry, but you can't say Dante was bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like, that's a forbidden opinion now, officially, in this otherwise open forum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That would immediately, at an intuitive level, strike people as a bigger problem than just saying that poetry isn't economics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I mean, people find it a different thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You know, if someone loses their job simply for their political opinion, even if that employer has every right in the world to fire you, I think Americans should still be like, well, it's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They have every right in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm not making a legal case that maybe you shouldn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Fire someone for their political opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But think that through.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like what society do we want to – what kind of society do we want to live in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's been funny watching – and I point this out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yes, I will defend businesses' First Amendment rights of association to be able to have the legal right to decide who works for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But from a moral or philosophical matter, if you think through the implications of if every business in America becomes an expressive association in addition to being a profit-maximizing organization, that would be a disaster for democracy because you would end up in a situation where people would actually be saying to themselves …
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I don't think I can actually say what I really think and still believe I can keep my job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's where I was worried.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I felt like we were headed because a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled was very simply, you know, oh, but they have the right to get rid of this person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's the beginning and end of the discussion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I thought that was a dodge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I thought that wasn't actually a very serious way that if you care about both the First Amendment and freedom of speech of thinking it through.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's an older, bolder, more expansive idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And you can have a situation – and I talk about countries that have good free speech law but not necessarily great free speech culture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I talk about how when we sometimes make this distinction between free speech law and free speech culture, we're thinking in a very cloudy kind of way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And what I mean by that is that law is generally – particularly in a common law country, it's the reflection of norms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Judges are people too and in a lot of cases, common law is supposed to actually take our intuitive ideas of fairness and place them into the law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So if you actually have a culture that doesn't appreciate free speech from a philosophical standpoint, it's not going to be able to protect free speech for the long haul even in the law because eventually – that's one of the reasons why I worry so much about some of these terrible cases coming out of law schools because I fear that even though, sure, American First Amendment law is very strongly protective of First Amendment rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
For now, it's not going to stay that way if you have generations of law students graduating who actually think there's nothing, there's no higher goal than shouting down your opponent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, you have this history, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
64, you have the free speech movement on Berkeley.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And in 65, you have Repressive Tolerance by Herbert Marcuse, which was a declaration of, by the way, we on the left, we shouldn't – we should have free speech, but we should have free speech for us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I mean I went back and reread Repressive Tolerance and how clear it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I forgot – I had forgotten that it really is kind of like – and these so-called conservatives and right-wingers –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We need to repress them because they're regressive thinkers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It really doesn't come out to anything more sophisticated than the very old idea that our people are good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They get free speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They should keep it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
other side bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We should not have – we have to retrain society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Of course, like it ends up being another – he was also a fan of Mao.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So it's not surprising that he – of course, the system would have to rely on some kind of totalitarian system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But that was a laughable
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
position, you know, say 30, 40 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The idea that essentially, you know, free speech for me, not for thee, as the great, you know, free speech champion that Hentoff used to say, was something that you were supposed to be embarrassed by.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But I saw this when I was in law school in 97.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I saw this when I was interning at the ACLU in 99, that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There was a slow motion train wreck coming that essentially there was these bad ideas from campus that had been taking on more and more steam of basically no free speech for my opponent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We're actually becoming more and more accepted as – and partially because academia was becoming less and less viewpoint diverse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think that as my –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Co-author Jonathan Haidt points out that when you have low viewpoint diversity, people start thinking in a very kind of tribal way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And if you don't have the respected dissenters, you don't have the people that you can point to that are like, hey, this is a smart person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This is a smart, reasonable, decent person that I disagree with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I guess not everyone thinks alike on this issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You start getting much more kind of like only –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
only bad people, only heretics, only blasphemers, only right-wingers can actually think in this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So one thing I want to be really clear about is the book takes on both right and left cancel culture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They're different in a lot of ways, and definitely, you know, cancel culture from the left is more important in academia, where the left is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But we talk a lot about cancel culture coming from legislatures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We talk a lot about cancel culture on campus as well, because even though most of the attempts that come from on campus to get people canceled are still from the left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
there are a lot of attacks that come from the right, that come from attempts by different organizations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And sometimes when there are stories in Fox News, they'll go after professors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And about one-third of the attempts to get professors punished that are successful actually do come from the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we talk about attempts to get books banned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
In the book, we talk about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I talk about suing the Florida legislature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Ron DeSantis had something called the Stop Woke Act, which we told everyone this is laughably unconstitutional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They tried to ban particular topics in higher ed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we're like, no, this is a joke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This will be laughed out of court.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And they didn't listen to us and they brought it – they passed it and we sued and we won.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, they're trying again with something that's equally as unconstitutional and we will sue again and we will win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, basically woke topics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It came out of the attempt to get at critical race theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's topics related to race, gender, etc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I don't remember exactly how they tried to cabinet to CRT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But when you actually, the law is really well established that you can't tell higher education what they're allowed to teach without violating the First Amendment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And when this got in front of a judge, he was exactly as skeptical of it as we thought he'd be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think he called this dystopian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it wasn't a close call.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Just the state doesn't have the power to simply say, to ban, you know, what professors in higher education teach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, it gets a little more complicated when you talk about K-12 because the state has a role in deciding what public K-12 teaches because they're your kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's taxpayer-funded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And generally, the legislature is involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There is democratic oversight of that process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, there definitely is in K through 12.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I mean, my kids go to public school.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I have a five and a seven-year-old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And they have lovely teachers, but we have run into a lot of problems with education schools at fire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And a lot of the graduates of education school end up being the administrators who clamp down on free speech in higher education.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And so I've been trying to think of positive ways to take on some of the problems that I see in K-12.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I thought that the attempt to just –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
dictate you won't teach the following 10 books or 20 books or 200 books was the wrong way to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, when it comes to deciding what books are in the curriculum, again, that's something the legislature actually can't have some say in, and that's pretty uncontroversial in terms of the law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But when it comes to how you fight it, I had something that, since I'm kind of stuck with a formula, I called empowering of the American mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I gave principles that were inconsistent with the sort of group think and heavy emphasis on identity politics that, you know, some of the critics are rightfully complaining about in K through 12.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we, that is actually in canceling of the American mind, but I have a more detailed explanation of it that I'm going to be putting up on my
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
blog, The Eternally Radical Idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
In K-12, you know, state legislatures, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They're part of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They're part of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And they can say, like, you should teach the following books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, of course, people are always a little bit worried that if they were to recommend, you know, teach the Declaration of Independence, you know, that it will end up being, well, they're going to teach the Declaration of Independence was just to protect slavery, which it wasn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Don't, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I mean, I'm an atheist with an intense interest in religion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I actually read the entire Bible this year just because I do stuff like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I never actually had read it from beginning to end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Then I read the Quran because, you know, and I'm going to try to do the Book of Mormon, but, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think you should just to know because it's such a touchstone in the way people talk about things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It can get pretty tedious, but I even made myself read through all of the very specific instructions on how tall the different parts of the temple need to be and how long the garbs need to be and what shape they need to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And those go on a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Surprisingly, a big chunk of Exodus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I thought that was more like in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But then you get to books like Job, you know, wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I mean, Job is such a read and no way Job originally had that ending.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Job is basically – it starts out as this perverse bet between God and Satan about whether or not they can actually make a good man renounce God.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And initially, they can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's all going very predictably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then they finally really torture Job, and he turns into the best –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
why is God cruel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
How could God possibly exist?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
How could a kind God do these things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And he beats, he turns into like the best lawyer in the entire world and he defeats everyone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
All the people who come to argue with him, he argues the pants off of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then suddenly at the end, God shows up and he's like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
well, you know, I am everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's a very confusing answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He gives an answer kind of like, I am there when lionesses give birth, and I am there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And by the way, there's this giant monster Leviathan that's very big, and it's very scary, and I have to manage the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm kind of like, God, are you saying that you're very busy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Is that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Is that essentially your argument to Job?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And you don't mention the whole kind of like, I have a bet that's why I was torturing you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That doesn't come up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then at the end, God decides, Job's like, oh, no, you're totally right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I was totally wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Sorry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And God says, I'm going to punish those people who tried to argue with you and didn't win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So he gets rid of the—I don't know exactly what he does to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I don't remember—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
um and then he gives job all his money back and all and it makes him super prosperous and i'm like no way that was the original ending of that book like because this would like this was clearly a beloved novel that they were like but it can't have that ending okay so so so yeah so it's a long way of saying i actually think it's worthwhile some of it was you're always kind of surprised when you end up in the part like um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There are parts of it that will sneak up on you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Kind of like Isaiah's a trip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Ecclesiastes, Depeche Mode.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And you said you also, the Korans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, which was fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
In the First Amendment, we have something that we call the religion clause, and I've never liked calling it just that because it's two brilliant things right next to each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The state may not establish an official religion, but it cannot interfere with your right to practice your religion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Two things at the same time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think they're both exactly right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think sometimes the right gets very excited of the free exercise clause and the left gets very excited about establishment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I like the fact that we have both of them together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, how does this relate to freedom of speech?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And how does it relate to the curriculum like we were talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I actually think it would be great if public schools could teach the Bible, like, in the sense of, like, read it as a historical document.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But back when I was at the ACLU, every time I saw people trying this, it always turned into them actually advocating for, you know, a Catholic or a Protestant or some – or Orthodox even – kind of, like, read on religion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
If you actually make it into something advocating for a particular view on religion, then it crosses into the establishment class side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So Americans haven't figured out a way to actually teach it, so it's probably better that you learn outside of a public school class.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think the answer is it depends on from whose perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
For some people, the bottom line is you have to teach it as true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And under those conditions, then the answer is no, you can't teach without offending someone at least.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You can try really hard and you will still make some people angry, but serious people will be like, oh, no, you actually tried to be fair to the beliefs here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I try to be respectful as much as I can about –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
A lot of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I still find myself much more drawn to both Buddhism and Stoicism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm very proud of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
People have been asking me since day one to do a ranking of schools according to freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Even though we have the best database in existence of campus speech codes, policies that universities have that violate First Amendment or First Amendment norms, we also have the best database of what we call the disinvitation database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But it's actually the, it's better named the deplatforming database, which is what we're going to call it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Disinvited or deplatforming also includes shouting down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And so having that, what we really needed in order to have some serious social science to really make a serious argument about what the ranking was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
was to be able to, one, get a better sense of how many professors were actually getting punished during this time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then the biggest missing element was to be able to ask students directly what the environment was like on that campus for freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Are you comfortable disagreeing with each other?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Are you comfortable disagreeing with your professors?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
do you think violence is acceptable in response to a speaker?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Do you think shouting down is okay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Do you think blocking people's access to a speaker is okay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And once we were able to get all those elements together, we first did a test run, I think in 2019, about 50, and we've been doing it for four years now, always trying to make the methodology more and more precise to better reflect the actual environment at particular schools.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And this year, the number one school was Michigan Technological University, which was a nice surprise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The number two school was actually Auburn University, which was nice to see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
In the top 10, the most well-known prestigious school is actually UVA, which did really well this year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
University of Chicago was not happy that they weren't number one, but University of Chicago was 13, and they had been number one or in the top three for years prior to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They had a case involving a student.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They wouldn't recognize a chapter of Turning Point USA, and they made a very classic argument, and classic in the bad way, that we hear at campuses across the country, oh, we have a campus for Republicans, so we don't need this additional conservative group.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We're like, no, I'm sorry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We've seen dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of attempts to get this one particular conservative student group de-recognized or not recognized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We told them at FIRE that we consider this serious, and they wouldn't recognize the group.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's a point down in our ranking, and it was enough to knock them from
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They probably would have been number two in the rankings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But now they're 13 out of 248.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They're still one of the best schools in the country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I have no problem saying that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The school that did not do so well at a negative 10.69, negative 10.69, and we rounded up to zero was Harvard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And Harvard has been not very happy with that result.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, and there are a couple people... Oh, Harvard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Oh, Harvard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And there are a couple people who have actually been really, I think, making a mistake by getting very Harvard-sounding, by being like, I've had statisticians look at this, and they think your methodology is a joke, and pointing out, and this case wasn't that important, and that scholar wasn't... One of the arguments against one of the scholars that we counted against them for punishing was that that wasn't a very famous or influential scholar, and I'm kind of like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
so your argument seems to be snobbery, like essentially that like you, you're not understanding our methodology for one thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then you're saying that actually that scholar wasn't important enough to count.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And by the way, Harvard, by the way, Harvard, um, if we, yeah, if we, even if we took all of your arguments as true, even if we decided to get rid of those two professors, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
you would still be in negative numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You would still be dead last.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You would still be after Georgetown and Penn, and neither of those schools are good for freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
All very well-earned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They have so many bad cases at all of those schools.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
A lot of deplatforming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
When we looked at the bottom five, 81% of attempts to get speakers deplatformed were successful at the bottom five.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There were a couple schools, I think Penn included, where every single attempt was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Every time a student group objected to that speaker coming, they canceled the speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think Georgetown was 100% success rate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think Penn had 100% success rate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think Harvard did stand up for a couple, but mostly people got deplatformed there as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Well, here's the dirty little secret about the big change in 2014.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And Fire and me and Haight have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus was that for most of my career, students were great on freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They were the best constituency for free speech, absolutely unambiguously, until about 2013, 2014.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it was only in 2014 where we had this very, you know, kind of sad for us experience where suddenly students were the ones advocating for deplatforming and new speech codes, kind of in a similar way that they had been doing in, say, like the mid-80s, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But here's the dirty little secret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's not just the students.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's students and administrators, sometimes only a handful of them, though, working together to create some of these problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And this was exactly what happened at Stanford when Kyle Duncan, a Fifth Circuit judge, tried to speak at my alma mater.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
A fifth of the class showed up to shout him down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It was a real showing of what was going on that 10 minutes into the shout down of a Fifth Circuit judge – and I keep on emphasizing that because I'm a constitutional lawyer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Fifth Circuit judges are big deals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They're one level below the Supreme Court.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
About a fifth of the school shows up to shout him down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
After 10 minutes of shouting him down, an administrator, a DEI administrator gets up with a prepared speech that she's written.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's a seven-minute long speech where she talks about free speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we're at this law school where people could learn to challenge these norms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So it's clear that there was coordination amongst some of these administrators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And from talking to students there, they were in meetings, extensive meetings for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They show up, do a shout-down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Then they take an additional seven minutes to lecture the speaker on free speech not being – the juice of free speech not being worth the squeeze.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then for the rest of it, it's just constant heckling after she leaves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This is clearly – and something very similar happened a number of times at Yale where it was very clearly administrators were helping along with a lot of these disruptions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I think every time there is a shout down at a university, the investigation should be first and foremost, did administrators –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
help create this problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Did they do anything to stop it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because I think a lot of what's really going on here is the hyper-bureaucratization of universities with a lot more ideological people who think of their primary job as basically like policing speech, more or less.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They're encouraging students, sorry, they're encouraging students who have opinions they like to do shout-downs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's why they really need to investigate this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It is at Stanford, the administrator who gave the prepared remarks about the juice not being worth the squeeze, she has not been invited back to Stanford.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But she's one of the only examples I can think of when these things happen a lot, where an administrator clearly facilitated something that was a shout-down or deplatforming or resulted in a professor getting fired or resulted in a student getting expelled, where the administrator has got off scot-free or probably in some cases even gotten a promotion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's something I've seen throughout my entire career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the only thing is it's kind of hard to catch this sort of in the act, so to speak.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's one of the reasons why it's helpful for people to know about this, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because there was this amazing case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This was at University of Washington.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we actually featured this in a documentary made in 2015, that came out in 2015, 2016, called Can We Take a Joke?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And this was when we started noticing something was changing on campus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We also heard that comedians were saying that they couldn't use their good humor anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This was right around the time that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock said that they didn't want to play on campuses because they couldn't be funny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But we featured a case of a comedian who wanted to do a musical called The Passion of the Musical, Making Fun of the Passion of the Christ, with the stated goal of offending everyone, every group equally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It was very much a South Park mission.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's an unusual case because we actually got documentation of administrators buying tickets for angry students and holding an event where they trained them to jump up in the middle of it and shout, I'm offended.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like they bought them tickets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They sent them to this thing with the goal of shouting it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, unsurprisingly, when you send an angry group of students to shut down a play, it's not going to end at just –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm offended.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it got heated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There were death threats being thrown.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then the Pullman Washington police told Chris Lee, the guy who made the play, that they wouldn't actually protect him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, it's not every day you're going to have that kind of hard evidence of actually seeing the administrators be so brazen that they recorded the fact that they bought them tickets and sent them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But I think a lot of that stuff is going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think it's a good excuse to cut down on one of the big problems in higher education today, which is hyper-bureaucratization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, and that's something that has been profoundly disappointing, is that when you look at the huge uptick in attempts to get professors fired that we've seen over the last 10 years, and actually over the last 22 years, as far back as our records go,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
At first, they were overwhelmingly led by administrators, attempts to get professors punished.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'd say that was my career up until 2013 was fighting back at administrative excesses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Then you start having the problem in 2014 of students trying to get people canceled, and that really accelerated in 2017.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
One thing that makes it easier to document are the petitions to get professors fired or punished.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And how disproportionately that those actually do come from students.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But another big uptick has been fellow professors demanding that their fellow professors get punished.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's kind of shameful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You shouldn't be proud of signing the petition to get your fellow professor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And what's even more shameful –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This has almost become a cliche within FIRE.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
When someone is facing one of these cancellation campaigns as a professor, I would get letters from some of my friends saying, I am so sorry this has happened to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And these were the same people who publicly signed the petition to get them fired.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And this was all throughout my career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
A president, a university president who puts their foot down early and says, nope, you know, we are not entertaining firing this professor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We are not expelling this student.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It ends the issue often very fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Although sometimes – and this is where you can really tell the administrative involvement –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Students will do things like take over the president's office, and then that takeover will be catered by the university.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
People will point this out sometimes as being kind of like, oh, it's clearly like my friend Sam Abrams when they tried to get him fired at Sarah Lawrence College.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that was one of the times that it was used as kind of like, oh, this was hostile to the university because the students took over the president's office.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm like, no, they let them take over the president's office.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I don't know if that was one of the cases in which the takeover was catered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But if there was ever sort of like a sign that's kind of like, yes, this is actually really quite friendly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And this is one of those tensions in First Amendment that actually I think has a pretty easy release, essentially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You absolutely have the right to devote your life to ending freedom of speech and ridiculing it as a concept.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And there are people who really can come off as very contemptible about even the philosophy of freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we will defend your right to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We will also disagree with you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And if you try to get a professor fired, we will be on the other side of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, I think you had Randy Kennedy, who I really – I love him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think he's a great guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But he criticized us for our deplatforming database as saying – this is saying that students can't protest speakers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm like –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Okay, that's silly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We, FIRE, as an organization, have defended the right to protest all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We are constantly defending the rights of protesters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Not believing that the protesters have the right to say this would—basically, that would be punishing the speakers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We're not calling for punishing the protesters, but what we are saying is you can't let the protesters win if they're demanding someone be fired for their freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And of course, shout downs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's just mob censorship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's something where the university – the way you deal with that tension in First Amendment law is essentially kind of like the one positive duty that the government has.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The first – the negative duty, the thing that it's not allowed to do is censor you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But its positive duty is that if I want to say awful things or, for that matter, great things that aren't popular in a public park, you can't let the crowd just shout me down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You can't allow what's called a heckler's veto.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm thinking a lot about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's one of the things we talk about in Canceling of the American Mind is arguing towards truth and that cancel culture is cruel, it's merciless, it's anti-intellectual, but it also will never get you anywhere in your truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And you are going to waste so much time destroying your opponents in something that can actually never get you to truth through the process, of course, of you never actually get directly at truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You just chip away at falsity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We try to make three major points in the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
One is just simply cancel culture is real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's a historic era, and it's on a historic scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The second one is you should think of cancel culture as part of a –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
rhetorical as a larger lazy rhetorical approach to what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We mean that in two senses, without having winning arguments or without actually having won arguments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We talk about all the different what we call rhetorical fortresses that both the left and the right have that prevent you from – that allow you to just dismiss the person
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, or dodge the argument without actually ever getting to the substance of the argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Third part is just, you know, how, how do we fix it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But the rhetorical fortress stuff is actually something I've been, I'm very passionate about because it, it, it interferes with our ability to get at truth and it wastes time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And, and frankly, it also kind of, since cancel culture is part of that rhetorical tactic, it can also ruin lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
October 17th.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I want to make little cards of these, of all of these tactics and start using them on X all the time because they are so commonly deployed and whataboutism I put first for a reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, I actually, when I was thinking about ways that X could be used to argue towards truth, I wouldn't want to have it so that, you know, everybody would be bound to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But I think that, I imagine almost being like a stream within X that was truth-focused, that agrees to some additional rules on how they would argue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
What about-ism, yeah, that's everywhere when you look at it, when you look at Twitter, when you look at social media in general.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the first, what we call the obstacle course is basically time-tested, old-fashioned, you know...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
argumentative dodges that everybody uses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And whataboutism is just bringing up something, you know, like someone makes an argument like, Biden is corrupt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then someone says, well, Trump was worse, you know, like, and that's not an illegitimate, you know, argument to make back, but it does, it seems to happen every time someone makes an assertion, someone just points out some other thing that was going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it can get increasingly attenuated from what you're actually trying to argue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And when you, and you see this all the time on social media.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's kind of – I was a big fan of Jon Stewart's Daily Show, but an awful lot of what the humor was and what the tactic was for arguing was this thing over here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's like, oh, I'm making this argument about this important problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Oh, actually, there's this other problem over here that I'm more concerned about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And, you know, let's pick on the right here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So January 6th, you know, watching everybody arguing about CHOP, you know, like the occupied part of Seattle or the occupied part of Portland and basically trying to like, oh, you're bringing up the riot on January 6th.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And by the way, I live on Capitol Hill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So believe me, I was very aware of like how scary and bad it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
um you know like i just my dad grew up in yugoslavia and that was a night where we all ate dinner in the basement because i'm like oh when the goes down eat in the basement it was it was it was genuinely scary and people would try to deflect from january 6 being serious by actually being making the argument that oh well there are crazy horrible things happening in all over the country uh you know riots uh um that came from some of the social justice protests
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And, of course, the answer is you can be concerned about both of these things and find them both problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But, you know, if I'm arguing about CHOP, you know, someone bringing up January 6th isn't super relevant to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Or if I'm arguing about January 6th, someone bringing up the riots in 2020 isn't that helpful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We took a long, dark journey from whataboutism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
My wonderful employee, Angel Anduardo, has something that he calls star manning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I find myself doing this a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's nice to have two immigrant parents because I remember being in San Francisco in the weird kind of like ACLU slash Burning Man kind of cohort and having a friend there who was an artist who would talk about hating Kansas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that was his metaphor for middle America is what he meant by it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But he was kind of proud of the fact that he hated Kansas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm like, you got to understand, I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And think about, like, change the name of Kansas to Croatia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You know, change the name of Kansas to some – that's what it sounds like to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the star manning idea, which I like, is the idea of being like, so you're saying that you really hate your dominant religious minority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like, and that's – when you start actually detaching yourself a little bit from it, how typical –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
America is exceptional in a number of ways, but some of our dynamics are incredibly typical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's one of the reasons why when people start reading Thomas Sowell, for example, they start getting hooked because one of the things he does is he does comparative analysis of countries' problems and points out that some of these things that we think are just unique to the United States exist in Europe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
75% of the rest of the countries in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
For instance, Fukuyama's, the book that I'm reading right now, Origins of the Political Order, actually does this wonderful job of pointing out how we're not special in a variety of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This is actually something that's very much on my mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Fukuyama, of course, it's a great book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's stilted a little bit in its writing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because his term for one of the things he's concerned about what destroys societies is repatrimonialization, which is the reversion to societies in which you favor your family and friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I actually think a lot of what I'm seeing in sort of – in the United States, it makes me worried that we might be going through a little bit of a process of repatrimonialization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think that's one of the reasons why people are so angry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think having – I think the prospect that we very nearly seem to have an election that was going to be Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's like are we a dynastic country now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Is that what's kind of happening?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But also it's one of the reasons why people are getting so angry about legacy admissions, about how much certain families seem to be able to keep their people in the upper classes of the United States perpetually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And believe me, I was poor when I was a kid and I got to go to one of the fancies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I got to go to Stanford.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I got to see how people –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
they treat you differently in a way that's almost insulting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like basically like suddenly to a certain kind of person, I was a legitimate person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I look at how much America relies on Harvard, on Yale to produce its, I'm gonna use a very Marxist sounding term, ruling class.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's one of the reasons why you have to be particularly worried about what goes on at these elite colleges.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And these elite colleges, with the exception of University of Chicago and UVA, do really badly regarding freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that has all sorts of problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It doesn't bode well for the future of the protection of freedom of speech for the rest of the society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I try really hard to empathize with, to a degree, everybody and try to really see where they're coming from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the anger on the right, I get it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I mean, like, I feel like the book, so Coddling the American Mind was a book that could be sort of a crowd pleaser to a degree, partially because we really meant what we said in the subtitle, that these are good intentions and bad ideas that are hurting people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And if you understand it and read the book, you can say it's like, okay, this isn't anybody being malicious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You know, this is people trying to protect their kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They're just doing it in a way that actually can actually lead to greater anxiety, depression, and depression.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
strangely, eventually posed a threat to freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But in this one, we can't be quite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Me and my, oh, I haven't even mentioned my brilliant co-author, Rikki Schlatt, a 23-year-old genius.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
She's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I started working with her when she was 20, who's my co-author on this book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So when I'm saying we, I'm talking about me and Rikki.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
She's a libertarian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Libertarian journalist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But we can't actually write this in a way that's too kind because counselors aren't kind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's a cruelty and a mercilessness about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I mean, I started getting really depressed this past year when I was writing it, and I didn't even want to tell my staff why I was getting so anxious and depressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's partially because I'm talking about people who will, you know, in some of the cases we're talking about, go to your house, target your kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So that's a long-winded way of saying it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I can get what drives the right nuts to a degree in this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I feel like they're constantly feeling like they're being gaslit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
elite education is really insulting to the working class.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Part of the ideology that is dominant right now kind of treats almost 70% of the American public like they're, we developed this a little bit in The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, like they're to some way illegitimate and not worthy of respect or compassion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And what's funny is the elitism has been repackaged as a kind of... It masquerades as kind of infinite compassion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That essentially it's based in a sort of very...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
To be frank, overly simple ideology and an oversimple explanation of the world and breaking people into groups and judging people on how oppressed they are on the intersection of their various identities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it came to that, I think, initially with an appeal from a compassionate core, but it gets used in a way that can be very cruel, very dismissive, compassionless, and allows you to not take seriously most of your fellow human beings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So the perfect rhetorical fortress is the way that's been developed by,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
on the left to not ever get to someone's actual argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I want to make a chart, like a flow chart of this about like, here's the argument and here is this perfect fortress that will deflect you every time from getting to the argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I started to notice this certainly when I was in law school, that there were lots of different ways you could dismiss people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And perfect rhetorical fortress, step one,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I can attest to this because I was guilty of this as well, that you can dismiss people if you can argue that they're conservative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They don't have to be conservative to be clear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You just have to say that they are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I never read Thomas Sowell because he was a right winger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I didn't read Camille Paglia because someone had convinced me she was a right-winger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There were lots of authors that – and when I was in law school, among a lot of very bright people, it really was already an intellectual habit that if you could designate something conservative, then you didn't really have to think about it very much anymore or take it particularly seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's a childish way of arguing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But nonetheless, I engaged in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It was a common tactic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I even mentioned in the book there was a time when a –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
A gay activist friend who was, I think, decidedly to my left, but nonetheless had that pragmatic experience of actually being an activist, said something like, well, just because someone's conservative doesn't mean they're wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I remember feeling kind of scandalized at some level of just being like, well, no, that's kind of, isn't that the whole thing when we're saying is that they're just kind of bad people with bad ideas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You can just throw, oh, that guy's a right winger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Don't have to think about you anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's weird because it's effective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's why it keeps on getting used.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Essentially, it should have hit someone's, because I have a great,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
liberal pedigree, everything from working at the ACLU to doing refugee law in Eastern Europe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I was part of an environmental mentoring program for inner city high school kids in DC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I can defend myself as being on the left, but I hate doing that because there's also part of me that's like, okay, so what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like are you really saying that if you can magically make me argue or convince yourself that I'm on the right that you don't have to listen to me anymore?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And again, that's arguing like children.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the reason why this has become so popular is because even among – or maybe especially among elites that it works so effectively as a perfect weapon that you can use uncritically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
If I can just prove you're on the right, I don't have to think about you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's no wonder that suddenly you start seeing people calling the ACLU right-wing and calling the New York Times right-wing because it's been such an effective way to delegitimize people as thinkers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Steven Pinker, who's on our board of advisors, he refers to academia as being the left pole, that essentially it's a position that from that point of view, everything looks as if it's on the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But once it becomes a tactic that we accept – and that's one of the reasons why I'm more on the left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But I think I'm left of center liberal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Ricky is more conservative, libertarian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And initially I was kind of like, should I really be writing something with someone who's more on the right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm like –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
absolutely I should be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I have to actually live up to what I believe on this stuff because it's ridiculous that we have this primitive idea that you can dismiss someone as soon as you claim, rightly or wrongly, that they're on the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Oh, the LA Times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Oh, fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Let's talk about the LA Times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So much to unpack there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Barry Weiss has this great project, The Free Press.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I've been very impressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's covering stories that a lot of the media, right or left, isn't willing to cover.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we did a – we hosted a debate with her, and we wanted to make it as fun and controversial as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So Fire and the Free Press hosted a debate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Did the sexual revolution fail?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So the debate was really exciting, really fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The side that said the sexual revolution wasn't a failure that Grimes and Sarah Hader were on won.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It was a nice, meaty, thoughtful night.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And there was a review of it that was just sort of scathing about the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it included a line saying that FIRE, which claims to believe in free speech but only defends viewpoints it agrees with—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I can't believe that even made it into the magazine because it's not just calling us – because, of course, the implication, of course, is that we're right-wing, which we're not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Actually, the staff leans decidedly more to the left than to the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But we also defend people all over the spectrum all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's something that even the most minimal Google search would have solved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So we've been giving LA Times some heat on this because it's like, yeah, if you said, in my opinion, they're right-wing, we would have argued back immediately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You know, saying, well, here's the following 50,000 examples of us not being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But when you actually make the factual claim that we only defend opinions we agree with, first of all, there's no way for us to agree with opinions because we actually have a politically diverse staff who won't even agree on which opinions are good and what opinions we have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But yeah, I had one time when someone did something like this and they were just being a little bit flippant about kind of like free speech being fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I did a 70 tweet long thread, you know, just being like, hey, do you really think this is fine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I decided not to do that on this particular one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The nice thing about it is it demonstrated two parts of the book, Canceling the American Mind, if not more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
One of them is dismissing someone because they're conservative because that was the implication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Don't have to listen to fire because they're conservative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But the other one is something, a term that I invented specifically for the way people argue on Twitter, which is hypocrisy projection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Hi, I'm a person who only cares about one side of the political fence, and I think everyone else is a hypocrite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And by the way, I haven't done any actual research on this, but I assume everyone else is a hypocrite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And you see this happen all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And this happens to FIRE a lot, where someone will be like, where is FIRE on this case?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we're like, we are literally quoted in the link you just sent, but didn't actually read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Or it's like, where's fire on this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's like, here's our lawsuit about it from six months ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So it's a favorite thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And also, Jon Stewart, Daily Show, like the whataboutism and the kind of like idea that these people must be hypocrites is something that –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Great as comedy, but as far as actually a rhetorical tactic that will get you to truth, just assuming that your opponent or just accusing your opponent of always being a hypocrite is not a good tactic for truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But by the way, it tends to always come from people who aren't actually consistent on free speech themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And there are three ways I want to respond to this, which is just giving example after example of times where we defended people on both sides of every major issue, basically every major issue, whether it's Israel-Palestine, whether it's terrorism, whether it's gay marriage, we have been – abortion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We have defended both sides of that argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The other part – and I call these the orphans of the culture war –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I really want to urge the media to start caring about free speech cases that actually don't have a political valence, that are actually just about good old-fashioned exercise of power against the little guy or little girl or little group on campus or off campus for that matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because these cases happen – a lot of our litigation are just little people protesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's regular people being told that they can't protest, that they can't hold signs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then the last part of the argument that I want people to really get is like, yeah, and by the way, right-wingers get in trouble too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And there are attacks from the left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And you should take those seriously too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You should care when Republicans get in trouble.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You should care when California has a DEI program that requires this on California community colleges.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
has a DEI program, a policy that actually requires even chemistry professors to work in different DEI ideas from intersectionality to anti-racism into their classroom, into their syllabus, etc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This is a gross.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
violation of academic freedom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It is as bad as it is to tell professors what they can't say, like we fought and defeated in Florida.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's even worse to tell them what they must say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's downright totalitarian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we're suing against this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And what I'm saying is that it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
When you're dismissing someone for just being on the other side of the political fence, you are also kind of making a claim that none of these cases matter as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I want people to care about censorship when it even is against people they hate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
DEI, I know people who are DEI consultants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Actually, I have a dear friend who I love very much who does DEI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Absolutely decent people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
What they want to do...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
is create bonds of understanding, friendship, compassion among people who are different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Unfortunately, the research on what a lot of DEI actually does is oftentimes the opposite of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think that it's partially a problem with some of the ideology that comes from critical race theory, which is a real thing, by the way, that informs a lot of DEI, that actually makes it something more likely to divide than unite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We talk about this in
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
coddling the American mind as the difference between common humanity identity politics and common enemy identity politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think that I know some of the people that I know who do DEI, they really want it to be common humanity identity politics, but some of the actual ideological assumptions that are baked in can actually cause people to feel more alienated from each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, when I started at FIRE, my first cases involved 9-11.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it was bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Professors were getting targeted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Professors were losing their jobs for saying insensitive things about 9-11, and both from the right and the left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Actually, in that case, actually, sometimes a lot more from the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it was really bad, and about five professors lost their jobs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Five professors over a relatively short period of time being fired for a political opinion, that's something that would get written up in any previous decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We're now evaluating how many professors have been targeted for cancellation between 2014 and middle of this year, July of 2023.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We're at well over 1,000 attempts to get professors fired or punished, usually driven by students and administrators, often driven by professors, unfortunately, as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
About two-thirds of those result in the professor being punished in some way, everything from having their article removed to suspension, et cetera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
About one-fifth of those result in professors being fired.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So right now, it's almost 200.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's around 190 professors being fired.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I want to give some context here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The Red Scare is generally considered to have been from 1947 to 1957.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It ended, by the way, in 57 when it finally became clear, thanks to the First Amendment, that you couldn't actually fire people for their ideologies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Prior to that, a lot of universities thought they could.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This guy is a very doctrinaire communist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You know, it can't be just waited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm going to fire them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They thought they actually could do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it was only 57 when the law was established.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So like right now, these are happening in an environment where freedom of speech, academic freedom are clearly protected at public colleges in the United States and we're still seeing these kind of numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
During the Red Scare, the biggest study that was done of what was going on – I think this came out in like 55 –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the evaluation was that there was about 62 professors fired for being communists and about 90-something professors fired for political views overall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That usually is reported as being about 100.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, so 60, 90, 100, depending on how you look at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think the number is actually higher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, but that's only because of hindsight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like what I mean by hindsight is we can look back and we actually find there were more professors who, who, who were fired as time reveals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We're at 190 professors fired.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I still have to put up with people saying this isn't even happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm like in the nine and a half years of cancel culture, 190 professors fired in the 11 years of, uh, of the red scare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Probably somewhere around 100, probably more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The number is going to keep going up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But unlike during the Red Scare, where people could clearly tell something was happening, the craziest thing about cancel culture is I'm still dealing with people who are saying this isn't happening at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it hasn't been subtle on campus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we know that's a wild undercount, by the way, because when we surveyed professors—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
17% of them said that they had been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for what they taught, said, or their research.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And one third of them said that they were told by administrators not to take on controversial research.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So, like, extrapolating that out, that's a huge number.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the reason why you're not going to hear about a lot of these cases is because there are so many different conformity-inducing mechanisms in the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's one of the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We have very low viewpoint diversity to begin with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And under these circumstances, administrators just start saying, you know what the problem is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We have too much heterogeneous thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We're not homogeneous enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We actually need another political litmus test, which is nuts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's what a DEI statement effectively is because there's no way to actually fill out a DEI statement without someone evaluating you on your politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's crystal clear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We even did an experiment on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Nate Honeycutt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He got something like almost like 3,000 professors to participate evaluating different kinds of DEI statements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And one was basically like the standard kind of identity politics intersectionality one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
One was about viewpoint diversity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
One was about religious diversity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And one was about socioeconomic diversity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And as far as where my heart really is, it's that we have too little socioeconomic diversity, particularly in elite higher ed, but also in education period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So the experiment had large participation, really interestingly set up, and it tried to model the way a lot of these DEI policies were actually implemented.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And one of the ways these have been implemented, and I think in some of the California schools, is that administrators go through the DEI statements before anyone else looks at them and then eliminates people off the top depending on how –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
how they feel about their DEI statements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the one on viewpoint diversity, I think like half of the people who reviewed it would eliminate it right out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think it was basically the same for religious diversity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It was slightly better, like 40%, for socioeconomic diversity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But that kills me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like the idea that kind of like, yeah, that actually is the kind of diversity that I think we need a great deal more of in higher education.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You can agree with – it's not hostile to the other kinds, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But the idea that we need more people from the bottom –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
three quarters of American society, like in higher education, I think should be something we could all get around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But the only one that really succeeded was the one that's that sprouted back exactly the kind of, you know, ideology that they thought the viewers would like, which is like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's no way this couldn't be a political litmus test.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We've proved that it's a political litmus test and still school after school is adding these to its application process to make schools still more ideologically homogenous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Well, one, it selects for people who tend to be farther to the left in a situation where you already have people – a situation where universities do lean decidedly that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But it also establishes essentially a set of sacred ideas that if you're being quizzed on whether – what you've done to advance –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
anti-racism, how you've been conscious of intersectionality, it's unlikely that you'd actually get in if you said, by the way, I actually think these are dubious concepts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think they're thin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think they're philosophically not very defensible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Basically, if your position was, I actually reject...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
these concepts as being oversimple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You're not going to get in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think that the person that I always think of that wasn't a right-winger that would be like, go to hell if you made him fill one of these things out, it's Feynman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I feel like if you gave one of these things to Richard Feynman, he'd be like, he would tear it to pieces and then not get the job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Oh, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, I mean, when you ask professors about, you know, are they intimidated under the current environment, the answer is yes, and particularly conservative professors, you know, already, you know, reporting that they're, you know, afraid for their jobs in a lot of different cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And back to the Red Scare comparison, and this is one of the interesting things about the data as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
is that that same study that I was talking about, the most comprehensive study of the Red Scare, there was polling about whether or not professors were self-censoring due to the fear of the environment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And 9% of professors said that they were self-censoring their research and what they were saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
9% is really bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's almost a tenth of professors saying that their speech was chilled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
When we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey, when you factor together, we asked them, are they self-censoring in their research?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Are they self-censoring in class?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Are they self-censoring online, et cetera?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It was 90%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Of professors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So the idea that we're actually in an environment that is historic in terms of like how scared people are actually of expressing controversial views, I think that it's the reason why we're going to actually be studying this in 50 years, the same way we study the Red Scare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's not – the idea that this isn't happening will just be correctly viewed as insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
When I started at FIRE in 2001, I didn't take the viewpoint diversity issue as seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I thought it was just something that right-wingers complained about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low viewpoint diversity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And actually, a lot of the research that I got most interested in was done in conjunction with the great Cass Sunstein, who writes a lot about group polarization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the research on this is very strong, that essentially when you have groups with –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And you can see this actually in judges, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It tends to produce reliably more moderate outcomes, whereas groups that have low political diversity tend to sort of spiral off in their own direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And when you have a super majority of people from just one political perspective, that's a problem for the production of ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It creates a situation where there are sacred ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And when you look at some of the departments, I think the estimate from the Crimson is that Harvard has 3% conservatives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But when you look at different departments, there are elite departments that have literally no conservatives in them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think that's an unhealthy intellectual environment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The problem is definitely worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
As you get more elite, we definitely see more cases of lefty professors getting canceled at less elite schools.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It gets worse as you get down from the elite schools.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's where a lot of the one-third of attempts to get professors punished that are successful do come from the right and largely from off-campus sources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We spend a lot of time talking about that in the book as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's something that I do think is underappreciated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Uh, but when it comes to the low, low viewpoint diversity, it, it's, you know, it works out kind of like you'd expect to a degree, you know, economics is what four to one or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Mm-hmm it's not as bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, but then when you start getting into some of the humanities, you know, like there are departments that they're literally none.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I don't love – and this is an argument that you'll sometimes run into on the left, just the argument that, well, people on the left are just smarter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's interesting because at least the research as of –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
10 years ago was indicating that if you dig a little bit deeper into that, a lot of the people who do consider themselves on the left tend to be a little bit more libertarian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's something that Pinker wrote a fair amount about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The idea that we're just smarter is not an opinion I'm the least bit comfortable with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I do think that departments take on momentum when they become a place where you're like, wow, it'd be really unpleasant for me to work in this department if I'm the token conservative, and I think that takes on a life of its own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There are also departments where a lot of the ideology is kind of explicitly –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
leftist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You look at education schools, a lot of the stuff that is actually left over from what is correctly called critical race theory is present, and you end up having that in a number of the departments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It would be very strange to be in many departments a conservative social worker professor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm sure they exist, but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's a lot of pressure to shut up if you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We have a little bit of fun with demographic numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But I run this by height and I remember him being kind of like, don't include the actual percentage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm like, no, we need to include the actual percentages because people are really bad at estimating what the demographics of the US actually looks like, both the right and the left in different ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, so we put it in the numbers and we talk about, you know, um, being dismissed for being white or being dismissed for, uh, being straight or being dismissed for being male.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, and we, uh, and you can already dismiss people for being conservative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we, so we, we, we give examples in the book of, of these being used to dismiss people and oftentimes on topics not related to the fact that they are a male or whether or not they're minority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then we get to, I think it's like layer six and we're like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Surprise, guess what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You're down to 0.4% of the population and none of it mattered because if you have the wrong opinion, even if you're in that 0.4% of the most intersectional person who ever lived and you have the wrong opinion, you're a heretic and you actually probably will be hated even more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the most interesting part of the research we did for this was just asking everyone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Every prominent black conservative and moderate that we knew personally, have you been told that you're not really black for an opinion you had?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Every single one of them was like, oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
No, and it's kind of funny because it's like oftentimes white lefties telling them that's like, oh, do you consider yourself black?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
John McWhorter talked about having a reporter when he talked about – when he showed that he dissented from some of what he described as kind of like woke racism in his book, Woke Ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The reporter actually is like, so do you consider yourself black?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He's like, what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He was like, what are you crazy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Of course I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And Coleman Hughes had one of the best quotes on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He said, I'm constantly being told that the most important thing to how legitimate my opinion is, is whether or not I'm black.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But then when I have a dissenting opinion, I get told I'm not really black.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So perfect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like there's no way to falsify this argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That investigation really struck me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's not just dismiss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We talk about this from a practical standpoint, the way the limitations on, you know, reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And one of them is time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And a lot of cancel culture as cultural norms, as this way of winning arguments without winning arguments, is about running out the clock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because by the time you get down to the bottom of the—actually, even to get a couple steps into the perfect rhetorical fortress and, you know,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Where is the time gone?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You probably just give up trying to actually have the argument and you never get to the argument in the first place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It allows you to feel outrage and superiority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we call it efficient because it eliminates –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
A lot of people you probably should listen to at least sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We point out sometimes how cancel culture can interfere with faith and expertise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So we get kind of being a little suspicious of experts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But at the same time, if you follow that and you follow it mechanically, and I definitely – I think everybody –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
probably has some older uncle who exercises some of these.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It is a really efficient way to sort of wall yourself off from the rest of the world and dismiss at least some people you really should be listening to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We could be solving things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
What's the fun in empathy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I mean, what's so interesting about this is that so much societal energy seems to be spent on these nasty primal desires where essentially a lot of it is like, please tell me who I'm allowed to hate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Where can I legitimately be cruel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Where can I actually exercise some aggression against somebody?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it seems to sometimes be just finding new justifications for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's an understandable, you know, human failing that sometimes can be used to defend justice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But again, it will never get you anywhere near the truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, I think that COVID was a big blow to people's faith and expertise, and cancel culture played a big role in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think one of the best examples of this is Jennifer Say at Levi's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
She is a lovely woman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
She was a vice president at Levi's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
She talked about actually potentially to be the president of Levi's Jeans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And she was a big advocate for kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And when they started shutting down the schools, she started saying, this is going to be a disaster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This is going to hurt the poor and disadvantaged kids the most.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We have to figure out a way to open the schools back up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that was such a heretical point of view.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the typical kind of cancel culture wave took over as he had all sorts of petitions for her to be fired and that she needed to apologize and all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And, you know, she was offered, I think, like a million-dollar severance, which she wouldn't take because she wanted to tell the world what she thought about this and that she wanted to continue saying that she hadn't changed her mind, that this was a disaster for young people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And now that's kind of the conventional wisdom, and the research is quite clear, that this was devastating for
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
to particularly disadvantaged youths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like people understand this now as being, okay, she was probably right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But one of the really sad aspects of cancel culture is people forget why you were canceled and they just know they hate you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's this lingering kind of like, well, I don't have to take them seriously anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But by the way, did you notice they happen to be right on something very important?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Now, one funny thing about freedom of speech
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you didn't also have the right to say things that were wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because if you can't engage in idea euphoria, if you can't actually speculate, you'll never actually get to something that's right in the first place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But it's especially galling when people who were right were censored and never actually got the credit that they deserve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Hate speech is the best marketing campaign for censorship, and it came from academia of the 20th century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that when I talked about the anti-free speech movement—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
that was one of their first inventions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There was a lot of talk about critical race theory and being against critical race theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And FIRE will sue if you say that people can't advocate for it or teach it or research it because you do absolutely have the right to pursue it academically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
However, every time someone mentions CRT, they should also say the very first project of the people who founded CRT, Richard Delgado, Mary Matsuda, et cetera,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
was to create this new category of unprotected speech called hate speech and to get it banned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The person who enabled this drift, of course, was Herbert Marcuse in 1965, basically questioning whether or not free speech should be a sacred value on the left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And he was on the losing side for a really long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The liberals, the way I grew up, that was basically being pro-free speech was synonymous with being a liberal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But that started to be
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
etched away on campus, and the way it was was with the idea of hate speech, that essentially, oh, but we can designate particularly bad speech as not protected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Who's going to enforce it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Who's going to decide what hate speech actually is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Well, it's usually overwhelmingly can only happen in an environment of really low viewpoint diversity because you have to actually agree on what the most hateful and wrong things are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And there's a bedrock principle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's referred to this in a great case about flag burning in the First Amendment that I think all the world could benefit from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You can't ban speech just because it's offensive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's too subjective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It basically – it's one of the reasons why these kind of codes have been more happily adopted in places like Europe where they have a sense that there's like a modal German or a modal Englishman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think this is offensive and therefore I can say that this is wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
In a more –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
in a genuinely more diverse country that's never actually had an honest thought that there is a single kind of American.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's never been – like we had the idea of Uncle Sam, but that was always kind of a joke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Boston always knew it wasn't Richmond, always knew it wasn't Georgia, always knew it wasn't Alaska.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like we've always been a hodgepodge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we get in a society that diverse that –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
you can't ban things simply because they're offensive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's one of the reasons why hate speech is not an unprotected category of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I go further.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
My theory on freedom of speech is slightly different than most other constitutional lawyers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think that's partially because some of these theories, although a lot of them are really good, are inadequate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They're not expansive enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I sometimes call my theory the pure informational theory of freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Or sometimes when I want to be fancy, the lab and the looking glass theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And its most important tenet is that if the goal is the project of human knowledge, which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So every time you're actually saying –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
you can't say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You're causing what Timur Karan, who's on our board of advisors, calls preference falsification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world, which by the way, in a lot of cases, because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced than they might be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And actually, these kind of restrictions, there was a book called Racial Paranoia
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, that came out in about 15 years ago that was making the point that the imposition of some of these codes can sometimes make people think that the only thing holding you back from being a raging racist, um, are these codes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So it must be really, really bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It can actually make all these things worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And one, which we talk about in the book, one very real practical way it makes things worse is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
is when you censor people, it doesn't change their opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with, and group polarization takes off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So we have some interesting data in the book about how driving people off of Twitter, for example, in 2017, and then again, I think in 2020,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Driving people to gab led to greater radicalization among those people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's a very predictable force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Censorship doesn't actually change people's minds and it pushes them in directions that actually by very solid research will actually make them more radicalized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So yeah, I think that the attempt to ban hate speech, it doesn't really protect us from it, but it gives the government such a vast opportunity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
What people think, and I think it's important that we actually do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I think that, you know, let's take, for example, QAnon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, QAnon's wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But where did it come from?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Why did they think that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
What's the motivation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Who taught them it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Who came up with these ideas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
This is important to understand history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's important to understand modern American politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And so if you put your scholar hat on, which you should be curious about kind of everyone, about where they're coming from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Daryl Davis, who I'm sure you're familiar with, part of his goal was just simply to get to know where people were coming from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And in the process, he actually de-radicalized a number of Klan's members.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
When they actually realized that this black man who had befriended them actually was compassionate, was a decent person, they realized all their preconceptions were wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So it can have a de-radicalizing factor, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But even when it doesn't, it's still really important to know what the bad people in your society think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Honestly, in some ways, for your own safety, it's probably more important to know what the bad people in your society actually think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Well, and meanwhile, just – and the reality check part of this is people always bring up, what about the Klan on campus?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm like, they're never invited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I haven't seen a case where they've been invited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Usually, the Klan argument gets thrown out when people are trying to excuse – and that's why we shouted down Ben Shapiro.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's why you can't have Bill Maher on campus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's why, you know, and it's like, okay, you know, and it's a little bit of that whataboutism again about being like, well, that thing over there is terrible and therefore this comedian shouldn't come.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I remember Steve Bannon got disinvited from the New Yorker Festival and Jim Carrey freaked out and all sorts of other people freaked out and he got disinvited from the – and I got invited to speak on Smirconish about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I was saying like, listen –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You don't have people to your conference because you agree with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like that's – we have to get out of this idea that that's – because they were trying to make it sound like that's an endorsement of Steve Bannon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like that's nonsense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like if you actually look at the opinions of all the people who are there –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You can't possibly endorse all the opinions that all these other people who are going to be there actually have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And in the process of making that argument, I got – and also, of course, the very classic, it's very valuable to know what someone, Steve Bannon, thinks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You should be curious about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I remember someone arguing back saying, well, would you want someone to interview a jihadi?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm like –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because at the moment, it was the time when ISIS was really going for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I was like, would you not want to go to a talk where someone was trying to figure out what makes some of these people tick?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because that changes your framing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That essentially it's like, no, it's curiosity is the cure for a lot of this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we need a great deal more curiosity and a lot less unwarranted certainty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's a great new documentary about Floyd Abrams that I really recommend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We did a documentary about Ira Glasser called Mighty Ira, which was my video team and my protege, Nico Perino, and Chris Malby and Aaron Reese put it together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it just follows the life and times of Ira Glasser, the former head of the ACLU.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Who's Ira?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Ira, he wasn't a lawyer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He started working at the NYCLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union, back in, I think, the 60s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think Robert Kennedy recommended that he go in that direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And he became the president of the ACLU right at the time that they were suffering from defending the Nazis at Skokie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And Nico and Aaron and Chris put together this – and they'd never done a documentary before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it came out so, so well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it tells the story of the Nazis in Skokie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It tells the story of the case around it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It tells the story of the ACLU at the time and what a great leader Ira Glasser was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And one of the things that's so great is like when you get to see the Nazis at Skokie, they come off like the –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
idiots that you would expect them to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's a moment when the rally is not going very well and the leader gets flustered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It almost seems like he's going to shout out, kind of like, you're making this Nazi rally into a mockery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It showed how actually allowing the Nazis to speak at Skokie kind of took the wind out of their sails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The whole movement, it all kind of dissolved after that because they looked like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
racist fools that they were.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They were, you know, even Blues Brothers made jokes about them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it didn't turn into the disaster that people thought it was going to be just by letting them speak.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And Ira Glasser, okay, so he has this wonderful story about how Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and how there was a moment when it was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
seeing someone, an African American, as literally on their team and how that really got him excited about the cause of racial equality and that became a big part of what his life was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I just think of that as such a great metaphor, is expanding your circle and seeing more people as being quite literally on your team is the solution to so many of these problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I worry that one of the things that is absolutely just a fact of life in America is like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
we do see each other more as enemy camps as opposed to people on the same team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that was actually something in the early days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Me and Will Creeley, the legal director of FIRE, wrote about the forthcoming free speech challenges of everyone being on Facebook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And one thing that I was hoping was that as more people were exposing more of their lives, we'd realize a lot of these things we knew intellectually, like kids go to the bar and get drunk and do stupid things, that when we started seeing...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
the evidence of them doing stupid things that we might be shocked at first, but then eventually get more sophisticated and be like, well, come on, people are like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That never actually really seemed to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That, that, that I don't think, I think that there are plenty of things we know about human nature and we know about dumb things people say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And we've, we've made it into an environment where there's just someone out there waiting to be kind of like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Oh, remember that dumb thing you said we were 14?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Well, I'm going to make sure that you don't get into your dream school because of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's not my term, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's a great term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's a great term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that one's tactical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That one isn't just someone not being empathetic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They're like, I'm going to punish you for this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's one of the reasons why I got depressed writing this book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because there's already people who don't love me because of Coddling the American Mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Usually based on a misunderstanding of what we actually said in Coddling the American Mind, but nonetheless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But on this one, I'm calling out people for being very cruel in a lot of cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But one thing that was really scary about studying a lot of these cases is that once you have that target on your back, what they're going to try to cancel you for could be anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They might go back into your old boats, find something that you said in 1995, do something –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, where essentially it looks like it's this entire other thing, but really what they're, what's going on is they didn't like your opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They didn't like your point of view on something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And they're going to find a, find a way that from now on, anytime your name comes up, it's like, oh, remember this, this thing I didn't like about him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's, again, it's cruel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It doesn't get you anywhere closer to the truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And, but it is a little scary to stick your neck out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Five and seven-year-old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Oh, God, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think the first quality you should be cultivating in your children, if you want to have a free speech culture...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
is curiosity and an awareness of the vastness that will always be unknown.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And getting my kids excited about the idea that's like, we're going to spend our whole lives learning about stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's fast and exciting and endless, and we'll never make a big dent in it, but the journey will be amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But only fools think they know everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And sometimes dangerous fools at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So giving the sense of intellectual humility early on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Also, you know, saying things that actually do sound kind of old-fashioned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But I say things to my kids like, listen, if you...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
enjoy study and work, both things that I very much enjoy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I do for fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, your life is going to feel great and it's going to feel easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, so some, some, you know, some of those old fashioned virtues are things I try to preach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Counterintuitive stuff like outdoor time, playing, having time that are not intermediated experiences is really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And little things like I talk about in the book about when my kids are watching something that's scary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm not talking about like zombie movies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm talking about like a cartoon that has kind of a scary moment and saying that they want to turn the TV off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I talk to them and I say, listen –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm going to sit next to you and we're going to finish this show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I want you to tell me what you think of this afterwards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I sat next to my sons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And by the end of it, every single time, you know, when I asked them, was it as scary as you thought it was going to be?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And they're always like, no, daddy, that was fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm like, that's one of the great lessons in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The fear that you don't go through becomes much bigger in your head than actually simply facing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's one of the reasons why I'm fighting back against this culture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I love, you know, for all of our kids to be able to grow up in an environment where people give you grace and, you know, accept the fact that sometimes people are going to say things that piss you off, take seriously the possibility of being wrong and be curious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Generation Z hates cancel culture the most.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's another reason why it's like people still claiming this is even happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's kind of like, no, you actually can ask, you know, kids what they think of cancel culture and they hate it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I am glad, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I mean, I'm one of those kids who is really glad that I was a little kid in the 80s and a teenager in the 90s because having everything potentially online, it's not an upbringing I envy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Robert Wright, he wrote a book on Buddhism, and I talked about trying to use social media from a Buddhist perspective as if it's the collective unconscious meditating and seeing those little angry bits that are trying to cancel you or get you to shut up and just kind of letting them go the same way you're supposed to watch your thoughts kind of trail off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Looking at the little sort of hateful, angry voices kind of pop up and be like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Okay, there you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm still focused on that thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because that is one of the things is... Okay, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Actually, this is probably late in the game to be giving my grand theory on this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But... Never too late.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So what I was studying in law school when I ran out of First Amendment classes, I decided to study censorship during the Tudor dynasty because that's where we get our ideas of prior restraint that come from the licensing of the printing press, which was something that Henry VIII was the first to do, where basically the idea was that if you can't print anything in England unless it's with these Your Majesty-approved printers—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It will prevent heretical work and anti-Henry VIII stuff from coming out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty efficient idea if nothing else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I always – so he started getting angry at the printing press around 1521 and then passed something that required prints to be – along with parliament in 1538.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I always think of that as kind of like where we are now because we have this – back then we had the original disruptive technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Writing was probably – but the next one, which was the printing press, which was absolutely calamitous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I mean – and I say calamitous on purpose because in the short term, the witch hunts went up like crazy because the printing press allowed you to get that manual on how to find witches.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That the religious wars went crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It led to all sorts of distress, misinformation, nastiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And Henry VIII was trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He was kind of like, I want to use this for good, like I feel like it could be used.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But he was in an unavoidable period of epistemic anarchy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's nothing you can do to make the period after the printing press came out to be a non-disruptive, non-crazy period other than absolute totalitarianism and destroy all the print presses, which simply was not possible in Europe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I feel like that's kind of like where we are now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That disruption came from adding, I think, several million people to the European conversation and then eventually the global conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But eventually, it became the best tool for disconfirmation, for getting rid of falsity, for spotting bad ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's the benefits, the long-term benefits of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
of the printing press are incalculably great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's what gives me some optimism for where we are now with social media, because we are in that unavoidably anarchical period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I do worry that there are attempts in states to pass things to try to put the genie back in the bottle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like if we ban TikTok or we say that nobody under 18 can be on the internet unless they have parental permission, we're going at something that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And no amount of sort of top-down is going to be able to fix it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We have to culturally adapt to the fact of it in ways that make us wiser and allow it potentially to be that wonderful engine for disconfirmation that we're nowhere near yet, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But think about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Additional millions of eyes on problems, thanks to the printing press, helped create the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the discovery of ignorance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We now have added billions of eyes and voices to solving problems, and we're using them for cat videos and canceling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It seems like the collective unconscious of the species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's one of these things where the tendency to want to see patterns in history sometimes can limit...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
the actual batshit crazy experience of what history actually is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because yes, we have these nice comforting ideas that it's going to be like last time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It hasn't happened yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think how unusual Twitter is because I think of it as like the – because people talk about –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
you know writing and um mass communications and uh as being expanding the size of our collective brain but now we're kind of looking at our collective brain in real time and it's filled just like our own brains with all sorts of like little crazy things that pop up and and and appear like virtual particles kind of all over the place of people um you know
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Reacting in real time to things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's never been anything even vaguely like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it can be, at its worst, awful to see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
At its best, sometimes seeing people just getting euphoric over something going on and cracking absolutely brilliant immediate jokes at the same time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It can even be a joyful experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I feel like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
i live in a neighborhood now on x where i mostly deal with people that i think are actually thoughtful even if i disagree with them um and and it's not such a bad experience i occasionally run into those other sort of what i call neighborhoods on x where it's just all canceling all nastiness and it's always kind of an unpleasant visit to those places i'm not saying the whole thing needs to be uh like like my experience but i do think that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The reason why people keep on coming back to it is it reveals raw aspects of humanity that sometimes we prefer to pretend don't exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The battle over information, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It can also stress you out to no end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Remember to get off it sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
The stats are pretty bad on mental health with young people, and I'm definitely in the camp of people who think that social media is part of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I understand the debate, but I'm pretty persuaded that one of the things that hasn't been great for mental health of people is just constantly being exposed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Have you ever watched Fleabag?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's an absolutely brilliant British show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it sets you up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
One of the reasons why people love it so much is it sets you up that you're watching a raunchy British sex in the city except the main character is the most promiscuous one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And you kind of roll your eyes a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's kind of funny and it's kind of cute and kind of spicy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then you realize that the person is actually kind of suffering and having a hard time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it gets deeper and deeper as the show goes on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And she will do these incredible speeches about, tell me what to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like, I know there's experts out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I know there's knowledge out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I know there's an optimal way to live my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So why can't someone just tell me what to do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's this wonderfully, like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
accurate, I think, aspect of human desire that what if something could actually tell me the optimal way to go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Because I think there is a desire to give up some amount of your own freedom and discretion in order to be told to do the optimally right thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But that path scares me to death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Well, the educational aspect of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yes, educational, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like, the idea of kind of like both going the speed that you need to and running as fast as you can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I'm definitely more in the, we're in an inescapably anarchical period, and require big cultural adjustments, and there's no way that this isn't going to be a difficult transition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I have lots of thoughts on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
With the printing press, an extra millions of eyes on any problem can tear down any institution, any person, or any idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's good in some ways because a lot of medieval institutions needed to be torn down and some people did too and a lot of ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
needed to be torn down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Same thing is true now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
An extra billions of eyes on every problem can tear down any person, idea, or institution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Again, some of those things needed to be torn down, but it can't build yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We are not at the stage that it can build yet, but it has shown us how thin our knowledge was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's one of the reasons why we're also aware of the replication crisis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's one of the reasons why we're also aware of how shoddy our research is, how much our expert class is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
arrogant in many cases, but people don't want to live in a world where they don't have people that they respect and they can look at.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think what's happening, possibly now, but will continue to happen, is people are going to establish themselves as being high integrity, that they will always be honest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think you are establishing yourself as someone who is high integrity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
where that where they can trust that person a fire wants to be um you know the institution that people can come to is like if it's free speech we will defend it period and i think that people need new uh uh need to have authorities that they can actually trust and i think that if you actually had a stream that maybe people can watch in action but not flood with you know stupid cancel culture stuff or dumb cat means where it is actually a serious discussion bounded around rules
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
No perfect rhetorical fortress, no efficient rhetorical fortress, none of the BS ways we debate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think you could start to actually create something that could actually be a major improvement in the speed with which we come up with new, better ideas and separate truth from falsity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's pretty damn impressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
What's your overall take?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I mean, I'm mostly impressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That sounds healthier than most environments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, and that basically, you know, you get the little cards for nope, wrong, nope, wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, and I think actually you can make it a little bit fun by you get a limited number of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You know, it's kind of like you get three whataboutism cards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, I mean, the whole thing, the whole journey with Coddling the American Mind began with me at the Belmont Psychiatric Facility in Philadelphia back in 2007.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I had called 911 in a moment of clarity because I'd gone to the hardware store to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
make sure that when I killed myself that it stuck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I wanted to make sure that I had my head wrapped and everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So if all the drugs I was planning to take didn't work, that I wouldn't be able to claw my way out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It had been a really rough year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I always had issues with depression, but they were getting worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And frankly, one of the reasons why this cancel culture stuff is so important to me is that the thing that I didn't emphasize as much in coddling the American mind, which by the way, that description that I give of trying to kill myself was the first time I'd ever written it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Nobody in my family was aware of how.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
of it being like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
My wife had never seen it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And basically the only way I was able to write that was by, by doing, you know how you can kind of trick yourself if, um, and I was like, I'm going to convince myself that this is just between me and my computer and nobody will see it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's probably now the most public thing I've ever written.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But what I didn't emphasize in that was how much the culture war played into how depressed I got because I was originally the legal director of FIRE.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Then I became president of FIRE in 2005, moved to Philadelphia where I get depressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's just I don't have family there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's something about the town they don't seem to like me very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But the main thing was being in the culture war all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There was a girl that I was dating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I remember, you know, she didn't seem to really approve of what I did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And a lot of people didn't really seem to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And meanwhile, like I was defending people on the left all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And they'd be like, oh, that's good that you're defending someone on the left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But they still would never forgive me for defending someone on the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I remember saying at one point, I'm like, listen, I'm like, I'm a true believer in this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm willing to defend Nazis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm certainly willing to defend Republicans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And she actually said, I think Republicans might be worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that didn't – that relationship didn't go very well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then I nearly got in fistfights a couple of times with people on the right because they found out I defended people who cracked jokes about 9-11.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like this happened more than once.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
By that time in my 20s, I'm not fistfighting again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But, yeah, it was always like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You see how hypocritical people can be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You can see how friends can turn on you if they don't like your politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I got an early preview of this, of what the culture we were heading into by being the president of FIRE, and it was exhausting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that was one of the main things that led me to be, you know, suicidally depressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
At the Belmont Center, if you told me that that would be the beginning of a new and better life for me, I would have laughed if I could have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But I would, you know, I don't, you can tell I'm okay if I'm still laughing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I wasn't laughing at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I got a doctor, and I started doing cognitive behavioral therapy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I started having all these voices in my head that were catastrophizing and, you know, giving overgeneralization and fortune-telling, you know, mind-reading, all of these things that they teach you not to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And what you do in CBT is essentially you have –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
something makes you upset and then you just write down what the thought was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, and you know, something minor could happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And your response was, you know, like, um, well, the date didn't seem to go very well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, and that's because I'm broken and we'll die alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And you're like, okay, okay, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
What, what, what are, what are the following?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You know, uh, that's catastrophizing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's mind reading.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's a fortune telling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's all this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Um, and you have to do this several times a day, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I actually need to brush up on it at the moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it slowly over time, voices in my head that have been saying horrible, you know, horrible internal talk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It just didn't sound as convincing anymore, which was a really kind of like subtle effect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Like it was just kind of like, oh, wait, I don't buy that I'm broken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You know, like that doesn't sound true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That doesn't sound like truth from God like it used to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And nine months after I was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
planning to kill myself, I was probably happier than I'd been in a decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that was one of the things that, you know, that the CBT is what led me to notice this in my own work, that it felt like administrators were kind of selling cognitive distortions, but students weren't buying yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then when I started noticing that they seemed to come in actually already believing in a lot of this stuff, that would be very dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that led to calling the American mind and all that stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But the thing that was rough about writing Canceling the American Mind, and I've mentioned this already a couple of times, I got really depressed this past year because I was studying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
You know, there's a friend in there that I talk about who killed himself after being canceled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I talked to him a week before he killed himself, and I hadn't actually –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I hadn't actually checked in with him because he seemed so confident I thought he would be totally fine because he had an insensitive tweet in June of 2020 and got forced out in a way that didn't actually sound as bad as a lot of the other professors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
He actually at least got a severance package, but they knew he'd sue and win because he had before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And so I waited to check in on him because we were so overwhelmed with the request for helps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And he was saying people were coming to his house still.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And then he shot himself the next week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I definitely – and because everyone knows I'm so public about my struggles with this stuff, everybody who fights this stuff comes to me when they're having a hard time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And this is a very hard psychologically taxing business to be in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And even admitting this right now, like –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think about all the vultures out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
They'll have fun with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Just like the same way when my friend Mike Adams killed himself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There were people celebrating on Twitter that a man was dead because they didn't like his tweets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But somehow that made them compassionate for some abstract other person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I was getting a little depressed and anxious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the thing that really helped me more than anything else was confessing to my staff about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
that I, you know, books take a lot of energy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I knew they didn't want to hear that not only was this taking a lot of the boss's time, this was making him depressed and anxious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But when I finally told the leadership of my staff, you know, people that even though I try to maintain a lot of distance from, I love very, very much, it made such a difference, you know, because I could be open about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the other thing was, have you heard this conference dialogue before?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Oh, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's like an invite only thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's Oren Hoffman runs it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It intentionally tries to get people over the political spectrum to come together and have off the record conversations about big issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it was nice to be in a room where liberal, conservative, none of the above were all like, oh, thank God someone's taking on cancel culture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And where it felt like maybe this won't be the disaster for me and my family that I was starting to be afraid of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It would be that taking this stuff on might actually have a happy ending.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Thinking that your cause is social justice in many cases can lead people to think, I can be as cruel as I want in pursuit of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
When a lot of times it's just a way to sort of vent some aggression on a person that you think of only as an abstraction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Well, that's one of the things that we do in the book to really kind of address people who still try to claim this isn't real is we just quote – we quote the Pope.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We quote Obama.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We quote James Carville.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We quote Taylor Swift on cancel culture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And Taylor Swift's quote is essentially about how behind all of this, when it gets particularly nasty, there's this very clear kill yourself kind of undercurrent to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's cruel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And the problem is that in an environment so wide open, there's always going to be someone who wants to be so transgressive and say the most hurtful, terrible thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But then you have to remember the misrepresentation, getting back to the old idioms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Has been...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
re-imagined in campus debates in the most asinine way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
People will literally say stuff like, but now we know words can hurt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it's like, now we know words can hurt?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Guys, you didn't have to come up with a special little thing that you teach children to make words hurt less if they never hurt in the first place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It wouldn't even make sense, the saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's a saying that you repeat to yourself to give yourself strength when the bullies have noticed you're a little weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That might be a little personal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And it helps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It really does help to be like, listen, okay, assholes are going to say asshole things, and I can't let them have that kind of power over me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But for the good people out there who actually just sometimes think that they're vented, think about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Remember that there are people on the other side of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah, that was always my sort of flippant answer to that if mankind is basically good or basically evil being like the biggest debate in philosophy and being like, well, the problem with the first is there's nothing basic about humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think that people are sick of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think people are sick of not being able to be authentic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's really what censorship is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's basically telling you, don't be yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Don't actually say what you think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Don't show your personality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Don't dissent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Don't be weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Don't be wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And that's not sustainable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think that people have kind of had enough of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But one thing I definitely want to say to your audience is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It can't just be up to us arguers to try to fix this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And I think that, and this may sound like it's an unrelated problem, I think if there were highly respected, let's say extremely difficult ways to prove that you're extremely smart and hardworking that cost little or nothing, that actually can give
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
the Harvards and the Yales of the world to run for their money, I think that might be the most positive thing we could do to deal with a lot of these problems and why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think the fact that we have become a weird – America with a great anti-elitist tradition has become weirdly elitist in the respect that we not only again are our leadership coming from these –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
few fancy schools, we actually have like great admiration for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
We kind of look up to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
But I think we'd have a lot healthier of a society if people could prove, you know, their excellence in ways that are coming from completely different streams and that are highly respected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I sometimes talk about there should be a test that anyone who passes it gets like a, you know, a BA in the humanities that like a super BA, like something like someone not a GED.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
That's not what I'm talking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I'm talking about something that like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
you know, one out of only a couple, like 100 people can pass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
Some other way of actually of not going through these massive, bloated, expensive institutions that people can raise their hands and say, I'm smart and hardworking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think that could be an incredibly healthy way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think we need additional streams for creative people to be solving problems, whether that's on X or someplace else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think that there's lots of things that technology could do to really help with this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think some of the stuff that Sal Khan is working on at Khan Academy could really help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So I think there's a lot of ways, but they exist largely around coming up with new ways of doing things, not just expecting the old things that have, say, $40 billion in the bank that they're going to reform themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And here's my – I've been picking on Harvard a lot, but I'm going to pick on them a little bit more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I talk a lot about class again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
There's a great book called Poison Ivy by Evan Mandry, which I recommend to everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It's outrageous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
It sounds like me on a rant at Stanford.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
I think the stat is elite higher education has more kids from the top 1% than they have from the bottom 50% or 60%, depending on the school.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
And when you look at how much they actually replicate class privilege, it's really distressing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
So everybody should read Poison Ivy.
That was the order given by angry students in response to a pro-Israel speaker.
This is UC Berkeley 2024, and pro-Palestinian students were determined not to let this talk happen.
A call to action went out on social media, urging students to shut down the event, and nearly 200 students showed up.
They attacked the venue, they broke down a door, they broke a window, and they forced the speaker to flee.
Now, I have defended the free speech rights of literally thousands of students and their right to protest, but you do not have the right to shut down someone else's talk and decide for everyone else who they are allowed to hear.
That is mob censorship, not freedom of speech.
But unfortunately, 2023 and 2024 were the two worst years for mob censorship and shout-downs on record.
Now, to be clear, not all speech is protected, nor should it be.
There are certain categories of speech acts like incitement to violence, harassment and true threats that aren't protected.
Indeed, if there is such a thing as a free speech absolutist, I have never met one.
But I am an opinion absolutist.
I believe that all opinions should be protected and your right to free speech is a human right.
But I also believe everyone's opinion is crucial data to have about the world.
But then again, I'm the weird law student who went to law school specifically to study freedom of speech and the First Amendment.
There was this one dude who actually laughed at me that I would never find a job in this field.
I've been doing this now for 25 years at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
And that 25 years of experience has allowed me to see both how far students have fallen from understanding freedom of speech, but also how principled and even joyful they used to be in defense of free speech not very long ago.
I think of West Virginia University about 20 years ago.
It was a lefty student group, and they were objecting to a free speech zone policy.
Free Speech Zones is an Orwellian name for these policies that actually restrict and quarantine free speech to little tiny corners of campus.
They thought this was ridiculous, so they protested the zone outside of the zone.
And what would happen is sometimes locals would walk by, and they'd make fun of the students.
They'd hackle them, they'd insult them.
Want to know what these students did in response?
They cheered their hecklers.
they believed, and I love these students, I absolutely love them for this, they understood that free speech belongs to everyone or it belongs to no one.
But unfortunately today, not just students, I feel like too many people believe in something closer to freedom from speech rather than freedom of speech.
But I'm not willing to accept that.
I believe that there are four truths that everyone needs to understand that can help get us back to understanding and appreciating free speech.
And they are, one, free speech makes us safer.
Two, free speech cures violence.
Three, free speech protects the powerless.
And four, even bad people can have good ideas.
Free speech makes you safer.
My mentor is a civil libertarian named Harvey Silverglate, and he spent his career in part defending freedom of speech, both on and off campus.
But when the idea started to hit campus, maybe back in the 80s, that bigoted or hurtful or hateful speech had to be banned, he would say, I'd prefer to know who the Nazis in the room are, so I know who not to turn my back to.
Simply, you are not safer for knowing less about what people really think.
So I'll give you an example.
Lizard people who live under the Denver airport do not, in fact, control the world.
But knowing that your future husband thinks they do, or your congressman thinks they do, or every single one of your neighbors thinks they do, is pretty important information to have.
To understand the world, you must know what people really think.
Free speech cures violence.
About half of Americans, by some estimates more,
believe that words can be violence.
And this is especially true, it's actually much worse on American college campuses.
Ann Coulter, conservative, tried to speak at Cornell a couple of years back, and her speech was also shouted down, and students actually literally shouted, your words are violence.
Now, I have experienced real violence.
I was once punched out, I was randomly assaulted, I got a concussion, and I couldn't see out of this eye for a month.
Worse, one of my friends was stabbed in the chest, and I was there.
There was blood everywhere, and I was sure he was going to die.
And we insult the victims of actual violence by equating words with bloody violence.
Free speech is not violence.
It's the best alternative to violence ever invented.
Free speech protects the powerless.
I fear, and I noticed this about 15 years ago, that people were showing up on my radar who seemed to have been taught that free speech is the cynical tool of the three Bs.
The bully, the bigot, and the robber baron.
Now, this is just bad history.
So historically, the robber baron, the wealthy and powerful, have not needed a special protection for free speech because they are wealthy and powerful.
And historically, the bully and the bigot in a democratic society, if they have the votes, they still get to call the shots.
You only need a special protection for freedom of speech, like the First Amendment, for people who are either unpopular with power or unpopular with the majority.
This is why revolutionary figures like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela all championed freedom of speech.
It's why John Lewis, someone I got to meet, actually, because he was in my neighborhood a lot, the great John Lewis, civil rights icon, he would argue, he would often say that without freedom of speech, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.
They understood that free speech was not the weapon of the powerful.
It is the best check on power ever invented.
Even bad people can have good ideas.
So much time is wasted in social media debates.
I can just probably end the sentence there.
But so much time is wasted in social media debates trying to establish that your opponent is a bad person as if that's the same thing as saying that they're wrong.
Hopefully by now we understand.
that good people aren't always right and bad people aren't always wrong.
I mean, like it or not, people with truly awful beliefs have made massive contributions.
Take Wernher von Braun, rocket scientist, goddess to the moon, also Nazi.
Or take Genghis Khan, absolutely spectacular for trade routes,
But, or take someone like Thomas Malthus, reportedly a kind and thoughtful man.
But his ideas on overpopulation actually were used to justify famines and mass sterilization.
Or take another Thomas, Thomas More, great intellectual and literal saint who also burned people to death.
But morality and accuracy don't always line up.
So I want you guys to do a little exercise with me.
So please look at your neighbor and repeat after me.
Just because I hate your guts doesn't mean you're wrong.
Just because I hate your guts doesn't mean you're wrong.
I know nobody hates each other at TED.
But it kind of points out how just labeling someone bad is kind of meaningless.
So for that matter, labeling someone, I don't know, like woke or fascist or libtard or grifter, it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not they are right.
The way we figure out truth is a process of checking and rechecking, and it doesn't work if you just talk to people you already agree with.
And think about the poster boy for questioning his society's sacred cows and certainties.
This is, of course, the great Socrates.
He was so good at questioning certainties and sacred cows that he angered his society so much, they made him poison himself to death.
Socrates embodied the idea that certainty is the mind killer.
Young people used to be the great drivers of free speech, and they can be again.
But for that to happen, we all must remember that to understand the world, it's crucial to know what people really think.
And that is only going to happen in a situation in which people feel like they can be their authentic selves.
And for that, we need free speech.